A Student's Advanced Grammar of English (SAGE) (eBook)

002 The character of English

English is quite literally a world language. It is the dominant mother tongue in Britain and Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In South Africa, although native to only 9% of the population, English is a joint official language along with several local ones, such as Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans. In India it is also an official national language, together with Hindi and seventeen other regional languages.

In these and other former British colonies and administrative areas, including several Caribbean, African and Far Eastern states, English has a central position in education and other walks of public life, and is learnt by non-natives as a strong second language. Altogether, it is spoken in a prominent cultural or official capacity in more than 60 countries or territories around the globe. In quite a few more it has some kind of special status as a general and traditional means of communication. All these regions taken together have a population of something like 2,000,000,000, or about one-third of all the world’s people. Of these, about 337 million speak it as a first language, and roughly 235 million as a second language. In addition to this, it is the world’s most learned foreign language, i.e. the first foreign language in about 50% of all countries. And it is the most used international language in diplomacy, politics and the law, in all fields of industry and commerce, including media communication, transport, tourism and sport, and, of course in the scientific and academic world.

Within the Indo-European super-clan, English belongs to the Germanic family. Its modern siblings are Low German and Dutch, with the Scandinavian languages as slightly more distant cousins. English originally came to the British Isles in the 5th century A.D. in the form of several old Low German dialects. These were brought by North German tribes known collectively as Anglo-Saxons, who invaded lowland Britain and settled there permanently after the fall of the Roman Empire. (English children learn that the Romans ‘went home’ in 410 A.D., leaving England at the mercy of ‘barbarian’ Germanic tribes.) Over the next three centuries the Anglo-Saxon parts of Britain became ‘Englaland’, and the Anglo-Saxons grew into the ‘Englisc’. (They did not learn to spell their new name properly until the French taught them later to write the c as an h.)

The Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) language in the 8th century was still similar in grammar and a lot of its vocabulary to Old High German, with a complex case system and verb conjugation. By this time, Anglo-Saxon society had become stabilized and orderly, formed into kingdoms and settled communities with established administrative and legal procedures. A flourishing Christian culture had developed, influenced mainly by Rome and the Continent (though in the north also by Irish monastery traditions and learning). The 9th century reign of the famous King Alfred of Wessex (the ‘kingdom of the West Saxons’), a devout Christian ruler and also a writer and scholar, saw the beginnings of public education and English literature.

Meanwhile, however, the peace and tranquillity of ‘Old England’ was being threatened by new invaders, the Danes (or ‘Vikings’) of Scandinavia. These fresh waves of migrants had begun to settle in the east and north of England, where their language, Old Norse, and their own tribal customs took root. England in Alfred’s time was divided into two parts, one Danish, the other Anglo-Saxon. Re-conquest followed, but Viking attacks renewed, and in the early 1000s Britain became entirely Danish. Old Norse had a considerable impact on Old English. The plosive consonants [k] and [ɡ], as in kid, dyke, get and give and the combination [sk], as in sky, skin, skill, etc., are of Norse origin. The surname ending -son, as in Robertson or Gibson, final syllables like -by and -thorpe in placenames (Grimsby, Scunthorpe), and above all the pronouns they/them/their, are all parts of England’s Scandinavian legacy.

Despite these changes, however, the basic character of Old English remained as it was, as the two languages were similar. A far greater upheaval, not just socially and politically, but also in language, took place as a result of the Norman Conquest a little later. The Normans were also originally Vikings, but had settled in the northwest coastal region of France permanently, and were now a powerful French-speaking territorial people. When they invaded the south of Britain in 1066, they were to change the face and tongue of Old England for ever. Great castles and fortresses were built (including the Tower of London), the feudal system was introduced and the language of a foreign aristocracy for 200 years was French. The Middle Ages had begun (though presumably nobody knew this at the time)! Slowly, native English people started to infiltrate the aristocracy and the Norman rulers began to develop a kind of ‘French English’ to communicate with them. By about 1200, this had become the general tongue among most social groups. Norman French and Anglo-Saxon died out, and French English became what was later called Middle English, i.e. the ordinary English of the Middle Ages and the forerunner of the modern language.

Middle English was quite different from Old English, not just in vocabulary, but also in pronunciation and grammar. Most of the old grammatical inflections were lost, verbs became simplified and grammatical case and gender disappeared. By about the middle of the 14th century, English had taken on a lot of the general character that it has today. With a bit of effort and a little learning, a present-day speaker can come to understand Middle English fairly easily. Old English, by comparison, has to be learnt more or less like a foreign language.

The development of printing in the later 15th century made an important contribution to stabilizing and spreading written forms of Middle English. Printing was centred on London, the capital, the seat of government and the commercial hub of England. This helped to establish London administrative English as a standard language. It was around this time, however, that English started to undergo further changes, focused now on the pronunciation of vowels. The Great Vowel Shift, completed mainly in the first decades of the 16th century (i.e. during the early reign of Henry VIII), marks the transition from Middle English to Modern English. It involved changes in the long vowel system: generally speaking, long open vowels became closer and long close vowels became diphthongs. For example, the word loud was spelt loude in Middle English and pronounced [lu:də]. By Shakespeare’s time the long [u:] had become a diphthong [oʊ], paving the way for its further development into its present form [aʊ] in the early 18th century. (Some vowels, particularly diphthongs, changed in several stages and took a little longer to reach their final modern form.)

It is the Vowel Shift which is mainly responsible for the irregularities of modern English spelling. Printing fixed the spelling of many words before the vowels had shifted into their modern form. In other words, we still have Middle English spelling, but with Modern English pronunciation. The discrepancy can drive schoolchildren and teachers to desperation.

In summary, the general stages in the historical development of English are as follows:

Additionally, the modern period is sometimes divided into:

This takes account of two things: firstly, some elements in the vowel shift did not find their true modern form until the beginning of the 18th century; and secondly, some 16th and early 17th century English (e.g. from Shakespeare and his contemporaries) is not easy for modern readers to understand without considerable guidance and practice.

Varieties are certain types of language used in certain contexts. Where context and language have a close relationship, the language usually shows highly conventionalized features, i.e. stereotyped and rule-governed characteristics. For instance, I was once in a pub paying for food at the bar, and offered a credit card to the barmaid, who responded with (1)a. The meaning of this, expressed in more neutral terms, is (1)b.: