Empires Of The Word Part 32

Wonder upon wonder

This chapter, like all those before it, has mainly focused so far on the political developments that have spread a language. But something else has been acting in favour of English, at least for the last two centuries, and increasingly so as decade follows decade. A glimmer of it was seen in the 1823 remark of Ram Mohan Roy, pleading for access to English education: '... useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world ... '

It has not only been self-a.s.sured aggression, superiority in fire-power or unrivalled access to capital which has carried British enterprise-and so, directly or indirectly, its language-around the world. All these things have played a role, but they had flowed from, and been reinforced by, the amazing status of Britain as centre and source of the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, people all over the world avidly accepted re-education in English, Britain was evidently the richest, and the most dynamic, country in the world. To quote a historian's pithy and overwhelming summary: Between 1760 and 1830, the United Kingdom was responsible for around 'two-thirds of Europe's industrial growth of output' (- P. Bairoch 1982), and its share of world manufacturing production leapt from 1.9% to 9.5%; in the next thirty years, British industrial expansion pushed that figure to 19.9%, despite the spread of the new technology to other countries in the West ... 'With 2% of the world's population and 10% of Europe's, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45% of the world's potential, and 55-60% of that in Europe' (- F. Crouset 1982). Its energy consumption from modern sources (coal, lignite, oil) in 1860 was 5 times that of either the United States or Prussia/Germany, 6 times that of France, and 155 times that of Russia! It alone was responsible for one-fifth of the world's commerce, but for two-fifths of the trade in manufactured goods.65 Bathed in the aura of such a stunning reality-even if the full statistics were not then available-it is hardly surprising that Indian students had usually been more impressed by the material benefits of British methods than the imperishable rewards promised by the Protestant missionaries. The prestige of English in the nineteenth century was elevated to the skies through the same process that had made French the leading language of European culture throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. At root, the thought was: 'if you're so rich, how can you not be smart?'

France had had a good natural endowment of fertile farmland and abundant labour on which to found this, but Britain had had quite a modest starting capital. In the early seventeenth century, when the British had first turned up in the East Indies, and tried to get involved in the spice trade, their main problem had been the lack of goods for which there was any local demand. But now, after over two centuries of trading, finagling, shipbuilding and warring, their capital and influence gave them access to pretty much anything they might desire: as the economist Stanley Jevons crowed in 1865: The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies...66 Britain, as a power, was going to find that some of these other powers, especially one in North America, would have a tendency to shift the terms of trade against it; but this was no loss to the English-language community; if anything it was a net gain when the English-speaking inhabitants of America began to look beyond their own domain, and use their resources, in fertile fields, in productive mines, and in a highly educated and ma.s.sive population, for schemes of their own devising.

Amid the general splurge of galloping wealth creation, there was a particular surge in the power and speed of communications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed progress that was unheard of, first in inventing, and then in speedily applying, all over the world, systems for transport of people and merchandise. Perhaps even more impressive is the parallel progress made, largely using electronics, in systems to transmit and store all sorts of information. A hundred and fifty years from 1830 takes us from the first railway engine through the steamboat to ma.s.s-market air transport, and from telegraph through the telephone to global broadcasts of radio and television, as well as the first approaches to effective computer networks. In the same period, means were found to store, and to access at will, all kinds of sounds, including speech and music, visual scenes and pictures, and views of events and actions as they took place. Any one of these would have had the potential to transform the world in an earlier age; but in this age, when humanity's dreams of magical powers came true, they all came together.

Almost every one of these new technologies was invented by a speaker of English-Stephenson, Fulton, Wright, Bell, Baird, Edison-or by a speaker perhaps of another language who had to work in the English-speaking world, as Marconi and Reuter had. And even when they were not-think of Benz's German internal combustion engine, or the French photograph and motion picture, due to pioneers such as Daguerre and Lumiere-it was English-speaking developers, such as Henry Ford or the film-makers of Hollywood, who first demonstrated what could be done with the new media on a truly vast scale. This inevitably meant that the key talk about these achievements, how to replicate them and what was to be done with them, took place above all in English. For scientists and engineers, but crucially for businessmen, English has been the language in which the world's know-how is set out. Never since cuneiform writing set up Akkadian as the diplomatic language of the Near and Middle East has technology been so effective in spreading a language. (See Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 58.) These triumphs in what is called 'communications' all tend to reduce the time-taking and effort-costing effects of distances in the world. But they also tend to reduce the differences between the world as it is presented to distant people. Quite literally, they make certain descriptions of experience 'common' to more and more people. They make regional and international business routine, allow international contacts to involve the highest level of personnel, turn far-distant destinations into sites for brief visits, even holidays. But they also standardise the images and phrases that people carry in their memories, from advertising through entertainment to education; nowadays there are not only cla.s.sic texts and works of art that we are taught to appreciate, but cla.s.sic jingles, cla.s.sic ads, cla.s.sic kitsch, which we can't get out of our heads from one end of the country or one end of the world to another: and quite likely the words we remember will be in English, even if we are Hungarian, Balinese, South African or Mongolian.

The new technologies of communication have made possible new inst.i.tutions too, inst.i.tutions that exist above all to spin words, to decorate them and transmit them. Newspapers, magazines, film studios, cinemas, song-sheet publishers and recording companies, radio stations, television production companies, website designers: the list will no doubt continue long into the future. And within every medium, advertising-the supreme meta-product of the language media, acting as a kind of fertiliser or growth hormone, promoting distribution and sales of all these language-based products through its explicit content, even as its payments for s.p.a.ce on the channels enable the communications media to cut their prices and reach farther; and at the same time, a major producer of language material in its own right. None of these new inst.i.tutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is restricted to English-but they all became available first in English, and English has remained the biggest producer.

As the Portuguese found when they first gained a reputation for trade in the Indian Ocean, a national language need not remain restricted to its own nationals. Portuguese became the lingua franca of international trade-and indeed the Christian Church-in South and South-East Asia for ten generations and more, long after Portugal itself had yielded in influence to the Dutch and British. The same thing has happened to English, but on a global, rather than an oceanic, scale. So many people in different parts of the world were finding that they needed to deal with English speakers that their dealings began to overlap: non-natives, and even those without any direct connection to the English-speaking world, started using English among themselves, purely for their own convenience. In the words of the English proverb, 'nothing succeeds like success', and the spread of a language is no exception. In the twentieth century English replaced French as the usual language for international conferences. The language of air traffic has always been (a restricted form of) English-unsurprising, perhaps, since aviation is a US invention; but English has anyway become the world's interlingua of choice. For 1996 it was estimated that 85 per cent of international a.s.sociations made official use of English, and 33 per cent used nothing else. In Asia and the Pacific, 90 per cent of international organisations work only in English.67 And the English-speaking world, with its characteristic eye for a business opportunity, has converted this too into a paying proposition: English Language Teaching (ELT) has become not only a field of education, but-as in those early days in Bengal-a commercial service industry in its own right. Now it flourishes in almost every country of the world: if the ambient language is English, it must be a good place for the students to get plenty of practice; and if it is not, English must be an eminently desirable skill to learn. The influential philosopher James Mill (1773-1836) had once remarked that the imperial civil service was little more than 'a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper cla.s.ses' of Great Britain: ELT could be seen as a new answer to the same problem, though now the qualifications in background and nationality are a little less demanding than they were then.

