The Mother Tongue | Shortform

1-Page Summary

All human societies feature one crucial building block of social organization—language. The spoken and written word is what binds individuals together and helps us form stable communities. In modern history, the English language has come to occupy a dominant position. Today, English is spoken by around 1.5 billion people across the globe, making it the world’s most widely spoken language.

At first glance, it might seem unlikely that the native tongue of a people occupying just one part of an island off the coast of northwestern Europe would become the international language of business and diplomacy. To understand how this came to be, we need to understand the history of English and the processes by which it evolved into the language we speak and write today. What are the origins of English? What are the characteristics of the language that made it easier for people all over the globe to adopt and spread it? What quirks and features of English make it unique? And what is the future of the language?

The History of English

Roots of English

Most of the languages of Europe and Asia belong to one great Indo-European family of languages. English is a member of the Germanic family of languages (the West Germanic branch, to be precise), which is itself part of the larger Indo-European language family.

The story of English began when Germanic peoples known as the Angles and Saxons, hailing from what is now Northern Germany, began migrating to and conquering the Roman province of Britannia in the mid-5th century CE. These Angles and Saxons brought their Germanic language to their new home, where it morphed over time into the language we now call Old English. Some of our most fundamental words today come from Old English, particularly words related to family—man, wife, child, brother, and sister, to name a few. Old English was a rich literary language as well, leaving behind a trove of letters, charters, religious works, and legal texts. Old English works like Beowulf and Caedmon’s Hymn are the starting points of English literature.

From the 8th to the 10th centuries CE, the British Isles were invaded and settled by the Vikings of Scandinavia. The Viking immigrants and their Norse language further enriched the Old English vocabulary, adding important words like husband, sky, and leg. Old English also absorbed syntax and grammatical structure from Old Norse, a testament to the language’s fluidity, even at this early stage in its development.

In 1066, the Norman king William I conquered England and displaced the reigning Anglo-Saxon ruling elite. Norman French came to exert its own powerful influence on English vocabulary and structure—no fewer than 10,000 words can be traced to the time of the Norman Conquest.

Historical Evolution

Throughout the later Middle Ages, English evolved organically and developed many of its more recognizable features. One such feature was uninflected verbs with stable consonants (in other words, they are mostly the same regardless of gender, tense, case, and mood). Another was the simplification of noun endings to denote plurals (almost all English nouns are today pluralized with the addition of a simple s at the end).

In England, the speech patterns of the capital city of London came to establish the standard for how the language was spoken in the rest of the country, although this was a long and uneven historical process that didn’t happen all at once or with the same speed everywhere. Vestigial features of older forms of the language remain in place to this day, with archaic pronouns like thee and thou still spoken in parts of Yorkshire.

Perhaps the most famous change in pronunciation was the Great Vowel Shift running roughly from 1400-1600 CE, during which English speakers began pushing vowels closer to the front of their mouths. The word life, for example, was pronounced lafe in Shakespeare’s time, with the vowel lodged further back in the throat.

At this time, English began to be regarded for its potential as a language of literature. No writer took greater advantage of the incredible flexibility and richness of the English language than Shakespeare. The Bard of Avon alone added some 2,000 words to the language, such as mimic, bedroom, lackluster, hobnob. He also introduced a host of new phrases we still use today, like “one fell swoop” and “in my mind’s eye.” Shakespeare greatly elevated and exalted the English language.

For much of the history of the language, however, words defied standard spelling, with even Shakespeare offering a bewildering array of different and inconsistent spellings for the same words throughout his works. The first steps toward standardization only began with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and the gradual spread of written works (and thus, literacy) throughout England.

By 1640, there were over 20,000 titles available in English, more than there had ever been. As printed works produced by London printers began to spread across the country, local London spelling conventions gradually began to supplant local variations. What this also meant was that old spellings became fixed just as many word pronunciations were shifting because of the Great Vowel Shift. Our inheritance is a written language with many words spelled the way they were pronounced 400 years ago.

As a result, English spellings often bedevil non-native speakers, as well as those who’ve spoken the language their whole lives. Pronunciation and spelling are frequently divergent. To take just one example, the sh sound can be spelled sh as in mash; ti as in ration; or ss as in session. The troublesome orthography (the set of conventions for writing) of English can be seen in words like debt, know, knead, and colonel, with their silent letters, as well as their hidden, but pronounced letters.

Formalizing English

The Failure of Official Rules

This incongruity of spelling and pronunciation led some notable public figures to champion more robust efforts at spelling standardization and simplification by the end of the 18th century. By the late 19th century, spelling reform groups like the American Philological Association even began to lobby for new spellings like tho, wisht, and hav in an effort to have spelling more closely match pronunciation.

Despite the great passion and energy poured into spelling reform efforts, however, they mostly failed in their mission. Language is such a fluid and organic tool, used differently by so many people and susceptible to innumerable internal and external influences, that it is quite impossible for some centrally directed body to impose reforms top-down—the development and evolution of language has always been a bottom-up process.

The organic and sometimes haphazard evolution of English led some figures to call for the establishment of a central body to create rules about and regulate the usage of the language.

But this idea was also greeted with hostility by opponents like the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson, US President Thomas Jefferson, and theologian Joseph Priestley, all of whom argued that an “official” authority on English would inhibit the evolution of the language and freeze it at a particular point in time.

Many of the “rules” of English are the arbitrary creations of self-appointed authorities who lived centuries ago and offered little or no rationale for the rules they promulgated. They often rested upon no logic or reason and were the products of nothing more than prejudice and bias, with the traditional speech of poorer and more marginalized groups being castigated and stigmatized, and that of elites being enshrined as the “official” and “proper” form of the language.

Dictionaries

Although efforts to codify official rules of English have met with little success, English has succeeded in producing the greatest and most comprehensive dictionaries to be found in any language.

Britain’s most famous lexicographer was Samuel Johnson. Despite unusual spellings (he retained a fondness for the unnecessary Anglo-Saxon k in words like musick), some incorrect definitions, and occasionally inflated prose, his 1735 Dictionary of the English Language remains a masterpiece of English literature. He was the most significant figure since Shakespeare to truly capture the beauty and richness of the language.

The most comparable figure in America was Noah Webster. Webster’s English dictionary was the most thorough of its day, with over 70,000 words catalogued. Driven by a fierce patriotic pride in his young nation and a conviction that American English was just as worthy of exaltation as British English, Webster contributed to some of the distinctive features and pronunciations of the language on his side of the Atlantic.

The crown jewel of all English dictionaries is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Originally published in 1884, the OED set out not only to list and define every word used in the English language since the 12th century, but also to trace their etymologies and evolving meanings and spellings throughout history. With nearly half a million word entries, the OED is a staggering intellectual achievement, one of the greatest pieces of scholarship in world history. Nothing comparable exists in another language.

Word Origins

We’ve seen how different migrant groups to the British Isles shaped the overall structure of the language, aided by individual innovators like Shakespeare, Johnson, and Webster. But now, let’s take a closer look to see how specific words came to be formed. Words come into being by five main processes:

Accident or mishearing—sweetheart was once sweetard, but evolved into its present form through persistent misuse.
Borrowing or adapting from other languages, as with a word like breeze, derived from the Spanish briza (although this particular word has become so thoroughly anglicized that we forget it is actually derived from a foreign source).
Invention out of whole cloth like, as in the way hound became dog, with no known explanation as to how it took place.
Shifting meaning over time—nice, for example, has meant everything from foolish to strange to wanton to lascivious. Only in the mid-18th century did it acquire something akin to its present meaning.
Alteration through prefixes and suffixes, like how an adjective like diverse can easily become a verb like diversify or a noun like diversification.

Pronunciation and Dialect

As we’ve seen, English words are derived from many different sources. This helps to explain why English is rich with varied pronunciation and dialects. There are an astonishing variety of dialects within England (let alone Wales, Scotland, and Ireland). The linguist Simeon Potter has observed that there is more difference in speech between two points 100 miles distant from each other in England than there is in the whole of North America.

One of the clearest manifestations of local dialect is slurring—the addition, subtraction, or substitution of letters in spoken English that aren’t reflected in the spelling. The general trend is one of subtraction, losing letters and syllables over time and letting pronunciations become looser and more casual. The words that tend to be slurred the most are local and familiar place-names—like how “Baltimore” becomes “Balamer” in the mouths of locals.

But it’s not just geography—social class can also be a powerful influence on English dialects. The American dialectologist William Labov observed in the 1930s that middle-class New Yorkers were far more likely to pronounce the r sound in words like door, car, and more than were their fellow working-class New Yorkers. Pronouncing one’s r sounds was an indicator of higher social status.

American English

American English differs in many respects from British English. Earlier, we explored the astonishing variety of dialects that can be found in the UK, even between towns that are short distances apart from one another. American speech, on the other hand, is comparatively homogenized, to such an extent that speakers on the East and West Coasts (roughly 3,000 miles apart) speak with virtually indistinguishable accents.

