Before English (Prehistory – c.
500AD)
Indo-European
Indo-European migrations (from Indo European Languages)
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The English language, and indeed most European languages, traces it original roots back to a
Neolithic (late Stone Age) people known as the Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans, who
lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from some time after 5000 BC (different hypotheses
suggest various different dates anywhere between the 7th and the 3rd millennium BC).
We do not know exactly what the original Indo-European language was like, as no writings
exist from that time (the very earliest examples of writing can be traced to Sumeria in around
3000 BC), so our knowledge of it is necessarily based on conjecture, hypothesis and
reconstruction. Using the “comparative method”, though, modern linguists have been able to
partially reconstruct the original language from common elements in its daughter languages. It
is thought by many scholars that modern Lithuanian may be the closest to (i.e. the least changed
from) the ancient Indo-European language, and it is thought to retain many features of ProtoIndo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages.
Indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto-languages, from which the world’s
modern languages are descended, and there are many other families including Sino-Tibetan,
North Caucasian, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Niger-Congo, Dravidian, Uralic, Amerindian, etc.
However, it is by far the largest family, accounting for the languages of almost half of the
modern world’s population, including those of most of Europe, North and South America,
Australasia, the Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe, only Basque, Finnish,
Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian languages are not descended
from the Indo-European family.
Spread of Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European language family tree (from Anthropology.net, originally from Scientific
American, March 1990)
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Sometime between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Indo-Europeans began to fan out across Europe
and Asia, in search of new pastures and hunting grounds, and their languages developed – and
diverged – in isolation. By around 1000 BC, the original Indo-European language had split into
a dozen or more major language groups or families, the main groups being:








Hellenic
Italic
Indo-Iranian
Celtic
Germanic
Armenian
Balto-Slavic
Albanian
In addition, several more groups (including Anatolian, Tocharian, Phrygian, Thracian, Illyrian,
etc) have since died out completely, and yet others may have existed which have not even left
a trace.
These broad language groups in turn divided over time into scores of new languages, from
Swedish to Portuguese to Hindi to Latin to Frisian. So, it is astounding but true that languages
as diverse as Gaelic, Greek, Farsi and Sinhalese all ultimately derive from the same origin. The
common ancestry of these diverse languages can sometimes be seen quite clearly in the
existence of cognates (similar words in different languages), and the recognition of this
common ancestry of Indo-European languages is usually attributed to the amateur linguist Sir
William Jones in 1786. Examples are:






father in English, Vater in German, pater in Latin and Greek, fadir in Old Norse
and pitr in ancient Vedic Sanskrit.
brother in English, broeer in Dutch, Brüder in German, braithair in Gaelic, bróðr in
Old Norse and bhratar in Sanskrit.
three in English, tres in Latin, tris in Greek, drei in German, drie in Dutch, trí in
Sanskrit.
is in English, is in Dutch, est in Latin, esti in Greek, ist in Gothic, asti in Sanskrit.
me in English, mich or mir in German, mij in Dutch, mik or mis in Gothic, me in
Latin, eme in Greek, mam in Sanskrit.
mouse in English, Maus in German, muis in Dutch, mus in Latin, mus in Sanskrit.
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Germanic
Distribution of Germanic languages (from Wikipedia)
The branch of Indo-European we are most interested in is Germanic (although the HellenicGreek branch and Italic-Latin branch, which gave rise to the Romance languages, also became
important later). The Germanic, or Proto-Germanic, language group can be traced back to the
region between the Elbe river in modern Germany and southern Sweden some 3,000 years ago.
Jacob Grimm (of fairy tales fame, but also a well-respected early philologist) pointed out that,
over time, certain consonants in the Germanic family of languages have shifted somewhat from
the Indo-European base. Thus, Germanic words like the English foot, West Frisian foet,
Danish fod, Swedish fot, etc, are in fact related to the Latin ped, Lithuanian peda,
Sanskrit pada, etc, due to the shifting of the “p” to “f” and the “d” to “t”. Several other
consonants have also shifted (“d” to “t”, “k” to “h”, “t” to “th”, etc), disguising to some extent
the common ancestry of many of the daughter languages of Indo-European. This process
explains many apparent root differences in English words of Germanic and Latinate origin
(e.g. father and paternal, ten and decimal, horn and cornucopia, three and triple, etc).
The early Germanic languages themselves borrowed some words from the aboriginal (nonIndo-European) tribes which preceded them, particularly words for the natural environment
(e.g. sea, land, strand, seal, herring); for technologies connected with sea travel
(e.g. ship, keel, sail, oar); for new social practices (e.g. wife, bride, groom); and for farming or
animal husbandry practices (e.g. oats, mare, ram, lamb, sheep, kid, bitch, hound, dung).
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The Germanic group itself also split over time as the people migrated into other parts of
continental Europe:



North Germanic, which evolved into Old Norse and then into the various Scandinavian
languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic (but not Finnish or Estonian,
which are Uralic and not Indo-European languages);
East Germanic, spoken by peoples who migrated back to eastern and southeastern
Europe, and whose three component language branches, Burgundian, Vandalic and
Gothic (a language spoken throughout much of eastern, central and western Europe
early in the first millennium AD), all died out over time; and
West Germanic, the ancestor of Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Low
Franconian and others which in turn gave rise to modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Low
German, Frisian, Yiddish and, ultimately, English.
Thus, we can say that English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European
family of languages.
The Celts
Distribution
of
Celtic
peoples (from Wikipedia)
Little or nothing is known about the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the British Isles
before they were cut off from the rest of Europe by the English Channel (around 5000-6000
BC). Indeed, little is know of the so-called Beaker People and others who moved into the
British Isles from Europe around 2500 BC, and were probably responsible for monuments like
Stonehenge around this time.
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The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from
the Greek keltoi meaning “barbarian”), also known as Britons, who probably started to move
into the area sometime after 800 BC. By around 300 BC, the Celts had become the most
widespread branch of Indo-Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of modern-day
Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and also Britain.
Parts of Scotland were also inhabited from an early time by the Picts, whose Pictish language
was completely separate from Celtic and probably not an Indo-European language at all. The
Pictish language and culture was completely wiped out during the Viking raids of the 9th
Century AD, and the remaining Picts merged with the Scots. Further waves of Celtic
immigration into Britain, particularly between 500 BC and 400 BC but continuing at least until
the Roman occupation, greatly increased the Celtic population in Britain, and established a
vibrant Celtic culture throughout the land.
But the Celts themselves were later marginalized and displaced, as we will see in the next
section, and Celtic was not the basis for what is now the English language. Despite their
dominance in Britain at an early formative stage of its development, the Celts have actually
had very little impact on the English language, leaving only a few little-used words such
as brock (an old word for a badger), and a handful of geographical terms like coombe (a word
for a valley) and crag and tor (both words for a rocky peak). Having said that, many British
place
names
have
Celtic
origins,
including Kent, York, London, Dover, Thames, Avon, Trent, Severn, Cornwall and
many
more. There is some speculation that Celtic had some influence over the grammatical
development of English, though, such as the use of the continuous tense (e.g. “is walking”
rather than “walks”), which is not used in other Germanic languages. The Celtic language
survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and
the Breton language of Brittany.
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The Romans
The Roman Empire at its height under Emperor Trajan
The Romans first entered Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar, although they did not begin a
permanent occupation until 43 AD, when Emperor Claudius sent a much better prepared force
to subjugate the fierce British Celts. Despite a series of uprisings by the natives (including that
of Queen Boudicca, or Boadicea in 61 AD), Britain remained part of the Roman Empire for
almost 400 years, and there was a substantial amount of interbreeding between the two peoples,
although the Romans never succeeded in penetrating into the mountainous regions of Wales
and Scotland.
Although this first invasion had a profound effect on the culture, religion, geography,
architecture and social behaviour of Britain, the linguistic legacy of the Romans’ time in Britain
was, like that of the Celts, surprisingly limited. This legacy takes the form of less than 200
“loanwords”
coined
by
Roman
merchants
and
soldiers,
such
as win (wine), butere (butter), caese (cheese), piper (pepper), candel (candle), cetel (kettle), d
isc (dish), cycene (kitchen), ancor (anchor), belt (belt), sacc (sack), catte (cat), plante (plant),
rosa (rose), cest (chest), pund (pound), munt (mountain), straet (street), wic (village), mil (mil
e), port (harbour), weall (wall), etc. However, Latin would, at a later time (see the sections
on The Coming of Christianity and Literacy and The English Renaissance), come to have a
substantial influence on the language.
Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it had done in Gaul, and the use of Latin
by native Britons during the peiod of Roman rule was probably confined to members of the
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upper classes and the inhabitants of the cities and towns. The Romans, under attack at home
from Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals, abandoned Britain to the Celts in 410 AD, completing
their withdrawal by 436 AD. Within a remarkably short time after this withdrawal, the Roman
influence on Britain, in language as in many other walks of life, was all but lost, as Britain
settled in to the so-called Dark Ages.
Old English (c. 500 – c. 1100)
Invasions of Germanic Tribes
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Settlement routes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes (from BBC)
More important than the Celts and the Romans for the development of the English language,
though, was the succession of invasions from continental Europe after the Roman withdrawal.
No longer protected by the Roman military against the constant threat from the Picts and Scots
of the North, the Celts felt themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack. Around 430AD, the
ambitious Celtic warlord Vortigern invited the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (from Jutland
in modern-day Denmark), to settle on the east coast of Britain to form a bulwark against sea
raids by the Picts, in return for which they were “allowed” to settle in the southern areas of
Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
But the Jutes were not the only newcomers to Britain during this period. Other Germanic tribes
soon began to make the short journey across the North Sea. The Angles (from a region called
Angeln, the spur of land which connects modern Denmark with Germany) gradually began to
settle in increasing numbers on the east coast of Britain, particularly in the north and East
Anglia. The Frisian people, from the marshes and islands of northern Holland and western
Germany, also began to encroach on the British mainland from about 450 AD onwards. Still
later, from the 470s, the war-like Saxons (from the Lower Saxony area of north-western
Germany) made an increasing number of incursions into the southern part of the British
mainland. Over time, these Germanic tribes began to establish permanent bases and to
gradually displace the native Celts.
Short poem (“Butter, bread and green cheese”) and numbers 1-10 in modern Frisian (16
sec) (from Peter Meijes Tiersma).
All these peoples all spoke variations of a West Germanic tongue, similar to modern Frisian,
variations that were different but probably close enough to be mutually intelligible. The local
dialect in Angeln is, at times, even today recognizably similar to English, and it has even more
in common with the English of 1,000 years ago. Modern Frisian, especially spoken, bears an
eerie resemblance to English, as can be seen by some of the Frisian words which were
incorporated
into
English,
like miel (meal), laam (lamb), goes (goose), bûter (butter), tsiis (cheese), see (sea), boat (boat
), stoarm (storm), rein (rain), snie (snow), frieze (freeze), froast (frost), mist (mist), sliepe (sle
ep), blau (blue), trije (three), fjour (four), etc.
The influx of Germanic people was more of a gradual encroachment over several generations
than an invasion proper, but these tribes between them gradually colonized most of the island,
with the exception of the more remote areas, which remained strongholds of the original Celtic
people of Britain. Originally sea-farers, they began to settle down as farmers, exploiting the
rich English farmland. The rather primitive newcomers were if anything less cultured and
civilized than the local Celts, who had held onto at least some parts of Roman culture. No love
was lost between the two peoples, and there was little integration between them: the Celts
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referred to the European invaders as “barbarians” (as they had previously been labelled
themselves); the invaders referred to the Celts as weales (slaves or foreigners), the origin of the
name Wales.
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (Heptarchy) c. 650 (from WNC Coins)
Despite continued resistance (the legends and folklore of King Arthur and the Knights of the
Round Table date from this time), the Celts were pushed further and further back by the
invaders into the wilds of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, although some chose to flee
to the Brittany region of northern France (where they maintained a thriving culture for several
centuries) and even further into mainland Europe. The Celtic language survives today only in
the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and the Breton language of
Brittany (the last native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777, and the last native
speaker of Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the tiny Isle of Man, died as recently as the
1960s, and these are now dead languages).
The Germanic tribes settled in seven smaller kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy: the Saxons
in Essex, Wessex and Sussex; the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria; and the
Jutes in Kent. Evidence of the extent of their settlement can be found in the number of place
names throughout England ending with the Anglo-Saxon “-ing” meaning people of
(e.g. Worthing, Reading, Hastings),
“-ton”
meaning
enclosure
or
village
(e.g. Taunton, Burton, Luton),
“-ford”
meaning
a
river
crossing
(e.g. Ashford, Bradford, Watford)
“-ham”
meaning
farm
(e.g. Nottingham, Birmingham, Grantham) and “-stead” meaning a site (e.g. Hampstead).
Although the various different kingdoms waxed and waned in their power and influence over
time, it was the war-like and pagan Saxons that gradually became the dominant group. The
new Anglo-Saxon nation, once known in antiquity as Albion and then Britannia under the
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Romans, nevertheless became known as Anglaland or Englaland (the Land of the Angles),
later shortened to England, and its emerging language as Englisc (now referred to as Old
English or Anglo-Saxon, or sometimes Anglo-Frisian). It is impossible to say just when English
became a separate language, rather than just a German dialect, although it seems that the
language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental
Germanic languages, by around 600AD. Over time, four major dialects of Old English
gradually emerged: Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the midlands, West
Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the southeast.
The Coming of Christianity and Literacy
Anglo-Saxon runes
Although many of the Romano-Celts in the north of England had already been Christianized,
St. Augustine and his 40 missionaries from Rome brought Christianity to the pagan AngloSaxons of the rest of England in 597 AD. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert
of Kent, it spread rapidly through the land, carrying literacy and European culture in it wake.
Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 601 AD and several great monasteries and
centres of learning were established particularly in Northumbria (e.g. Jarrow, Lindisfarne).
The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons used an alphabet of runes, angular characters originally
developed for scratching onto wood or stone. The first known written English sentence, which
reads “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman”, is an Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a
gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450-480 AD. The early Christian
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missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet (much as we use today), which was
easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The Anglo-Saxons quite
rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet, but with the addition of letters such as (“wynn”), þ
(“thorn”), ð (“edh” or “eth”) and Ȝ (“yogh”) from the old runic alphabet for certain sounds not
used in Latin. later became “uu” and, still later, “w”; þ and ð were used more or less
interchangeably to represent the sounds now spelled with “th”; and Ȝ was used for “y”, “j” or
“g” sounds. In addition, the diphthong æ (“ash”) was also used; “v” was usually written with
an “f”; and the letters “q”, “x” and “z” were rarely used at all.
The Latin language the missionaries brought was still only used by the educated ruling classes
and Church functionaries, and Latin was only a minor influence on the English language at this
time, being largely restricted to the naming of Church dignitaries and ceremonies
(priest, vicar, altar, mass, church, bishop, pope, nun, angel, verse, baptism, monk, eucharist,
candle, temple and presbyter came into the language this way). However, other more domestic
words
(such
as fork, spade, chest, spider, school, tower, plant, rose, lily, circle, paper, sock, mat, cook,
etc) also came into English from Latin during this time, albeit substantially altered and adapted
for the Anglo-Saxon ear and tongue. More ecclesiastical Latin loanwords continued to be
introduced,
even
as
late
as
the
11th
Century,
including chorus, cleric, creed, cross, demon, disciple, hymn, paradise, prior, sabbath, etc.
“The Lord’s Prayer” in Old English (31 sec).
Old English literature flowered remarkably quickly after Augustine’s arrival. This was
especially notable in the north-eastern kingdom of Northumbria, which provided England with
its first great poet (Caedmon in the 7th Century), its first great historian (the Venerable Bede
in the 7th-8th Century) and its first great scholar (Alcuin of York in the 8th Century), although
the latter two wrote mainly in Latin. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is
usually considered to be “Cædmon’s Hymn”, composed between 658 and 680. Northumbrian
culture and language dominated England in the 7th and 8th Centuries, until the coming of the
Vikings, after which only Wessex, under Alfred the Great, remained as an independent
kingdom. By the 10th Century, the West Saxon dialect had become the dominant, and
effectively the official, language of Britain (sometimes referred to as the koiné, or common
dialect). The different dialects often had their own preferred spellings as well as distinctive
vocabulary
(e.g.
the
word evil was
spelled efel in
the
south-east,
and yfel elsewhere; land would be land in West Saxon and Kentish, but lond further north;
etc).
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The Anglo-Saxon or Old English Language
First page of “Beowulf”
About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling
tales of wild battles and heroic journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature
is “Cædmon’s Hymn”, which was composed between 658 and 680, and the longest was the
ongoing “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”. But by far the best known is the long epic
poem “Beowulf”.
“Beowulf” may have been written any time between the 8th and the early 11th Century by an
unknown author or authors, or, most likely, it was written in the 8th Century and then revised
in the 10th or 11th Century. It was probably originally written in Northumbria, although the
single manuscript that has come down to us (which dates from around 1000) contains a
bewildering mix of Northumbrian, West Saxon and Anglian dialects. The 3,182 lines of the
work shows that Old English was already a fully developed poetic language by this time, with
a particular emphasis on alliteration and percussive effects. Even at this early stage (before the
subsequent waves of lexical enrichment), the variety and depth of English vocabulary, as well
as its predilection for synonyms and subtleties of meanings, is evident. For example, the poem
uses 36 different words for hero, 20 for man, 12 for battle and 11 for ship. There are also many
interesting “kennings” or allusive compound words, such as hronrad (literally, whale-road,
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meaning the sea), banhus (bone-house, meaning body) and beadoleoma (battle-light, meaning
sword). Of the 903 compound nouns in “Beowulf”, 578 are used once only, and 518 of them
are known only from this one poem.
Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern English. Nouns
had three genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. There
were seven classes of “strong” verbs and three of “weak” verbs, and their endings changed for
number, tense, mood and person. Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite
articles had three genders and five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. Word order
was much freer than today, the sense being carried by the inflections (and only later by the use
of propositions). Although it looked quite different from modern English on paper, once the
pronunciation and spelling rules are understood, many of its words become quite familiar to
modern ears.
Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old
English,
including
words
like water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she, you, no,
not, etc. Interestingly, many of our common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin
(including tits, fart, shit, turd, arse and, probably, piss), and most of the others were of early
medieval provenance. Care should be taken, though, with what are sometimes called “false
friends”, words that appear to be similar in Old English and modern English, but whose
meanings have changed, words such as wif (wife, which originally meant any woman, married
or not), fugol (fowl, which meant any bird, not just a farmyard one), sona (soon, which meant
immediately, not just in a while), won (wan, which meant dark, not pale) and fæst (fast, which
meant fixed or firm, not rapidly).
During the 6th Century, for reasons which are still unclear, the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster
“sk” changed to “sh”, so that skield became shield. This change affected all “sk” words in the
language at that time, whether recent borrowings from Latin (e.g. disk became dish) or ancient
aboriginal borrowings (e.g. skip became ship). Any modern English words which make use of
the “sk” cluster came into the language after the 6th Century (i.e. after the sound change had
ceased to operate), mainly, as we will see below, from Scandinavia.
Then, around the 7th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation (analogous
to the Great Vowel Shift during the Early Modern period) in which vowels began to be
pronouced more to the front of the mouth. The main sound affected was “i”, hence its common
description as “i-mutation” or “i-umlaut” (umlaut is a German term meaning sound alteration).
As part of this process, the plurals of several nouns also started to be represented by changed
vowel pronunciations rather than changes in inflection. These changes were sometimes, but
not always, reflected in revised spellings, resulting in inconsistent modern words pairings such
as foot/feet, goose/geese, man/men, mouse/mice,
as
well
as blood/bleed, foul/filth, broad/breadth, long/length, old/elder, whole/hale/heal/health, etc.
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Beginning of the Prologue of “Beowulf” (36 sec) (from University of Virginia).
It is estimated that about 85% of the 30,000 or so Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under
the cultural onslaught of the Vikings and the Normans who would come after them, leaving a
total of only around 4,500. This represents less than 1% of modern English vocabulary, but it
includes
some
of
the
most
fundamental
and
important
words
(e.g. man, wife, child, son, daughter, brother, friend, live, fight, make, use, love, like, look, dri
nk, food, eat, sleep, sing, sun, moon, earth, ground, wood, field, house, home, people, family,
horse, fish, farm, water, time, eyes, ears, mouth, nose, strong, work, come, go, be, find, see, lo
ok, laughter, night, day, sun, first, many, one, two, other, some, what, when, which, where, w
ord, etc), as well as the most important “function” words (e.g. to, for, but, and, at, in, on, from,
etc). Because of this, up to a half of everyday modern English will typically be made up of Old
English words, and, by some estimates, ALL of the hundred most commonly-used words in
modern English are of Anglo-Saxon origin (although pronunciations and spellings may have
changed significantly over time).
The Vikings
Area of the Viking-ruled Danelaw
By the late 8th Century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east
cost of Britain. They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes
who came with the greatest force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness,
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the Vikings pillaged and plundered the towns and monasteries of northern England – in 793,
they sacked and looted the wealthy monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria – before turning
their attentions further south. By about 850, the raiders had started to over-winter in southern
England and, in 865, there followed a full-scale invasion and on-going battles for the
possession of the country.
Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great and, in 878, a treaty between the
Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings established the Danelaw, splitting the country along a line
roughly from London to Chester, giving the Norsemen control over the north and east and the
Anglo-Saxons the south and west. Although the Danelaw lasted less than a century, its
influence can be seen today in the number of place names of Norse origin in northern England
(over 1,500), including many place names ending in “-by”, “-gate”, “-stoke”, “-kirk”, “thorpe”,
“-thwaite”,
“-toft”
and
other
suffixes
(e.g. Whitby, Grimsby, Ormskirk, Scunthorpe, Stoke Newington, Huthwaite, Lowestoft, etc), as
well as the “-son” ending on family names (e.g. Johnson, Harrison, Gibson, Stevenson, etc) as
opposed to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent “-ing” (e.g. Manning, Harding, etc).
The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to AngloSaxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic (the word viking actually means “a pirate raid”
in Old Norse). Accents and pronunciations in northern England even today are heavily
influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland.
Over time, Old Norse was gradually merged into the English language, and many Scandinavian
terms were introduced. In actual fact, only around 150 Norse words appear in Old English
manuscripts of the period, but many more became assimilated into the language and gradually
began to appear in texts over the next few centuries. In all, up to 1,000 Norse words were
permanently added to the English lexicon, among them, some of the most common and
fundamental
in
the
language,
including skull, skin, leg, neck, freckle, sister, husband, fellow, wing, bull, score, seat, root, bl
oom, bag, gap, knife, dirt, kid, link, gate, sky, egg, cake, skirt, band, bank, birth, scrap, skill, t
hrift, window, gasp, gap, law, anger, trust, silver, clasp, call, crawl, dazzle, scream, screech,
race, lift, get, give, are, take, mistake, rid, seem, want, thrust, hit, guess, kick, kill, rake, raise,
smile, hug, call, cast, clip, die, flat, meek, rotten, tight, odd, rugged, ugly, ill, sly, wrong, loos
e, happy, awkward, weak, worse, low, both, same, together, again, until, etc.
Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words, both of
which
have
been
carried
on
(e.g.
Anglo-Saxon craft and
Norse skill, wish and want, dike and ditch, sick and ill, whole and hale, raise and rear, wrath
and anger, hide and skin, etc). Unusually for language development, English also adopted
some Norse grammatical forms, such as the pronouns they, them and their, although these
words did not enter the dialects of London and southern England until as late as the 15th
Century. Under the influence of the Danes, Anglo-Saxon word endings and inflections started
to fall away during the time of the Danelaw, and prepositions like to, with, by, etc became more
16 | P a g e
important to make meanings clear, although many inflections continued into Middle English,
particularly in the south and west (the areas furthest from Viking influence).
Old English after the Vikings
First page of the “Peterborough Chronicle” (one of the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicles”)
(from National Education Network)
By the time Alfred the Great came to the throne in 871, most of the great monasteries of
Northumbria and Mercia lay in ruins and only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom.
But Alfred, from his capital town of Winchester, set about rebuilding and fostering the revival
of learning, law and religion. Crucially, he believed in educating the people in the vernacular
English language, not Latin, and he himself made several translations of important works into
English, include Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English People”. He also began
the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which recounted the history of England from the time of
Caesar’s invasion, and which continued until 1154.
He is revered by many as having single-handedly saved English from the destruction of the
Vikings, and by the time of his death in 899 he had raised the prestige and scope of English to
a level higher than that of any other vernacular language in Europe. The West Saxon dialect of
Wessex became the standard English of the day (although the other dialects continued
nontheless), and for this reason the great bulk of the surviving documents from the AngloSaxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex.
The following paragraph from Aelfrich’s 10th Century “Homily on St. Gregory the
Great” gives an idea of what Old English of the time looked like (even if not how it sounded):
17 | P a g e
Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle
genemnode wæron. þa cwæð he, “Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite
habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon.”
A few words stand out immediately as being identical to their modern equivalents
(he, of, him, for, and, on) and a few more may be reasonably easily guessed (nama became the
modern name, comon became come, wære became were, wæs became was). But several more
have
survived
in
altered
form,
including axode (asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla (angels), habbað (have), swilcum (
such), heofonum (heaven), and beon (be), and many more have disappeared completely from
the
language,
including eft (again), ðeode (people,
nation), cwæð (said,
spoke), gehatene (called, named), wlite (appearance, beauty) and geferan (companions), as
have special characters like þ (“thorn”) and ð (“edh” or “eth”) which served in Old English to
represent the sounds now spelled with “th”.
Birhtwold’s Speech from “The Battle of Maldon” (29 sec) (from Norton Anthology of English
Literature).
Among the literary works representative of this later period of Old English may be listed
the “Battle of Maldon”, an Old English poem relating the events of the Battle of Maldon of
991 (the poem is thought to have been written not long after) and the “Old English Hexateuch”,
a richly illustrated Old English translation of the first six books of the Bible, probably compiled
in Canterbury in the second quarter of the 11th Century. Ælfric of Eynsham, who wrote in the
late 10th and early 11th Century and is best known for his “Colloquy”, was the greatest and
most prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon sermons, many of which were copied and adapted for use
well into the 13th Century. A number of other Christian, heroic and elegiac poems, secular and
Christian prose, as well as riddles, short verses, gnomes and mnemonic poems for remembering
long lists of names, have also come down to us more or less intact.
Middle English (c. 1100 – c. 1500)
18 | P a g e
Norman Conquest
William the Conqueror (from Bayeux
Tapestry) (from History of Information Opens in a new window)
The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman
Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of
England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in
his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a
19 | P a g e
brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans
(and some English) who supported him.
The conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in northern
France about 200 years before (the very word Norman comes originally from Norseman).
However, they had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly
adopted French (which is a so-called Romance language, derived originally from the Latin, not
Germanic, branch of Indo-European), to the extent that not a single Norse word survived in
Normandy.
However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences,
usually called Anglo-Norman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard
French of Paris of the period, which is known as Francien. The differences between these
dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King
John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England
became even more isolated from continental Europe.
Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than
300 years (Henry IV, who came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since
before the Conquest to have English as his mother tongue). While Anglo-Norman was the
verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly used for
written language, especially by the Church and in official records. For example,
the “Domesday Book”, in which William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was
written in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.
However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the population, an estimated
95%) continued to speak English – considered by the Normans a low-class, vulgar tongue –
and the two languages developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and AngloSaxons began to intermarry. It is this mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman that is usually
referred to as Middle English.
French (Anglo-Norman) Influence
20 | P a g e
Henry II, King of England from 1154-1189 (from English Monarchs Opens in a new window)
The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which are still
in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Perhaps predictably, many of them related to matters of crown and
nobility (e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke, viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry);
of government and administration (e.g. parliament, government, governor, city); of court and
law(e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence, appeal, condemn, plaintiff, bailiff, jury
, felony, verdict, traitor, contract, damage, prison);
of
war
and
combat
(e.g. army, armour, archer, battle, soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy, destroy);
of
authority
and
control
(e.g. authority, obedience, servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer, charity); of fashion and
high
living
(e.g. mansion, money, gown, boot, beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite, banquet, herb, spice, sauce
, roast, biscuit);
and
of
art
and
literature
(e.g. art, colour, language, literature, poet, chapter, question). Curiously, though, the AngloSaxon
words cyning (king), cwene (queen), erl (earl), cniht (knight), ladi (lady)
and lord persisted.
While humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g. baker, miller, shoemaker, etc),
the more skilled trades adopted French names (e.g. mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc).
While the animals in the field generally kept their English names
(e.g. sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine, deer), once cooked and served their names often became
French (e.g. beef, mutton, pork, bacon, veal, venison, etc). Sometimes a French word
completely
replaced
an
Old
English
word
(e.g. crime replaced firen, place replaced stow, people replaced leod, beautiful replaced wlitig
21 | P a g e
, uncle replaced eam, etc). Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form
a new word, such as the French gentle and the Germanic man combined to formed gentleman.
Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly different senses
(e.g. the Old English doom and French judgement, hearty and cordial, house and mansion,
etc).
But, often, different words with roughly the same meaning survived, and a whole host of new,
French-based synonyms entered the English language (e.g. the French maternity in addition to
the
Old
English motherhood, infant to child, amity to friendship, battle to fight, liberty to freedom, la
bour to work, desire to wish, commence to start, conceal to hide, divide to cleave, close to sh
ut, demand to ask, chamber to room, forest to wood, power to might, annual to yearly, odour
to smell, pardon to forgive, aid to help, etc). Over time, many near synonyms acquired subtle
differences in meaning (with the French alternative often suggesting a higher level of
refinement than the Old English), adding to the precision and flexibility of the English
language. Even today, phrases combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman French doublets are still
in common use (e.g. law and order, lord and master, love and cherish, ways and means, etc).
Bilingual word lists were being compiled as early as the 13th Century.
Excerpt from “Le Chanson de Roland” in Norman French (c. 1160) (23 sec).
The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural Anglo-Norman and the softer
Francien dialect of Paris were also carried over into English pronunciations. For instance,
words like quit, question, quarter, etc, were pronounced with the familiar “kw” sound in
Anglo-Norman (and, subsequently, English) rather than the “k” sound of Parisian French. The
Normans tended to use a hard “c” sound instead of the softer Francien “ch”, so
that charrier became carry, chaudron became cauldron, etc. The Normans tended to use the
suffixes “-arie” and “-orie” instead of the French “-aire” and “-oire”, so that English has words
like victory (as compared to victoire) and salary (as compared to salaire), etc. The Normans,
and therefore the English, retained the “s” in words like estate, hostel, forest and beast, while
the French gradually lost it (état, hôtel, forêt, bête).
French scribes changed the common Old English letter pattern “hw” to “wh”, largely out of a
desire for consistency with “ch” and “th”, and despite the actual aspirated pronunciation, so
that hwaer became where, hwaenne became when and hwil became while. A “w” was even
added, for no apparent reason, to some words that only began with “h” (e.g. hal became whole).
Another oddity occurred when hwo became who, but the pronunciation changed so that the “w”
sound was omitted completely. There are just some of the kinds of inconsistencies that became
ingrained in the English language during this period.
22 | P a g e
Manuscript of “Sumer is icumen in”, oldest known English song (c. 1260) (from UCL Opens
in a new window)
During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in the second
half of the 12th Century, many more Francien words from central France were imported in
addition to their Anglo-Norman counterparts (e.g. the Francien chase and the AngloNorman catch; royal and real; regard and reward; gauge and wage; guile and wile; guardian
and warden; guarantee and warrant). Regarded as the most cultured woman in Europe,
Eleanor
also
championed
many
terms
of
romance
and
chivalry
(e.g. romance, courtesy, honour, damsel, tournament, virtue, music, desire, passion, etc).
Many more Latin-derived words came into use (sometimes through the French, but often
directly) during this period, largely connected with religion, law, medicine and literature,
including scripture, collect, meditation, immortal, oriental, client, adjacent, combine, expedit
ion, moderate, nervous, private, popular, picture, legal, legitimate, testimony, prosecute, pau
per, contradiction, history, library, comet, solar, recipe, scribe, scripture, tolerance, imagina
ry, infinite, index, intellect, magnify and genius. But French words continued to stream into
English at an increasing pace, with even more French additions recorded after the 13th Century
than before, peaking in the second half of the 14th Century, words
like abbey, alliance, attire, defend, navy, march, dine, marriage, figure, plea, sacrifice, scarle
t, spy, stable, virtue, marshal, esquire, retreat, park, reign, beauty, clergy, cloak, country, foo
l, coast, magic, etc.
A handful of French loanwords established themselves only in Scotland (which had become
increasingly English in character during the early Middle English period, with Gaelic pushed
23 | P a g e
further and further into the Highlands and Islands), including bonnie and fash. Distinctive
spellings like “quh-” for “wh-” took hold (e.g. quhan and quhile for whan and while), and the
Scottish accent gradually became more and more pronounced, particularly after Edward I’s
inconclusive attempts at annexation. Scottish English’s radically distinct evolution only
petered out in the 17th Century after King James united the crowns of Scotland and England
(1603), and the influence of a strongly emerging Standard English came to bear during
the Early Modern period.
Middle English After the Normans
A page from the late 12th Century “Ormulum” (from Wikipedia Opens in a new window)
During these Norman-ruled centuries in which English as a language had no official status and
no regulation, English had become the third language in its own country. It was largely a spoken
rather than written language, and effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole. The main
dialect regions during this time are usually referred to as Northern, Midlands, Southern and
Kentish, although they were really just natural developments from the Northumbrian, Mercian,
West Saxon and Kentish dialects of Old English. Within these, though, a myriad distinct
regional usages and dialects grew up, and indeed the proliferation of regional dialects during
24 | P a g e
this time was so extreme that people in one part of England could not even understand people
from another part just 50 miles away.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and
general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still
copied by hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence
of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed (London had been the
largest city for some time, and became the Norman capital at the beginning of the 12th
Century), and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and
indicating a lack of education. The 14th Century London dialect of Chaucer, although
admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English, whereas text
in the Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely foreign language.
It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the uneducated
peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually
disappeared. By the 14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and
adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular
and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which
in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the
beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after
the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed
“schwa” (like the “e” in taken, or the “i” in pencil). As inflectons disappeared, word order
became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object
word order had gradually become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb
inflections.
Passage from “Ormulum” (late 12th Century) (17 sec) (from Palgrave Macmillan Opens in a
new window).
The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern
Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the
way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were
pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel (much
as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he used three
separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he
used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”. This unusual phonetic
spelling system has given philologists an invaluable snap-shot of they way Middle English was
pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.
25 | P a g e
Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English
writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:















