Horobin Simon - How English became English: A short history of a global language

ENGLISH. adj.

Belonging to England; thence English is the language of England.

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Samuel Johnsons straightforward identification of English as the language of England hardly begins to capture the diversity and complexity of the languages use in the twenty-first century; English today is spoken by approximately 450 million people all over the world. But the language used by its many speakers varies, in pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, to such an extent that it seems necessary to ask whether these people can all be considered to be speaking English. Even more people speak English as a second language, with figures varying from 1 billion to 1.5 billion people, and with considerably greater levels of linguistic divergence. Are all these people speaking the same language, or are we witnessing the emergence of new Englishes? Since more than half of the worlds native English speakers live in the USA, we might wonder whether the balance of power has shifted such that to speak English today is to speak General American rather than Standard British English. Does English no longer belong to England, as Dr Johnson confidently claimed, but rather to the USA, or to everyone who wishes to employ it?

English has been in use for 1,500 years; during that time it has changed to such an extent that the form of the language used by the Anglo-Saxons is unrecognizable to contemporary English speakers. Today we refer to this language as Old English, but should we perhaps think of it as a different language altogether? Modern Italian is descended from the Latin spoken by the Romans, but these are considered to be different languages. Might that not also be true of Old English and Modern English?

The following sections contain five different translations of the same passage from the New Testament (Luke 15: 1116). Despite being very different, each of these has a claim to represent a kind of English. But are they all forms of English, or different languages in their own right? What criteria should we apply when attempting to make such distinctions?

He cw: solice sum man hfde twegen suna. a cw se yldra to his fder; Fder. syle me minne dl minre hte e me to gebyre: a dlde he him his hte; a fter feawa dagum ealle his ing gegaderude se gingra sunu: and ferde wrclice on feorlen rice. and forspilde ar his hta lybbende on his glsan; a he hig hfde ealle amyrrede a wear mycel hunger on am rice and he wear wdla; aferde he and folgude anum burhsittendan men s rices a sende he hine to his tune t he heolde his swyn; a gewilnode he his wambe gefyllan of am biencoddun e a swyn ton. and him man ne sealde.

Given how different the language of this extract is from Modern English, you may be wondering how it could be considered a form of English at all. It is taken from a translation into Old Englishthe scholarly term that refers to the language used by the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled in Britain in the fifth century ad up to the Norman Conquest in 1066. But, while its vocabulary may appear quite unrelated to that of Modern English, this is in part the consequence of a different spelling systemincluding the letters thorn, ash, and eth, which are no longer used in English. If we look closely, we can spot a number of familiar words, such as sunu, fder, and tune, which are the ancestors of Modern English son, father, and town. Other words are harder to recognize, but are nevertheless demonstrably the root of the Modern English equivalent: mycel much, twegen two, dl dole. All of these are English words, yet their spellings and pronunciations have changed so that we no longer immediately recognize them as such.

In other cases, it is not just the spelling and pronunciation that have changed. The word sylle is the origin of our Modern English word sell, but here it means give; similarly, wambe is Modern English womb, but here it refers to the stomach. If we turn from the lexical, or content, words in the passage to its grammatical itemsprepositions, pronouns, and conjunctionswe find that many are identical to their Modern English equivalents: he, him, his, me, and, to. But, despite these clear correspondences, this Old English extract remains significantly different from Modern English, to the extent that contemporary speakers of English are unable to read it without special study.

And hee said, A certaine man had two sonnes: And the yonger of them said to his father, Father, giue me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he diuided vnto them his liuing. And not many dayes after, the yonger sonne gathered al together, and tooke his iourney into a farre countrey, and there wasted his substance with riotous liuing. And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land, and he beganne to be in want. And he went and ioyned himselfe to a citizen of that countrey, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would faine haue filled his belly with the huskes that the swine did eate: & no man gaue vnto him.