Indeed, despite the massive waves of immigration during the 19th century, American speech patterns did not diverge over time; instead, they converged. The movement of people within the US created a linguistic melting pot of intermingling, which homogenized speech patterns. As time went on, people faced social pressures to conform to “normal” American speech, especially the children of immigrants, who faced even stronger pressure to shed the accents and idioms of their parents.

Over time, English-speaking Americans developed their own unique vocabulary and pronunciations, many of which became widely adopted in England, as well as in whole other languages. The ubiquitous ok is maybe the best example, having worked its way into languages across every inhabited continent. Its history and origins are unclear, although linguists believe it may have arisen out the ironic wordplay of early 19th century American jokesters. Around this time, some well-educated young people in American cities led a fad of creating acronyms for deliberately misspelled phrases—thus, “ok” came from “oll korrect,” meaning “all correct.”

America has exerted a powerful influence over English, especially as the reach of US media and Hollywood films has extended around the world. American idioms like don’t have are replacing haven’t got in Britain, while truck is gradually edging out the more uniquely British lorry. We can also see this in British spelling, as the u in humour and colour is slowly becoming extinct in the UK.

The Success of English Around the World

We’ve seen how English evolved over a long historical process, spreading to America where it took on its own unique form—which, in turn, shaped how the language was spoken in the mother country. But the reach of English, of course, extends far beyond Britain and America—English is a world language, with official status in 59 countries, a higher figure than for any other language. Of course, not everyone in these countries actually speaks English (in fact, many people in the US and the UK don’t) but its widespread reach can’t be denied. How did it achieve this global status?

The residual historical legacy of the British Empire, plus the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, naturally played major roles in rendering English the global lingua franca. But certain features of the language itself aided in its worldwide adoption by native speakers of other languages: Its spelling is relatively phonetic; it is almost entirely free of gendered nouns; and it lacks the accent marks and diacritics that subtly transform pronunciation. Thus, it is relatively easy to speak and write English.

Moreover, English is based on a phonetic alphabet. That is, the written characters correspond to particular sounds. This is a great advantage and makes writing and pronouncing words simple, because there are only so many sounds that can be represented by the letters. It limits the number of characters that comprise the writing system.

We’ve seen how, even in its earliest stages, English was highly flexible in accepting new words from Norse and Norman French. The process also works the other way around—English words themselves have been readily adopted by other languages, often with only slight modifications to fit the native tongue. The Japanese, in particular, are adept at adapting English words into their notoriously difficult and inaccessible language. These are known as wasei-eigo, or “Japanese-made-English.” Thus, smart became sumato, rush hour became rushawa, idol became aidoru, and so on.

Quirks of English

We’ve explored the origins of English, its evolution over time, and its emergence as a dominant language of global business and politics. But English is also a language of literature and oratory, capable of eloquently expressing the most powerful human emotions and desires. It possesses a number of unique properties, quirks, and complexities that set it apart from other tongues. What, then, are some of the language’s unique traits that make it so rich and evocative?

One of the best ways to get a true flavor of the English language is through its swear words. Unlike some other languages, like Japanese, English features a rich vocabulary of swear words. English swear words derive their power from the fact that they are highly emotive, as well as forbidden, and tend to be oriented around two themes: obscenity, which is either the disgusting and/or taboo (often having to do with bodily functions or sex); or blasphemy, which involves sacrilege or invoking the name of God in vain. In English, shit, piss, fuck, and cunt would fall into the former category; hell, damn, goddamn and Jesus Christ (in certain contexts) would fall into the latter.

Cunt is perhaps the most obscene word in the English language, but it was entirely commonplace and inoffensive a few centuries ago, existing even in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Throughout the history of the English language, however, there have been shifting definitions of which words were and weren’t considered offensive. What was perfectly acceptable in one era could be considered highly offensive in another.

By the Victorian Age (1837-1901), many English words that would have scarcely raised an eyebrow in the Middle Ages or in Shakespeare’s time were considered totally out of bounds. Indeed, this era was famous for its prudishness and squeamishness. Even non-taboo parts of the body were considered too delicate to mention in polite society. Thus, legs became limbs and belly became midriff.

Beyond the ingenuity one can deploy with swearing (fuck alone is incredibly versatile, able to express the full range of emotions and be used as any part of speech), English affords ample opportunity for wordplay and creativity. The forms of wordplay are greatly varied.

Palindromes (sentences spelled the same backwards and forwards) are among the most creative and most challenging to write. Consider how difficult it is to come up with a palindrome like “Rise to vote sir” or “A nut for a jar of tuna” that satisfy the criteria and form coherent statements.

Anagrams (words or phrases made from rearranging the letters of other words and phrases) are also highly popular. Thus, one can turn Emperor Octavian into “Captain over Rome” or Osama Bin Laden into “Is bad man alone.”

Perhaps the most famous wordplay in spoken English is the phenomenon of cockney rhyming slang. This is a linguistic characteristic specific to the cockneys of London’s East End, believed to have started around the mid-19th century. In this rhyming slang, the speaker replaces a word (like mate) with a multi-word phrase (like china plate), the last word of which rhymes with the word that’s been replaced. Thus, “How are you, mate?” would become “How are you, china plate?” But in reality, it goes a step further. The second, rhyming word is often dropped. Thus, “How are you, mate?” would really become “How are you, china?” This renders the etymology of these phrases deeply obscure and often baffling to outsiders.

Next Steps for English

Given its dominant status, it is convenient, advantageous, and expedient for people around the world to have a working knowledge of English. Yet even within countries that have high levels of English proficiency, people are still quite proud of their native languages and wish to preserve them. Indeed, many parts of the world view the English language itself as a symbol of western colonialism.

For these reasons, English speakers should never be reduced to complacency by the seeming triumph of their language. Things can always change, and the supremacy of English may one day be supplanted by a rival claimant.

What, then, is the future of the language? With America’s powerful economic and cultural influence over the world, the likely trajectory seems to be a homogenization of English to conform to the way it's spoken in the United States. These trends are reinforced by the influences of mass media, which expose us to dialects of speech that we would never have otherwise heard. Thus, a melting pot of English, rather than a polarization of different dialects, looks to be where we’re headed.

On the one hand, this is positive. Americans, Britons, Australians, Canadians, South Africans, Jamaicans, and all other English-speaking nations will understand one another better, creating stronger conditions for political, social, and economic cooperation. But, on the other hand, something irreplaceable would be lost—the variety and flavor of our rich and beautiful language.

Chapter 1: The Origins of English

(Shortform note: According to The Economist, around 1.5 billion people across the globe speak English with at least some degree of proficiency, making it the world’s most-spoken language.)

But before we can explore the history of how the English language came to be, we need to have some understanding of the processes by which all languages develop.

Origins of Language

Human language probably began with prehistoric Cro-Magnon man and became more complex with the arrival of Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years ago. The bigger brains of Homo sapiens likely helped the development and sophistication of language, which, in turn, provided an evolutionary advantage for Homo sapiens over other hominids because it made communication and social cohesion a lot easier. The precise mechanisms by which humans first created language are unknown, though some linguists think that onomatopoeia (words like boom or clap that phonetically mimic the sounds they describe) may have played a role in catalyzing the process, as humans would have sought a way to communicate the natural sounds they heard.

Some of the most interesting and insightful work on language origins has been done through the study of how children first learn and acquire it. Noam Chomsky observed that even newborn infants seem to possess some innate understanding of language and a basic template for how words are supposed to be ordered and sequenced. For example, before they turn two, most children seem to grasp the difference between stative (“I like bananas”) and non-stative verbs (“I am liking bananas”) and rarely ever make this grammatical mistake again.

The Indo-European Language Family

Linguists have discovered that many of the languages spoken in Europe and Asia today, as well as many languages of the ancient world, belong to one great Indo-European family of languages. There are even linkages between languages separated by vast reaches of space, like the Basque spoken in some parts of Spain and certain Native American languages.

Linguists have yet to discover a single master Indo-European parent language or identify the precise geographical area where it may have originated. They believe that languages became differentiated and unique once the original tribal group began to spread out across the Eurasian landmass between 2,500 and 3,500 BCE, giving rise to languages across an area stretching from the Scottish Highlands to Sri Lanka.

The Legacy of Rome

Latin, perhaps the most famous language of the ancient world and the tongue of the Roman Empire, belongs to the Indo-European language family. The spread of the Empire across most of Europe kickstarted the historical processes that led to the Romance languages—those that have their roots in Latin—including French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian.

English is within the Germanic family of languages (the West Germanic branch, to be precise), along with German and Dutch. English, although not a Romance language, owes much of its origins to Latin and the Roman Empire.

The Saxon Invasions

(Shortform note: This was happening during a period of great political turmoil, as the Western Roman Empire was crumbling under both internal pressures and waves of Germanic invasions. The last Roman troops vacated Great Britain around 410 CE, leaving the island exposed to invaders.)