the Old English letters ð (“edh” or “eth”) and þ (“thorn”), which did not exist in the
Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and replaced with “th”, and the letter Ȝ
(“yogh”) was generally replaced with “g” (or often with “gh”, as in ghost or night);
the simple word the (written þe using the thorn character) generally replaced the
bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and most nouns had lost their
inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;
the Norman “qu” largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon “cw” (so
that cwene became queen, cwic became quick, etc);
the “sh” sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old
English, including “sc”, was regularized as “sh” or “sch” (e.g. scip became ship);
the initial letters “hw” generally became “wh” (as in when, where, etc);
a “c” was often, but not always, replaced by “k” (e.g. cyning/cyng became king) or “ck”
(e.g. boc became bock and, later, book) or “ch” (e.g. cild became child, cese
became cheese, etc);
the common Old English “h” at the start of words like hring (ring) and hnecca (neck)
was deleted;
conversely, an “h” was added to the start of many Romance loanword
(e.g. honour, heir, honest, habit, herb, etc), but was sometimes pronounced and
sometimes not;
“f” and “v” began to be differentiated (e.g. feel and veal), as did “s” and “z”
(e.g. seal and zeal) and “ng” and “n” (e.g. thing and thin);
“v” and “u” remained largely interchangeable, although “v” was often used at the start
of a word (e.g. (vnder), and “u” in the middle (e.g. haue), quite the opposite of today;
because the written “u” was similar to “v”, “n” and “m”, it was replaced in many words
with an “o” (e.g. son, come, love, one);
the “ou” spelling of words like house and mouse was introduced;
many
long
vowel
sounds
were
marked
by
a
double
letter
(e.g. boc became booc, se became see, etc), or, in some cases, a trailing “e” became no
longer pronounced but retained in spelling to indicate a long vowel (e.g. nose, name);
the long “a” vowel of Old English became more like “o” in Middle English, so
that ham became home, stan became stone, ban became bone, etc;
short vowels were identified by consonant doubling (e.g siting became sitting, etc).
Sumer is icumen in” (c. 1260) (35 sec).
The “-en” plural noun ending of Old English (e.g. house/housen, shoe/shoen, etc) had largely
disappeared by the end of the Middle English period, replaced by the French plural ending “26 | P a g e
s” (the “-en” ending only remains today in one or two important examples, such
as children, brethren and oxen). Changes to some word forms stuck while others did not, so
that we are left with inconsistencies like half and halves, grief and grieves, speech and speak,
etc. In another odd example of gradual modernization, the indefinite article “a” subsumed over
time the initial “n” of some following nouns, so that a napron became an apron, a
nauger became an auger, etc, as well as the reverse case of an ekename becoming a nickname.
Although Old English had no distinction between the formal and informal second person
singular, which was always expressed as thou, the words ye or you (previously the second
person plural) were introduced in the 13th Century as the formal singular version (used with
superiors or non-intimates), with thou remaining as the familiar, informal form.
Resurgence of English
Spread of the Black Death (from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1994)
It is estimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of the Viking and
particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very existence of the English language
looked to be in dire peril. In 1154, even the venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for
centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite
the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and, two
hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French that emerged as the
language of England.
There were a number of contributing factors. The English, of necessity, had become
“Normanized”, but, over time, the Normans also became “Anglicized”, particularly after 1204
when King John’s ineptness lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France and the
Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties. Increasingly out of touch
27 | P a g e
with their properties in France and with the French court and culture in general, they soon
began to look on themselves as English. Norman French began gradually to degenerate and
atrophy. While some in England spoke French and some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both),
everyone, from the highest to the lowest, spoke English, and it gradually became the lingua
franca of the nation once again.
The Hundred Year War against France (1337 – 1453) had the effect of branding French as the
language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence. The Black Death of
1349 – 1350 killed about a third of the English population (which was around 4 million at that
time), including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the
English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and,
within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the
commoners was largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official
language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), was
adopted in 1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament
in English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385, English had become the language
of instruction in schools.
The following passage is taken from a late 14th Century work called “Mandeville’s
Travels” about travels in foreign land:
In þat lond ben trees þat beren wolle, as þogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes,
and all þing þat may ben made of wolle. In þat contree ben many ipotaynes, þat dwellen som
tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and þei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd
before; and þei eten men, whan þei may take hem. And þere ben ryueres and watres þat ben
fulle byttere, þree sithes more þan is the water of the see. In þat contré ben many griffounes,
more plentee þan in ony other contree. Sum men seyn þat þei han the body vpward as an egle,
and benethe as a lyoun: and treuly þei seyn soth þat þei ben of þat schapp. But o griffoun hath
the body more gret, and is more strong, þanne eight lyouns, of suche lyouns as ben o this half;
and more gret and strongere þan an hundred egles, suche as we han amonges vs. For o
griffoun þere wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, Ȝif he may fynde him at the poynt, or two
oxen Ȝoked togidere, as þei gon at the plowgh.
Beginning of the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (late 14th Century) (61 sec) (from Norton
Anthology of English Literature Opens in a new window).
There are clearly many more recognizable words in this sample than in the Old English passage,
especially once the continued use of þ (“thorn”) to represent the sound “th” is accepted. Another
now obsolete character Ȝ (“yogh”, more or less equivalent in most cases to the modern
28 | P a g e
consonantal “y” as in yellow or sometimes like the “ch” in loch) is also used in this passage,
and the letters “v” and “u” seem to be used more or less interchangeably
(e.g. vpward for upward, ryueres for rivers, treuly for truly). The indications of a language in
a state of flux are also apparent in the variety of spellings of the same words even within this
short passage (e.g. contré and contree, þan and þanne, water and watres). Some holdovers
from Old English inflections remain (e.g. present tense verbs still receive a plural inflection, as
in beren, dwellen, han and ben), and many words still have the familiar medieval trailing “e”
(e.g. wolle, benethe, suche, fynde, etc), but the overall appearance is much more modern than
that of Old English.
Throughout the Middle English period, as in Old English, all the consonants were pronounced,
so that the word knight, for example, would have been pronounced more like “k-neecht” (with
the “ch” as in the Scottish loch) than like the modern English knight. By the late 14th Century,
the final “e” in many, but not all, words had ceased to be pronounced (e.g. it was silent in words
like kowthe and thanne, but pronounced in words like ende, ferne, straunge, etc).
Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature
Beginning of “The Knight’s Tale” from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (from Wikipedia
Opens in a new window)
Texts in Middle English (as opposed to French or Latin) begin as a trickle in the 13th Century,
with works such as the debate poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” (probably composed
around 1200) and the long historical poem known as Layamon’s “Brut” (from around the same
period). Most of Middle English literature, at least up until the flurry of literary activity in the
latter part of the 14th Century, is of unknown authorship.
29 | P a g e
Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous “Canterbury Tales” in the early 1380s, and
crucially he chose to write it in English. Other important works were written in English around
the same time, if not earlier, including William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” and the
anonymous “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. But the “Canterbury Tales” is usually
considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic
legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin.
In the 858 lines of the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”, almost 500 different French
loanwards occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucer’s vocabulary is French in
origin. However, the overall sense of his work is very much of a re-formed English, a complete,
flexible and confident language, more than adequate to produce great literature. Chaucer
introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts – these were almost
certainly words in everyday use in 14th Century London, but first attested in Chaucer’s written
works. Words like paramour, difficulty, significance, dishonesty, edifice, ignorant, etc, are all
from French roots, but when he wanted to portray the earthy working man of England (e.g. the
Miller), he consciously used much more Old English vocabulary, and he also reintroduced
many
old
words
that
had
fallen
out
of
favour,
such
as churlish, farting, friendly, learning, loving, restless, wifely, willingly, etc. The list of words
first
found
in
Chaucer’s
works
goes
on: absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, desperate, discomfit,
digestion, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative,
miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, princess, resolve, rumour, scisso
rs, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine, village,
vulgar, wallet, wildness, etc, etc.
Beginning of the “General Prologue” to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (67 sec).
Such was the pace of continuous change to the language at this time, that different forms of
words were often used interchangeably, even by the same author, and this flexibility (or
inconsistency)
in
spelling
is
quite
noticeable
in
Chaucer’s
work
(e.g. yeer and yere, doughtren and doughtres, etc). However, it should be noted that, because
Chaucer’s work was copied by several different scribes, and we have no original in Chaucer’s
own hand, different manuscripts have different spellings, none of which are definitive (e.g. the
same word is variously rendered as site, sighte, syth, sigh and cite in different manuscripts).
In 1384, John Wycliffe (Wyclif) produced his translation of “The Bible” in vernacular English.
This challenge to Latin as the language of God was considered a revolutionary act of daring at
the time, and the translation was banned by the Church in no uncertain terms (however, it
continued to circulate unofficially). Although perhaps not of the same literary calibre as
Chaucer (in general, he awkwardly retained the original Latin word order, for instance),
30 | P a g e
Wycliffe’s “Bible” was nevertheless a landmark in the English language. Over 1,000 English
words were first recorded in it, most of them Latin-based, often via French,
including barbarian, birthday, canopy, childbearing, communication, cradle, crime, dishonour, emperor, envy, godly, graven, humanity, g
lory, injury, justice, lecher, madness, mountainous, multitude, novelty, oppressor, philistine, p
ollute, profession, puberty, schism, suddenly, unfaithful, visitor, zeal, etc, as well as wellknown phrases like an eye for an eye, woe is me, etc. However, not all of Wycliffe’s neologisms
became enshrined in the language (e.g. mandement, descrive, cratch).
By the late 14th and 15th Century, the language had changed drastically, and Old English
would probably have been almost as incomprehensible to Chaucer as it is to us today, even
though the language of Chaucer is still quite difficult for us to read naturally. William Caxton,
writing and printing less than a century after Chaucer, is noticeably easier for the modern reader
to understand.
Early Modern English (c. 1500 –
c. 1800)
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Great Vowel Shift
A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel
Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of
which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short
vowel sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some
centuries before 1400, and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue
even to this day). Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the
English vowel shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a
sudden and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time that
English lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic
pairing between long and short vowel sounds.
The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the
very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this
time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English
phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish
were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from
French and Latin.
In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long vowels were generally
pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe (e.g. sheep would
have been pronounced more like “shape”; me as “may”; mine as “meen”; shire as
“sheer”; mate as
“maat”; out as
“oot”; house as
“hoose”; flour as
“floor”; boot as
“boat”; mode as “mood”; etc). William the Conqueror’s “Domesday Book”, for example,
32 | P a g e
would have been pronounced “doomsday”, as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After
the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and similar words would have been much
more like they are spoken today. The Shift comprises a series of connected changes, with
changes in one vowel pushing another to change in order to “keep its distance”, although there
is some dispute as to the order of these movements. The changes also proceeded at different
times and speeds in different parts of the country.
Thus, Chaucer’s word lyf (pronounced “leef”) became the modern word life, and the
word five (originally pronounced “feef”) gradually acquired its modern pronunciation. Some
of the changes occurred in stages: although lyf was spelled life by the time of Shakespeare in
the late 16th Century, it would have been pronounced more like “lafe” at that time, and only
later did it acquired its modern pronunciation. It should be noted, though, that the tendency of
upper-classes of southern England to pronounce a broad “a” in words
like dance, bath and castle (to sound like “dahnce”, “bahth” and “cahstle”) was merely an 18th
Century fashionable affectation which happened to stick, and nothing to do with a general
shifting in vowel pronunciation.
The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and now
obscures the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts. The
spellings of some words changed to reflect the change in pronunciation
(e.g. stone from stan, rope from rap, dark from derk, barn from bern, heart from herte, etc),
but most did not. In some cases, two separate forms with different meaning continued
(e.g. parson, which is the old pronunciation of person). The effects of the vowel shift generally
occurred earlier, and were more pronounced, in the south, and some northern words
like uncouth and dour still retain their pre-vowel shift pronunciation (“uncooth” and “door”
rather than “uncowth” and “dowr”). Busy has kept its old West Midlands spelling, but an East
Midlands/London pronunciation; bury has a West Midlands spelling but a Kentish
pronunciation. It is also due to irregularities and regional variations in the vowel shift that we
have ended up with inconsistencies in pronunciation such as food (as compared
to good, stood, blood, etc) and roof (which still has variable pronunciation), and the different
pronunciations of the “o” in shove, move, hove, etc.
Great Vowel Shift pronunciation changes (35 sec) (from National Science Foundation).
Other changes in spelling and pronunciation also occurred during this period. The Old English
consonant X – technically a “voiceless velar fricative”, pronounced as in the “ch”
of loch or Bach – disappeared from English, and the Old English word burX (place), for
example, was replaced with “-burgh”, “-borough”, “-brough” or “-bury” in many place names.
In some cases, voiceless fricatives began to be pronounced like an “f” (e.g. laugh, cough).
33 | P a g e
Many other consonants ceased to be pronounced at all (e.g. the final “b” in words
like dumb and comb; the “l” between some vowels and consonants such
as half, walk, talk and folk; the initial “k” or “g” in words like knee, knight, gnaw and gnat;
etc). As late as the 18th Century, the “r” after a vowel gradually lost its force, although the “r”
before a vowel remained unchanged (e.g. render, terror, etc), unlike in American usage where
the “r” is fully pronounced.
So, while modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English (with some difficulty
admittedly), Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the
modern ear. The English of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 16th and
early 17th Century, on the other hand, would be accented, but quite understandable, and it has
much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer.
Even in Shakespeare’s time, though, and probably for quite some time afterwards, short vowels
were almost interchangeable (e.g. not was often pronounced, and even written,
as nat, when as whan, etc), and the pronunciation of words like boiled as “byled”, join as
“jine”, poison as
“pison”, merchant as
“marchant”, certain as
“sartin”, person as
“parson”, heard as “hard”, speak as “spake”, work as “wark”, etc, continued well into the 19th
Century. We retain even today the old pronunciations of a few words like derby and clerk (as
“darby” and “clark”), and place names like Berkeley and Berkshire (as “Barkley” and
“Barkshire”), except in America where more phonetic pronunciations were adopted.
The English Renaissance
Queen Elizabeth I presided over the English Renaissance
34 | P a g e
The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival of classical
scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and
early 17th Century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century),
and is often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after the most
important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary
during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of
new nationalities or any top-down decrees.
Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language of
education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages
during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking
around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the
16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent
did not exist.
Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this period, either
intact
(e.g. genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, le
ns, antenna, paralysis, nausea,
etc)
or,
more
commonly, slightly
altered
(e.g. horrid, pathetic, iilicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, excavate, medita
te, adapt, enthusiasm, absurdity, area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature, c
apsule, premium, system, expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, ficti
tious, physician, anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript, lexi
con, comedy, tragedy, anthology, fact, biography, mythology, sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis
, climax, etc). A whole category of words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “ism” were also introduced around this time.
Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug “lexical gaps” where no adjective
was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g. marine for sea, pedestrian for walk), or
where
an
existing
adjective
had
acquired
unfortunate
connotations
(e.g. equine or equestrian for horsey, aquatic for watery), or merely as an additional synonym
(e.g. masculine and feminine in
addition
to manly and womanly, paternal in
addition
to fatherly, etc). Several rather ostentatious French phrases also became naturalized in English
at this juncture, including soi-disant, vis-à-vis, sang-froid, etc, as well as more mundane
French borrowings such as crêpe, étiquette, etc.
35 | P a g e
Early Modern English loans from Latin & French
(from Google Books, originally from T. Nevaleinen “An Introduction to Early Modern
English”)
Some scholars adopted Latin terms so excessively and awkwardly at this time that the
derogatory term “inkhorn” was coined to describe pedantic writers who borrowed the classics
to create obscure and opulent terms, many of which have not survived. Examples of inkhorn
terms
include revoluting, ingent, devulgate, attemptate, obtestate, fatigate, deruncinate, subsecive,
nidulate, abstergify, arreption, suppeditate, eximious, illecebrous, cohibit, dispraise and other
such inventions. Sydney Smith was one writer of the period with a particular penchant for such
inkhorn
terms,
including
gems
like frugiverous, mastigophorus, plumigerous, suspirous, anserous and fugacious, The socalled Inkhorn Controversy was the first of several such ongoing arguments over language use
which began to erupt in the salons of England (and, later, America). Among those strongly in
favour of the use of such “foreign” terms in English were Thomas Elyot and George Pettie;
just as strongly opposed were Thomas Wilson and John Cheke.
However, it is interesting to note that some words initially branded as inkhorn terms have
stayed
in
the
language
and
now
remain
in
common
use
(e.g. dismiss, disagree, celebrate, encyclopaedia, commit, industrial, affability, dexterity, sup
eriority, external, exaggerate, extol, necessitate, expectation, mundane, capacity and ingenio
us). An indication of the arbitrariness of this process is that impede survived while its
opposite, expede, did not; commit and transmit were allowed to continue, while demit was not;
and disabuse and disagree survived, while disaccustom and disacquaint, which were coined
around the same time, did not. It is also sobering to realize that some of the greatest writers in
the language have suffered from the same vagaries of fashion and fate. Not all of Shakespeare’s
many
creations
have
stood
the
test
of
time,
including barky, brisky, conflux, exsufflicate, ungenitured, unhair, questrist, cadent, perisive,
abruption, appertainments, implausive, vastidity and tortive.
Likewise,
Ben
Jonson’s ventositous and obstufact died a premature death, and John Milton’s
impressive inquisiturient has likewise not lasted.
There was even a self-conscious reaction to this perceived foreign incursion into the English
language, and some writers tried to deliberately resurrect older English words
36 | P a g e
(e.g. gleeman for musician, sicker for certainly, inwit for conscience, yblent for confused,
etc),
or
to
create
wholly
new
words
from
Germanic
roots
(e.g. endsay for conclusion, yeartide for anniversary, foresayer for prophet, forewitr for prud
ence, loreless for ignorant, gainrising for resurrection, starlore for astronomy, fleshstrings fo
r muscles, grosswitted for stupid, speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for ornithology,
etc).
Most of these were also short-lived. John Cheke even made a valiant attempt to translate the
entire “New Testament” using only native English words.
The 17th Century penchant for classical language also influenced the spelling of words
like debt and doubt, which had a silent “b” added at this time out of deference to their Latin
roots (debitum and dubitare respectively). For the same reason, island gained its silent
“s”, scissors its “c”, anchor, school and herb their “h”, people its “o” and victuals gained both
a
“c”
and
a
“u”.
In
the
same
way,
Middle
English perfet and verdit became perfect and verdict (the added “c” at least being pronounced
in these cases), faute and assaut became fault and assault, and aventure became adventure.
However, this perhaps laudable attempt to bring logic and reason into the apparent chaos of the
language has actually had the effect of just adding to the chaos. Its cause was not helped by
examples such the “p” which was added to the start of ptarmigan with no etymological
justification whatsoever other than the fact that the Greek word for feather, ptera, started with
a “p”.
Whichever side of the debate one favours, however, it is fair to say that, by the end of the 16th
Century, English had finally become widely accepted as a language of learning, equal if not
superior to the classical languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular
literature and little else – and still criticized throughout much of Europe as crude, limited and
immature – had become recognized for its inherent qualities.
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Printing Press and Standardization
The first book printed in English was “Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye” by Raoul Lefevre,
translated by William Caxton in 1473 (from John Rylands University Library)
The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing
press, one of the world’s great technological innovations, introduced into England by William
Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany
around 1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton’s own
translation, “The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”, actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or
early 1474. Up to 20,000 books were printed in the following 150 years, ranging from mythic
tales and popular stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, and Caxton
himself became quite rich from his printing business (among his best sellers were
Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Thomas Malory’s “Tales of King Arthur”). As massproduced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and
soon works in English became even more popular than books in Latin.
At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within
England – Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to include
London), Southern and Kentish – and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety
of different spellings. For example, the word church could be spelled in 30 different
ways, people in 22, receive in 45, she in 60 and though in an almost unbelievable 500
variations. The “-ing” participle (e.g. running) was said as “-and” in the north, “-end” in the
East Midlands, and “-ind” in the West Midlands (e.g. runnand, runnend, runnind). The “-eth”
and “-th” verb endings used in the south of the country (e.g. goeth) appear as “-es” and “-s” in
the Northern and most of the north Midland area (e.g. goes), a version which was ultimately to
become the standard.
38 | P a g e
The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard
spellings for official documents, specifying I instead of ich and various other common variants
of the first person pronoun, land instead of lond, and modern spellings
of such, right, not, but, these, any, many, can, cannot, but, shall, should, could, ought, thorou
gh, etc, all of which previously appeared in many variants. Chancery Standard contributed
significantly to the development of a Standard English, and the political, commercial and
cultural dominance of the “East Midlands triangle” (London-Oxford-Cambridge) was well
established long before the 15th Century, but it was the printing press that was really
responsible for carrying through the standardization process. With the advent of mass printing,
the dialect and spelling of the East Midlands (and, more specifically, that of the national capital,
London, where most publishing houses were located) became the de facto standard and, over
time, spelling and grammar gradually became more and more fixed.
Early printing was a very labour-intensive process
Some of the decisions made by the early publishers had long-lasting repercussions for the
language. One such example is the use of the northern English they, their and them in
preference to the London equivalents hi, hir and hem (which were more easily confused with
singular pronouns like he, her and him). Caxton himself complained about the difficulties of
finding forms which would be understood throughout the country, a difficult task even for
simple little words like eggs. But his own work was far from consistent
(e.g. booke and boke, axed and axyd) and his use of double letters and the final “e” was
haphazard
at
best
(e.g. had/hadd/hadde, dog/dogg/dogge, well/wel, which/whiche, fellow/felow/felowe/fallow/fa
39 | P a g e
llowe, etc). Many of his successors were just as inconsistent, particularly as many of them were
Europeans and not native English speakers. Sometimes different spellings were used for purely
practical reasons, such as adding or omitting letters merely to help the layout or justification of
printed lines.
A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has
been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic
consensus had emerged among teachers and writers. Printing also directly gave rise to another
strange quirk: the word the had been written for centuries as þe, using the thorn character
of Old English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the
letter “y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period),
resulting in the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is
only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the
“modern” pronunciation of ye has been used.
As the Early Modern period progressed, there was an increased use of double vowels
(e.g. soon) or a silent final “e” (e.g. name) to mark long vowels, and doubled consonants to
mark a preceding short vowel (e.g. sitting), although there was much less consensus about
consonants at the end of words (e.g. bed, glad, well, glasse, etc). The letters “u” and “v”, which
had been more or less interchangeable in Middle English, gradually became established as a
vowel and a consonant respectively, as did “i” and “j”. Also during the 16th Century, the
virgule (an oblique stroke /), which had been a very common mark of punctuation in Middle
English, was largely replaced by the comma; the period or full-stop was restricted to the end
of sentences; semi-colons began to be used in additon to colons (although the rules for their
use were still unclear); quotation marks were used to mark direct speech; and capital letters
were used at the start of sentences and for proper names and important nouns. The grammarian
John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms.
Standardization was well under way by around 1650, but it was a slow and halting process and
names in particular were often rendered in a variety of ways. For example, more than 80
different spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been recorded, and he himself spelled it
differently in each of his six known signatures, including two different versions in his own
will!
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The Bible
Page from John Wycliffe’s English “Bible” (from Wikipedia)
Two particularly influential milestones in English literature were published in the 16th and
early 17th Century. In 1549, the “Book of Common Prayer” (a translation of the Church liturgy
in English, substantially revised in 1662) was introduced into English churches, followed in
1611 by the Authorized, or King James, Version of “The Bible”, the culmination of more than
two centuries of efforts to produce a Bible in the native language of the people of England.
As we saw in the previous section, John Wycliffe had made the first English translation of “The
Bible” as early as 1384, and illicit handwritten copies had been circulating ever since. But, in
1526, William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the
original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale printed his “Bible” in secrecy in Germany, and smuggled
them into his homeland, for which he was hounded down, found guilty of heresy and executed
in 1536. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others
carried on his labours.
Tyndale’s “Bible” was much clearer and more poetic than Wycliffe’s early version. In addition
to completely new English words like fisherman, landlady, scapegoat, taskmaster, viper, seashore, zealous, beautiful, clear-eyed, broken-hearted and many others, it includes many of the
well-known phrases later used in the King James Version, such as let there be light, my
brother’s keeper, the powers that be, fight the good fight, the apple of mine eye, flowing with
milk and honey, the fat of the land, am I my brother’s keeper?, sign of the times, ye of little
faith, eat drink and be merry, salt of the earth, a man after his own heart, sick unto death, the
spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, a stranger in a strange land, let my people go, a law unto
themselves, etc.
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Ironically, a scant few years after Tyndale’s execution, Henry VIII’s split with Roman
Catholicism completely changed official attitudes to an English “Bible”, and by 1539 the idea
was being wholeheartedly encouraged, and several new English language Bibles were
published (including the “Coverdale Bible”, the “Matthew Bible”, the “Great Bible”,
the “Geneva Bible”, the “Bishops Bible”, etc).
The “King James Bible” was compiled by a committee of 54 scholars and clerics, and
published in 1611, in an attempt to standardize the plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up
over the preceding 70 years. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking,
both in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely
fallen out of use, or were at least in the process of dying out
(e.g. digged for dug, gat and gotten for got, bare for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, hol
pen for helped, wist for knew, etc), and several archaic forms such as brethren, kine and twain.
The “-eth” ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though “-es” was
becoming much more common by the early 17th Century, and ye is used for the second person
plural pronoun, rather than the more common you.
The comparison below of the famous Beatitudes from Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to
St. Matthew (in the Wycliffe, Tyndale and Authorized versions respectively) gives an idea of
the way the language developed over the period:
Wycliffe
Tyndale
King
1. And Jhesus, seynge the puple,
wente vp in to an hil; and whanne he
was set, hise disciplis camen to hym.
2. And he openyde his mouth, and
tauyte
hem,
and
seide,
3. Blessed ben pore men in spirit, for
the kyngdom of heuenes is herne.
4. Blessid ben mylde men, for thei
schulen
welde
the
erthe.
5. Blessid ben thei that mornen, for
thei
schulen
be
coumfortid.
6. Blessid ben thei that hungren and
thristen riytwisnesse, for thei schulen
be
fulfillid.
7. Blessid ben merciful men, for thei
schulen
gete
merci.
8. Blessid ben thei that ben of clene
herte, for thei schulen se God.
1. When he sawe the people, he went
vp into a mountayne, and when he was
set, his disciples came to hym,
2. And he opened hys mouthe, and
taught
them
sayinge:
3. Blessed are the povre in sprete: for
theirs is the kyngdome of heven.
4. Blessed are they that morne: for
they
shalbe
comforted.
5. Blessed are the meke: for they shall
inheret
the
erth.
6. Blessed are they which honger and
thurst for rightewesnes: for they
shalbe
filled.
7. Blessed are the mercifull: for they
shall
obteyne
mercy.
8. Blessed are the pure in herte: for
they
shall
se
God.
1. And seeing the multitudes
into a mountaine: and when
his disciples came
2. And he opened his mouth
them,
3. Blessed are the poore i
theirs is the kingdome
4. Blessed are they that mou
shall
be
5. Blessed are the meeke: fo
inherit
the
6. Blessed are they which
and thirst after righteousne
shall
be
7. Blessed are the mercifu
shall
obtaine
8. Blessed are the pure in he
shall
see
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9. Blessid ben pesible men, for thei
schulen be clepid Goddis children.
10. Blessid ben thei that suffren
persecusioun for riytfulnesse, for the
kingdam of heuenes is herne.
9. Blessed are the peacemakers: for
they shalbe called the chyldren of
God.
10. Blessed are they which suffre
persecucion for rightwesnes sake: for
theirs ys the kyngdome of heuen.
9. Blessed are the peacemak
shall bee called the childr
10. Blessed are they
persecuted for righteousnes
theirs is the kingdome of he
Excerpt from the Gospel According to St. Matthew Ch. 26 (Douay version, 1582) (73
sec) (from Palgrave Macmillan).
Although the majority of the King James Version was quite clearly based on Tyndale’s (up to
80% of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament), it is often considered a
masterpiece of the English language, and many phrases from it have become well-used in every
day speech. It is still considered by many to be the definitive English version of “The Bible”,
and its iconic opening lines “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” are well
known, as are many of its phrases (in addition to those borrowed from Tyndale), including how
are the mighty fallen, the root of the matter, to every thing there is a season, bent their swords
into ploughshares, set your house in order, be horribly afraid, get thee behind me, turned the
world upside down, a thorn in the flesh, etc. Much of its real power, though, was in exposing
the written language to many more of the common people.
Dictionaries and Grammars
The first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall”, was published by English schoolteacher
Robert Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first
French dictionary, although admittedly some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and
nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey’s little book contained 2,543 of what
he called “hard words”, especially those borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French,
although it was not actually a very reliable resource (even the word words was spelled in two
different ways on the title page alone, as wordes and words).
Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed
during the 17th and 18th Century. The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English
language was “An Universall Etymological English Dictionary”, compiled by Nathaniel
Bailey in 1721 (the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).
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But the first dictionary considered anything like reliable was Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of
the English Language”, published in 1755, over 150 years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive
academic achievement in its own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word dictionary remained the preeminent English dictionary until the much more comprehensive “Oxford English
Dictionary” 150 more years later, although it was actually riddled with inconsistencies in both
spelling and definitions. Johnson’s dictionary included many flagrant examples of inkhorn
terms
which
have
not
survived,
including digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, denominable, opiniatry, ariola
tion, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy, disubitary, esurine, estuation, indignate and
others.
Johnson also deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or considered
vulgar (including bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby and touchy), but these useful words have
clearly survived intact regardless of his opinions. Several of his definitions appear deliberately
jokey or politically motivated.
Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what was
increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language, including John Cheke’s 1569 proposal for
the removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar’s 1580 recommendation of a new 37letter alphabet (including 8 vowels, 4 “half-vowels” and 25 consonants) in order to aid and
simplify spelling. There were even attempts (similarly unsuccessful) to ban certain words or
phrases that were considered in some way undesirable, words such
as fib, banter, bigot, fop, flippant, flimsy, workmanship, selfsame, despoil, nowadays, further
more and wherewithal, and phrases such as subject matter, drive a bargain, handle a
subject and bolster an argument.
But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English
language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. Jonathan Swift, in
his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” of 1712,
decried the “degeneration” of English and sought to “purify” it and fix it forever in unchanging
form, calling for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the
Académie Française. He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and
Daniel Defoe, but such an institution was never actually realized. (Interestingly, the only
country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South Africa, in 1961).
In the wake of Johnson’s “Dictionary”, a plethora (one could even say a surfeit) of other
dictionaries appeared, peaking in the period between 1840 and 1860, as well as many
specialized dictionaries and glossaries. Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist,
and looked to regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling. His
book “British Education”, published in 1756, and unashamedly aimed at cultured British
society, particularly cultured Scottish society, purported to set the correct pronunciation of the
English language, and it was both influential and popular. His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. Malaprop.
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In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to appear in the 18th Century, the
best-known and most influential of which were Robert Lowth’s “A Short Introduction to
English Grammar” (1762) and Lindley Murray’s “English Grammar” (1794). In fact, some
200 works on grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and no less than
800 during the 19th Century. Most of these works, Lowth’s in particular, were extremely
prescriptive, stating in no uncertain terms the “correct” way of using English. Lowth was the
main source of such “correct” grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive,
never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive. A refreshing exception to
such prescriptivism was the “Rudiments of English Grammar” by the scientist and polymath
Joseph Priestley, which was unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by
common usage and not prescribed by self-styled grammarians.
The first English newspaper was the “Courante” or “Weekly News” (actually published in
Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in force in England at that time) arrived in 1622,
and the first professional newspaper of public record was the “London Gazette”, which began
publishing in 1665. The first daily, “The Daily Courant”, followed in 1702, and “The Times” of
London published its first edition in 1790, around the same time as the influential
periodicals “The Tatler” and “The Spectator”, which between them did much to establish the
style of English in this period.
Golden Age of English Literature
Newton’s “Opticks” was published in English (from Wikipedia)
All languages tend to go through phases of intense generative activity, during which many new
words are added to the language. One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern
period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English
Literature (other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th
Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing
today). Between 1500 and 1650, an estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about
half of which are still in use today.
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Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was
not considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac
Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and,
even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then
translated them into English. Sir Francis Bacon, however, hedged his bets and wrote many of
his works in both Latin and English and, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek, coined
several scientific words such as thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia. In
1704, Newton, having written in Latin until that time, chose to write his “Opticks” in English,
introducing in the process such words as lens, refraction, etc. Over time, the rise of nationalism
led to the increased use of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium
of intellectual communication.
Thomas Wyatt’s experimentation with different poetical forms during the early 16th Century,
and particularly his introduction of the sonnet from Europe, ensured that poetry would became
the proving ground for several generations of English writers during a golden age of English
literature, and Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Dryden,
Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and many other rose to the challenge. Important English
playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster
and of course Shakespeare.
The English scholar and classicist Sir Thomas Elyot went out of his way to find new words,
and gave us words like animate, describe, dedicate, esteem, maturity, exhaust and modesty in
the
early
16th
Century.
His
near
contemporary
Sir
Thomas
More
contributed absurdity, active, communicate, education, utopia, acceptance, exact, explain, ex
aggerate and others, largely from Latin roots. Milton was responsible for an estimated 630
word coinages, including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium. Ben Jonson, a contemporary
of Shakespeare, is also credited with the introduction of many common words,
including damp, defunct, strenuous, clumsy and others; John Donne gave us selfpreservation, valediction and
others;
and
to
Sir
Philip
Sydney
are
attributed bugbear, miniature, eye-pleasing, dumb-stricken, far-fetched and conversation in
its modern meaning.
It was really only in the 17th Century that dialects (or at least divergence from the fashionable
Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey) began to be considered uncouth and an indication
of inferior class. However, such dialects provided good comic material for the burgeoning
theatre industry (a well-known example being the “rude mechanicals” of Shakespeare’s “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and, paradoxically, many dialect words were introduced into
general usage in that way. The word class itself only acquired its modern sociological meaning
in the early 18th Century, but by the end of the century it had become all-pervasive, to the
extent that the mere sound of a Cockney accent was enough to brand the speaker as a vagabond,
thief or criminal (although in the 19th Century, Charles Dickens was to produce great literature
46 | P a g e
and sly humour out of just such preconceptions, explicitly using speech, vocabulary and accent
for commic effect).
William Shakespeare
A page from “Hamlet” from Shakespeare’s First Folio (from Hamlet on the Ramparts,
originally from Folger Shakespeare Library)
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Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, it is clear that one
man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant
extent in the late 16th and early 17th Century. Shakespeare took advantage of the relative
freedom and flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free and easy
with the already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs,
adjectives and substantives – an early instance of the “verbification” of nouns which modern
language purists often decry – in phrases such as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods Herod”, dog
them at the heels, the good Brutus ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it well”, “uncle me no uncle”,
etc.
He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and he personally coined an estimated
2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works, including, but by no means limited to, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled, ho
micide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lacklustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hotblooded, laughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pellmell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy,
and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts, almost one in ten of
the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is
the equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new
word here). However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare
himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than
happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest
fashions and fads for new ideas.
He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as one fell swoop, vanish into
thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed
lovers, as luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s
the rub, to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it’s Greek to me, a
tower of strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated breath, more
in sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s
paradise and flesh and blood, among many others.
By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object
pattern, and English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system, although to be was still
commonly used as the auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g. I am come rather
than I have come). Do was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g. say
you so? or do you say so?). Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still
acceptable to use clomb as well as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well
as shaved, digged as well as dug, etc. Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old
English to just two, “-s” and “-en”, and again Shakespeare sometimes used one and sometimes
the other. The old verb ending “-en” had in general been gradually replaced by “-eth”
48 | P a g e
(e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc), although this was itself in the process of being replaced by the
northern English verb ending “-es”, and Shakespeare used both (e.g. loves and loveth, but not
the old loven). Even over the period of Shakespeare’s output there was a noticeable change,
with “-eth” endings outnumbering “-es” by over 3 to 1 during the early period from 1591-1599,
and “-es” outnumbering “-eth” by over 6 to 1 during 1600-1613.
A comparison of a passage from “King Lear” in the 1623 First Folio with the same passage
from a more familiar modern edition below gives some idea of some of the changes that were
still underway in Shakespeare’s time:
Sir, I loue you more than words can weild ye matter,
Deerer
than
eye-sight,
space,
and
libertie,
Beyond what can be valewed, rich or rare,
No lesse then life, with grace, health, beauty, honor:
As much as Childe ere lou’d, or Father found.
A loue that makes breath poore, and speech vnable,
Beyond all manner of so much I loue you.
Sir, I love you more than word can wield
Dearer
than
eyesight,
space,
and
Beyond what can be valued, rich
No less than life, with grace, health, beau
As much as childe e’er loved, or fat
A love that makes breath poor and spee
Beyond all manner of ‘so much’ I love you.
Other than the spellings of words such as weild, libertie, valewed and honor, the most obvious
differences from modern-day spellings are the continued transposition of of “u” and “v”
in loue and vnable, and the trailing silent “e” in lesse, Childe and poore, both hold-overs
from Middle English and both in the process of transition at this time. However, it should be
remembered that, just as with Chaucer, the Shakespeare folios we have today were compiled
by followers such as John Hemming, Henry Condell and Richard Field, all of whom were not
above making the odd change or “improvement” to the text, and so we can never be sure exactly
what Shakespeare himself actually wrote.
Prologue from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in original dialect (45 sec).
Thee, thou and thy (signifying familiarity or social inferiority, as in most European languages
today) were still very prevalent in Shakespeare’s time, and Shakespeare himself made good
use of the subtle social implications of using thou rather than thou. Thee and thou had
disapeared almost completely from standard usage by the middle of the 17th Century,
paradoxically making English one of the least socially conscious of languages. The
commonplace letter “e” found at the end of many medieval English words was also beginning
its long decline by this time, although it was retained in many words to indicate the lengthening
of the preceding vowel (e.g. name pronounced as “naim”, not as the Old English “nam-a”). The
effects of the Great Vowel Shift were underway, but by no means complete, by the time of
49 | P a g e
Shakespeare, as can be seen in some of his rhyme schemes (e.g. tea and sea rhymed
with say, die rhymed with memory, etc).
International Trade
Major global trade
routes, 1400-1800 (from Mail & Guardian Online)
While all these important developments were underway, British naval superiority was also
growing. In the 16th and 17th Century, international trade expanded immensely, and loanwords
were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world, including
those of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Among
these were:








