With a free registration, you can read Nathan Bierma's article from today's paper. Here are excerpts, for those unwilling to register.

To hear linguist Richard Ingham [of Birmingham!] tell it, the double negative wasn't nothing unusual in the history of the English language. Double negatives -- such as "wouldn't never" and "not give him nothing" -- were common in Old English (English before the year 1000).

Many linguists assume a speaker had a choice whether to say either "wouldn't never" or "would never." But Ingham argues that the use depended on what dialect of Old English you spoke … the double negative was far more common in an Old English dialect called "West Saxon," spoken in the west and south of Britain. Outside those regions, the double negative was used sparingly.

The dialect differences lasted through the Middle English period, but the double negative was almost gone by Shakespeare's time, although it does show up occasionally in Shakespeare's plays.

Ironically, back in Old English, the West Saxon dialect -- the dialect that used the double negative -- was considered the "proper" dialect of English, according to Ingham. "I came across some beautiful examples of people actually `correcting' single negation to double negation at that time!"

The double negative, he writes by e-mail, "is common in many languages of the world, but single negation is common too."

I survived into Middle English, too. Chaucer has quite a few examples of it. Some consider French to use a double negative: je ne sais pas where ne 'not' and pas 'not' literally step, but used as a negative these days. They also use the oblique case of the personal pronoun after the copula: L'etat, c'est moi 'The State, that's me'. In English, people use double negatives all the time. I personally think that the grammar mavens proscribed its use so they could say things like he is not unkind.

Double negatives are sometimes analyzed as feature spreading.

this sentence is apparently from Serbian

Niko nikada nigde ništa nije uradio
literally Nobody never nowhere nothing did not do, meaning "Nobody ever did anything anywhere."

quote:

Some consider French to use a double negative: je ne sais pas where ne 'not' and pas 'not' literally step, but used as a negative these days.

Ne is almost always omitted in conversational French, but not in written French.