These Angles and Saxons brought their North Sea Germanic dialects to their new home. The linguistic linkages between English and the dialects spoken in Northern Germany can still be detected today. They even gave their name to the new country—Angle-land, or England.

Different invading tribes settled in different regions of what is now England, lending their own unique linguistic stamp to different regions of the country. The echoes of this historical process of localized linguistic development can even be seen in the United States today, as different regions of North America were, in their turn, settled by people from different regions of the British Isles.

(Shortform note: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America by David Hackett Fischer explores this latter idea in greater detail, showing how migration to the Americas from different parts of Great Britain influenced the linguistic, social, economic, and political trajectories of different regions of what ultimately became the United States.)

These illiterate, war-like invaders certainly formed a stark contrast with the law-abiding, literate, and cultured Romano-British elite, who enjoyed a standard of living that would be unseen in the British Isles for nearly a millennium. Truly, the Dark Ages had arrived.

Old English

The proto-English spoken by the Angles and Saxons morphed over time into Old English. Christian missionaries arrived in 597 and began the process of Christianizing the population (or, at least, the political elite of the country). The rise of a new priestly class that needed to be able to read and write in order to understand and teach the Bible aided in the spread of literacy and helped give Old English a written form.

Old English gradually supplanted the old Latin and Celtic influences in England. These latter linguistic traditions have left very little trace in modern England—astonishingly few English personal or place-names today have Latin or Celtic antecedents.

Old English is largely unintelligible to speakers and readers of Modern English. We can observe this by comparing lines of text. The Old English “Fæder ure şu şe eart on heofonum, si şin nama gehalgod” translates to the Modern English “Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name”—the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer.

Despite the seemingly alien nature of Old English, it does have some similarities of structure and syntax to the language we speak and write today. Although influences from subsequent linguistic waves over the British Isles displaced much of the Old English language (only about 1 percent of our vocabulary can be traced to it) some of our most fundamental words owe their origins to Old English, particularly words related to family—man, wife, child, brother, and sister, to name a few.

There was a great outpouring of Old English literature during the Anglo-Saxon period of English history. The Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk, was the first English historian and chronicler; Caedmon was the first English poet; and Alcuin was the first English scholar of international reputation, a leading figure at the court of Charlemagne. In addition to these, we have a rich trove of Old English letters, charters, and legal texts that point to the vibrancy of the language. Works like Beowulf and Caedmon’s Hymn are the starting points of English literature.

The Vikings and the Scandinavian Influence

From the 8th to the 10th centuries CE, the British Isles suffered a new wave of invasion and settlement. This time, the invaders were Vikings from what are now the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Scholars are unclear as to why these invasions started when they did, but they left a profound and lasting influence on the English language. A political settlement with the Anglo-Saxon kings in the mid-9th century granted the Vikings a specified area in Northeastern England in which they could live and settle. This area was known as the Danelaw.

The linguistic stamp of the Danelaw can still be observed in England today, as the Viking invaders infused Old English with new loanwords taken from their Old Norse languages. Important words like husband, sky, and leg can be dated back to the Viking Age.

(Shortform note: Many modern place-names in England are Scandinavian. Place-names like Grimsby, Derby, and others that end in “-by” are usually Viking-derived).

The importation of Scandinavian words also made the Old English language more flexible, because these words often supplemented words that already existed in Old English instead of completely replacing them. This gave Old English a host of synonyms and doublets that allowed different words to be used to express slightly different ideas. Old English also absorbed syntax and grammatical structure from Old Norse, a testament to the language’s fluidity, even at this early stage in its development.

The Norman Conquest

In 1066, the Norman king William I conquered England and displaced the reigning Anglo-Saxon ruling elite. The Normans were people from Normandy, in Northern France, themselves descended from Viking ancestors. The Norman Conquest, unlike the earlier Saxon and Viking invasions, was not a mass migration. Instead, it was a replacement of one set of elites by another—the Old English nobility was dispossessed and replaced by a new Anglo-Norman governing class, but life and language continued on normally for the vast majority of the English population.

Norman French, not English, was the language of the ruling elite in England for centuries after the Norman Conquest—after 1066, no English monarchs spoke English as their primary language until Henry IV’s coronation in 1399. The words imported into today’s English from Norman French distinctly show this social/linguistic split. It is no coincidence that the roughly 10,000 words that owe their origins to the Norman Conquest are disproportionately concentrated in subject matters like court (duke, baron) and jurisprudence (jury, felony), while words like baker and miller having to do with everyday life or ordinary trades are disproportionately Anglo-Saxon in origin.

Largely left to its own devices, English developed organically during the Middle Ages. The ruling Anglo-Norman elite took little notice of developments in English, because it was the language of commoners.

This was the era when English developed many of its more recognizable features, like uninflected verbs with stable consonants (inflection is a change in the form of a word, often the ending, to reflect different contexts like gender, mood, and tense). In English, however, verbs and other parts of speech tend to be the same regardless of these different contexts. As we shall see later, such developments were to prove greatly advantageous to English as it spread throughout the world.

Medieval Developments

By the mid-14th century, English had reasserted itself as a language of government and law, likely due to the fact that the political links between England and France were severed over the course of the centuries. Moreover, we see a shift in the character of written English—Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a clear departure from Old English. It is written in what we call Middle English, a form far more recognizable to modern readers.

The biggest part of this change was the loss of inflection and gender, but other forms of simplification and unification were taking place. For example, Old English had six noun endings to denote a plural, but only two survived into Middle and Modern English (“-s” as in hands and “-en” as in oxen, with the latter being extremely rare and used only for a handful of words). Verb forms were also being reduced, with fewer options to denote the tense of a word.

Although Medieval English dialects could vary widely even across short distances, the language was becoming more standardized in the Late Middle Ages. This had much to do with the influence of London. The relatively simple grammatical structure of the English dialect in this city as compared to other dialects, its large population, its role as the national seat of government and commerce, and its proximity to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge gave London English advantages that ensured its ultimate triumph over other, local forms of the language.

This was a long and uneven historical process—it didn’t happen all at once and it didn’t happen at the same speed everywhere. Vestigial irregular verbs (those whose conjugation does not follow the usual pattern remain in the language like bear/bore and wear/wore. In addition, there are still parts of South Yorkshire in the north of England where archaic pronouns like thee and thou survive to this day. Lastly, non-English Celtic languages for a long time remained the primary mode of speech in the fringes of the British Isles, like Western Ireland, Wales, and Highland Scotland.

Chapter 2: Later Development of English

We’ve seen how invasions from the Angles, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans helped to form the basic structure of the English language. In this chapter, we’ll look at more recent developments in the history of the language that made it into the language we know today. These later developments helped give English the richness, variety, and adaptability that helped transform it from a local language into a global one.

Shakespeare: Elevating the Language

No writer took greater advantage of the incredible flexibility and richness of the English language than Shakespeare. In the late-16th and early-17th centuries, the Bard of Avon alone added some 2,000 words to the language, like mimic, bedroom, lackluster, hobnob. He also introduced a whole host of new phrases that we still use today, like “one fell swoop” and “in my mind’s eye” owe their origins to Shakespeare. He reshaped English, showcasing its extraordinary possibilities as a language of literature. Although academic works by English authors continued to be written in French and Latin, Shakespeare made a remarkable contribution to the standardization and exaltation of the English language.

The Great Vowel Shift

Perhaps the most famous change in the morphology and pronunciation of a language that we can trace through the historical record is the Great Vowel Shift. This was a change in the pronunciation of English vowels that began in the late Middle Ages and continued into the early modern era, running roughly from 1400-1600 CE. The pronunciation of vowels began moving closer to the front of the mouth. The word life, for example, was pronounced lafe in Shakespeare’s time, with the vowel lodged further back in the throat. The Great Vowel Shift changed it to the pronunciation we have today.

We know a great deal about how these shifts in pronunciation were occurring (even long before the days of audio recording) through our study of rhymes and poetry. Shakespeare forms rhymes using knees and grease as couplets, as well as grass and grace. Their placement in verse indicates that these words must have rhymed in his day, even though they wouldn’t in modern pronunciation.

Interestingly, this was the era in which Englishmen were beginning to colonize North America. The American descendants of English settlers in New England and Virginia were thus cut off from the great linguistic developments taking place back in the British Isles. Early American speech thus preserved many relics and vestiges of Elizabethan English that had long since died out in the mother country. One example is the er sound in a word like mercy, which was pronounced like marcy by Elizabethan Britons (with the a sound being further back in the throat). This pronunciation survived in parts of the United States well into the 19th century, hundreds of years after its virtual extinction in England.

The Evolution of English Spelling

These shifts in pronunciation led to strange divergences between how words were spelled and how they were pronounced. The troublesome orthography (the set of conventions for writing) of English can still be seen in words like debt, know, knead, and colonel, with their silent letters, as well as their hidden, but pronounced letters. How did these divergences come to be?

The Normans had noticed the unusual orthography of English quickly after taking control of the country. We see this in the Domesday Book, a remarkable 11th-century survey of English property holdings that William I commissioned in order to help him tax and administer his new conquest. In the Domesday Book, we see multiple spellings for various place-names throughout the country. The Normans complicated this already-complicated picture by superimposing certain conventions of their own spelling into the orthography of their new conquest, introducing the letters z and g for example.

As we’ve seen with pronunciation and the Great Vowel Shift, sometimes the spelling conventions of one region of England won out over the whole county, regardless of pronunciation. Thus, some words might be spelled the way they were spelled in the East Midlands, but pronounced the way they were spoken in Yorkshire. For much of the history of the language, words defied standard spelling, with even Shakespeare offering a bewildering array of different and inconsistent spellings for the same words throughout his works.

This unruly spelling even governed (or failed to govern) how people spelled their own names. Even famous and highly literate figures like Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Oliver Cromwell did not spell their own names consistently.

The Printing Press

The first steps toward spelling standardization began with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and the gradual spread of written works (and thus, literacy) throughout England. By 1640, there were over 20,000 titles available in English, more than there had ever been. The printing industry became highly profitable and naturally centered itself in the nation’s commercial, cultural, and political capital—London.

And as printed works produced by London printers began to spread across the country, local London spelling conventions gradually began to supplant local variations. As with the Great Vowel Shift, the sheer weight of London’s gravity was decisive. By the dawn of the 18th century, English had become far more unified in its spelling than it had just a generation before.

What this also meant was that old spellings became fixed just as many word pronunciations were shifting. Consequently, our inheritance is a written language with many words spelled the way they were pronounced 400 years ago. Such spellings often bear little resemblance to how the words are actually spoken. This accounts for many of the silent letters in words like knight and aisle, which used to be pronounced more phonetically than they are today.

Attempts at Formal Standardization

The incongruity of spelling and pronunciation led some notable public figures to champion more robust efforts at spelling standardization and simplification by the end of the 18th century. These figures included American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, famed lexicographer Noah Webster (who actually advocated legal consequences for improper spelling), industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, US President Theodore Roosevelt, and author Mark Twain. By the late 19th century, spelling reform groups like the American Philological Association even began to lobby for new spellings like tho, wisht, and hav in an effort to simplify American English spelling and have it more closely align with pronunciation

These groups decried the irrationality of spelling. After all, what good reason was there to call the money you owe to someone else a debt rather than a det? Leaders of this time belonged to the Progressive Era, which focused on efficiency and rationality and saw little need to pay deference to outdated custom and tradition. Why should they respect the hoary old conventions of English spelling?

The Difficulties of Spelling Reform

The pretensions of political and cultural leaders notwithstanding, the development and evolution of language has always been a bottom-up process. Two hundred years ago, people spelled shoppe and musick. No state mandate ordered people to change the way these words were spelled—on their own, people took the initiative to drop the unnecessary letters from them.

Today, we are used to the non-phonetic spellings of words like bread. It would be deeply strange and unnatural for us to write bred. And of course, bred is itself a word, which would merely create confusion. Bread and bred are homophones, words that sound the same but are spelled differently. The high number of homophones in English gives the non-phonetic spellings of many words a useful purpose. Thus can we distinguish might from mite, great from grate, and sure from shore. Perhaps our spelling isn’t so irrational after all.

Grammar Police

The organic and sometimes haphazard evolution of English has led some figures to call for the establishment of a central body to create rules about and regulate the usage of the language. Such bodies do exist in other languages. The Académie Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century, still serves as the official body regulating proper usage of the French language (how seriously its rules are taken by actual Francophones is another matter). English men of letters like John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift believed that English might benefit from the establishment of such an academy.

But this idea was also greeted with hostility by opponents like the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson, US President Thomas Jefferson, and theologian Joseph Priestley, all of whom argued that an “official” authority on English would inhibit the evolution of the language, exert an overly conservative and stodgy influence on usage, and freeze the language at a particular point in time. Ultimately, no “English Academy” was established.

Many celebrate this outcome as a positive development for the language, one that freed it from being saddled with a set of cumbersome and inflexible rules imposed by an elitist and out-of-touch body. In the absence of an official organization, English has relied upon informal and self-appointed grammarians and lexicographers to define its rules.

These figures write books and give lectures on proper or standard usage of the language, but they are usually ignored by the vast majority of the population. Even high-profile elites in the worlds of academia, politics, and culture frequently misuse words (confusing flout with flaunt, as US President Jimmy Carter once did in a televised address) or use technically improper forms of the language (splitting an infinitive as in the Star Trek phrase “to boldly go” instead of the more proper “to go boldly”).

Many of the rules of English we observe today are the arbitrary creations of self-appointed authorities who lived centuries ago and offered little or no rationale for the rules they promulgated. The 18th-century English clergyman and amateur grammarian Robert Lowth is a good example of such a figure. It is to Lowth that we owe many of the arbitrary rules of usage that we see in style guides and textbooks all over the English-speaking world such as not ending a sentence with a preposition, the prohibition against double negatives like “I don’t want no potatoes,” and the subtle, but different meanings of between and among.

Other grammar police of the time and of later ages declared that it was unacceptable to combine Greek and Latin root words into a single new word, and so railed against words like petroleum (combining the Latin petro and the Greek oleum). These deeply silly and pretentious dictums rested upon no logic or reason and ignored centuries of real-world use in England and her colonies by both ordinary people and the great English writers of the time.

Bias and Prejudice

In some cases, it would seem that the practitioners of “bad” grammar have it quite right. Why is “you was” invalid and “you were” correct? Was is a singular form of the verb “to be” in all other cases (e.g., “she was,” “he was,” “I was”) while were is plural in all other cases (“they were,” “we were”), so it would make sense that the singular you and the singular was would go together. It’s completely understandable why speakers new to English routinely make the mistake, because the convention makes absolutely no sense.

Unfortunately, many of these rules come down to simple prejudice and bias rather than logic. The traditional speech of poorer and more marginalized groups tends to be castigated and stigmatized, while that of elites tends to be enshrined as the “official” and “proper” form of the language. This is despite the fact that the proper form of the language is no more consistent or logical than the improper form, and often considerably less so.

(Shortform note: These issues of class and privilege as they relate to language remain contentious flashpoints up to the modern day. In 1996, for example, the Oakland Unified School District passed a resolution recognizing the legitimacy of African-American Vernacular English and mandated some level of school instruction in this vernacular. This met with great hostility—much of it racial in character—from critics, who argued that the resolution was degrading the English language by elevating improper and illegitimate forms of it.)

Early Lexicographers

Although efforts to codify official rules of English have met with little success, English has succeeded in producing the greatest and most comprehensive dictionaries to be found in any language. The early ones were produced not by committees of academics, but by eccentric oddballs who were driven by a relentless passion for words.

Britain’s most famous lexicographer was Samuel Johnson. Despite unusual spellings (he retained a fondness for the unnecessary Anglo-Saxon k in words like musick), some incorrect definitions, and occasionally overly inflated prose, his 1735 Dictionary of the English Language remains a masterpiece of English literature. He was the most significant figure since Shakespeare to truly capture the beauty and richness of the language.

The most comparable figure in America was Noah Webster, working in the early 19th century. Webster himself was widely regarded as unpleasant, exceedingly self-regarding, pompous, officious, and absurdly boastful (he boasted of speaking 23 languages, a claim that was almost certainly untrue). Moreover, much of his lexicographical work was derivative of (if not outright plagiarized from) the works of those who came before him.

Despite his arguably unsavory personal character, Webster’s English dictionary was the most thorough of its day, with over 70,000 words catalogued. Driven by a fierce patriotic pride in his young nation and a conviction that American English was just as worthy of exhalation as British English, Webster did contribute to some of the distinctive features and pronunciations of the language on his side of the Atlantic.

Some of his more notable innovations include the American pronunciation of aluminum, and the dropping of unnecessary l’s in words like traveler and jeweler. Unfortunately for Webster himself, he profited little from his dictionary during his lifetime. It was only after his death in 1843 that two businessmen named Charles and George Merriam purchased the rights to the book, heavily edited it, and republished it as the famous Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, after which it became a bestseller and household name.

The Oxford English Dictionary

The crown jewel of all English dictionaries is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Originally published in 1884, the OED set out not only to list and define every word used in the English language since the 12th century, but also to trace their etymologies and evolving meanings and spellings throughout history. It was an extraordinary intellectual undertaking. The man tasked with overseeing the compilation and publication of the OED was James Augustus Henry Murray. The effort by Murray and his team covered half a dozen volumes, over 6,400 pages, and took over four decades to complete.

Murray enlisted an army of amateur philologists to help him with the Herculean task, including the prolific bibliophile James Platt, who was said to have read 100 languages and claimed to read a complete book each day; and the eccentric American Dr. W.C. Minor, who made most of his contributions to the OED from within the confines of a hospital for the criminally insane, where he had been sent after committing a murder while suffering from paranoid delusions. The final volume of the OED wasn’t even published until 1928, more than a decade after Murray’s death.

With nearly half a million word entries, the OED was a staggering intellectual achievement, one of the greatest pieces of scholarship in world history. Nothing comparable exists in another language. The OED is as close to a complete roadmap of a language as we have. Thanks to it, and to the remarkable efforts of the individuals who created it (and still update it to this day), we know more about the history of English than we do about any other language.

(Shortform note: The OED today contains over 615,000 entries. It’s updated quarterly, with new words being added every three months. In March 2020, some of the new additions included coulrophobia, man hug, and pronoid.)

Exercise: Explore Linguistic Prejudice

Examine how language can be used to stigmatize or marginalize those who are different.

Provide an example of a rule of something you were taught was “improper” English. Based on what you’ve read about how rules of English were often created, do you think this rule is based on clear reasoning? Explain why or why not.
Have you ever been stigmatized or marginalized because of the way you speak or write? If so, please describe what happened.
How do you think marginalized groups can protect their languages and dialects from those who demand that they assimilate themselves into the broader culture?

Chapter 3: Flexibility of English

We’ve seen how the English language, in its development and evolution over time, proved to be remarkably flexible and adaptable to innovations and influences from other languages. These characteristics gave English a versatility that would later be a major asset as it spread to nearly all corners of the globe. In this chapter, we’ll explore how variable and fluid English can be—in ways that can sometimes lead to real confusion.

Complications of Versatility

For all the benefits of being a flexible and adaptable language, English can sometimes be too flexible. Even simple words like set or fine can baffle speakers of other languages with their multiple meanings and contexts. Linguistic phenomena like polysemy—different meanings for a single word—are common (and confounding) properties of English. The language is also notorious for contronyms, words that appear the same but have multiple meanings that are the exact opposite—for example, sanction can mean either to approve or to censure; clip can mean either to bind or to detach.

Moreover, this same versatility can make English rules of grammar seem maddeningly arbitrary to non-native speakers. The subtle complexities of English can also bedevil even the most well-versed speakers. Even as ubiquitous a word as what has far more meanings than you’d think—it takes the OED a full five pages to define it.

Beyond grammar, English spellings often bedevil non-native speakers, as well as those who’ve spoken the language their whole lives. As we covered in the last chapter, pronunciation and spelling are frequently divergent. There are approximately 200 different ways of spelling all the different sounds in English (we’ll explore sounds in English in the next section). For example, the sh sound can be spelled sh as in mash; ti as in ration; or ss as in session. The f sound, meanwhile can be spelled f as half or gh as in enough.

Even the great lexicographers we met in the previous chapter failed to achieve a standard of uniform spelling. Spellings are not even fully standardized in works like Webster’s New World Dictionary or the American Heritage Dictionary. Studies have shown that even college-level students frequently misspell words like professor and rhythm (ironically, misspell itself is often written incorrectly, with spellers leaving out an extra s or i).

Parts of Speech

Another compilation of English arising from its versatility is the variability of the parts of speech themselves. In English, the parts of speech are quite loose and interchangeable. Unlike those languages whose grammatical structures derived more from Latin, English mostly lacks hard and fast rules governing tense, split infinitives, or any number of thorny grammatical or syntactic issues. For example, many words serve as both verbs and nouns. You can take a drive (noun) or drive a car (verb); you can go to a dance (noun) or you can dance to the beat (verb). The “rules” governing which words are which parts of speech are largely arbitrary. They are what they are because of custom and historical usage, not because of any universally applied and immutable set of principles.

Even the definition of what constitutes a sentence is fuzzy. Nominally, a sentence has both a subject and a predicate clause, but even these most basic rules break down in common usage. Even though they don’t have both a subject and predicate, single- word questions or exclamations like “How?” or “What!” can be considered sentences because of the implied existence of unwritten or unspoken words.

Some of the chaotic structure of English is due to the fact that early grammarians sought to impose Latin rules on Old English—a West Germanic language whose structure bore little relation to Latin. As the language of the Roman Empire and of the Catholic Church, Latin reigned supreme for medieval scholars; for centuries, nearly all literary and scientific works were written in the language. Even texts about English grammar were, incredibly, written in Latin.

The Creation of Words

We’ve explored the historical forces that shaped the overall structure of the English language. But in our effort to understand how English became the language we speak and write today, we need to delve deeper and understand the processes by which individual words themselves are formed. There are six primary ways words have entered the English language.

Words are born through accident. Many English words are the product of simple mispronunciation, misspelling, mishearing, or misuse. For instance, sweetheart was once sweetard, but evolved into its present form through persistent misuse. In other cases, words are created through backfilling from plural to singular. For example, the word pease was once the singular form of pea. The word pea didn’t exist, but people mistakenly thought that pease was plural, so pea was created to correct this supposed error.
Words are adopted from other languages, as we saw with loanwords from Old Norse and Norman French. English has proven to be a remarkably welcome home for “refugee” words. Even in Shakespeare’s time, English had already borrowed words from over 50 languages, a remarkable feat considering the difficulties of travel and communication in the pre-modern era. Indeed, loan words and phrases from other languages live on in English long after they have gone extinct in their native tongues (like nome de plume or double entendres, both of which no longer exist in their original French). Some words like breeze (derived from the Spanish briza) have become so thoroughly anglicized that we forget they are actually derived from foreign sources.
Words are invented from nothing, with no known explanation as to their origin. We’ve already seen how Shakespeare single-handedly introduced hundreds of words into the language. Even as ubiquitous a word as dog only began to appear in the late Middle Ages; before this, the word for this animal was hound. Other times, new words come into existence as a by-product of new technologies—in our time, the internet has spawned its own mini-language.
Existing words shift their meaning over time, even if they retain their spelling and pronunciation. Some words have undergone remarkable changes in definition over the centuries, even coming to mean the exact opposite of what they originally did. This latter phenomenon is called catachresis. Since Chaucer’s time, the word nice has meant everything from foolish to strange to wanton to lascivious. Only in the mid-18th century did it acquire something akin to its present meaning. The word has changed so much that it is sometimes impossible for historians and linguists to divine its precise meaning in antiquated texts.
Existing words are altered or modified. The rich tapestry of prefixes and suffixes in English gives it a flexibility that makes it easy to modify words into different parts of speech or give them a different tense. An adjective like diverse can easily become a verb like diversify or a noun like diversification. But this leads to the same double-edged sword we’ve seen with English before—its flexibility simultaneously makes it adaptable to non-native speakers, while populating it with a maddening array of exceptions to the rules and irregular forms. For instance, there are eight separate prefixes just to express negation alone (such as non-, ir-, and in-), but not all words that begin this way are negatives, as anyone familiar with the shared and highly confusing meanings of flammable and inflammable can attest.

The Variety of English Sounds

Another way we can see the versatility of English is with its great variety of sounds. The most common sound in the English language is the schwa. You may not have ever heard this term before, but you use it all the time. It’s the i sound in animal or the first a in alone. It corresponds roughly to an “uh”sound. And all five vowels in English can produce this sound.

Despite the omnipresence of this one sound, the English language is rich with varied pronunciation, filled with words spelled differently than how they are pronounced, which we touched on in the previous chapter. We see this in word pairs that have similar spellings, but wildly different pronunciations—five and give; wear and hear; and doll and roll, to name just a few. All 26 letters of our alphabet are capable of having different pronunciations depending on the word in which they’re used.

Linguists have debated just how many different sounds are present in English. The figures vary depending on how one defines a unique sound. One study has found 90 separate sounds for just the letter t, but, regardless of the precise number, English is vastly richer in the variety of its sounds than other widely spoken languages (the whole Italian language, for example, has only 27 sounds).

Slurring

One of the most interesting ways for us to observe the evolution of the spoken language is with slurring—the addition, subtraction, or substitution of letters in spoken English that aren’t reflected in the spelling. For example, we say gramfather instead of grandfather, sumpthing instead of something, and glantz instead of glance.

Linguists believe that slurring arose from the fact that we can hear language much more quickly than we can speak it. This disparity in our processing speeds accounts for the common phenomenon of not being able to get words out, even when you have them formed in your mind (or your mind’s eye, to borrow from Shakespeare). It also gives rise to slurring, as we rush to articulate the words that we’ve already articulated in our minds. The general trend is one of subtraction, losing letters and syllables over time and letting pronunciations become looser and more casual. This is a phenomenon common to most languages as they evolve over time.