French
(e.g. bizarre, ballet, sachet, crew, progress, chocolate, salon, duel, brigade, infantry,
comrade, volunteer, detail, passport, explorer, ticket, machine, cuisine, prestige, gara
ge, shock, moustache, vogue);
Italian
(e.g. carnival, fiasco, arsenal, casino, miniature, design, bankrupt, grotto, studio, umb
rella, rocket, ballot, balcony, macaroni, piano, opera, violin);
Spanish (e.g. armada, bravado, cork, barricade, cannibal);
Portuguese (e.g. breeze, tank, fetish, marmalade, molasses);
German
(e.g. kindergarten, noodle, bum, dumb, dollar, muffin, hex, wanderlust, gimmick, walt
z, seminar, ouch!);
Dutch/Flemish
(
e.g. bale, spool, stripe, holster, skipper, dam, booze, fucking, crap, bugger, hunk, poll,
scrap, curl, scum, knapsack, sketch, landscape, easel, smuggle, caboose, yacht, cruis
e, dock, buoy, keelhaul, reef, bluff, freight, leak, snoop, spook, sleigh, brick, pump, bo
ss, lottery);
Basque (e.g. bizarre, anchovy);
Norwegian (e.g. maelstrom, iceberg, ski, slalom, troll);
50 | P a g e










