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English – One Tongue, Many Voices
English
One Tongue, Many Voices

Second Edition

Jan Svartvik
Lund University

and

Geoffrey Leech
Lancaster University

With contributions from

David Crystal
University of Bangor
Jan Svartvik Geoffrey Leech (1935–2014)
Lund University Lancaster University
Sweden UK

David Crystal
University of Bangor
UK

ISBN 978-1-137-55022-4 ISBN 978-1-137-16007-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137160072

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: Cover image © Valentyn Volkov / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London.
For Gunilla and Fanny
Contents

List of Figures xi

Preface xiii

Preface to the Second Edition xv

Acknowledgements xvi

List of Abbreviations xvii

1 English: The Working Tongue of the Global Village 1

English is spoken in circles 2
The Inner Circle 3
The Outer Circle 4
The Expanding Circle 5
Do we need a world language? 5
Why English? 6
One or two explanations 9

Part I History of an Island Language

2 The First 500 Years 13
Roman Britain 14
Ships are sighted with English in embryo on board 17
Christianity in the Isles 19
The Viking age 22
What was Old English like? 27
The Lord’s Prayer 28
Beowulf 30

3 1066 and All That 34

Middle English 36
An influx of French words 37
Grammatical endings disappear 40
Geoffrey Chaucer and William Caxton 41

4 Modern English in the Making 48

The three ‘Rs’ – Renaissance, Reformation and Restoration 49
English and Latin 51

vii
viii Contents

The Elizabethan period 52

Shakespeare’s language 55
The King James Bible – a milestone in the history of English 60
Restoration and reaction 62
English gains a new domain – the language of science 65
‘Dictionary Johnson’ 66
The ‘end of history’? 68
Codification of the standard language 70

Part II The Spread of English Around the World

5 English Goes to the New World 73
English takes root in America 74
The Pilgrim Fathers 77
The first Americanisms 78
Linguistic variety and uniformity in the United States 80
The American Revolution 84
The frontier moves further west 85
New Americans 89
English goes to Canada 93
Cartier and Canada 93
Loyalists’ influence 96
Canadian English 97

6 English Transplanted 101

Australia – the First Fleet 102
Kangaroo, koala and kookaburra become English 104
Australian English 107
New Zealand – Aotearoa 109
New Zealand English 111
English in Africa – the Inner Circle 114
English comes to South Africa 115
English in Africa – the Outer Circle 119
English in South Asia 120
‘The jewel in the crown’ 121
English in Southeast Asia 123
New Englishes 125

7 English Varieties in the British Isles 128

Received Pronunciation 129
Cockney 132
Estuary English 134
The North 135
 Contents ix

The West Country 137

Vernacular grammar 138
English in Wales 139
English in Scotland 140
Scottish varieties 145
English in Ireland 149

8 American and British English 154

‘Divided by a common language’? 156
Americanisms and Americanization 161
Persistent transatlantic differences of vocabulary 163
American and British pronunciation – comparing GA with RP 168
American vs. British grammar 171
AAVE – Black English – Ebonics 174

9 English, Pidgins and Creoles 178

Pidgins and creoles 180
Jamaican creole 183
Sranan 185
The life cycle of a creole 187
The Atlantic creoles and their characteristics 189
Tok Pisin 191

Part III A Changing Language in Changing Times

10 The Standard Language Today 195
Standard English – the written language 197
Vocabulary – combining the North Sea and the Mediterranean 201
A spectrum of usage – from speech to writing 203
Is spoken English grammatical? 207

11 Linguistic Change in Progress: Back to the Inner Circle 210

Grammaticalization 210
Colloquialization 211
Liberalization? 213
Americanization 214
Is English becoming a more democratic language? 215
Is English becoming a non-sexist language? 219

12 Electronic English 224

Is Electronic English changing the language? 226
Is EE a revolution? 229
New kinds of text 231
The future of EE 235
x Contents

13 English into the Future 237

One English or many Englishes? 237
World English 240
The globalization of English 242
English as a lingua franca 247
‘Reports of the death of the native speaker have been exaggerated’ 251
What is happening in the heartland of English? 253
Changing American voices: Northern Cities Shift 255
The English juggernaut? 257
And where is it all going? 262

Notes and Comments 263

References 283

Index of People 292

Index of Topics 294

Pronunciation 299
List of Figures

Figures

1.1 The three concentric circles of English worldwide 2

1.2 The mushroom of English 8
2.1 Diagram of Germanic and Celtic languages within
the Indo-European family 14
2.2 Map of the British Isles 16
2.3 Map of the main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (early eighth century) 20
2.4 Map of the Danelaw and Scandinavian settlement-names,
showing the paths of Viking incursions and settlements 24
2.5 Runes 29
2.6 The first page of the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf 31
3.1 A scene from the Bayeux tapestry 35
3.2 The opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from Caxton’s
early printed version 43
3.3 The oldest known representation of a printing press 45
4.1 The title-page of Shakespeare’s First Folio 53
4.2 An early sketch of an Elizabethan theatre 56
5.1 Early expeditions to America by English-speakers, and
the 13 original states (with their present boundaries) 75
5.2 Main accent areas in the United States 83
5.3 Map of the United States 90
5.4 South-eastern Canada 95
6.1 The Endeavour, painted by Herbert ‘Herb’ Kawainui Kāne 102
6.2 Map of Australia 104
6.3 Map of New Zealand 110
6.4 Map of South Africa 114
7.1 The pyramid of standardization 131
7.2 Map of England and Wales 136
7.3 An engraving of the four sides of the Ruthwell Cross 142

xi
xii List of Figures

7.4 Map of Scotland 143

7.5 Robert Burns 146
7.6 Map of Ireland 150
8.1 The spread of English in the world 155
9.1 The Caribbean and Central America 179
9.2 Map of Jamaica 182
9.3 Scene from a Caribbean wedding 184
9.4 Map of Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana 185
10.1 A spectrum of usage linking speech with writing 205
13.1 A model of world English 241
13.2 Dialect areas in the United States with the Northern Cities Shift 255
13.3 Northern Cities Shift 256
Preface

This book began in 2000 when one of the authors – Jan Svartvik – presented
to the other author – Geoffrey Leech – a copy of his book in Swedish Engelska –
öspråk, världsspråk, trendspråk, which translates as ‘English – island language,
world language, trend language’. Geoffrey Leech, in spite of his severely
restricted reading knowledge of Swedish, was impressed by the overall content,
shape and appeal of the book, and was further impressed to learn that it had
received the August Prize for the best non-fiction title published in Swedish in
1999. It seemed to both of us that the book would benefit a wider audience,
and would indeed appeal to students and teachers of English as well as to other
people throughout the world with an interest in the English language.
The Swedish publisher Norstedts Ordbok very kindly allowed us to adapt
and develop our book from the original Swedish version. However, producing
an international edition of the book was not easy. It was not just a matter of
translating the Swedish into English. It was necessary to edit out some of the
Scandinavian focus of the original (for example, the Vikings, understandably,
had more than their fair share of the Swedish book). As we worked together on
the English version, we had to take account of new developments and world-
wide perspectives. In fact, we had to rethink and redraft the book from begin-
ning to end. The result, we hope, is an up-to-date and wide-ranging historical
and geographical survey of English, divided into three parts:

Part I: History of an Island Language (Chapters 2–4) covers how it evolved

from its beginnings as a separate language.
Part II: The Spread of English Around the World (Chapters 5–9) tells the
unprecedented story of the worldwide spread and diversification of a
single language.
Part III: A Changing Language in Changing Times (Chapters 10–13) examines
English as it is today, and speculates on its twenty-first century pros-
pects as a global language.