English speakers cut off the beginning, middle, and end of words. Speakers of British and American English might do this in different ways (sometimes rendering their speech mutually unintelligible), but the phenomenon exists on both sides of the Atlantic. Interestingly, the words that tend to be slurred the most are local and familiar place-names. The pronunciation of English places like Gloucestershire, Worcester, and Leicester (pronounced “Gloster,” “Wooster,” and “Lester,” respectively) can baffle outsiders, but so does the way Marylanders refer to their state’s largest city (“Balamer” instead of “Baltimore”).

Local Dialects of Great Britain

Our discussion of the slurring of place-names by locals brings us to another demonstration of the remarkable malleability of English—regional dialect and pronunciation. There is an astonishing variety of dialect within England alone (let alone Wales, Scotland, and Ireland). The linguist Simeon Potter has observed that there is more difference in speech between two points 100 miles distant from each other in England than there is in the whole of North America (we’ll go into greater detail on American speech patterns, as well as those in the broader English-speaking world, in the next chapter).

Harold Orton’s Linguistic Atlas of England demonstrated that even small areas of the country show great variation in their words for common items. Three neighboring villages in Berkshire each had a different word for a jacket—it was either a greatcoat, a topcoat, or an overcoat.

Unexplained enclaves of one region’s dialect mysteriously appear in another region. These dialects can be identified with great precision—Londoners are able to tell which side of the Thames a speaker comes from by hearing her dialect, while the people of Yorkshire can pinpoint someone’s home village with remarkable accuracy.

Socioeconomic Variation in Speech

In the 18th century, the English aristocracy began broadening the short a sound in words like bath, rather, and math to render their pronunciations bahth, rahther, and mahth. This is a feature that non-Britons instinctively identify with UK speech, although it’s of relatively recent vintage. This pronunciation forms a major dividing line between English and American speech, but also different socioeconomic groups within the UK—with Britons from wealthier backgrounds tending to broaden their a’s and working-class Britons retaining the short a.

The remnants of this pronunciation shift can still be seen even in the US. Nineteenth-century, upper-class Bostonians and New Yorkers likewise began broadening their vowels in imitation of the British aristocracy, while Americans further inland did not.

(Shortform note: Some older white Americans from wealthy Anglo-Saxon families still speak this way—it is the transatlantic or “Boston Brahmin” accent.)

Indeed, social class can be as powerful an influence on English as geography and ethnicity. The American dialectologist William Labov observed in the 1930s that middle-class New Yorkers were far more likely to pronounce the r sound in words like door, car, and more than were their fellow working-class New Yorkers (the variability in the pronunciation of r sounds is known as rhoticity). The quintessential New York accent was clearly closely tied up with social class and income level. Pronouncing one’s r sounds was an indicator of higher social status.

Chapter 4: English Beyond England

So far, we’ve explored the history of the English language mostly as it pertained to its original home—the British Isles. We’ve seen how these historical processes gave rise to a language that is notable for its malleability and adaptability, able to be written and spoken in a wide variety of ways.

In this chapter, we’re going to take our survey of the language beyond the British Isles. We’ll explore how American English came into existence, diverged from British English, and developed its own unique characteristics. Then, we’ll examine how English has evolved as a global language.

The Legacy of the British Empire

English became a world language in large part through the political and economic power of the British Empire.

(Shortform note: At its peak in the early 20th century, the British Empire occupied nearly one-quarter of the world’s total land area and counted nearly proportion of the world’s people as its subjects.)

The British Empire exported the English language all over the globe. Very soon after the establishment of British colonies in far-flung territories, English quickly began to follow new developmental trajectories in these places. Indeed, new twists on the English language developed with remarkable speed. British visitors noted that Australians had developed their own unique English dialect (“Strine,” so named because of the way they pronounce the word Australian) just a few generations after their British ancestors colonized the continent.

The unique blend was aided by loanwords from the aboriginal peoples who inhabited the continent long before the arrival of white British settlers, as well as the astonishing array of new flora and fauna they encountered for which there were no existing words in English. Interestingly, Australian English today is more open to American influences than British English, sharing some common Yankee terminologies and spellings, like saying mail instead of post and spelling labor instead of labour.

Some elements of otherwise obscure English dialects have gone mainstream, largely due to the legacy of the British Empire. The common American word peek, as in “to take a peek,” was once confined to a small corner of East Anglia (most other English people would say peep or squint), but because migrants from this region settled in the New World, the word got an unlikely new lease on life. Likewise, the ubiquitous American yeah was, until the mid-20th century, an obscure local word used only in certain regions of southeast England.

Divergence Between British and American English

Of course, we can’t discuss the evolution and influence of the English language without exploring the major role played by English as it’s spoken in the United States. American English differs in many respects from British English.

In Chapter 2, we saw how the first English settlers were arriving in the New World just as major linguistic changes like the Great Vowel Shift were sweeping the mother country. This was an immediate point of divergence between what would become the two main branches of the language.

Of course, this divergence was a long and slow historical process. British English and American English once shared more in common with each other than they do today. Soldiers fighting on opposite sides of the American Revolutionary War probably had similar pronunciations of words, although both sides likely sounded more like modern-day Americans than modern-day British (most 18th-century Englishmen still pronounced their r’s and used the flat a in words like bath and path).

Hybrid English in the New World

The first English settlers in the Americas found themselves in a vastly different environment from the one they’d known, filled with plants and animals that didn’t exist in Europe. They needed to invent new words to describe the things they saw.

They often borrowed from the languages of the American Indians, creating anglicized words like hickory, squash, and raccoon. We also see this in place-names like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Manhattan. They also drew upon words from earlier Spanish settlers, which had often themselves been adapted from the Indian originals by the Spanish. The English-Spanish hybrids include bronco, avocado, and canyon. Lastly, they sourced from the French, which we see in place-names like Illinois, Detroit, and New Orleans, as well as nouns like chowder and prairie.

Over time, English-speaking Americans developed their own unique vocabulary and pronunciations, many of which became widely adopted in England, as well as in whole other languages. The ubiquitous ok is maybe the best example, having worked its way into languages across every inhabited continent. Its history and origins are unclear, although linguists believe it may have arisen out the ironic wordplay of early 19th century American jokesters. Around this time, some well-educated young people in American cities led a fad of creating acronyms for deliberately misspelled phrases—thus, “ok” came from “oll korrect,” meaning “all correct.”

Local Dialects of the United States

The United States is a far more heterogeneous society than the United Kingdom, with a far shorter history. The sheer geographic size of the country, moreover, dwarfs that of the UK. People come to America from all over the world, and no one’s ancestors have been in America as long as many people’s ancestors have been in Britain. The influence of speech and language from other parts of the world is much more immediate and recent in America and is spread over a vastly greater geographical area.

Given this, one might assume a far greater variety of American speech than actually exists. After all, we saw in

Chapter 3 how much speech variability there is in England, which is much smaller (both in terms of geography and population) and more ethnically homogenous than the United States.

But linguists have found the opposite to be the case—American speech is remarkably homogenized, to such an extent that speakers on the East and West Coasts (roughly 3,000 miles apart) speak with virtually indistinguishable accents. Of course, regional accents do exist, as anyone who has been in northern New England or the Deep South can attest.

In 1949, Professor Hans Kurath divided the US into four basic speech groups: Southern, New England, Northern, and Midland, though regional subgroups exist within these categories. Kurath also observed that the main dividing lines in American speech ran east to west, with accents becoming more homogeneous and unified the further west one went. The “borders” between these speech groups are fluid, imprecisely defined, and run across vast stretches of the continental US, but they describe the variety of American speech reasonably well.

The speech groups feature differences in pronunciation and word choice. New Yorkers call sugary, carbonated soft drinks soda, while Midwesterners call it pop. Californians are known for adding the definite article before the numbers of interstate highways, talking about “the 101” or “the 80,” which is not seen in other regions of the country. Famously, southerners elongate and drawl their vowels, while New Englanders shorten and clip theirs, rendering words like park as pak. Certain words like balm, bomb, caught, and cot are great signifiers and can tell you easily where someone is from based on how they pronounce them.

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) records over 100,000 variations in the pronunciation and terminology for different words across the US, indicating that there is perhaps far greater linguistic variation in America than Kurath originally observed. This is especially true when one considers the enormous racial and ethnic diversity of the United States, which adds a whole other layer to how English is spoken in the country (DARE under-sampled African-Americans in its initial language survey).

The American Linguistic Melting Pot

As we’ve seen, the language became more homogenous across the vast tracts of the United States, populated by people from all across the globe, than in much-smaller and more ethnically homogenous England.

To be sure, there was an explosion of immigration to the US beginning in the mid-19th century and continuing well into the first two decades of the 20th century. This created ethnic and linguistic enclaves all over the country, with Pennsylvania Dutch speakers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Germans in Midwestern cities like St. Louis and Chicago; Italian- and Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods in New York City; and speakers of Scandinavian languages in the states of the Upper Midwest.

But over time, American speech patterns did not diverge; instead, they converged. The movement of people within the US created a linguistic melting pot of intermingling, which homogenized speech patterns. As time went on, people faced social pressures to conform to “normal” American speech, especially the children of immigrants, who faced even stronger pressure to shed the accents and idioms of their parents.

The Myth of Antiquated Americanisms

It is sometimes said that the physical isolation of certain regions of the US, like the remote communities of parts of the Appalachians, has preserved antiquated dialects of English that date back to Elizabethan times. And it is true that many conventionally “hillbilly” expressions like consarn it and afeared bear the stamp of 16th-century England.

But to say that rural West Virginians are some sort of holdover from that era is to grossly overstate the case. The region wasn’t settled until long after the Elizabethan Age and it was never as isolated from outside influences as these theories suggest.

American Influence and Resistance

American English has exerted its own influence on British English, with American words like teenager and commuter becoming commonplace in the British vocabulary. Indeed, most of the new words introduced into the language since independence have come from the American side of the Atlantic. British language purists have sometimes reacted to this influence with hostility and suspicion, treating it as a hostile foreign invasion and bastardization of their native tongue. Samuel Johnson—whose work as one of the great early lexicographers of English we explored in Chapter 2—reserved particular contempt for Americans and the American dialect of English, believing it to be nothing more than a crude and inferior facsimile of the superior original.

Figures like Johnson even fumed against words they wrongly believed to be Americanisms, like jeopardy and smolder, not knowing that these words had well-established roots in the British Isles. Many Americans of the time bought into these British notions of American linguistic inferiority, with newspaper editors in New York sometimes refusing to print words that they believed lacked proper credentials on the other side of the Atlantic.

But despite the prejudice, America has continued to work its will on the mother tongue, especially as the reach of US media and Hollywood films has extended around the world. American idioms like don’t have are replacing haven’t got in Britain, while truck is gradually edging out the more uniquely British lorry. We can also see this in British spelling, as the u in humour and colour is slowly becoming extinct in the UK.

Despite the convergence of the two dialects and the steady Americanization of British English, substantial differences remain between the two main branches of the language. In everyday speech, there are still some 40,000 words that are used differently in the US and the UK.

English’s Competitive Advantage

We’ve seen the rise and spread of American English. Now, we need to take our study of English a step further and explore the phenomenon of English as a world language.

There are five important features of the language that make it easy for non-native speakers all over the world to adopt it. These features give English a competitive advantage over other languages.

English is relatively easy to spell, with many spellings closely matching the phonetic pronunciation. While this, of course, does not make English “superior” to any other language, it may give it a slight advantage in its worldwide adoption, because it is generally easier to learn to read and write.
English does not have gendered nouns like the Romance languages or tonal variations that can drastically alter meaning, like Chinese.
English has few pronouns, suffixes, and prefixes whose proper use depends on the relative social standing of the speaker and the listener. For example, there is no English equivalent of the informal tú form or formal usted form used in Spanish.
The sentence structure of English is highly flexible, allowing the same idea to be expressed in multiple ways—an active sentence like, “I kicked the ball” has the same meaning as the passive sentence “The ball was kicked by me.” Many other languages do not have this capability.
English has mostly uninflected verbs with stable consonants (in other words, these verbs are mostly the same regardless of gender, tense, case, and mood).

The Benefits of a Phonetic Alphabet

The same cannot be said for many languages of the Far East, like Chinese and Japanese. They have a pictographic-ideographic system, in which the characters represent not sounds, but things or ideas. And there are far more things and ideas than there are sounds, which saddles the script with a baffling array of characters. In standard Chinese, there are over 50,000 characters (compared to the mere 26 of our Roman alphabet).

English is also not saddled with diacritical symbols like accent marks, umlauts, macrons, and breves, all of which subtly transform the pronunciation of written words. It also tends to leave intact the spellings and pronunciations of words like garage and buffet that are borrowed from other languages, instead of aggressively anglicizing them, which further assists those unfamiliar to the language.

Global English

These features of English played a critical role in facilitating the spread of the language across every continent. While Mandarin Chinese certainly can boast more fluent speakers than English, its influence is far more constricted to a particular geographic area. The reach of English, meanwhile, is simply unmatched. It is an official language in 59 countries, a higher figure than for any other language. Of course, not everyone in these countries actually speaks English (many in the US and the UK don’t) but its widespread reach can’t be denied.

Moreover, it is the international language of advanced fields like science, business, and diplomacy. It has become what Latin was to the Roman world and French was to Early Modern Europe—a common denominator, a language that binds peoples and nations.

Foreign Adoption and Adaptability

We saw earlier how, even in its earliest stages, English was highly flexible in accepting new words from Norse and Norman French. The process also works the other way around—English words are readily adopted by other languages, often with only slight modifications to fit the native tongue.

The Japanese, in particular, are adept at adapting English words into their notoriously difficult and inaccessible language. These are known as wasei-eigo, or “Japanese-made-English.” Thus, smart became sumato, rush hour became rushawa, idol became aidoru, and so on. Despite the differences between the two languages, Japanese has readily welcomed English words, with 20,000 estimated to have been adopted.

Resistance to English

While we English speakers may flatter ourselves by thinking that the world has rolled out the welcome mat for English because of some innate superiority of the language, this is hardly the case. Speakers of other languages have done so because it is convenient, advantageous, and expedient to have a working knowledge of English. The residual historical legacy of the British Empire, plus the emergence of the United States as a global superpower played a major role in rendering English the global lingua franca.

Yet even within countries that have high levels of English proficiency, people are still quite proud of their native languages and wish to preserve them. If the Japanese have welcomed English influences with open arms, the French have tried (often unsuccessfully) to maintain a healthy distance. Official state commissions and acts of legislation have barred French people from using English words and phrases like pipeline, jet plane, and hamburger, in an effort to maintain the “purity” of the language (although these measures are largely unenforceable and French authorities have seldom ever attempted to impose penalties on violators).

Indeed, many parts of the world view the English language itself as a symbol of western colonialism. This is especially true in countries, like India, that really did experience occupation and colonization under the British Empire. Some Indian politicians have attempted to stamp out the use of English among the population, though without success, as there are still great economic benefits to having a large portion of the labor force fluent in such a universal language.

Chapter 5: The Richness of English

We’ve looked at the emergence of English as a dominant language of global business and politics through the British Empire and the political and cultural influence of the United States. But English is also a language of literature and oratory, capable of eloquently expressing the most powerful human emotions and desires. It possesses a number of unique properties, quirks, and complexities that set it apart from other tongues. In this chapter, we’ll explore some of the language’s unique traits that make it so rich and evocative.

English Place-Names

One of the best ways to glimpse the richness and variety of English is to explore names, especially place-names and personal names. Place-names in England are often perplexing to outsiders because of the divergence between their spellings and pronunciations: Leicester is pronounced “lester,” Worcester is pronounced “wooster,” and Postwick is pronounced “pozick.” These names are often the product of waves of conquerors—Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans twisting and reshaping the names of the places they encountered. Thus, British place-names bear the stamp of peoples from all across Europe.

Many names of streets, pubs, and towns are remarkably colorful and evocative. London boasts streets named Crooked Usage, Ha Ha Road, and Bleeding Heart Yard, to name just a few. Classic English pubs often have baffling names, like the Quiet Woman, the Nobody Inn, the Bunch of Carrots, and the Cat and Custard Pot.

Many English pub names harken back to old aristocratic heraldry and coats of arms, or were meant to signal loyalty to an old medieval political faction. Often, they needed to have colorful and unique names and symbols to make themselves identifiable to a population that was largely illiterate. Others, like the Bishop’s Finger and the Monk’s Head have names rooted in religious orders.

American Place-Names

Not to be outdone, the United States has its own roster of names that bedevil non-natives. Like in England, many of these names are products of conquests of indigenous peoples. Thus did Missikamaa become Michigan and šhíyena become Cheyenne. Similar processes unfolded with place-names that had their origins in French, Dutch, and Spanish names. The United States also has colorful names in abundance, from Screamer, Alabama to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Some American place-names or nicknames have unknown or dubious origins, like the Hawkeye State (Iowa) or the Hoosier State (Indiana). Perhaps the most famous misnaming of a place by outside conquerors is the West Indies. Europeans who first journeyed to this part of the Caribbean believed that they had arrived in India (largely due to a glaring navigational and cartographic error by Christopher Columbus). Hence the name for the place and the name that has stuck to the indigenous peoples of the New World ever since: Indians.

Surnames

English surnames tell a rich and interesting story. For much of the Middle Ages, ordinary people did not have any need for surnames. They lived in small communities in which they knew everyone, so personal names like John or William were wholly sufficient: you might be the only John or William in the village.

This began to change in the later Middle Ages, as the royal government began to more aggressively and efficiently collect taxes, which required a more thorough way of tracking everyone who owed money to the crown. Registering individuals by personal name and surname turned out to be an effective way to do this.