This spread of English is harder to map geographically than the expansion of British colonies. In spirit, it follows in direct descent from the re-education policy that the British introduced in India. But the mechanism is almost pure diffusion, since-unlike in India-the language has travelled with very little presence of its native speakers. It is probably the best example of a language spread by the sheer prestige of the culture a.s.sociated with it. Our previous examples have shown the possibility in principle, as when the Egyptian and Hitt.i.te courts of the fourteenth century BC corresponded in Akkadian, when the Cambodians and Javanese of the fifth century AD chose to inscribe their temples with literary Sanskrit, or when the Mughals, sweeping down into India from Afghanistan in the sixteenth century, preferred Persian to their native Turkic as their court language. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century vogue for French in eastern Europe, too, should be seen in this light. But the spread of English was the first time that a language and culture had simultaneously made themselves desirable to peoples all over the world, truly a unique event.

In one way, our account of this process has differed from the usual one. This is in our lack of emphasis on the role of the USA.

The worldwide take-up of English in the twentieth century, and particularly in its latter half after the Second World War, is mostly set down to the influence of the USA, its globally stationed armies and fleets, its outreaching commercial enterprises, and above all its ubiquitous films, pop music, TV shows, news media and computer software. Certainly, all these things have been significant, and ma.s.s enthusiasm for English-language culture is now focused on the products of the USA. Among the native speakers of English, the USA's 231 million are clearly the largest single group, four times the size of the UK's 60 million, and alone make up two-thirds of the global total.68 And arguably, the preferred brand of English now-to judge from accents fashionable outside their own regions-is General American, verging to African American Vernacular English; by contrast, the UK's current broadcast favourite of 'Estuary English', a London-oriented alternative to the traditional Oxbridge 'Received p.r.o.nunciation', is very much a local taste.*

But our concern in this book has always been the spread of language communities, bodies of people who can understand one another through a given language. In this sense, distinctions of accent are irrelevant until they threaten mutual understanding. And looked at historically, it is quite evident that the springboard from which English made its jump to global status was built far less on the recent exploits of Uncle Sam than on the adventures over the previous 350 years of John Bull.

We have to consider the growth of second-language speakers, since it is they who have dominated expansion of English use in the twentieth century: by the 1950s, all sizeable countries whose first language was English had already slowed the growth in their populations. For second-language speakers, a good estimate, or range of estimates, is provided by David Graddol's 1999 essay 'The decline of the native speaker'. He identifies recent growth in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, growth that will almost certainly lead on to second-language speakers outnumbering native speakers within the next fifty years, if they don't already.

The levels persisting in ex-British colonies range between 2 per cent and 5 per cent, but are usually estimated to amount in total to around 200 million speakers. Other recent estimates put the rate much higher, as much as 20 per cent in India and Pakistan, 10 per cent in Bangladesh.69 If these are correct, the total should already stand at 395 million. Contrast Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, where knowledge of English is clearly growing, but where Graddol estimates current percentages as no more than 1 per cent of the population (73 million, 43 million). In the very few parts of the world with significant use of English directly due to US influence, the proportions of people knowing it are 50 per cent in the Philippines (36 million), and 85 per cent in Liberia (2 million-although this last represents speakers of English creole). All in all, these English-speaking regions of non-British origin may represent a total of 152 million.

Already in this second-language-speaking part of the English world, then, it seems that the growth of British-origin English remains more significant than the radical effects of the US influence. But this leaves out of account what may currently be the fastest-growing area of second-language English, namely Europe.* It is purely a matter of definition whether European English should be considered as part of the foreign-language or the second-language domain, but it is clear that it has become the major working language of the European Union, as well as being widely used in commerce, industry and academia in northern European countries, particularly Scandinavia. Graddol's a.n.a.lysis of the European Union's Eurobarometer surveys from 1990 to 1998 suggests that English competence in Europe was high, but fairly static, until 1980, at under 20 per cent; it then perked up and since 1990 has begun to take off meteorically. It now stands at over 100 million, approaching a third of the European Union's population.*

English among its peers

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us.

It wad frae monie a blunder free us

An' foolish notion.

What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us

An' ev'n Devotion.

Robert Burns, 'To a Louse', 1798 A language that links together a speech community, even a vast one like the global mult.i.tude who think and speak in English, is given its character not so much by its phonetics and phrasings as by the patterns of a.s.sociations that have piled up on its words as they are transmitted down the generations. A language bespeaks a history-the history, of course, of those who have spoken it-and this is the main creator of its reputation abroad, as it is of its attractions to those who may want to learn the language, and so join its community. This is one reason why study of a language has long emphasised its literature, 'the best that has been said and thought' using that language, as selected by its own tradition. But not all the experiences in a language's long memory may have been hallowed by good writing.

Looking back on the history of English as formative of its present character and reputation, memory can afford to be quite selective: the past before the sixteenth century of the Reformation and the beginnings of colonial expansion seems to have left only the very faintest of traces. But from that era on, the kinds of adventures that spread English, and which were prized most highly by many of its speakers, do have a certain consistency. English is a.s.sociated with the quest to get rich, the deliberate acquisition of wealth, often by quite unprecedented and imaginative schemes. This quest has sometimes had to struggle with religious and civic conscience, and the glories of patriotism, but has largely been able to enlist them on its side. In general, it has been the ally, rather than the rival, of freedom of the individual. English has been, above all, a worldly language.70 There is little left in English from the epoch before the arrival of the Germanic dialects that were destined to fuse into Anglo-Saxon: perhaps only the name Britain itself, from a presumably Gaulish term to describe the ancient Britons, 'the figured ones' (Pretanoi-Welsh pryd, Old Irish cruth, 'form'), for their custom of body painting. Even older might be the name Albion, used in Greek c.300 BC, and still used in Gaelic to refer to Scotland, A lba: for this the only suggested etymology is pre-Indo-European, making it cognate with the A lps, and two ancient Roman cities called A lba: a truly ancient word for 'highlands'.71 It is also just possible that some features seen in Irish English, such as 'I'm after finishing my work' and 'I saw Thomas and he sitting by the fire', imported from typical phraseology in Irish, are features that happen to go back to the language spoken here before the Celts even got here. Similar phraseology is after all found in Egyptian and the Semitic languages respectively, and one hypothesis to explain this, and much else, is that there was prehistoric trade among these regions.72 We can briefly recapitulate English's first millennium of existence. The language, once established in Britain in the fifth century, found itself surrounded by Celtic to the west and the north. Celts could not stand against its advance at spear-point, but gradually forces bent on converting its speakers to Christianity converged from the north-west and south-east, finally meeting and ending the compet.i.tion at the Synod of Whitby in 664, when King Oswy ruled in favour of the Roman tradition. English reacted well to the sophisticated missionaries of Roman Christianity, becoming actively literate, with translations from Latin but also its own poetry and prose set down in books. Overlaid by French in the eleventh century, it suffered a setback to its literary life, but benefited from the invaders' military prestige in that it began to expand into all the remaining Celtic areas of both Britain and Ireland. Its life under French domination could perhaps be compared to the early years of Aramaic, submerged militarily by speakers of Akkadian from a.s.syria, but gradually replacing it as the empire's elite faced crises that shook its power structure (see Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 64). For the chivalrous romance of Norman French, the disrupting crises came as bubonic plague, which struck repeatedly in the fourteenth century, especially in towns and monasteries, and military severance of England and Wales from southern France. In the new dispensation, where feudal ties were dissolved and politics was firmly focused north of the Channel, English came into its own as the unifying language of the kingdom.

This long period, a full millennium, created the substance of English as we know it, but socially it was so different from the bourgeois life that followed that it has contributed little to the language's modern character. In the sixteenth century England's rulers began to conceive the country as an agency independent of, and in principle equal to, any power in Europe, secular or spiritual. In this period the foundation was also laid for the formal union with the outlying parts of the British Isles, Scotland and Ireland. The governance of the whole region was firmly in London's hands. At the same time, with the advent of printed books, the spelling and grammar of English became standardised. England, and English, was positioned for growth.

This growth, when it came, was based on sea power and commercial credit. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the strength of the Royal Navy and the City of London became una.s.sailable, and both enabled English to be projected around the world. As the language that settlers brought to North America, English simply persisted and spread: the colonies were self-sufficient, and grew at the expense of their neighbours. Not surprisingly, as they became richer they also became more self-confident and overbearing: they never had serious cause to revise their early, self-regarding, att.i.tudes, especially since they could hardly fail to notice that whenever they came up against opposition, whether indigenous or from another colonial power, they came off best. A belief in 'manifest destiny' could almost be seen as the lesson of experience.

In the other great overseas enterprise that spread English, the English East India Company-founded like Virginia at the beginning of the seventeenth century-business ac.u.men was more to the fore. This enterprise was driven not by desperate or hopeful people committing their lives, but by rich people committing part of their capital. But as in the American colonies, the venturesome spirit of those engaged made it a success. Nonetheless, it did not begin seriously to spread English for the first two centuries. It was only when a more earnest spirit began to prevail at home, and the colonies taken for profit came to be seen as conferring a responsibility to uplift the less fortunate, that schools were founded actively to spread the intangible benefits of Britishness, starting with the language.

By this time a third stream of English-based enterprise was beginning to flourish, the host of ventures in ways to profit from fossil fuels and the sheer ingenuity that go under the name of the Industrial Revolution. This same revolution began the shrinking of the world, with news ever more available of achievements far away. English was from now on identified not only with self-regarding settlers and self-righteous governors but self-inventing and self-aggrandising entrepreneurs too: and so it became seen as a pa.s.sport to self-improvement for ambitious people all over the world.

This progress of English contrasts in many ways with the careers of other world languages.

Compared with its contemporaries, the fellow European imperial languages, the advance of English is remarkably informal. With the exception of the state's first charter of a trading monopoly for the East India Company, and until the British parliament began to concern itself with policy in the nineteenth century, there is a sense of do-it-yourself. Maintenance of the Royal Navy became a state responsibility, after the glory days of profitable Caribbean piracy were over; but the actual activity of spreading English settlement, British business and indeed the Anglican word of G.o.d around the world was left up to private initiative.

This contrasts starkly with the mode of operation of Spain and Portugal, where individual conquistadores might open the way, but state involvement of viceroys, and the whole apparatus of state and Church, immediately followed; until the revolutions of the nineteenth century, all Spain's and Portugal's colonies were ruled by governors sent out directly from Europe. This made for strained relations, and a lack of solidarity, between the home governments and the criollos who had succeeded in establishing themselves abroad. The Romance-speaking settlers were not really trusted as representatives of their Catholic Majesties. In the early days, the allocation of land through encomienda meant that they were at best leaseholders from the king; and as we have seen, many settlers' descendants in Peru adopted Quechua to emphasise their separateness from the European establishment. (See Chapter 10, 'The Church's solution: The lenguas generales', p. 364.) In these circ.u.mstances, it is hard to say what the Spanish and Portuguese languages came to represent overseas: perhaps more than anything else, the continuing link with the Catholic Church-ironic, when we remember how the policies of the religious orders had delayed the spread of these languages in Latin America for hundreds of years.

And for France, too, overseas expansion was under government control, ever since King Francois I had sent Jacques Cartier out to seek a North-West Pa.s.sage in 1534. In the seventeenth century, Colbert had fretted over the non-expansion of the French language; but a century later, the French colonists on the ground had taken so little interest in de la Salle's explorations along the Mississippi, let alone effective occupation of them, that Napoleon volunteered to sell them, sight unseen, to the USA. All the colonies that the French acquired in the nineteenth century, from Algeria to Indochina, were taken by French arms for the glory of France: la gloire remained an active motive. At the same time France was clearly still a major force in the scientific civilisation that it promoted, so that use of French could be presented as a channel to modernity. Settlers did move into Algeria, but elsewhere the force that made the French colonies a reality-and so spread the use of French-was the central government. Apart from in Algeria and lndo-China, this centralised approach meant that withdrawal of French control, when it came in the 1960s, was surprisingly speedy and painless. What often remained was an affection for the French language, a symbol of la civilisation francaise, rational in aspiration, national in sentiment.

Given that Russian was spread over three centuries rather nakedly as a mark of the power of the Tsar's empire-of limited appeal to those not accepted as Russian-and that the twentieth-century attempt to convert it, after the fact, into a vernacular for 'Scientific Socialism' collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian language has something of an image problem. The heavy-handedness with which its materialism was a.s.serted contrasted with the lighter touch of French rationalism, and the even-handedness of British pragmatism, and the open-handedness of American consumerism. Russian's a.s.sociations with group effort and economic austerity are almost the converse of English's conjuring up of initiative and ingenuity by individuals, leading to wealth through enterprise.

English, as a quintessentially 'worldly' tongue, can also be set against the atmospheres of world languages from a more distant past. Chinese and Egyptian, and indeed Greek and Latin in the ancient world, were all vehicles of civilisations that emphasised the value of the here and now, and at their best were able to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, as well as a degree of peace and security. Arabic and Sanskrit, by contrast, like Latin and Greek in the Christian era, were and are promoted by much more otherworldly cultures, focusing their speakers' aspirations on spiritual aims, and seeing their degree of visible success or gratification in daily life as only a small part of what is really important.*

This difference of language culture is in our age very evident. In the early twenty-first century, the aspiration to learn English or Arabic has become distinctive for many young people all over the world. In the countries of western Asia and North Africa, Arabic Language Teaching has become a service industry seeking foreign customers, just like ELT in so many other parts of the world. English and Arabic are in some ways remarkably similar: both have a written history of about one and a half thousand years, have been spread around the world by speakers who often knew no other language, and have bodies of literature that freight them with a.s.sociations many centuries old. But rare is the young person who strives to learn Arabic for Avicenna's philosophy, the stories of the Thousand and One Nights or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz; even rarer is one who struggles with English hoping to read the King James Bible, or the Book of Common Prayer. In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the Koran, English the language of modern business and global popular culture.

* Old English 'Be happy'; 'stay healthy'; 'let it come' (i.e. the loving-cup pa.s.sed around); 'drink l.u.s.tily' 'drink backwards'; 'drink to me' 'drink half; 'drink to the dregs'. These are all English toasts and drinking boasts to be heard as the English caroused the night away before the crucial battle of Hastings. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing c.1140, says "... to this day the tradition has endured in Britain that at a banquet the one who drinks to another says "waesseil", and he who receives the cup after him replies "drincheil'" (Historia Regum Britannie 100, ms 568, f. 46v.).

* Latin t.i.tles of prayers, 'Spirit of the Lord', 'Salvation of the people', 'Hail Holy Mother', following naturalised French forms of 'Take pity', (Greek) 'Lord, have mercy', 'Our Father'.

Robert Wace, a Norman from Jersey, was commissioned in the 1160s by King Henry II to write a celebration of Norman history, named for its patriarch Rollo (i.e. Rou). This was to parallel his earlier Roman de Brut, on Britain before the Normans (likewise supposedly founded by Brutus). This section tells of the different demeanours of the English and Normans on the night before Hastings, 1066; but it also neatly ill.u.s.trates the different roles of English, Norman French and Latin in Norman England.

* In this section, 'Norman' will include the governing cla.s.ses of England and its dependencies from 1066 to 1399. Their vernacular was initially Norman French, also known as Anglo-Norman; but after 1154, the varieties of French spoken at court would have been more broadly based, since Henry II and his barons were based in Anjou, in south-western France. Thereafter the dynasty is known as Angevin.

* These were an a.s.set to their literary culture as much as to their politics. Although Arthur comes out of Celtic legend, it was Anglo-Norman literature which created the ideal of the gallant knight in shining armour, the chevaler, a word that originally meant 'horseman'. In Old English knight (usually spelt cniht) had just meant 'lad', hence someone young enough to fight, without overtones of cavalry, let alone chivalry.

* After the first of these, Edward, in 1301, is supposed to have offered to give the Welsh a prince 'born in Wales, and without a word of English'-then presented his own son, just recently bom at campaign headquarters in Caernarfon. The story, however, goes back only to the sixteenth century, and would be more credible if Edward himself had been a speaker of English rather than French. And his son had been born in 1284.

Calum Ceann Mor, 'Big Head', who reigned from 1059 to 1093. This was the famed Malcolm who had deposed and killed Macbeth.

* It is all very reminiscent of the emotional, nostalgic and somewhat desperate tone of the defence for learning Latin itself, offered in the grammar schools of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

* Characteristically conservative, the law held out longest: Law French did not finally disappear from the English courts until eliminated by an act of Parliament in 1733. By the same standard of retrospection, the law's fondness for eighteenth-century wigs and gowns has still a century to run.

'... in many the country language is impaired; some use a strange babbling, twittering, snarling, growling and gnashing.'

* From another point of view, the dialects of English were a boon to a naturalistic author like Chaucer, who was the first to use them to give realism to dialogue. In The Canterbury Tales, the Reeve, himself scripted as a Norfolk man, tells a story of Cambridge students John and Aleyn, who are clearly lads from the North. And the Summoner and the Friar both keep breaking into broad Northern English (Robinson 1957: 686, 688, 704-5).

* The basic linguistic features of this area were: using o not a in words like woe, stone, go-north of the Humber they kept the Old English a; using y (i.e. u, French u) and later i, in words like hill, sin, fire, mice-in Kent and East Anglia they said e-and this explains most instances of the apparently gratuitous y in Caxton's spelling; using the modal verb shall, as against Northumbrian sal; using p.r.o.nouns, she, they, them, theyr, as against West and South Country heo, hy, hem, here. In verbs, the present participle and gerund generalised Southern and Midland -ynge, as against Northern -ande; the plural ends in -en or nothing: we speken, they use, as against the South Country we speketh, hy useth. In fact, the present tense of verbs became subject to a lot of confusion, since this -eth ending was also used as a third singular ending in the South, and is widely used as such in Shakespeare and the King James Bible: the wind bloweth, he goeth. Ultimately, this too was replaced, but by the -es ending, which had been used for every person but first singular in the North: I here, but thou/ he/ we/ ye/ they heres. (These details are gathered from Mosse 1962, who gives many more.) * And indeed in Welsh: Elizabeth I also authorised the publication of Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan, which was printed in London in 1588, and joined the Welsh translation of the Prayer Book (Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin) in Welsh churches.

A corpus of texts that is usually mentioned in the same breath as the King James Bible, and accorded almost equal status in the textual definition of English, is the poetry of William Shakespeare. The two are almost exact contemporaries, this 'Authorised Version' of the Bible being compiled from 1604 to 1611, and Shakespeare writing from 1590 to 1611. But unlike the Bible, Shakespeare (first fully published in 1623) did not immediately become an iconic text of the English language, his reputation growing through the seventeenth century until it was fully canonised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth.

The Shakespeare phenomenon recalls the place of Homer in the history of Greek. Each was a poet of encyclopedic range and unchallenged quality but obscure ident.i.ty, at or near the very foundation of the language's main tradition of literary cla.s.sics. Each seems to have acquired this status at least a century after he actually lived and composed. Each went on to have an overwhelming role in the heritage of his language, endlessly praised by critics and schoolteachers, and also to inform traditional ideas of the language community's history. Perhaps this is best explained by emphasising that each of them is indebted more than most to a rich ancient tradition, Homer to that of the travelling bard or aoidos, Shakespeare to that of the strolling player. This was less remarkable to their contemporaries, who saw them in context, but somehow, as time went on, their works were felt to sum up the tradition, and so replaced it in memory.