Icelandic (e.g. mumps, saga, geyser);
Finnish (e.g. sauna);
Persian (e.g. shawl, lemon, caravan, bazaar, tambourine);
Arabic
(e.g. harem, jar, magazine, algebra, algorithm, almanac, alchemy, zenith, admiral, sh
erbet, saffron, coffee, alcohol, mattress, syrup, hazard, lute);
Turkish (e.g. coffee, yoghurt, caviar, horde, chess, kiosk, tulip, turban);
Russian (e.g. sable, mammoth);
Japanese (e.g. tycoon, geisha, karate, samurai);
Malay (e.g. bamboo, amok, caddy, gong, ketchup);
Chinese (e.g. tea, typhoon, kowtow).
Polynesian (e.g. taboo, tatoo).
Late Modern English (c. 1800 –
Present)
ByRichard BarkerUpdated:April 3, 2024
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The Industrial and Scientific Revolution
Steam-powered looms were just one of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution (from How
Stuff Works, original from Getty Images)
The dates may be rather arbitrary, but the main distinction between Early Modern and Late
Modern English (or just Modern English as it is sometimes referred to) lies in its vocabulary –
pronunciation, grammar and spelling remained largely unchanged. Late Modern English
accumulated many more words as a result of two main historical factors: the Industrial
Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed;
and the rise of the British Empire, during which time English adopted many foreign words and
made them its own. No single one of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th Century could
have established English as a world language, but together they did just that.
Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century
were of British origin, including the harnessing of steam to drive heavy machinery, the
development of new materials, techniques and equipment in a range of manufacturing
industries, and the emergence of new means of transportation (e.g. steamships, railways). At
least half of the influential scientific and technological output between 1750 and 1900 was
written in English. Another English speaking country, the USA, continued the English
language dominance of new technology and innovation with inventions like electricity, the
telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the sewing machine, the computer, etc.
The industrial and scientific advances of the Industrial Revolution created a need for
neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries. To a large extent, this relied on the
classical languages, Latin and Greek, in which scholars and scientists of the period were usually
well versed. Although words like oxygen, protein, nuclear and vaccine did not exist in the
classical languages, they could be (and were) created from Latin and Greek
roots. Lens, refraction, electron, chromosome, chloroform, caffeine, centigrade, bacteria, chr
onometer and claustrophobia are just a few of the other science-based words that were created
during this period of scientific innovation, along with a whole host of “-ologies” and “onomies”,
like biology, petrology, morphology, histology, palaeontology, ethnology, entomology, taxon
omy, etc.
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Many more new words were coined for the new products, machines and processes that were
developed
at
this
time
(e.g. train, engine, reservoir, pulley, combustion, piston, hydraulic, condenser, electricity, tel
ephone, telegraph, lithograph, camera, etc). In some cases, old words were given entirely new
meanings
and
connotation
(e.g. vacuum, cylinder, apparatus, pump, syphon, locomotive, factory, etc), and new words
created by amalgamating and fusing existing English words into a descriptive combination
were particularly popular (e.g. railway, horsepower, typewriter, cityscape, airplane, etc).
Colonialism and the British Empire
The British Empire at its height (in pink)
British colonialism had begun as early as the 16th Century, but gathered speed and momentum
between the 18th and 20th Century. At the end of the 16th Century, mother-tongue English
speakers numbered just 5-7 million, almost all of them in the British Isles; over the next 350
years, this increased almost 50-fold, 80% of them living outside of Britain. At the height of the
British Empire (in the late 19th and early 20th Century), Britain ruled almost one quarter of the
earth’s surface, from Canada to Australia to India to the Caribbean to Egypt to South Africa to
Singapore.
Although the English language had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland and the Scottish
Highlands by the time of Shakespeare, just two hundred years later, in 1780, John Adams was
confident enough to be able to claim (with a certain amount of foresight, but quite reasonably)
that English was “destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the
language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age”. In 1852, the
German linguist, Jacob Grimm, called English “the language of the world”, and predicted it
was “destined to reign in future with still more extensive sway over all parts of the globe”.
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It was taken very much for granted by the British colonial mentality of the time that extending
the English language and culture to the undeveloped and backward countries of Africa and
Asia was a desirable thing. The profit motive may have been foremost, but there was a certain
amount of altruistic motivation as well, and many saw it as a way of bringing order and political
unity to these chaotic and internecine regions (as well as binding them ever more strongly to
the Empire). To some extent, it is true that the colonies were happy to learn the language in
order to profit from British industrial and technological advances.
But colonialism was a two-way phenomenon, and Britain’s dealings with these exotic
countries, as well as the increase in world trade in general during this time, led to the
introduction of many foreign loanwords into English. For instance, Australia gave us a set of
words (not particularly useful outside the context of Australia itself)
like boomerang, kangaroo, budgerigar, etc. But India gave us such everyday words
as pyjamas, thug, bungalow, cot, jungle, loot, bangle, shampoo, candy, tank and many others.
The rise of so-called “New Englishes” (modern variants or dialects of the language, such as
Australian English, South African English, Caribbean English, South Asian English, etc)
raised, for some, the spectre of the possible fragmentation of the English language into
mutually unintelligible languages, much as occurred when Latin gave rise to the various
Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) centuries ago. As early as 1789, for example,
Noah Webster had predicted “a language in North America as different from the future
language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German or from
one another”. However, in retrospect, this does not seem to have happened and, in the age of
instantaneous global communication, it now seems ever less likely to occur in the future.
The New World
Settlement of the English Colonies
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It was largely during the Late Modern period that the United States, newly independent from
Britain as of 1783, established its pervasive influence on the world. The English colonization
of North America had begun as early as 1600. Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607, and
the Pilgrim Fathers settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. The first settlers were, then,
contemporaries of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Bacon (1561-1626) and Donne (1572-1631), and
would have spoken a similar dialect. The new land was described by one settler as “a hideous
and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men”, and half of the settlers were dead
within weeks of their arrival, unaccustomed to the harsh winter. In fact, the colony would
probably have gone the way of the earlier ill-fated Roanoke Island settlement attempt of 1584
were it not for the help of an American native called Squanto, who had learned English from
English sailors.
Parts of the New World had already been long colonized by the French, Spanish and Dutch,
but English settlers like the Pilgrim Fathers (and those who soon followed them) went there to
stay, not just to search for riches or trading opportunities. They wanted to establish themselves
permanently, to work the land, and to preserve their culture, religion and language, and this
was a crucial factor in the survival and development of English in North America. The German
“Iron Chancellor” Otto van Bismarck would later ruefully remark that “the most significant
event of the 20th Century will be the fact that the North Americans speak English”.
Interestingly, some English pronunciations and usages “froze” when they arrived in America
while they continued to evolve in Britain itself (sometimes referred to as “colonial lag”), so
that, in some respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern
British English is. Perhaps the best-known example is the American use of gotten which has
long since faded from use in Britain (even though forgotten has survived). But the American
use
of
words
like fall for
the
British autumn, trash for rubbish, hog for pig, sick for ill, guess for think,
and loan for lend are all examples of this kind of anachronistic British word usage. America
kept several words (such as burly, greenhorn, talented and scant) that had been largely
dropped in Britain (although some have since been recovered), and words
like lumber and lot soon acquired their specific American meanings. Something approaching
Shakespearean speech can sometimes be encountered in isolated valleys in the Appalachian or
Ozarks, where words like afeard, yourn, sassy and consarn, and old pronunciations like “jine”
for join, can still sometimes be heard.
The settlement of America served as the route of introduction for many Native American words
into the English language. Most of the early settlers were austere Puritans and they were quite
conservative in their adoption of native words, which were largely restricted to terms for native
animals and foods (e.g. raccoon, opossum, moose, chipmunk, skunk, tomato, squash, hickory,
etc). In many cases, the original indigenous words were very difficult to render in English, and
55 | P a g e
have often been mangled almost beyond recognition (e.g. squash is from the
native quonterquash or asquutasquash,
depending
on
the
region; racoon is
from raugraughcun or rahaugcum; hickory is from pawcohiccora; etc). Some words needed to
describe
the
Native
American
lifestyle
were
also
accepted
(e.g. canoe, squaw, papoose, wigwam, moccasin, tomahawk),
although
many
other
supposedly Native-derived words and phrases (such as brave, peace-pipe, pale-face, war-path,
etc) were actually spurious and a product of the fertile imaginations of 19th Century American
romantic novelists. New words were also needed for some geographical features which had no
obvious
English
parallel
in
the
limited
experience
of
the
settlers
(e.g. foothill, notch, bluff, gap, divide, watershed, clearing, etc).
Immigration into America was not limited to English speakers, though. In the second half of
the 19th Century, in particular, over 30 million poured into the country from all parts of the
world. At the peak of immigration, from 1901 to 1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a
million Austro-Hungarians, half a million Russians and tens of thousands each from many
other countries. Many nationalities established their own centres: the Amish or Pennsylvania
Dutch (actually Germans, as in Deutsch) tended to stay in their isolated communities, and
developed a distinctive English with a strong German accent and an idiosyncratic syntax; many
Germans also settled in Wisconsin and Indiana; Norwegians settled in Minnesota and the
Dakotas; Swedes in Nebraska; etc.
Often foreigners were despised or laughed at, and the newcomers found it in their best interests
to integrate well and to observe as much uniformity of speech and language as possible. This,
as well as the improvements in transportation and communication, led to fewer, and less
distinct, dialects than in the much smaller area of Britain, although there are some noticeable
(and apparently quite arbitrary) regional differences, even within some states. A few isolated
communities, like the so-called “Tidewater” communities around Chesapeake Bay in Virginia
(who were mainly descended from settlers from Somerset and Gloucestershire in the West
Country of England, unlike the Massachusetts settlers who were largely from the eastern
counties of England), have managed to retain the distinctive burring West Country accent of
their forebears. But, by the 19th Century, a standard variety of American English had developed
in most of the country, based on the dialect of the Mid-Atlantic states with its characteristic flat
“a” and strong final “r”. Today, Standard American English, also known as General American,
is based on a generalized Midwestern accent, and is familiar to us from American films, radio
and newscasters.
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British Colonization of North America (1713-1763)
American language zealots like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster revelled
in the prospect of a plain English, free of the regional dialects and class distinctions of Britain.
Long before the Declaration of Independence, British visitors to America often remarked that
the average American spoke much better English than the average Englishman. After the
American War of Independence of 1775 – 1783, there was some discussion about whether
English should remain the national language, but it was never really in any doubt, and was not
even mentioned in the new Constitution (even today, the USA does not have an “official
language”, as indeed neither does Australia or Britain itself).
The colonization of Canada proceeded quite separately from that of America. There had been
British, French and Portuguese expeditions to the east coast of Canada even before the end of
the 15th Century, but the first permanent European settlement was by France in 1608. British
interests in Canada did not coalesce until the early 18th Century but, after the Treaty of Paris
of 1763, Britain wrested control of most of eastern Canada from the French, and it became an
important British colony. It was the War of 1812 against the Americans, as much as
Confederation and independence from Britain in 1867, that definitively cemented the separate
identity of English Canada.
English in Canada has also been influenced by successive waves of immigration, from the
influx of Loyalists from the south fleeing the American Revolution, to the British and Irish
who were encouraged to settle the land in the early 19th Century to the huge immigration from
all over the world during the 20th Century. But, more than anything, the speech of the Loyalists
arriving in southern Ontario from states like Pennsylvania and New York, formed the basis of
Canadian speech and its accent (including the distinctive pronunciation of the “ou” in words
like house and out, and the “i” in words like light). Modern Canadian English tends to show
very little regional diversity in pronunciation, even compared to the United States, the Irishtinged dialect of Newfoundland being far and away the most distinctive dialect.
57 | P a g e
Canadian English today contains elements of British English and American English in its
vocabulary (it also uses a kind of hybrid of American and British spelling), as well several
distinctive “Canadianisms” (like hoser, hydro, chesterfield, etc, and the ubiquitous eh? at the
end of many sentences). Its vocabulary has been influenced by loanwords from the native
peoples
of
the
north
(e.g. igloo, anorak, toboggan, canoe, kayak, parka, muskeg, caribou, moose, etc), as well as
the French influence (e.g. serviette, tuque) from Lower Canada/Quebec.
American Dialect
Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06)
In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter: “The new circumstances under which we are
placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An
American dialect will therefore be formed”. As the settlers (including a good proportion of
Irish and Scots, with their own distinctive accents and usages of English) pushed westward,
new terms were indeed introduced, and these pioneers were much less reticent to adopt native
words or, indeed, to make up their own. The journals of Lewis and Clark, written as they
explored routes to the west coast in 1804-6, contain over 500 native words (mainly animals,
plants and food). The wild “outlands” west of the Mississippi River gave us the
word outlandish to describe its idiosyncratic characters.
John Adams’ much-vaunted “plain English” took a back seat in the hands of colourful
characters like Davy Crockett (who was himself of Scots-Irish decent) and others, who saw
western expansion as an excuse to expand the language with new words and quirky
Americanisms
like skedaddle, bamboozle, shebang, riff-raff, hunky-dory, licketysplit, rambunctious, ripsnorter, humdinger, doozy, shenanigan, discombobulate, absquatulate
, splendiferous, etc, not to mention evocative phrases like fly off the handle, a chip on the
shoulder, no axe to grind, sitting on the fence, dodge the issue, knuckle down, make the fur
fly, go the whole hog, kick the bucket, face the music, bite the dust, barking up the wrong
tree, pass the buck, stack the deck, poker face, in cahoots, pull up stakes, horse sense, two
cents’ worth, stake a claim, strike it rich, the real McCoy and even the phrase stiff upper lip (in
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regard to their more hidebound British cousins). From the deliberately misspelled and
dialectical works of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings to popular novels like Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852) and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (1884), this
American vernacular spread rapidly, and became in the process more publicly acceptable both
in everyday speech and in literature.
Many Spanish words also made their way into American English during the expansion and
settlement
of
the
Spanish-influenced
American
West,
including
words
like armadillo, alligator, canyon, cannibal, guitar, mosquito, mustang, ranch, rodeo, stamped
e, tobacco, tornado and vigilante (some of which were also originally derived from native
languages). To a lesser extent, French words, from the French presence in the Louisiana area
and in Canada, contributed loanwords like gopher, prairie, depot, cache, cent and dime, as
well as French-derived place names like Detroit, Baton Rouge, Des Moines, etc.
Thomas Edison talks about electricity in 1908 (example of General American accent of the
time) (29 sec) (from Internet Archive).
The number of American coinings later exported back to the mother country should not be
underestimated.
They
include
commonly
used
word
like commuter, bedrock, sag, snag, soggy, belittle, lengthy, striptease, gimmick, jeans, teenag
er, hangover, teetotal, fudge, publicity, joyride, blizzard, showdown, uplift, movie, obligate, st
unt, notify, redneck, businessman, cocktail, skyscraper, bootleg, highfalutin, guesstimate, rain
coat, cloudburst, nearby, worthwhile, smooch, genocide, hindsight and graveyard among
many others. Even the word roundabout originally came from America, even though traffic
circles hardly exist there. Perhaps the quintessential Americanism is OK (okay), which has
become one of the best known and most widespread terms throughout the whole world. Its
origins are somewhat obscure and still hotly debated, but it seems to have come into common
usage in America during the 1830s. Many of these Americanisms were met with a certain
amount of snobbery in Britain, and many words thought to be American in origin were vilified
as uncouth and inferior by the British intelligentsia (even though many of those denigrated
actually turned out to be of older English provenance in the first place).
Today, some 4,000 words are used differently in the USA and Britain
(lift/elevator, tap/faucet, bath/tub, curtains/drapes, biscuit/cookie and boot/trunk are
just
some of the better known ones) and, increasingly, American usage is driving out traditional
words and phrases back in Britain (e.g. truck for lorry, airplane for aeroplane, etc). American
spelling
is
also
becoming
more
commonplace
in
Britain
(e.g. jail for gaol, wagon for waggon, reflection for reflexion,
etc),
although
some
Americanized spelling changes actually go back centuries (e.g. words
like horror, terror, superior, emperor and governor were
originally
spelled
as horrour, terrour, superiour, emperour and governour in Britain according to Johnson’s
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1755 “Dictionary”, even if other words like colour, humour and honour had resisted such
changes).
Black English
Atlantic slave trade triangle
The practice of transporting cheap black labour from western Africa to the New World was
begun by the Spaniards in the 16th Century, and it had been also used by the Portuguese, Dutch
and French, but it was adopted in earnest by the British in the early 17th Century. The British
had established numerous outposts in the Caribbean (dubbed the “West Indies” by Columbus
out of the conviction that he had reached the spice islands of the Indies, or Asia, by a western
route), and had developed a whole trading empire to take advantage of the tropical climate of
the region. The labour-intensive work on tobacco, cocoa, cotton and particularly sugar
plantations required large numbers of cheap workers, and the Atlantic slave trade triangle
(Britain – West Africa – Americas) was developed to supply it, although soon a demand also
grew for household servants.
The numbers of African slaves in the America alone grew from just twenty in 1619 to over 4
million at the time of the American abolition of slavery after the Civil War in 1865 (the British
had abolished the slave trade earlier, in 1807). The slaves transported by the British to work in
the plantations of the American south and the islands of the West Indies were mainly from a
region of West Africa rich in hundreds of different languages, and most were superb natural
linguists, often speaking anywhere between three and six African languages fluently. Due to
the deliberate practice of shipping slaves of different language backgrounds together (in an
attempt to avoid plots and rebellions), the captives developed their own English-based pidgin
60 | P a g e
language, which they used to communicate with the largely English-speaking sailors and
landowners, and also between themselves.
A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between people with no
language in common. Verb forms in particular are simplified (e.g. “me go run school”, “him
done go”, etc), but adjectives are also often used instead of adverbs, verbs instead of
prepositions, pronouns are no inflected, etc. The resulting stripped-down language may be
crude but it is usually serviceable and efficient.
Once established in the Americas, these pidgins developed into stable creoles, forms of
simplified English combined with many words from a variety of African languages. Most of
the African slaves made landfall at Sullivan Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, and even
today Gullah can be heard in many of the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia.
Gullah is an English-African patois (the name is possibly derived from the word Angola),
thought to be remarkably unchanged from that spoken by African slaves two or three centuries
ago. Gullah and similar “plantation creoles” provided the basis of much of modern Black
American English, street slang and hip-hop, but interestingly it also significantly influenced
the language and accent of the aristocratic white owners, and the modern English of the
southern states.
The popular Uncle Remus stories of the late 19th Century (many of them based around the
trickster character of Brer Rabbit and others like Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, etc) are probably based
on this kind of creole, mixed with native Cherokee origins (although they were actually
collections made by white Americans like Joel Chandler Harris). The following passage is from
Charles Colcock Jones Jr.’s 1888 story “Brer Lion an Brer Goat”:
Brer Lion bin a hunt, an eh spy Brer Goat duh leddown topper er big rock duh wuk eh mout an
der chaw. Eh creep up fuh ketch um. Wen eh git close ter um eh notus um good. Brer Goat keep
on chaw. Brer Lion try fuh fine out wuh Brer Goat duh eat. Eh yent see nuttne nigh um ceptin
de nekked rock wuh eh duh leddown on. Brer Lion stonish. Eh wait topper Brer Goat. Brer
Goat keep on chaw, an chaw, an chaw. Brer Lion cant mek de ting out, an eh come close, an
eh say: “Hay! Brer Goat, wuh you duh eat?” Brer Goat skade wen Brer Lion rise up befo um,
but eh keep er bole harte, an eh mek ansur: “Me duh chaw dis rock, an ef you dont leff, wen
me done long um me guine eat you.” Dis big wud sabe Brer Goat. Bole man git outer diffikelty
way coward man lose eh life.
Many of the words may look strange at first, but the meanings become quite clear when spoken
aloud, and the spellings give a good approximation of a black/Caribbean accent
(e.g. notus for notice, bole for bold, ansur for answer, skade for scared, etc). Dis/dem/dey are
used for this/them/they in order to avoid the difficult English “th” sound, and many other
61 | P a g e
usages
are
familiar
from
modern
Caribbean
accents
(e.g. mout for mouth, ting for thing, gwine for going, etc). For simplicity, adjectives often
stand in for adverbs (e.g. coward man) and verbs may be simplified (e.g. Brer Lion bin a hunt)
or left out completely (e.g. Brer Lion stonish). Double adjectives (e.g. big big) are often used
as intensifiers, although not in this particular passage.
Jamaican creole (known locally as “Patwa”, for patois) was one of the deepest in the Caribbean,
partly because of the sheer numbers transported there, and the accent there is still so thick as
to be almost undecipherable. Variations of English creoles gradually mixed with other creole
forms based on French, Spanish and Portuguese, leading to a diverse range of English varieties
throughout the Caribbean islands, as well as adjacent areas of Central and South America.
Familiar words like buddy for brother, palaver for trouble, and pikni for child, arose out of
these
creoles,
and
words
like barbecue, savvy, nittygritty, hammock, hurricane, savannah, canoe, cannibal, potato, tobacco and maize were also
early introductions into English from the Caribbean, often via Spanish or Portuguese.
Britain’s Other Colonies
A family tree representation of the spread of the English language around the world (from The
Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, after Peter Strevens)
But North America was not the only “New World”. In 1788, less than twenty years after James
Cook’s initial landing, Britain established its first penal colony in Sydney, Australia (once
labelled merely as Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Land). About 130,000
prisoners were transported there over the next 50 years, followed by other “free” settlers. Most
of the settlers were from London and Ireland, resulting in a very distinctive and egalitarian
accent and a basic English vocabulary supplemented by some Aboriginal words and
expressions (e.g. boomerang, kangaroo, koala, wallaby, budgerigar, etc). The Australian
Aborigines were nomadic and reclusive, and their numbers relatively small (perhaps 200,000,
62 | P a g e
speaking over 200 separate languages), so the loanwords they contributed to English were few
and mainly limited to local plant and animal names.
Over time, the convicts who had served out their time became citizens of the emerging country,
and became euphemistically known as “government men”, “legitimates”, “exiles” or “empire
builders”. Some British slang words, especially Cockney terms and words from the
underground “Flash” language of the criminal classes, became more commonly used in
Australia than in Britain (e.g. chum, swag, bash, cadge, grub, dollop, lark, crack, etc), and
some distinctively Australian terms were originally old English words which largely died out
outside of Australia (e.g. cobber, digger, pom, dinkum, walkabout, tucker, dunny).
New Zealand began to be settled by European whalers and missionaries in the 1790s, although
an official colony was not established there until 1840. New Zealand was keen to emphasize
its national identity (and particularly its differences from neighbouring Australia), and this
influenced its own version of English, as did the incorporation of native Maori words into the
language.
British settlement in South Africa began in earnest in 1820, and nearly half a million Englishspeaking immigrants moved there during the last quarter of the 19th Century, eager to take
advantage of the discoveries of gold and diamonds. The Dutch had been in South Africa since
the 1650s, but the wave of British settlers soon began to anglicize the Afrikaans (Dutch) and
black population. English was made the official language in 1822 and, as in Australia, a
distinctive homogeneous accent developed over time, drawing from the various different
groups of settlers. Although English was always – and remains – a minority language, spoken
by less than 10% of South Africans, Afrikaans was seen by the 80% black majority as the
language of authority and repression (the word apartheid, in addition to trek, remains South
Africa’s best known contribution to the English lexicon), and English represented for them a
means of achieving an international voice. In 1961, South Africa became the only country ever
to set up an official Academy to promote the English language. The 1993 South African
constitution named no less than eleven official languages, of which English and Afrikaans are
but two, but English is increasingly recognized as the lingua franca.
In West Africa, the English trading influence began as early as the end of the 15th Century. In
this language-rich and highly multilingual region, several English-based pidgins and creoles
arose, many of which (like Krio, the de facto national language of Sierra Leone) still exist
today. Sierra Leone, Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and Cameroon were all run as British Crown
Colonies in the 19th Century, and the influence of the English language remains of prime
importance in the region. Liberia, founded in 1822 as a homeland for former American slaves
63 | P a g e
(similar to the way in which Sierra Leone had been established by the British in the 1780s), is
the only African country with an American influence.
In East Africa, British trade began around the end of the 16th Century, although systematic
interest only started in the 1850s. Six modern East African states with a history of 19th Century
British imperial rule (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe), gave
English official language status on achieving independence in the 1960s. English is widely
used in government, civil service, courts, schools, media, road signs, stores and business
correspondence in these countries, and, because more British emigrants settled there than in
the more difficult climate of West Africa, a more educated and standard English-speaking
population grew up there, and there was less need for the development of pidgin languages.
Decolonization after 1945 (from University of Oregon)
The British East India Company established its first trading station in India in 1612, and it
expanded rapidly. At first, the British traders had to learn the various languages of India in
order to do business (Hindi, Bengali, Gujurati and others). But soon, schools and Christian
missions were set up, and British officials began to impose English on the local populace.
During the period of British sovereignty in India (the “Raj”), from 1765 until partition and
independence in 1947, English became the medium of administration and education throughout
the Indian sub-continent, particularly following Thomas Macaulay’s famous (or
infamous) “Minutes” of 1835. This was welcomed by some (particularly in the Dravidian
speaking areas of southern India, who preferred English as a lingua franca to the Hindi
alternative), but opposed and derided by others. A particularly florid and ornate version of
English, incorporating an extreme formality and politeness, sometimes referred to as Babu
English, grew up among Indian administrators, clerks and lawyers.
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Although now just a “subsidiary official language” (one of 15 official languages in a country
which boasts 1,652 languages and dialects), and much less important than Hindi, English
continues to be used as the lingua franca in the legal system, government administration, the
army, business, media and tourism. In addition to Britain’s contribution to the Indian language,
though, India’s many languages (particularly Hindi) gave back many words such
as pyjamas, bandanna, pundit, bungalow, veranda, dinghy, cot, divan, ghoul, jungle, loot, cas
h, toddy, curry, candy, chit, thug, punch (the
drink), cushy, yoga, bangle, shampoo, khaki, turban, tank, juggernaut, etc.
English also became the language of power and elite education in South-East Asia, initially
though its trading territories in Penang, Singapore, Malacca and Hong Kong. Papua New
Guinea developed differently, developing a pervasive English-based pidgin language known
as Tok Pisin (“Talk Pidgin”) which is now its official language. The Philippines was an
American colony for the first half of the 20th Century and the influence of American English
remains strong there.
Language Reform
Noah Webster’s “The American Spelling Book” (from Open Library)
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George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde or Dylan Thomas or even Winston Churchill,
the attribution is unclear) once quipped that “England and America are two countries separated
by a common language”, and part of the reason for the differences between the two versions of
English lies in the American proclivity for reform and simplification of the language. In the
1760s, Benjamin Franklin campaigned vigorously for the reform of spelling (he advocated the
discontinuation of the “unnecessary letters “c”, “w”, “y” and “j” and the addition of six new
letters), as later did Noah Webster and Mark Twain. To be fair, there were also calls for reform
in Britain, including from such literary luminaries as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Conan
Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and even Charles Darwin, although the British efforts generally
had little or no effect.
Both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster were totally convinced that American English
would evolve into a completely separate language. Towards the end of the 19th Century, the
English linguist Henry Sweet predicted that, within a century, “England, America and Australia
will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, owing to their independent changes of
pronunciation” (as it has turned out, with the development of instantaneous global
communications, the different dialects seem likely to converge rather than diverge, and
American economic and cultural dominance is increasingly apparent in both British and,
particularly. Australian speech and usage).
Noah Webster is often credited with single-handedly changing American spelling, particularly
through his dictionaries: “The American Spelling Book” (first published in 1788, although it
ran to at least 300 editions over the period between 1788 and 1829, and became probably the
best selling book in American history after “The Bible”), “The Compendious Dictionary of the
English Language” (1806), and “The American Dictionary of the English Language” (1828).
In fact, many of the changes he put forward in his dictionaries were already underway in
America (e.g. the spelling of theater and center instead of theatre and centre) and many others
may well have happened anyway. But he was largely responsible for the revised spelling of
words
like color and honor (instead
of
the
British colour and honour), traveler and jeweler (for traveller and jeweller), check and mask (
for cheque and masque), defense and offense (for defence and offence), plow for plough,
as
well as the rather illogical adoption of aluminum instead of aluminium.
Many
of
Webster’s
more
radical
spelling
recommendations
(e.g. soop, groop, bred, wimmen, fether, fugitiv, tuf, thum, hed, bilt, tung, fantom, croud, ile, d
efinit, examin, medicin, etc) were largely ignored, as were most of his suggested pronunciation
suggestions (e.g. “deef” for deaf, “booty” for beauty, “nater” for nature, etc), although he was
responsible for the current American pronunciations of words like schedule and lieutenant.
Webster
also
claimed
to
have
invented
words
such
as demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable and expenditure, even though
these words had actually been in use for some centuries.
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For many Americans, like Webster, taking ownership of the language and developing what
would become known as American Standard English was seen as a matter of honour (honor)
for the newly independent nation. But such reforms were fiercely criticized in Britain, and even
in America a so-called “Dictionary War” ensued between supporters of Webster’s
Americanism and the more conservative British-influenced approach of Joseph Worcester and
others. When the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Webster’s dictionaries and produced
the first Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1847, they actually expunged most of Webster’s more
radical spelling and pronunciation ideas, and the work (and its subsequent versions) became an
instant success. In 1906, the American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie tried to resurrect some
of Webster’s reforms. He contributed large sums of money towards the Simplified Spelling
Board, which resulted in the American adoption of the simpler spellings of words such
as ax, judgment, catalog, program, etc. President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to use these
spellings for all federal publications and they quickly caught on, although there was still stiff
resistance to such recommended changes as tuf, def, troble, yu, filosofy, etc.
Literary Developments
From “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll
A vast number of novels (of varying quality and literary value) were published in the 19th
Century to satisfy the apparently insatiable appetite of Victorian Britain for romantic stories,
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ranging from the sublimity of Jane Austen’s works to the florid excesses and hackneyed
phrasing typified by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s famous opening lines “It was a dark and stormy
night…” Due to the strictures of prudish Victorian society, an inventive list of euphemisms
were popularized for body parts and other unmentionable concepts, a prudery perhaps
epitomized by Thomas Bowdler’s “bowdlerization” of the works of Shakespeare in which
offending words like strumpet, whore, devil, etc, were removed or toned down.
The early 19th century language of Jane Austen appears to all intents and purposes to be quite
modern in vocabulary, grammar and style, but it hides some subtle distinctions in meaning
which have since been lost (e.g. compliment usually meant merely polite or conventional
praise; inmate connoted an inhabitant of any sort rather than a prisoner; genius was a general
word for intelligence, and did not suggest exceptional prowess; regard encompassed a feeling
of genuine affection; irritation did not carry its modern negative connotation, merely
excitement; grateful could also mean gratifying; to lounge meant to stroll rather than to sit or
slouch; to essay mean to attempt something; etc). To Austen, and other writers of her
generation, correct grammar and style (i.e. “correct” according to the dictates of Robert
Lowth’s “Grammar”) were important social markers, and the use of non-standard vocabulary
or grammar would have been seen as a mark of vulgarity to be avoided at all costs.
New ideas, new concepts and new words were introduced in the early science fiction and
speculative fiction novels of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Lewis Carroll began
to experiment with invented words (particularly blended or “portmanteau” words) in poems
like “Jabberwocky” (1872). Chortle and galumph are two words from the poem that made the
jump to everyday English, but the work is jam-packed with nonsense words as may be seen
from its first few lines: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: /
All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe”).
But some truly revolutionary works were just around the corner in the early 20th Century, from
Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot to William Faulkner to Samuel Beckett and, perhaps most
emphatically, the innovations of the Irishman, James Joyce, in “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s
Wake” (although,
of
the
hundreds
of
new
words
in
these
works,
only monomyth and quark have enjoyed any currency, and that rather limited). A single
sentence from “Finnegan’s Wake” (1939) may suffice to give a taste of the extent of Joyce’s
neologistic rampage:
The allwhite poors guardiant, pulpably of balltossic stummung, was literally astundished over
the painful sake, how he burstteself, which he was gone to, where he intent to did he, whether
you think will, wherend the whole current of the afternoon whats the souch of a surch hads of
hits of hims, urged and staggered thereto in his countryports at the caledosian capacity for
Lieutuvisky of the caftan’s wineskin and even more so, during, looking his bigmost
astonishments, it was said him, aschu, fun the concerned outgift of the dead med dirt, how that,
arrahbejibbers, conspuent to the dominical order and exking noblish permish, he was namely
coon at bringer at home two gallonts, as per royal, full poultry till his murder.
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James Joyce reads an excerpt from “Finnegan’s Wake” (Book I Ch. 8) (72 sec) (from The
Floating Library).
Clearly, this is English taken to a whole new level, pushing the boundaries of the language, and
it is considered one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Although the
basic English grammar and syntax is more or less intact, it is written in an experimental streamof-consciousness style, and contains masses of literary allusions, puns and dream-like word
associations. Almost half of the vocabulary consists of neologisms (particularly compound
words like allwhite, bigmost, countryports, outgift, etc, and portmanteau, or blended words,
like guardiant, wherend, conspuent, etc), and many of the words that are recognizable are used
in an idiosyncratic and non-standard way. Some of Joyce’s word inventions (not in this sample)
are 100 letters long. Initial reception of the work lurched between rabid praise and expressions
of absolute incomprehension and disdain, and even today it remains a polarizing issue. The
book continues to be more written about than read.
In the late 19th Century, the Scottish lexicographer James Murray was given the job of
compiling a “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles”. He worked on this project for
36 years from 1879 until his death in 1915, and his results were completed by others and
published in 1928 as the “Oxford English Dictionary”. It contained 415,000 entries supported
by nearly 2 million citations, and ran to over 15,000 pages in 12 volumes, and was immediately
accepted as the definitive guide to the English language. Interestingly, this version used the
American “-ize” ending for words such as characterize, itemize, etc, rather than the British
practice (both then and now) of spelling them characterise, itemise, etc. Although supplements
were issued in 1933 and 1972-6, it was not revised or added to until 1989, when the current
(second) edition was published, listing over 615,000 words in 20 huge volumes, officially the
world’s largest dictionary.
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20th Century
Sir Ernest Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words”
By the end of the 19th Century, the USA had overtaken the UK as the world’s fastest growing
economy, and America’s “economic imperialism” continued the momentum of the British
Industrial Revolution into the 20th Century. The American dominance in economic and
military power, as well as its overwhelming influence in the media and popular culture has
ensured that English has remained the single most important language in the world and the
closest thing to a global language the world has ever seen.
Perhaps in reaction to the perceived appropriation or co-option of English by the United States,
a certain amount of language snobbery continued to grow in England. In 1917, Daniel Jones
introduced the concept of Received Pronunciation (sometimes called the Queen’s English,
BBC English or Public School English) to describe the variety of Standard English spoken by
the educated middle and upper classes, irrespective of what part of England they may live in.
The invention of radio in the 1920s, and then television in the 1930s, disseminated this
archetypal English accent to the masses and further entrenched its position, despite the fact that
it was only spoken by about 1 in 50 in the general population. At the same time, regional accents
were further denigrated and marginalized. However, since the Second World War, a greater
permissiveness towards regional English varieties has taken hold in England, both in education
and in the media.
There was a mid-century reaction within Britain against what George Orwell described as the
“ugly and inaccurate” contemporary English of the time. In Orwell’s dystopic novel “Nineteen
Eighty-Four”, words like doublethink, thoughtcrime, newspeak and blackwhite give a
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nightmarish vision of where he saw the language going. The “Plain English” movement, which
emphased clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language, was bolstered by Sir Ernest
Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words”, published in the early 1950s, and the trend towards
plainer language, appropriate to the target audience, continued in official and legal
communications, and was followed by a similar movement in the United Sates during the
1970s. Gowers himself thought that legal language was a case apart, being more of a science
than an art, and could not be subject to Plain English rules, but in more recent years there has
been a trend toward plainer language in legal documents too.
The 20th Century was, among other things, a century of world wars, technological
transformation, and globalization, and each has provided a source of new additions to the
lexicon.
For
example,
words
like blockbuster, nose-dive, shellshocked, camouflage, radar, barrage, boondocks, roadblock, snafu, boffin, brainwashing, spe
arhead, etc, are all military terms which have made their way into standard English during the
World Wars. As an interesting aside, in 1941, when Sir Winston Churchill wanted to plumb
the depths of the English soul at a particularly crucial and difficult time in the Second World
War, almost all of the words in the main part of his famous speech (“we shall fight on the
beaches… we shall never surrender”) were of Anglo-Saxon origin, with the significant
exception of surrender (a French loanword). The speech is also a good example of what was
considered Received Pronunciation at the time.
Winston Churchill’s 1941 War Speech (32 sec).
The push for political correctness and inclusiveness in the last third of the 20th Century,
particularly by homosexuals, feminists and visible minority groups, led to a reassessment of
the popular usage of many words. Feminists called into question the underlying sexism in
language (e.g. mankind, chairman, mailman, etc) and some have even gone to the lengths of
positing herstory as an alternative to history. For a time, stong objections were voiced at the
inherent racism underlying words like blacklist, blackguard, blackmail, even blackboard, and
at the supposedly disparaging and dismissive nature of terms like mentally
handicapped, disabled, Third World, etc. But there has also been a certain amount of positive
re-branding and reclamation (also known as reappropriation) of many pejorative words, such
as gay, queer, queen, dyke, bitch, nigger, etc, by those very same marginalized segments of
society.
The explosion in electronic and computer terminology in the latter part of the 20th Century
(e.g. byte, cyberspace, software, hacker, laptop, hard-drive, database, online, hitech, microchip, etc) was just one element driving the dramatic increase in new English terms,
particularly due to the dominance of the USA in the development of computer technology,
from IBM to Apple to Microsoft. Parallel to this, science fiction literature has contributed it
own
vocabulary
to
the
common
word-stock,
including
terms
such
as robotics, hyperspace, warp-speed, cyberpunk, droid, nanotech, nanobot, etc.
71 | P a g e
Later, the Internet it gave rise to (the word Internet itself is derived form Latin, as
are audio, video, quantum,
etc)
generated
its
own
set
of
neologisms
(e.g. online, noob, flamer, spam, phishing, larping, whitelist, download, blog, vblog, blogosp
here, emoticon, podcast, warez, trolling, hashtag, wifi, bitcoin, selfie, etc). In addition, a
whole body of acronyms, contractions and shorthands for use in email, social networking and
cellphone texting has grown up, particularly among the young, including the relatively wellknown lol, ttfn, btw, omg, wtf, plz, thx, ur, l8ter, etc. The debate (db8) continues as to whether
texting is killing or enriching the English language.
Present Day
Cellphone
texting
is
increasingly popular, especially among teens
The language continues to change and develop and to grow apace, expanding to incorporate
new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and gadgets. In the current digital age, English
is going though a new linguistic peak in terms of word acquisition, as it peaked before during
Shakespeare’s time, and then again during the Industrial Revolution, and at the height of the
British Empire. According to one recent estimate, it is expanding by over 8,500 words a year
(other estimates are significantly higher), compared to an estimated annual increase of around
1,000 words at the beginning of the 20th Century, and has almost doubled in size in the last
century.
Neologisms are being added all the time, including recent inclusions such
as fashionista, metrosexual, McJob, McMansion, wussy, bling, nerd, pearshaped, unplugged, fracking, truthiness, locavore, parkour, sexting, crowdsourcing, regift, m
eme, selfie, earworm, meh, diss, suss, emo, twerk, schmeat, chav, ladette, punked, vaping, etc,
etc.
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In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards using an existing words as a different
part of speech, especially the “verbification” of nouns (e.g. the word verbify is itself a prime
example; others include to thumb, to parrot, to email, to text, to google, to medal, to critique,
to leverage, to sequence, to interface, to tase, to speechify, to incentivize, etc), although some
modern-sounding verbs have surprisingly been in the language for centuries (e.g. to author,
to impact, to message, to parent, to channel, to monetize, to mentor, etc). “Nounification” also
occurs, particularly in business contexts (e.g. an ask, a build, a solve, a fail, etc).
Compound or portmanteau words are an increasingly common source of new vocabulary
(e.g. stagflation, edutainment, flexitarian, Disneyfication, frenemy, confuzzle, gastropub, bro
mance, hacktivist, chillax, infomercial, shareware, dramedy, gaydar, wellderly, techlash, etc).
The meanings of words also continue to change, part of a process that has been going on almost
as long as the language itself. For instance, to the disgust of many, alternate is now almost
universally accepted in North America as a replacement for alternative; momentarily has come
to mean “very soon” and not (or as well as) “for a very short period of time”; and the use of
the modifier literally to mean its exact opposite has recently found it way into the Oxford
English Dictionary (where one of its meanings is shown as “used for emphasis rather than being
actually true”). In some walks of life, bad, sick, dope and wicked are all now different varieties
of good.
In our faddy, disposable, Internet-informed, digital age, there are even word trends that appear
to be custom-designed to be short-lived and epehemeral, words and phrases that are considered
no longer trendy once they reach anything close to mainstream usage. Examples might
be bae, on fleek, YOLO (you only live once), fanute, etc. Resources like the Urban
Dictionary exist for the rest of us to keep track of such fleeting phenomena.
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English Today
Speaks English?
World map coloured according to percentage of English speakers by country
Today, English is the second or third most popular mother tongue in the world, with an
estimated 350-400 million native speakers. But, crucially, it is also the common tongue for
many non-English speakers the world over, and almost a quarter of the globe’s population –
maybe 1½-2 billion people – can understand it and have at least some basic competence in its
use, whether written or spoken.
It should be noted here that statistics on the numbers around the world who speak English are
unreliable at best. It is notoriously difficult to define quite what is meant by “English speaker”,
let alone the definitions of first language, second language, mother tongue, native speaker, etc.
What level of competency counts? Does a thick creole (English-based, but completely
incomprehensible to a native English speaker) count? Just to add to the confusion, there are at
least 40 million people in the nominally English-speaking United States who do NOT speak
English. In addition, the figures, of necessity, combine statistics from different sources,
different dates, etc. You may well see large variations on any statistics quoted here.
But best recent estimates of first languages suggest that Mandarin Chinese has around 800-850
million native speakers, while English and Spanish both have about 330-350 million each.
Following on, Hindi speakers number 180-200 million (around 240 million, or possibly much
more, when combined with Urdu), Bengali 170-180 million, Arabic 150-220 million,
Portuguese 150-180 million, Russian 140-160 million and Japanese roughly 120 million. If
second-language speakers are included, Mandarin increases to around 1 billion, English to over
74 | P a g e
500 million, Spanish to 420-500 million, Hindi/Urdu to around 480 million, and so on, although
some estimates for English as a first or second language rise to over a billion. In fact, among
English speakers, non-native speakers may now outnumber native speakers by as much as three
to one.
In terms of total population, in a world approaching 7 billion, the top three countries by
population are China (1.3 billion), India (1.2 billion) and USA (about 310 million), followed
by Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia and Japan. Thus, the USA is by far
the most populous English-speaking country and accounts for almost 70% of native English
speakers (Britain, by comparison has a population of just over 60 million, and ranks 22nd in
the world). India represents the third largest group of English speakers after the USA and UK,
even though only 4-5% of its population speaks English (4% of over 1.2 billion is still almost
50 million). However, by some counts as many as 23% of Indians speak English, which would
put it firmly in second place, well above Britain. Even Nigeria may have more English speakers
than Britain according to some estimates.
Braj Kachru’s Three Circles of English
English is the native mother-tongue of only Britain, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and a handful of Caribbean countries. But in 57 countries (including Ghana, Nigeria,
Uganda, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Philippines, Fiji, Vanuatu, etc), English is
either as its “official language” or a majority of its inhabitants speak it as a first language. These
are largely ex-colonial countries which have thoroughly integrated English into its chief
institutions. The next most popular official language is French (which applies in some 31
countries), followed by Spanish (25), Arabic (25), Portuguese (13) and Russian (10).
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Although falling short of official status, English is also an important language in at least twenty
other countries, inluding several former British colonies and protectorates, such as Bahrain,
Bangladesh, Brunei, Cyprus, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. It is the most commonly
used unofficial language in Israel and an increasing number of other countries such as
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany. Within Europe, an estimated 85% of
Swedes can comfortably converse in English, 83% of Danes, 79% of Dutch, 66% in
Luxembourg and over 50% in countries such as Finland, Slovenia, Austria, Belgium, and
Germany.
If the “inner circle” of a language is native first-language speakers and the “outer circle” is
second-language speakers and official language countries, there is a third, “expanding circle”
of countries which recognize the importance of English as an international language and teach
it in schools as their foreign language of choice. English is the most widely taught foreign
language in schools across the globe, with over 100 countries – from China to Russia to Israel,
Germany, Spain, Egypt, Brazil, etc, etc – teaching it to at least a working level. Over 1 billion
people throughout the world are currently learning English, and there are estimated to be more
students of English in China alone than there are inhabitants of the USA. A 2006 report by the
British Council suggests that the number of people learning English is likely to continue to
increase over the next 10-15 years, peaking at around 2 billion, after which a decline is
predicted.
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English as a Lingua Franca
Top ten languages in the Internet (2010) (from Internet World Stats)
Any number of other statistics may be quoted, none of them definitive, but all shining some
light on the situation. However, absolute numbers aside, it is incontrovertible that English has
become the lingua franca of the world in the fields of business, science, aviation, computing,
education, politics and entertainment (and arguably many others).
Over 90% of international airlines use English as their language of choice (known as
“Airspeak”), and an Italian pilot flying an Italian plane into an Italian airport, for example,
contacts ground control in English. The same applies in international maritime communications
(“Seaspeak”). Two-thirds of all scientific papers are published in English, and the Science
Citation Index reports that as many as 95% of its articles were written in English, even though
only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries. Up to half of all business
deals throughout the world are conducted in English. Popular music worldwide is
overwhelmingly dominated by English (estimates of up to 95% have been suggested), and
American television is available almost everywhere. Half of the world newspapers are in
English, and some 75% of the world mail correspondence is in English (the USA alone
accounts for 50%). At least 35% of Internet users are English speakers, and estimated 70-80%
of the content on the Internet is in English (although reliable figures on this are hard to
establish).
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Many international joint business ventures use English as their working language, even if none
of the members are officially English-speaking. For example, it is the working language of the
Asian trade group ASEAN and the oil exporting organization OPEC, and it is the official
language of the European Central Bank, even though the bank is located in Germany and
Britain is not even a member of the Eurozone. Switzerland has three official languages
(German, French and Italian and also, in some limited circumstances, Romansh), but it
routinely markets itself in English in order to avoid arguments between different areas.
Wherever one travels in the word one see sees English signs and advertisements.
Reverse Loanwords
“A Dictionary Of European Anglicisms” (from Oxford University Press)
Although a huge number of words have been imported into English from other languages over
the history of its development, many English words have been incorporated (particularly in the
last century) into foreign languages in a kind of reverse adoption process. Anglicisms such
as stop, sport, tennis, golf, weekend, jeans, bar, airport, hotel, etc, are among the most
universally used in the world.
But a more amusing exercise is to piece together the English derivations of foreign words where
phonetic spelling are used. To give a few random examples, herkot is Ukrainian for
“haircut”; muving pikceris is Lithuanian for “movie” or “moving pictures”; ajskrym is Polish
for “ice-cream”; schiacchenze is Italian for “shake hands”; etc. Japanese has as many as 20,000
78 | P a g e
anglicisms
in
regular
use
(“Japlish”),
including apputodeito (up-todate), erebata (elevator), raiba
intenshibu (labour-intensive), nekutai (necktie), biiru (beer), isukrimu (ice-cream), esukareta (escalator), remon (lemon), mai-kaa (my
car) and shyanpu setto (shampoo and set), the meanings of which are difficult to fathom until
spoken out phonetically. “Russlish” uses phonetic spellings such as seksapil (sex
appeal), jeansi (jeans), striptiz (strip-tease), kompyuter (computer), chempion (champion)
and shusi (shoes),
as
well
as
many
exact
spellings
like rockmusic, discjockey, hooligan, supermarket, etc. German has invented, by analogy,
anglicisms
that
do
not
even
exist
in
English,
such
as Pullunder (from pullover), Twens (from teens), Dressman (a word for a male model)
and handy (a word for a cellphone).
After many centuries of one-way traffic of words from French to English, the flow finally
reversed in the middle of the 20th Century, and now anywhere between 1% and 5% of French
words are anglicisms, according to some recent estimates. Rosbif (roast beef) has been in the
French language for over 350 years, and ouest (west) for 700 years, but popular recent
“Franglais” adoptions like le gadget, le weekend, le blue-jeans, le self-service, le cash-flow, le
sandwich, le babysitter, le meeting, le basketball, le manager, le parking, le shopping, le
snaque-barre, le sweat, le marketing, cool, etc, are now firmly engrained in the language.
There is a strong movement within France, under the stern leadership of the venerable
Académie Française, to reclaim French from this onslaught of anglicisms, and the country has
even passed laws to discourage the use of anglicisms and to protect its own language and
culture. New French replacements for English words are being encouraged, such as le
logiciel instead of le soft (software), le disc audio-numérique instead of le compact
disc (CD), le baladeur instead of le walkman (portable music player), etc. In Québec, the
neologism le clavardage (a portmanteau word combining clavier – keyboard –
and bavardage – verbal chat) is becoming popular as a replacement for the common
anglicism le chat (in the sense of online chat rooms). Norway and Brazil have recently adopted
similar measure to keep English out, and this kind of lexical invasion in the form of loanwords
is seen by some as the thin end of the wedge, to be strenuously avoided in the interests of
national pride and cultural independence.
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Modern English Vocabulary
English words derived from different sources
After centuries of acquisition, borrowing and adaptation, English has ended up with a
vocabulary second to none in its richness and breadth, allowing for the most diverse and subtle
shadings of meaning. No other language has so many words to say the same thing (consider
the multiplicity of synonyms for big which are in daily use, for example). It is often considered
to have the largest vocabulary of any language, although such comparisons are notoriously
difficult (as an example, it is impossible to compare with Chinese, because of fundamental
differences in language structure).
Just how many words there currently are in the English language is open to conjecture. The
Global Language Monitor (a Texas-based company that analyzes and tracks worldwide
language trends) claims that the English language now boasts over a million words, but in
reality it is almost impossible to count the number of words in a language, not least because it
is so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. For instance, how are we to treat
abbreviations, hypenated words, compound words, compound words with spaces, etc? The
latest full revision of the “Oxford English Dictionary”, published in 1989 and considered the
premier dictionary of the English language, contains about 615,000 word entries, listed under
about 300,000 main entries. This includes some scientific terms, dialect words and slang, but
does not include more specialized scientific and technical terms, nor the large number of more
recent neologisms coined each passing year. “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary”,
published in1961, lists 475,000 main headwords.
The working vocabulary of the average English speaker, though, is notoriously difficult to
assess (it is hard enough to count the words used in written works – estimates of the number of
words in the “King James Bible” range from 7,000 to over 10,000, and estimates of
Shakespeare’s vocabulary range from 16,000 to over 30,000). An average educated English
80 | P a g e
speaker has perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 words at his or her disposal, although often only around
10% of these are used in an average week’s conversation (typically, we “know” at least 25%
more words than we ever actually use). Some studies suggest that just 43 words account for
fully half of the words in common use, and just 9 (and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, you)
account for a quarter of the words in any random sample of spoken English.
The English lexicon includes words borrowed from an estimated 120 different languages.
Attempts have been made to put in context the various influences and sources of modern
English vocabulary, although this is necessarily an inexact science. Some studies have put
Germanic, French and Latin sources more or less equal at between 26-29% each, with the
balance made up of Greek, words derived from proper names, words with no clear etymology
and words from other languages. Other studies put the French input higher, the Latin lower and
suggest that other languages have contributed as much as 10% of the vocabulary. None of the
studies is considered definitive.
Early Modern English loans from Latin & French
(from Google Books, originally from T. Nevaleinen “An Introduction to Early Modern
English”)
As we have seen, English has throughout its history accumulated words from different sources
which act as synonyms or near synonyms to native or traditional words, a process which started
with the early invasions by Vikings and Normans, and continued with the embracing of the
classical languages during the Renaissance and the adoption of foreign words though trading
and colonial connections. Many of these developed different social connotations over time. For
example, introduced Norman French words tended to be, and often still tend to be, considered
classier and more refined than existing Anglo-Saxon words (e.g. the Norman desire compared
to the Anglo-Saxon wish, odour compared to smell, chamber to room, dine to eat, etc). It has
also been suggested that many English words have three synonyms appropriate to the different
levels of culture (popular/literary/scholarly), often corresponding to Old English/French/Latin
roots,
as
illustrated
by
groups
of
words
like rise/mount/ascend, fear/terror/trepidation, think/ponder/cogitate, kingly/royal/regal, hol
y/sacred/consecrated, ask/question/interrogate, etc (sometimes referred to as “lexical
triplets”).
The sheer number of English synonyms can make for a rather unwieldy and untidy language
at times, though, and its embarrassment of riches can sometime seem a little gratuitous and
unnecessary. This is particularly evident in the large number of redundant phrases (composed
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of
two
or
more
synonyms)
which
are
in
everyday
use,
e.g. beck and call, law and order, null and void, safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and
tribulations, kith and kin, hale and hearty, peace and quiet, cease and desist, rack and ruin,
etc.
Also, despite the sheer volume of words in the language, there are still some curious gaps,
which have arisen through quirks in its development over the centuries, such as the unused
positive
forms
of
common
negative
words
like inept, ineffable, dishevelled, disgruntled, incorrigible, ruthless, disastrous, incessant and
unkempt, most of which used to exist but have died out for unknown reasons.
Perhaps even stranger, given the generous availability of words, is English’s tendency to load
single words with multiple meanings. For example: fine has at least 14 definitions as an
adjective, 6 as a noun, 2 as a verb and 2 as an adverb; round has 12 uses as an adjective, 19 as
a noun, 12 as a verb, 1 as an adverb and 2 as a preposition; set has an incredible 58 uses as a
noun, 126 as a verb and 10 as an adjective (the “Oxford English Dictionary” takes about
60,000 words – the length of a short novel – to describe them all).
As in any language, meanings have shifted over time, sometimes many times, but in some cases
the same word can has even ended up with two contradictory meanings (contranyms), examples
being sanction (which has conflicting meanings of permission to do something, or prevention
from doing something), cleave (to cut in half, or to stick together), sanguine (hot-headed and
bloodthirsty, or calm and cheerful), ravish (to rape, or to enrapture), fast (stuck firm, or moving
quickly), oversight (watchful control, or something not noticed), etc.
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Modern English Spelling
“The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough” by Dr. Seuss plays on the oddities of English
spelling (from Amazon)
Largely as a result of the vagaries of its historical development, modern English is a
maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly. The inveterate borrowing from other
languages, combined with shifts in pronunciation and well-meaning reforms in orthography
have resulted in a language seemingly at odds with itself. While Old English was about 90%
phonemic (i.e. words sound the same as they look), modern English is probably closer to 40%
phonemic. There are a large number of possible spelling rules (up to 100 by some counts), and
a large number of exceptions to those rules, and the language continues to confound both native
speakers and foreigners alike.
Often, the desire to standardize the language, such as occurred with the introduction of the
printing press, has itself led to anomalies and inconsistencies in its spelling, or has at least
frozen existing inconsistencies in place. Spelling reform, which took place at various times,
both in Britain and particularly in the United States, has further complicated the picture, despite
a professed desire for simplification, and we now have many differences between American
and
British
spellings
to
add
to
its
intrinsic
difficulties
(e.g. realize/realise, center/centre, dialog/dialogue, aging/ageing, traveler/traveller, etc).
Although English has “only” forty to fifty different sounds (still much more than many
languages), there are over 200 ways of spelling those sounds. For instance, the sound “sh” can
be
spelled
in
a
bewildering
number
of
different
ways
(as
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in shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc); a long “o” can be written as
in go, show, beau, sew, doe, though, depot, etc; a long “e” can be spelled as
in me, seat, seem, ceiling, siege, people, key, machine, phoenix, paediatric, etc; and a long “a”
can be rendered as in hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great, etc. As George Bernard Shaw
pointed out, the word fish could just as easily be spelled ghoti, using the “gh” sound in enough,
the “o” sound from women, and the “ti” from the middle of nation.
There is a whole catalogue of silent letters in English, often letters that were added to spellings
during the English Renaissance out of a misplaced desire for etymological authenticity, or
existing letters that have ceased to be pronounced for one reason or another. In fact, of the 26
letters of the alphabet, only 5 (F, J, Q, V and X) are NEVER silent! There are too many to
detail, but some examples include: the silent “b” in comb, debt, climb, etc; the silent “c”
in scene, scent, science, scissors, etc; the silent “k” in knife, knock, know, etc; the silent “n”
in damn, hymn, column, etc; the silent “p” in psalm, psychiatry, ptarmigan, etc; the silent “gh”
in night, through, taught, etc; the silent “g” in gnome, gnaw, sign, etc; the silent “l’
in palm, salmon, yolk, etc; the silent “u” in biscuit, building, tongue, etc; the silent ”w”
in wreck, knowledge, sword, etc; and the silent “h” in hour, honour, honest, etc, as well
asin annihilate, vehement, vehicle, ghost, rhyme, rhubarb, rhythm, exhaust, exhibition, exhort
, etc.
English has many words which are identical in meaning but different in spelling and
pronunciation, otherwise known as synonyms. But it also has homophones or heterographs
(words with different spellings and different meanings, but identical pronunciation), such
as hour and our, plane and plain, right, wright, write and rite, etc; homographs or heteronyms
(words with identical spellings, but different meanings and pronunciations), such
as axes, bass, defect, desert, record, tear, etc; and true homonyms (words with the same
spelling and the same pronunciation, but different meaning), such as stalk, bank, fluke, etc.
Some confusing words in American dialect (4 sec) (from alt.usage.english).
To confuse matters further, in some accents, some sounds have merged to the extent that they
are no longer distinguishable (e.g. pin and pen, and merry, marry and Mary, in some American
accents; talk and torque, and court and caught in some British accents). Simplified
Americanized spellings of lite for light and thru for through have arisen in recent years,
largely due to advertising campaigns.
The sheer variety of English spelling is formidable. There are words with five consecutive
vowels (queuing); words with technically no vowels (rhythm, pygmy); words with six
consecutive consonants (catchphrase, watchstrap); words with alternating vowels and
consonants
(overimaginitive, versimilitudes);
words
with
triple
letters
(headmistressship, bulllike); words that include eight of the same letter (possessionlessness);
long words which use none of the same letters (e.g. uncopyrightable); words spelled the same
way backwards as forwards (deified, racecar, rotator); etc, etc.
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English History Timeline
Here is a list of important dates in the development of the English language.
The selection of events is my own, and the dates are approximate in some
cases, but it gives at least some idea of the time-scales involved, and puts
the developments into some sort of perspective.