Generally speaking, surnames derive from place-names (John Lancaster), nicknames (John Whitehead), trade names (John Smith), or familial relations or patronymics (John Son-of-William, or John Williamson). Interestingly, smith-work was so common that Smith or its equivalents are today extremely common in every language, from the German Schmidt to the French Ferrier to the Italian Ferraro.

English surnames that are rooted in place-names often bear the names of obscure or thinly populated places. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive—shouldn’t there be a lot more Sarah Londons than Sarah Dovers? But it actually makes sense. People wanted surnames that distinguished themselves from others. Lots of people came from big cities like London and York, so these wouldn’t be good surnames to adopt, unless you were moving to a rural area, in which case your place of origin in an urban center would be distinctive.

Although the most common names in America are of British origin, certain British names are far more common in the US than in the UK. Johnson, for instance, is more prevalent in America because the many Jonssons and Johanssens that came to America from Scandinavia and had their names anglicized to Johnson. When immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe came to America, they, too, often had their names changed at ports of entry, either voluntarily or by immigration officials.

Obscenity and Blasphemy

(Shortform note: This section contains language that some readers may find offensive.)

One of the best ways to get a true flavor of the English language is through its swear words. Most languages feature swears, although some, like Japanese, do not. Swear words derive their power from the fact that they are highly emotive, as well as forbidden. We reach for these words to express extreme emotions: fear, surprise, joy, anger.

Swear words and phrases are remarkably varied from language to language, but they tend to be oriented around two themes: obscenity, which is either the disgusting and/or taboo (often having to do with bodily functions or sex); or blasphemy which involves sacrilege or invoking the name of God in vain. In English, shit, piss, fuck, and cunt would fall into the former category; hell, damn, goddamn and Jesus Christ (in certain contexts) would fall into the latter.

Many taboo words in English are actually quite old, with some of them having origins in Old English, from the days before the Norman Conquest. Shit is very old, dating back to the shite of the 1300s and the Anglo-Saxon scītan before that. Fuck may have Latin origins and was first printed in 1503, meaning that it was almost certainly widely used before that date.

Throughout the history of the English language, there have been shifting definitions of which words were and weren’t considered offensive. For much of the Middle Ages, the strongest words in modern English would scarcely raise an eyebrow. Cunt is perhaps the most obscene word in the English language, but it was entirely commonplace and inoffensive a few centuries ago. It features in the works of Chaucer, and even Shakespeare had a famous winking reference to it through a double entendre in this memorable exchange from Hamlet:

Hamlet: [To Ophelia] Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia: No, my lord.

Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap.

Ophelia: Ay, my lord.

Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.

Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.

Many English cities of the time had a Gropecunt Lane, streets where prostitution was common. This was entirely unremarkable, simply an extension of the practice of naming streets and boroughs after the economic activity that took place there, analogous to a Butcher’s Alley or Baker’s Court.

By contrast, words and phrases that seem relatively harmless today were considered extremely taboo during the pious Middle Ages. Many of these were blasphemous or sacrilegious in nature, taking the name of God in vain or making explicit reference to God or Jesus’s body. Damn, hell, or phrases like “by the blood of Christ,” “God’s blood,” or “God’s wounds” (the last of which was shortened to the minced oath zounds), were far more offensive than shit or piss.

(Shortform note: Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr explores the origins and evolution of foul language, as well as the changing sensibilities over time over which words were and weren’t considered offensive.)

Victorian Euphemisms

By the Victorian Age (1837-1901), many English words that would have scarcely raised an eyebrow in the Middle Ages or in Shakespeare’s time were considered totally out of bounds. Indeed, the Victorian Age was famous for its prudishness and squeamishness, in both England and America. Self-conscious reformers sought to sanitize the language, often going to absurd lengths. Thomas Bowdler, a Scottish physician, took it upon himself to edit the great works of English literature by Shakespeare and Gibbon to remove any traces of what he deemed to be profanity, obscenity, or double entendre. His efforts even gave a name to this sort of overzealous expurgation of art: Bowdlerization.

Even non-taboo parts of the body were considered too delicate to mention in polite society. Thus, legs became limbs and belly became midriff. People who had last names like Hitchcock or Alcock, meanwhile, suffered deep social discomfort and embarrassment when they had to introduce themselves. There are even reports (although possibly apocryphal) of some Americans covering the legs of their pianos out of squeamishness.

These attitudes continued well into the 20th century, when the Hollywood Production Code, responsible for censoring American films, was still banning words like dame from the silver screen as late as 1949. We live with the legacy of such attitudes, even today. While British newspapers and magazines are, generally speaking, willing to print swear words, especially in the context of quotes, their American counterparts still evince a high reluctance to do so.

In its style guide, the New York Times, says that goddamn should be avoided unless absolutely necessary; even the transcript of an airplane cockpit conversation between a pilot and co-pilot moments before a deadly airplane crash was censored by the National Transportation Safety Board, which chose to omit the word bitch.

English Wordplay and Wit

We can also see the richness of English in its wordplay. As evidenced by the popularity of crossword puzzles and anagrams in the United States and Great Britain, wordplay is highly popular in the English-speaking world. Whether it’s puns, rhymes, palindromes, doggerel, or onomatopoeia, the language affords ample opportunity for creativity and wit.

Of course, it’s not just English. There’s evidence of wordplay in much older languages, going all the way back to Ancient Greek palindromes and anagrams. There’s even evidence for them in the text of the Bible! But they have a long tradition in our language as well. Some of the earliest Old English poets like Cynewulf wrote acrostics, in which the first letters of each line of verse, when put together, forms a word or phrase. Shakespeare also loved his puns, with his works containing over 3,000 of them.

Palindromes, Anagrams, and Lipograms

The forms of wordplay are greatly varied. Palindromes (sentences spelled the same backwards and forwards) are among the most creative and most challenging to write. Consider how difficult it is to come up with a palindrome like “Rise to vote sir” or “A nut for a jar of tuna” that satisfy this criteria and form coherent statements.

Or, if you’re feeling up to it, you can challenge yourself to a lipogram, a sentence written without using a particular letter. Indeed, the French author Georges Perec once wrote an entire novel without using the letter e.

Holorimes

Pop music is a great source of another type of wordplay, the holorime. These are phrases that sound similar phonetically, but can be written using different words and form sentences with completely different meanings. If you’ve misheard Jimi Hendrix saying “Scuse me while I kiss this guy” or mistaken the opening verse of the US national anthem as “Jose, can you see...” then you’re familiar with holorimes.

Cockney Rhyming Slang

But in reality, it goes a step further. The second, rhyming word is often dropped. Thus, “How are you, mate?” would really become “How are you, china?” This renders the etymology of these phrases deeply obscure and often baffling to outsiders.

Conclusion: The Road Ahead for English

In the United States, there have been many attempts throughout the years to “protect” and “preserve” the English language from the perceived threat of foreign or outside influence. Interest groups have sought to establish English as the official language (at least for government use) in cities, states, and even at the federal level. These groups claim that linguistic divisions have historically led to strife in other countries (like Belgium and Canada).

There is some truth to this claim, because language is one of the main things that divides human societies from each other and is closely tied to national and ethnic identity. The struggles between Flemish- and Walloon-speakers in Belgium, the Québécois separatist movement pitting Anglophone and Francophone speakers in Canada, and the persecution of Esperanto speakers in fascist states in the early 20th century all attest to language as a hot-button issue.

These same groups, however, ignore the reality that government-led attempts to encourage the survival and spread of minority languages usually fail, because the evolution and death of languages is an organic process. Indeed, despite the heavy efforts of the Republic of Ireland to keep the Irish language alive, only 4.2 percent of the population speaks Irish daily, according to the country’s 2016 census.

More to the point, efforts to “protect” or “save” English are entirely unnecessary. As we’ve seen, learning English confers such powerful social and economic advantages that few non-native speakers in America or any other English-speaking country would deliberately choose not to learn it. The language is in no need of “protection.”

So what is the future of the language? Will it remain a global language forever? Perhaps, but English speakers should never be reduced to complacency by the seeming triumph of their language. Things can always change, and the supremacy of English may one day be supplanted by a rival claimant.

With America’s powerful economic and cultural influence over the world, the most likely trajectory seems to be a homogenization of English to conform to the way it's spoken in the United States. These trends are reinforced by the influences of mass media, which expose us to dialects of speech that we would never have otherwise heard. Thus, a melting pot of English, rather than a polarization of different dialects, looks to be where we’re headed.

Exercise: Understanding The Mother Tongue

Explore the main takeaways from The Mother Tongue.

Why do you think English has become adopted by so many people across the world?
Do you view the lack of a formal body governing the rules and usage of English as a positive or a negative? In a few sentences, explain your reasoning.
Why do you think organized attempts by governments to control how language is used have proven to be unsuccessful?