* Too many remarks proffered as comments on the nature of English, especially by writers, are thinly disguised praise of the traditions and aspirations of its speakers. Consider Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's words introducing the Oxford Book of English Verse: 'Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being as precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.' Or Walt Whitman: 'Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies' ('Slang in America', North American Review, 41, 1885). Such confidence may of course be useful in using the language eloquently. Any language carries a vast network of a.s.sociations with the past, which grow in power as that past is remembered.

* I should rea.s.sure linguists reading this that I am consciously ignoring the structure latent in the vast amount of vocabulary borrowed from, or constructed out of, Latin, French and Greek.

* To my knowledge, only the j.a.panese 'kanbun' tradition of marking up cla.s.sical Chinese text to be read out just as if it were in j.a.panese has had the chutzpah to dispense with that basic convention.

* It, and the island of Croatoan, to which it famously but mysteriously decamped, were actually on the coast of modern North Carolina. The few survivors, merging with local Algonquian speakers, were to drop their English in the seventeenth century. But English did survive in the follow-up colony at Jamestown, whose capital was later moved to Williamsburg.

* It is interesting to note that one major motive for Rome and Russia, the drive to secure borders by conquering neighbours, was largely absent.

* The term is an anachronism, but the concept is not. Hakluyt organises the doc.u.ment, Discourse of Western Planting, with all the striking content on the second page, chapter headings that tell it all:

A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted, Written In the yere 1584 by Richarde Hackluyt of Oxforde at the requeste and direction of the righte worshipfull Mr. Walter Raghly [Ralegh] nowe Knight, before the comynge home of his Twoo Barkes: and is devided into xxi chapiters, the t.i.tles whereof followe in the nexte leafe.

* Chesapeake Bay, the site of the Virginia colony, had in fact been the northern boundary of Spanish Jesuit activities in 'la Florida'. From 1565 this had included small settlements in the modern Georgia, Carolinas and Virginia, but the whole area was abandoned in 1572 after eight missionaries were killed at Chesapeake.

Pocahontas was in many ways an exceptional woman. Seven years earlier, when still a girl, she had intervened with her father to save the life of another English pioneer, Captain John Smith, who went on to become the Jamestown colony's first governor. When John Rolfe won her hand, she had still been confined against her will on an English ship on the Potomac river. She later became an early convert to Protestant Christianity.

* The French had, as it happened, already studied the Algonquin language, when exploring the Ottawa river valley in 1541.

* Swedish presence on the Atlantic seaboard was of fairly short duration (1638-55); their settlement in Delaware had been summarily evicted by the Dutch.

* In 1867, Alaska too was acquired, by purchase from Russia.

* This has been trans.m.u.ted into the legend that at one point German was almost to be declared the official language of the USA.

German remained the second-largest language of immigrants (at 25 per cent) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was a surge of German-speaking immigrants in the early nineteenth century, and a tendency early on for them to congregate in Pennsylvania. It peaked in the 1870s, when 600,000, among a state population of 4 million, are said to have had German ('Pennsylvania Dutch') as their everyday language, with another 150,000 outside the state. The popular use of German in public was very severely damaged by the First World War. It survives today only in small sectarian communities such as the Mennonites and Amish (Adams 1990: ch. 7).

This is made up of 14 per cent from the UK, 13 per cent from Ireland, 12 per cent from Canada, 4 per cent from the Philippines and 1 per cent from Jamaica. After German with 25 per cent, the next languages are Russian (10 per cent), Hungarian (4 per cent) and Chinese (3 per cent) (US Dept of Justice, 1998 Statistical Yearbook, quoted in Wright 2000: 291).

* New York's 'Bowery' perpetuates the name of the farm of Pieter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor.

* Over 1.2 million Britons for 55,000 French.

* Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wyoming.

* By interesting coincidence, the cities that grew up around them, which went on to become the first centres of government for British India, have all been renamed in the 1990s: as Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.