c. 6000 BC
Britain cut off from continental Europe by English Channel

c. 5000 BC
Proto-Indo-Europeans living in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

c. 1000 BC
Germanic Indo-European tribes living in parts of modern-day Germany

c.500 BC
Celts inhabit much of Europe, and beginning to colonize the British Isles

55 BC
First Roman raids on Britain under Julius Caesar

43 AD
Roman occupation of Britain under Emperor Claudius (beginning of Roman
rule of Britain)

410-436
Roman withdrawal from Britain
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
c.450
Anglo-Saxon settlement (Angles, Frisians, Saxons, Jutes) of Britain begins

450-480
Earliest Old English inscriptions

597
St. Augustine arrives in Britain (beginning of Christian conversion of the
Anglo-Saxons)

c.600
Anglo-Saxon language covers most of modern-day England

c.660
“Cædmon’s Hymn” composed in Old English

731
The Venerable Bede writes “The Ecclesiastical History of the English
People” (in Latin)

792
Viking raids of Britain begin

c.800
Old English epic poem “Beowulf” composed

865
The Danes launch full-scale invasion and occupy Northumbria

871
Alfred the Great becomes king of Wessex, encourages English prose and
translation of Latin works

871
“The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” is begun

878
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Danelaw established, dividing Britain into Anglo-Saxon south and Danish
north

911
Charles II of France grants Normandy to the Viking chief Hrolf the Ganger
(the beginning of Norman French)

c.1000
The oldest surviving manuscript of “Beowulf” dates from this period

1066
The Norman conquest under William the Conqueror

1086
“Domesday Book” compiled

c.1100
London becomes de facto capital of England

c.1150
The oldest surviving manuscripts in Middle English date from this period

1154
Eleanor of Aquitaine, French wife of Henry II, becomes Queen Consort of
England

1154
“The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” discontinued

1167
Oxford University established

c.1180
The “Ormulum” text of the monk Orm completed

1204
King John loses the province of Normandy to France
87 | P a g e

1209
Cambridge University established

1349-50
The Black Death kills one third of the British population

1362
The Statute of Pleading replaces French with English as the language of law
(although records continue to be kept in Latin)

1362
English is used in English Parliament for the first time

c.1370
William Langland writes “Piers Plowman”

1384
John Wycliffe publishes his English translation of “The Bible”

1385
English replaces Latin as main language in schools (except Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge)

c.1388
Chaucer begins “The Canterbury Tales”

1399
Henry IV becomes first English-speaking monarch since before the
Conquest

c.1450
The Great Vowel Shift begins

1476
William Caxton establishes the first English printing press

c.1500
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Start of English Renaissance

1526
William Tyndale prints his English translation of the New Testament of “The
Bible”

1539
“The Great Bible” published

1549
First version of “The Book of Common Prayer” published

c.1590
William Shakespeare writes his first plays

1604
Robert Cawdrey publishes the first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall”

1607
Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World,
established

1611
The Authorized, or King James Version, of “The Bible” is published

1616
Death of William Shakespeare

1622
Publication of the first English-language newspaper, the “Courante” or
“Weekly News”

1623
First Folio of Shakespeare’s works is published

1702
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Publication of the first daily English-language newspaper, “The Daily
Courant”, in London

1755
Samuel Johnson publishes his “Dictionary of the English Language”

1763
Britain wrests control of Canada from the French

1777
Last native speaker of the Celtic Cornish language dies

1782
George Washington defeats Cornwallis at Yorktown and Britain abandons
its American colonies

1788
British penal colony established in Australia

1788
First publication of “The Times” newspaper in London

1788
Noah Webster publishes “The American Spelling Book”

1795
First English settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

1804
Lewis and Clark document exploration of routes to American West

1828
Noah Webster publishes his “The American Dictionary of the English
Language”

1834
Abolition of slavery in the British Empire
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
1840
British colony established in new Zealand

1865
United States ends slavery after Civil War

1922
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) founded

1928
First edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary” is published

1947
India and Pakistan gain independence from Britain

1954
Sir Ernest Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words” published

1989
Second edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary” is published
91 | P a g e
How New English Words are
Created?
By Creating from Scratch
Some common words have no apparent etymological roots
Many of the new words added to the ever-growing lexicon of the English language are just
created from scratch, and often have little or no etymological pedigree. A good example is the
word dog, etymologically unrelated to any other known word, which, in the late Middle Ages,
suddenly and mysteriously displaced the Old English word hound (or hund) which had served
for centuries. Some of the commonest words in the language arrived in a similarly inexplicable
way
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(e.g. jaw, askance, tantrum, conundrum, bad, big, donkey, kick, slum, log, dodge, fuss, prod,
hunch, freak, bludgeon, slang, puzzle, surf, pour, slouch, bash, etc).
Words
like gadget, blimp, raunchy, scam, nifty, zit, clobber, boffin, gimmick, jazz and googol have
all appeared in the last century or two with no apparent etymology, and are more recent
examples of this kind of novel creation of words. Additionally, some words that have existed
for centuries in regional dialects or as rarely used terms, suddenly enter into popular use for
little or no apparent reason (e.g. scrounge and seep, both old but obscure English words,
suddenly came into general use in the early 20th Century).
Sometimes, if infrequently, a “nonce word” (created “for the nonce”, and not expected to be
re-used or generalized) does become incorporated into the language. One example is James
Joyce’s invention quark, which was later adopted by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann to name
a new class of sub-atomic particle, and another is blurb, which dates back to 1907.
By Adoption or Borrowing
Some word borrowings from other languages follow a circuitous route
Loanwords, or borrowings, are words which are adopted into a native language from a different
source language. Such borrowings have shaped the English language almost from its
beginnings, as words were adopted from the classical languages as well as from successive
wave of invasions (e.g. Vikings, Normans). Even by the 16th Century, long before the British
Empire extended its capacious reach around the world, English had already adopted words
from an estimated 50 other languages, and the vast majority of English words today are actually
foreign borrowings of one sort or another.
Sometimes these adoptions have come by a circuitous route (e.g. the word orange originated
with the Sanskrit naranj or naranga or narangaphalam or naragga, which became the
Arabic naranjah and the Spanish naranja, entered English as a naranj, changed to a narange,
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then to an arange and finally an orange; the word garbage came to English originally from
Latin, but only arrived via Old Italian, an Italian dialect and then Norman French). Sometimes
the tortuous route and degrees of filtering through other languages can modify words so much
that their original derivations are all but indiscernible (e.g. both coy and quiet come from the
Latin
word quietus; sordid and swarthy both
come
from
the
Latin sordere; entirety and integrity both
derive
from
the
Latin integritas; salary and sausage both
originate
with
the
Latin
word sal; grammar and glamour are both descended from the same Greek word gramma;
and gentle, gentile, genteel and jaunty all come from the Latin gentilis; etc).
Since the expansion of global trade, and particularly since British colonialism opened up rich
new sources (see the page on Late Modern English), a huge number of words have been
adopted into English from a great diversity of different languages. In a reverse process, many
English words have also been adopted by other countries (see the section on Reverse
Loanwords in English Today).
By Adding Prefixes and Suffixes
Prefixes and suffixes can change a root word into many new words
The ability to add affixes, whether prefixes (e.g. com-, con-, de-, ex-, inter-, pre-, pro-, re, sub-, un-, etc) and suffixes (e.g. -al, -ence, -er, -ment, -ness, -ship, -tion, -ate, -ed, -ize, able, -ful, -ous, -ive, -ly, -y, etc) makes English extremely flexible. This process, referred to as
agglutination, is a simple way to completely alter or subtly revise the meanings of existing
words, to create other parts of speech out of words (e.g. verbs from nouns, adverbs form
adjectives, etc), or to create completely new words from new roots. There are very few rules in
the addition of affixes in English, and Anglo-Saxon affixes can be attached to Latin or Greek
roots, or vice versa. An extreme example is the word incomprehensibility, which is based on
the simple root -hen- (original from Indo-European root word ghend- meaning to grasp or
seize) with no less than 5 affixes: in- (not), com- (with), pre- (before), -ible (capable) and ity (being).
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However, the sheer variety and number of possible affixes in English can lead to some
confusion. For instance, there is no single standard method for something as basic as making a
noun into an adjective (-able, -al, -ous and -y are just some of the possibilities). There are at
least nine different negation prefixes (a-, anti-, dis-, il-, im-, in-, ir-, non- and un-), and it is
almost impossible for a non-native speaker to predict which is to be used with which root word.
To make matters worse, some apparently negative forms do not even negate the meanings of
their roots (e.g. flammable and inflammable, habitable and inhabitable, ravel and unravel).
Some affix additions are surprisingly recent. Officialdom and boredom joined the ancient
word kingdom as recently as the 20th Century, and apolitical as the negation of political did
not appear until 1952. Adding affixes remains the simplest and perhaps the commonest method
of creating new words.
By Truncation or Clipping
Some words are shortened or “clipped” forms of longer words
Some
words
arise
simply
as
shortened
forms
of
longer
words
(exam, gym, lab, bus, van, vet, fridge, bra, wig, curio, pram, taxi, rifle, canter, phone and bur
ger are some obvious and well-used examples). Perhaps less obvious is the derivation of words
like mob (from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, meaning a fickle crowd), goodbye (a shortening
of God-be-with-you) and hello (a shortened form of the Old English for “whole be thou”).
Leaving aside the common English practice of contracting multiple words like do not, you
are, there will and that would into the single words don’t, you’re, there’ll and that’d, there are
many other examples where multiple words or phrases have been contracted into single words
(e.g. daisy was once a flower called day’s eye; shepherd was sheep herd; lord was
originally loaf-ward; fortnight was fourteen-night; etc).
Acronyms are another example of this technique. While most acronyms
(e.g. USA, IMF, OPEC, etc) remain as just a series of initial letters, some have been formed
into
words
(e.g. laser from light amplification
by stimulated emmission
95 | P a g e
of radiation, radar from radio detection and ranging); quasar from quasi-stellar radio
source; scuba from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus; etc).
By Fusing or Compounding Existing Words
Two words many be combined or blended to form a new word
Like many languages, English allows the formation of compound words by fusing together
shorter words (e.g. airport, seashore, fireplace, footwear, wristwatch, landmark, flowerpot,
etc), although it is not taken to the extremes of German or Dutch where extremely long and
unwieldy word chains are commonplace. The concatenation of words in English may even
allow for different meanings depending on the order of combination
(e.g. houseboat/boathouse, basketwork/workbasket, casebook/bookcase, etc).
The root words may be run together with no separation (as in the examples above), or they may
be hyphenated (e.g. self-discipline, part-time, mother-in-law) or even left as separate words
(e.g. fire hydrant, commander in chief), although the rules for such constructions are unclear at
best.
During the English Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, compounding classical elements
of Greek and Latin (e.g. photograph, telephone, etc) was a very common method of English
word formation, and the process continues even today. A large part of the scientific and
technical lexicon of English consists of such classical compounds.
Sometimes words or phonemes are blended rather than combined whole, forming a
“portmanteau word” with two meanings packed into one word, or with a meaning intermediate
between the two constituent words (e.g. brunch, which blends breakfast and lunch; motel,
which blends motor and hotel; electrocute, which blends electric and execute; smog, which
blends smoke and fog; guesstimate, which blends guess and estimate; telethon, which
blends telephone and marathon; chocoholic, which blends chocolate and alcoholic; etc).
Lewis Carroll was perhaps the first to deliberately use this technique for literary effect, when
he introduced new words like slithy, frumious, galumph, etc, in his poetry in the 19th Century.
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By Changing the Meaning of Existing Words
Words may change their meaning over time, sometimes drastically
The drift of word meanings over time often arises, often but not always due to catachresis (the
misuse, either deliberate or accidental, of words). By some estimates, over half of all words
adopted into English from Latin have changed their meaning in some way over time, often
drastically. For example, smart originally meant sharp, cutting or painful; handsome merely
meant easily-handled (and was generally derogatory); bully originally meant darling or
sweetheart; sad meant full, satiated or satisfied; and insult meant to boast, brag or triumph in
an insolent way. A more modern example is the changing meaning of gay from merry to
homosexual (and, in some circles in more recent years, to stupid or bad).
Some words have changed their meanings many times. Nice originally meant stupid or foolish;
then, for a time, it came to mean lascivious or wanton; it then went through a whole host of
alternative meanings (including extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious,
modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating and dainty), before settling down into its
modern meaning of pleasant and agreeable in the late 18th Century. Conversely, silly originally
meant blessed or happy, and then passed through intermediate meanings of pious, innocent,
harmless, pitiable, feeble and feeble-minded, before finally ending up as foolish or
stupid. Buxom originally meant obedient to God in Middle English, but it passed through
phases of meaning humble and submissive, obliging and courteous, ready and willing, bright
and lively, and healthy and vigorous, before settling on its current very specific meaning
relating to a plump and well-endowed woman.
Some words have become much more specific than their original meanings. For
instance, starve originally just mean to die, but is now much more specific; a forest was
originally any land used for hunting, regardless of whether it was covered in trees; deer once
referred to any animal, not just the specific animal we now associate with the word; girl was
97 | P a g e
once a young person of either sex; and meat originally covered all kinds of food (as in the
phrase “meat and drink”).
Some words came to mean almost the complete opposite of their original meanings. For
instance, counterfeit used to mean a legitimate copy; brave once implied cowardice; crafty was
originally a term of praise; cute used to mean bow-legged; enthusiasm and zeal were both once
disparaging words; manufacture originally meant to make by hand; awful meant deserving of
awe; egregious originally connoted eminent or admirable; artificial was a positive description
meaning full of skilful artifice; etc.
A related category is where an existing word comes to be used with another grammatical
function, often a different part of speech, a process known as functional shift. Examples
include: the creation of the nouns a commute, a bore and a swim from the original verbs to
commute, to bore and to swim; the creation of the verbs to bottle, to catalogue and to text from
the original nouns bottle, catalogue and text; the creation of the verbs to dirty, to empty and to
dry from the original adjectives dirty, empty and dry, etc. Modern language purists often
condemn such developments, although they have occurred throughout the history of English,
and in some cases may even reclaim the original sense of a word (e.g. impact was originally
introduced as a verb, then established itself predominantly as a noun, and has only recently
begun to be used a verb once more).
By Errors
New words may arise due to mishearings, misrenderings or other
errors
According to the “Oxford English Dictionary”, there are at least 350 words in English
dictionaries (most of them thankfully quite obscure) that owe their existence purely to
typographical errors or other misrenderings.
There are many more words, often in quite common use, that have arisen over time due to
mishearings
(e.g. shamefaced from
the
original shamefast, penthouse from pentice, sweetheart from sweetard, buttonhole from butto
n-hold, etc).
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Mrs. Mapalprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play “The Rivals”, was
famous for her “malapropisms” like illiterate, reprehend, etc, but these never gained common
currency. Likewise, it seems unlikely that “Bushisms” (named for US President Bush’s
unfortunate tendency to mangle the language) like misunderestimate, or Sarah
Palin’s refudiate will ever become part of the everyday language, although there are many who
would argue that they deserve to.
Many misused words (as opposed to newly-coined words) have, for better or worse, become
so widely used in their new context that they may be considered to be generally accepted,
particularly in the USA, although many strict grammarians insist on their distinctness
(e.g. alternate to
mean alternative, momentarily to
mean presently, disinterested to
mean uninterested, i.e. to mean e.g., flaunt to mean flout, historic to mean historical, imply to
mean infer, etc).
By Back-Formation
Some new words are back-formed due to mis-identified affixes
Some words are “back-formed”, where a new word is formed by removing an actual, or often
just a supposed or incorrectly identified, affix. A good example of back-formation is the old
word pease, which was mistakenly assumed to be a plural, and thus led to the creation of a new
“singular”
word, pea.
Similarly, asset was
back-formed
from
the
singular
noun assets (originally from the Anglo-Norman asetz).
More often, though, a new word for a different part of speech is derived form an older form
(e.g. laze from lazy, beg from beggar, greed from greedy, rove from rover, burgle from burgl
ar, edit from editor, difficult from difficulty, resurrect from resurrection, insert from insertio
n, project from projection, grovel from groveling, sidle from sideling or sidelong, etc).
By Imitation of Sounds
99 | P a g e
Words may be coined to imitate sounds, such as animal sounds
Words may be formed by the deliberate imitation of sounds they describe (onomatopoeia).
Often this kind of onomatopoeic formation is surprisingly ancient, and Old English literature
is usually described as highly onomatopoeic, alliterative and percussive. Sometimes, the
imitation may have originally occurred in a source language, and only later borrowed into
English, and by its very nature sound imitation tends to result in similar cognates in several
languages. Some philologists have suggested that the first human languages developed as
imitations of natural sounds (so-called “bow-wow theories”), and imitative abilities certainly
seem to have played some role in the evolution of language.
Examples
include boo, bowwow, tweet, boom, tinkle, rattle, buzz, click, hiss, bang, plop, cuckoo, quack, beep, etc, but
there are many many more. Some words, like squirm for example, are not strictly
onomatopoeic but are nevertheless imitative to some extent (e.g like a worm)
By Transfer of Proper Nouns
Many words are named after people or places
A surprising number of words have been created by the transfer of the proper names of people,
places and things into words which then become part of the generalized vocabulary of the
language, also known as eponyms. Examples include maverick (after the American cattleman,
Samuel Augustus Maverick); saxophone (after the Belgian musical-instrument maker,
Adolphe
Sax); quisling (after
the
pro-Nazi
Norwegian
leader,
Vidkun
Quisling); sandwich (after the fourth Earl of Sandwich); silhouette (after the French finance
minister, Etienne de Silhouette); kafkaesque (after the Czech novelist, Franz
Kafka); quixotic (after the romantic, impractical hero of a Cervantes novel); boycott (after
Charles Boycott, the shunned Irish land agent for an absentee landlord); etc. Other common
eponyms
100 | P a g e
include biro, bloomers, boffin, chauvinism, diesel, galvanize, guillotine, leotard, lesbian, lync
h, marathon, mesmerize, svengali, mentor, odyssey, atlas, sadism, shrapnel, spartan, teddy, w
ellington,
etc,
as
well
as
some
less
obvious
ones
like panic, maudlin, dunce, bugger, currant, tawdry, doily and hooligan.
Many terms for political, philosophical or religious doctrines are based on the names of their
founders or chief exponents (e.g. Marxism, Aristotelianism, Platonic, stoic, Christianity, etc).
Similarly, many scientific terms and units of measurement are named after their inventors
(e.g. ampere, angstrom, joule, watt, etc).> Increasingly, in the 20th Century, specific brand
names have become generalized descriptions (e.g. hoover, kleenex, xerox, aspirin, google,
etc).
Sometimes, portmanteau words (see Fusing and Compounding Words above) may be produced
by joining together proper nouns with common nouns, such as in the case of gerrymandering,
a word combining the politically-contrived re-districting practices of Massachusetts Governor
Elbridge Gerry with the salamander-shaped outline one of the districts he created.
Language & Geography
101 | P a g e
National Boundaries
Although containing some errors, this map makes an attempt to show how
languages overlap the national boundaries of Europe (from EuroMinority)
Language is no respecter of boundaries or national borders, and overlaps
across borders are common. For example, German covers not only the
traditional areas of Germany, Austria and most of Switzerland, but also spills
over into Belgium, Denmark, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Poland,
and several countries of the old Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union was a
single country, it hosted about 150 separate languages, and almost half of
the population spoke a language other than Russian as its native tongue (a
quarter did not speak Russian at all!)
Conversely, the languages of some different countries may be much closer
than those spoken within the same country. Romanian and Moldavian are
essentially the same languages just with different names, and Serbian and
Croatian are fundamentally the same except that Serbian uses the Cyrillic
alphabet and Croatia uses Western characters. Although Celtic Gaelic
speakers of Scotland generally cannot understand the Celtic spoke in nearby
102 | P a g e
Wales, they are usually able to understand the Celtic spoken much further
afield in the Brittany region of France.
The so-called Romance languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese and Romanian) all developed out of Latin, and there remain
many parallels between the languages, to the extent that Spaniards can
usually understand written Italian and Portuguese (and vice versa)
sufficiently well to carry on a correspondence, although spoken conversation
tends to be more difficult. The modern language that most closely resembles
ancient Latin is Lugurodese, an Italian dialect spoken in central Sardinia,
although it should be remembered that classical Latin was exclusively a
literary and scholarly language, and spoken or “vulgar” Latin (out of which
the Romance languages largely developed) was substantially different.
Romania, isolated in Eastern Europe and surrounded only by Slavic
languages, is closer to Latin than even Italian, and is the only Romance
language to keep the declensions and the neuter gender from classical Latin.
Most of the languages of Europe developed out of the Indo-European family
of languages, however there are some exceptions. The Basque language,
spoken in a small area of northeastern Spain and southwestern France, is a
completely unrelated language isolate, as is the Georgian language of the
Caucasus region of eastern Europe. Maltese is a Semitic language, closer
to Arabic but written using the Latin alphabet. Estonian, Finnish and
Hungarian are all Finno-Ugric languages, a subfamily of the Uralic language
family. Turkish is a Turkic language, more closely related to the Altaic
languages of Mongolian, Korean and Japanese than to Indo-European
languages.
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Multilingual Countries
Official and functional multilingual nations (from Wikipedia)
In many countries, perhaps even the majority of countries, there are at least
two native languages. In Belgium, for example, many towns have both
French and Dutch names which are used by the French- and Flemishspeaking population (e.g. Bruges and Brugge, Liège and Luik, Tournai and
Doornik, etc). In Luxembourg, the inhabitants use French at school, German
for reading newspapers and Luxemburgish (a local German dialect) at home.
Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world’s
population. By some estimates, 50% of the population of Africa is
multilingual. Some countries have not just two or three languages but
hundreds, and India boasts 1,600 languages and dialects. South Africa has
no less than eleven official languages: Afrikaans, English, Southern
Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda,
Xhosa and Zulu. In West Africa, an English-based pidgin language,
developed during the Atlantic slave trade years, still serves as a common
lingua franca between several different countries with distinct and mutually
unintelligible languages.
But not all speakers in a multilingual society need to be multilingual. Some
countries may have multilingual policies and recognise several official
languages (such as English and French in Canada), but particular languages
may be associated only with particular regions in the state (e.g. Québec,
New Brunswick). In Scandinavia, many, if not most, speakers of Swedish
and Norwegian (and also of Norwegian and Danish) can communicate with
104 | P a g e
each other by speaking their respective languages, and just avoiding words
that are not found in the other language, or that may be misunderstood. A
similar phenomenon occurs in Argentina, where the similar but distinct
languages of Spanish and Italian are both widely spoken.
Multiple languages within a country can also lead to political problems, as
witnessed by the simmering resentment of the Dutch-speaking majority in
Belgium, the sometimes radical tactics of the French-speaking Québecois in
Canada and Welsh language campaigners in English-dominated Wales, and
the full-blooded terrorism of the Basque organization ETA in the name of
linguistic and cultural independence.
However, despite such activism, and apparently regardless of government
support or otherwise, minority languages in multilingual countries are
generally on the decline. There have been isolated victories, such as the
increasing usage of Hawaiian and Scottish Gaelic, but there have been many
more set-backs. For instance, Irish Gaelic appears moribund, and even
Welsh is still declining slowly despite the investment of millions in
government money. The last native speaker of Manx, a Celtic language
spoken on the tiny Isle of Man, died in the 1960s. Further afield, Ubykh, a
highly complex Caucasian language with 82 consonants and just 3 vowels,
once spoken by 50,000 people in the Crimea region of eastern Europe, went
the same way in 1992.
Endangered Languages
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Language hotspots, where many languages are near extinction
(from National Geographic, using data from Living Tongues Institute for
Endangered Languages)
It is difficult to pinpoint the total number of contemporary languages in the
world, but around 6,000 is a good broad estimate. The Ethnologue database
identifies over 6,900 active languages, of which 33% are in Asia and 30% in
Africa. Of these, UNESCO categorizes about 2,500 to be in one of five levels
of endangerment: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered,
critically endangered and extinct. In recent times alone, more than 2000
languages have already become extinct around the world. It is estimated by
some that up to 80% of the world’s living languages may die out within the
next century.
The issue is far from clear, though. Some languages in Indonesia, for
example, may have tens of thousands of current speakers, but may
nevertheless be endangered because children are no longer learning them,
as speakers shift to using the national Indonesian language (or a local Malay
variety) in place of local languages. Others, like the Andamanese languages
of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, may have only a hundred
speakers each, but may be considered very much alive if they are the
primary language of a community and the first (or only) language of all
children in that community.
It is possible to revitalize dead or moribund languages. Hebrew is perhaps
the only example of a language which has gone from being extinct as a
spoken language to being a national language with millions of first language
speakers. But Cornish has also been successfully revived, after well over a
century of extinction, and now has a growing number of speakers (currently
in the thousands). Attempts to revitalise Irish Gaelic, Welsh in Wales,
Galician in Galicia, Basque in Basque Country, Catalan in Catalonia and
some Amerindian languages have, however, met with mixed success.
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English as a Global Language
What is a Global Language?
At the height of the Roman Empire, Latin was the lingua franca of most of Europe, Asia Minor and
North Africa (from Wikipedia)
There is no official definition of “global” or “world” language, but it essentially refers to a
language that is learned and spoken internationally, and is characterized not only by the number
of its native and second language speakers, but also by its geographical distribution, and its use
in international organizations and in diplomatic relations. A global language acts as a “lingua
franca”, a common language that enables people from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities to
communicate on a more or less equitable basis.
Historically, the essential factor for the establishment of a global language is that it is spoken
by those who wield power. Latin was the lingua franca of its time, although it was only ever a
minority language within the Roman Empire as a whole. Crucially, though, it was the language
of the powerful leaders and administrators and of the Roman military – and, later, of the
107 | P a g e
ecclesiastical power of the Roman Catholic Church – and this is what drove its rise to
(arguably) global language status. Thus, language can be said to have no independent existence
of its own, and a particular language only dominates when its speakers dominate (and, by
extension, fails when the people who speak it fail).
The influence of any language is a combination of three main things: the number of countries
using it as their first language or mother-tongue, the number of countries adopting it as their
official language, and the number of countries teaching it as their foreign language of choice
in schools. The intrinsic structural qualities of a language, the size of its vocabulary, the quality
of its literature throughout history, and its association with great cultures or religions, are all
important factors in the popularity of any language. But, at base, history shows us that a
language becomes a global language mainly due to the political power of its native speakers,
and the economic power with which it is able to maintain and expand its position.
Why is a Global Language Needed?
Member states of the
United Nations (from Wikipedia)
It is often argued that the modern “global village” needs a “global language”, and that
(particularly in a world of modern communications, globalized trade and easy international
travel) a single lingua franca has never been more important. With the advent since 1945 of
large international bodies such as the United Nations and its various offshoots – the UN now
has over 50 different agencies and programs from the World Bank, World Health Organization
and UNICEF to more obscure arms like the Universal Postal Union – as well as collective
organizations such as the Commonwealth and the European Union, the pressure to establish a
worldwide lingua franca has never been greater. As just one example of why a lingua franca is
useful, consider that up to one-third of the administration costs of the European Community is
taken up by translations into the various member languages.
Some have seen a planned or constructed language as a solution to this need. In the short period
between 1880 and 1907, no less than 53 such “universal artificial languages” were developed.
By 1889, the constructed language Volapük claimed nearly a million adherents, although it is
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all but unknown to day. Today the best known is Esperanto, a deliberately simplified language,
with just 16 rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings and no illogical spellings. A
sentence like “It is often argued that the modern world needs a common language with which
to communicate” would be rendered in Esperanto as “Oni ofte argumentas ke la moderna
mondo bezonas komuna linguon por komunikado”, not difficult to understand for anyone with
even a smattering of Romance languages.
Many of these universal languages (including Esperanto) were specifically developed with the
view in mind that a single world language would automatically lead to world peace and unity.
Setting aside for now the fact that such languages have never gained much traction, it has to be
said this assumption is not necessarily well-founded. For instance, historically, many wars have
broken out within communities of the same language (e.g. the British and American Civil Wars,
the Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia, etc) and, on the other hand, the citizens
of some countries with multiple languages (e.g. Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, etc) manage
to coexist, on the whole, quite peaceably.
Is a Global Language Necessarily “A Good
Thing”?
Language hotspots, where many languages are near extinction (from National Geographic, using data
from Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages)
While its advantages are self-evident, there are some legitimate concerns that a dominant global
language could also have some built-in drawbacks. Among these may be the following:

