ABSTRACT
Drama of the period 1580–1620 makes great play with the accented English of foreign characters. The question of how far an expanding English language should include words from foreign languages was one of the most frequently discussed linguistic issues of the sixteenth century. One major exception to the prevailing discourse of mistrust and linguistic chauvinism is Richard Mulcaster's humanist tract on education, his Elementarie of 1582. Mulcaster's linguistic agenda becomes explicitly nationalistic, drawing on the contemporary debate about the possibilities and problems of incorporating foreign refugees and immigrants. The Elementarie states that the complete naturalization of words, and, by implication, immigrants, is neither possible nor desirable. Contemporary confusion around the terms 'denizen' and 'free denizen', and the ambiguity of the status of denization compound the difficulties attendant on Mulcaster's argument about linguistic incorporation. In contemporary discourse the words denization and naturalization seem to be used interchangeably, as do the words denizen, alien, and stranger.