There is a risk that the increased adoption of a global language may lead to the weakening
and eventually the disappearance of some minority languages (and, ultimately, it is feared,
ALL other languages). It is estimated that up to 80% of the world’s 6,000 or so living languages
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
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may die out within the next century, and some commentators believe that a too-dominant
global language may be a major contributing factor in this trend. However, it seem likely that
this is really only a direct threat in areas where the global language is the natural first language
(e.g. North America, Australia, Celtic parts of Britain, etc). Conversely, there is also some
evidence that the very threat of subjugation by a dominant language can actually galvanize
and strengthen movements to support and protect minority languages (e.g. Welsh in Wales,
French in Canada).
There is concern that natural speakers of the global language may be at an unfair advantage
over those who are operating in their second, or even third, language.
The insistence on one language to the exclusion of others may also be seen as a threat to
freedom of speech and to the ideals of multiculturalism.
Another potential pitfall is linguistic complacency on the part of natural speakers of a global
language, a laziness and arrogance resulting from the lack of motivation to learn other
languages. Arguably, this can already be observed in many Britons and Americans.
Is English a Global Language?
A family tree representation of the spread of the English language around the world (from The
Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, after Peter Strevens)
As can be seen in more detail in the section on English Today, on almost any basis, English is
the nearest thing there has ever been to a global language. Its worldwide reach is much greater
than anything achieved historically by Latin or French, and there has never been a language as
widely spoken as English. Many would reasonably claim that, in the fields of business,
academics, science, computing, education, transportation, politics and entertainment, English
is already established as the de facto lingua franca.
The UN, the nearest thing we have, or have ever had, to a global community, currently uses
five official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese, and an estimated 85%
of international organizations have English as at least one of their official languages (French
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comes next with less than 50%). Even more starkly, though, about one third of international
organizations (including OPEC, EFTA and ASEAN) use English only, and this figure rises to
almost 90% among Asian international organizations.
As we have seen, a global language arises mainly due to the political and economic power of
its native speakers. It was British imperial and industrial power that sent English around the
globe between the 17th and 20th Century. The legacy of British imperialism has left many
counties with the language thoroughly institutionalized in their courts, parliament, civil service,
schools and higher education establishments. In other counties, English provides a neutral
means of communication between different ethnic groups.
But it has been largely American economic and cultural supremacy – in music, film and
television; business and finance; computing, information technology and the Internet; even
drugs and pornography – that has consolidated the position of the English language and
continues to maintain it today. American dominance and influence worldwide makes English
crucially important for developing international markets, especially in the areas of tourism and
advertising, and mastery of English also provides access to scientific, technological and
academic resources which would otherwise be denied developing countries.
Is English Appropriate for a Global
Language?
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The Second Edition (1989) of the Oxford English Dictionary” runs to 20 volumes (from Oxford
University Press)
Some have also argued that there are other intrinsic features of the English language that set it
apart, and make it an appropriate choice as a global language, and it may be worthwhile
investigating some of these claims:

The richness and depth of English’s vocabulary sets it apart from other languages. The 1989
revised “Oxford English Dictionary” lists 615,000 words in 20 volumes, officially the world’s
largest dictionary. If technical and scientific words were to be included, the total would rise to
well over a million. By some estimates, the English lexicon is currently increasing by over 8,500
words a year, although other estimates put this as high as 15,000 to 20,000. It is estimated
that about 200,000 English words are in common use, as compared to 184,000 in German,
and mere 100,000 in French. The availability of large numbers of synonyms allows shades of
distinction that are just not available to non-English speakers and, although other languages
have books of synonyms, none has anything on quite the scale of “Roget’s Thesaurus”. Add to
this the wealth of English idioms and phrases, and the available material with which to express
meaning is truly prodigious, whether the intention is poetry, business or just everyday
conversation.

It is a very flexible language. One example of this is in respect of word order and the ability to
phrase sentences as active or passive (e.g. I kicked the ball, or the ball was kicked by me).
Another is in the ability to use the same word as both a noun and a verb (such
as drink, fight, silence, etc). New words can easily be created by the addition of prefixes or
suffixes (e.g. brightness, fixation, unintelligible, etc), or by compounding or fusing existing
words together (e.g. airport, seashore, footwear, etc). Just how far English’s much-vaunted
flexibility should go (or should be allowed to go) is a hotly-debated topic, though. For example,
should common but incorrect usages (e.g. disinterested to mean uninterested; infer to
mean imply; forego to mean forgo; flout to mean flaunt; fortuitous to mean fortunate; etc)
be accepted as part of the natural evolution of the language, or reviled as inexcusable
sloppiness which should be summarily nipped in the bud?
Its grammar is generally simpler than most languages. It dispenses completely with noun
genders (hence, no dithering between le plume or la plume, or between el mano or la mano),
and often dispenses with the article completely (e.g. It is time to go to bed). The distinction
between familiar and formal addresses were abandoned centuries ago (the single English
word you has seven distinct choices in German: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, Ihr and euch). Case
forms for nouns are almost non-existent (with the exception of some personal pronouns
like I/me/mine, he/him/his, etc), as compared to Finnish, for example, which has fifteen forms
for every noun, or Russian which has 12. In German, each verb has 16 different forms (Latin
has a possible 120!), while English only retains 5 at most (e.g. ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden)
and often only requires 3 (e.g. hit, hits, hitting).
Some would also claim that it is also a relatively simple language in terms of spelling and
pronunciation, although this claim is perhaps more contentious. While it does not require
mastery of the subtle tonal variations of Cantonese, nor the bewildering consonant clusters

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of Welsh or Gaelic, it does have more than its fair share of apparently random spellings, silent
letters and phonetic inconsistencies (consider, for example, the pronunciation of the “ou”
in thou, though, thought, through, thorough, tough, plough and hiccough, or the “ea”
in head, heard, bean, beau and beauty). There are somewhere between 44 and 52 unique
sounds used in English pronunciation (depending on the authority consulted), almost equally
divided between vowel sounds and consonants, as compared to 26 in Italian, for example, or
just 13 in Hawaiian. This includes some sounds which are notoriously difficult for foreigners
to pronounce (such as “th”, which also comes in two varieties, as in thought and though, or
in mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb), and some sounds which have a huge variety of
possible spellings (such as the sound “sh”, which can be written as
in shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc, or the long “o” which can be
spelled as in go, show, beau, sew, doe, though, depot, etc). In its defence, though, its
consonants at least are fairly regular in pronunciation, and it is blessedly free of the accents
and diacritical marks which festoon many other languages. Also, its borrowings of foreign
words tend to preserve the original spelling (rather than attempting to spell them
phonetically). It has been estimated that 84% of English spellings conform to general patterns
or rules, while only 3% are completely unpredictable (3% of a very large vocabulary is,
however, still quite a large number, and this includes such extraordinary examples
as colonel, ache, eight, etc). Arguably, some of the inconsistencies do help to distinguish
between
homophones
like fissure and fisher; seas and seize; air and heir; aloud and allowed; weather and whether;
chants and chance; flu, flue and flew; reign, rein and rain; etc.

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
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Some argue that the cosmopolitan character of English (from its adoption of thousands of
words from other languages with which it came into contact) gives it a feeling of familiarity
and welcoming compared to many other languages (such as French, for example, which has
tried its best to keep out other languages).
Despite a tendency towards jargon, English is generally reasonably concise compared to many
languages, as can be seen in the length of translations (a notable exception is Hebrew
translations, which are usually shorter than their English equivalents by up to a third). It is also
less prone to misunderstandings due to cultural subtleties than, say, Japanese, which is almost
impossible to simultaneously translate for that reason.
The absence of coding for social differences (common in many other languages which
distinguish between formal and informal verb forms and sometimes other more complex
social distinctions) may make English seem more democratic and remove some of the
potential stress associated with language-generated social blunders.
The extent and quality of English literature throughout history marks it as a language of culture
and class. As a result, it carries with it a certain legitimacy, substance and gravitas that few
other languages can match.
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Percentage of EU populations who claim to speak English (from InterSol)
On balance, though, the intrinsic appeal of English as a world language is probably overblown
and specious, and largely based on chauvinism or naïveté. It is unlikely that linguistic factors
are of great importance in a language’s rise to the status of world language, and English’s
position today is almost entirely due to the aforementioned political and economic factors.
What About The Future?
Countries where English is an
official language (from Wikipedia)
Although English currently appears to be in an unassailable position in the modern world, its
future as a global language is not necessarily assured. In the Middle Ages, Latin seemed forever
set as the language of education and culture, as did French in the 18th Century. But
circumstances change, and there are several factors which might precipitate such a change once
again.
There are two competing drives to take into account: the pressure for international
intelligibility, and the pressure to preserve national identity. It is possible that a natural balance
may be achieved between the two, but it should also be recognized that the historical loyalties
of British ex-colonies have been largely replaced by pragmatic utilitarian reasoning.
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The very dominance of an outside language or culture can lead to a backlash or reaction against
it. People do not take kindly to having a language imposed on them, whatever advantage and
value that language may bring to them. As long ago as 1908, Mahatma Gandhi said, in the
context of colonial India: “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them”.
Although most former British colonies retained English as an official language after
independence, some (e.g. Tanzania, Kenya, Malaysia) later deliberately rejected the old
colonial language as a legacy of oppression and subjugation, disestablishing English as even a
joint official language. Even today, there is a certain amount of resentment in some countries
towards the cultural dominance of English, and particularly of the USA.
As has been discussed, there is a close link between language and power. The USA, with its
huge dominance in economic, technical and cultural terms, is the driving force behind English
in the world today. However, if the USA were to lose its position of economic and technical
dominance, then the “language loyalties” of other countries may well shift to the new dominant
power. Currently, perhaps the only possible candidate for such a replacement would be China,
but it is not that difficult to imagine circumstances in which it could happen.
A change in population (and population growth) trends may prove to be an influential factor.
The increasing Hispanic population of the USA has, in the opinion of some commentators,
already begun a dilution of the “Englishness” of the country, which may in turn have
repercussions for the status of the English language abroad. Hispanic and Latino Americans
have accounted for almost half of America’s population growth in recent years, and their share
of the population is expected to increase from about 16% today to around 30% by 2050. Some
even see the future possibility of a credible secessionist movement, similar to that for an
independent Quebec in Canada, and there has been movements within the US Republican party
(variously called “English First” or “Official English” or “US English”) to make English the
nation’s official language in an attempt to reduce the significance of Spanish. Official policies
of bilingualism or multilingualism in countries with large minority language groups, such as
are in place in countries like Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, are an expensive option and
fraught with political difficulties, which the USA would prefer to avoid.
A 2006 report by the British Council suggests that the number of people learning English is
likely to continue to increase over the next 10-15 years, peaking at around 2 billion, after which
a decline is predicted. Various attempts have been made to develop a simpler “controlled”
English language suitable for international usage (e.g. Basic English, Plain English, Globish,
International English, Special English, Essential World English, etc). Increasingly, the longterm future of English as a global language probably lies in the hands of Asia, and especially
the huge populations of India and China.
Having said that, though, there may now be a critical mass of English speakers throughout the
world which may make its continued growth impossible to stop or even slow. There are no
comparable historical precedents on which to base predictions, but it well may be that the
emergence of English as a global language is a unique, even an irreversible, event.
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