Arguably, English has so many different incarnations in different parts of

the world that it is no longer a single language, but some kind of plurality of
languages. As the original title of the book did not translate easily into English,
we chose a title that emphasized this mixture of unity and plurality that is the
present-day English language: English – One Tongue, Many Voices.
We are especially grateful to Rikard Svartvik for his indispensable contribu-
tion to the book in the form of partial translation and historical comments.

xiii
xiv Preface

We also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Gunnel Tottie, who put at our
disposal her breadth of knowledge, particularly on American English as com-
pared with British English, and generously gave time to a thorough reading
and insightful commentary on our drafts. More specific, but hardly less valued,
were the comments of Susan Dray on Caribbean English, pidgins and creoles,
Graeme Kennedy on New Zealand English, Vivian de Klerk on South African
English, Ian Lancashire on Canadian English, Pam Peters on Australian English
and Toshihiko Suzuki on Japanese. David Britain acted as the publisher’s clear-
ance reader, and we valued his expert and well-targeted comments. Julia Youst
MacRae commented on some chapters from the point of view of a speaker of
American English, and we appreciated being able to make use of her vivid com-
ments on certain areas of usage – see particularly the quotations on pp. 157–8
and 216. We end with the conventional (but genuine) caveat that none of
these friendly commentators can be held responsible for any errors in the book
in its final form.
The work on this book has been a great pleasure and source of inspiration.
Our professional lives have been devoted to the English language, and this
represents our latest undertaking in a co-authorship habit that extends over a
period of more than 30 years.

Jan Svartvik, Lund University, Sweden

Geoffrey Leech, Lancaster University, England
Preface to the Second Edition

As we were preparing for a second edition of this book, Geoffrey Leech sud-
denly died on 19 August 2014. It was a terrible blow, not only to his family,
friends, colleagues and the world of linguistics at large but also to our joint
project. Geoff was a long-time friend, colleague and co-author.
For the new edition we had planned to focus on updating the later chapters
of the book. In this critical situation I called on our common friend David
Crystal for help and, fortunately, he agreed to step in. As an eminent scholar
and successful author in a wide variety of English linguistics areas he was of
course the ideal choice for the task. His contribution has been to write a com-
pletely new chapter, Chapter 12, on Electronic English, as well as to suggest
revisions of various parts of the overall text, including the updating of statistics
relating to global English usage. Other changes between the first and second
edition include trimming of some sections in the historical chapters and revi-
sion of Notes and Comments, for example by adding tips about web addresses
that contain further relevant chapter material, such as sound recordings of
varieties and dialects. The Pronunciation section now also offers information
about how to type phonetic symbols.
I am grateful for having had the opportunity of working with both Geoff and
Dave, happily recalling the early years of the 1960s when all three of us were
Randolph Quirk’s assistants at the Survey of English Usage, University College
London.

Jan Svartvik

xv
Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge permission from the following sources to reproduce

illustrations and other copyright material. Every effort has been made to con-
tact copyright holders, but if we have failed to find the copyright holder, or if
any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make
amends at the earliest opportunity.

Illustrations

Figure 2.3 Runes, reproduced from Dennis Freeborn, From Old English to
Standard English, 2nd edition 1998; Palgrave Macmillan.
Figure 3.1 A scene from the Bayeux tapestry, ‘Beachhead 1’ from the replica
of the tapestry in the Reading Museum © Reading Museum Service (Reading
Borough Council). All rights reserved.
Figure 3.2 The opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from Caxton’s early
printed version (1478). Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and
Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.
Figure 4.2 The Swan Theatre; sketch by Arent van Buchell (Arnoldus Buchelius,
1565–1641) after a lost original of ca. 1597 by Johannes de Witt (1566–1622),
Utrecht University Library, MS 842, fol. 132r.
Figure 6.1 The Endeavour, painted by Herbert ‘Herb’ Kawainui Kāne.
Figure 13.3 Northern Cities Shift, adapted from A National Map of the Regional
Dialects of American English, by William Labov, Charles Boberg and Sharon
Ash at the following website: www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/NationalMap/
NationalMap.html.

Text materials

Pages 161–3: Edward Olson, ‘Differences in the UK and US Versions of Four

Harry Potter Books, FAST US-1, Introduction to American English, Department
of Translation Studies, University of Tampere, Finland, at the following web-
site: https://www15.uta.fi/FAST/US1/REF/potter.html.
Page 180: ‘Sweet and Dandy’ by Frederick ‘Toots’ Hibbert; of Toots and the
Maytals, reproduced with permission, transcribed and annotated by Peter L.
Patrick, Jamaican Creole Texts, on his website: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/
~patrickp/JCtexts.html.

xvi
List of Abbreviations

AAVE African American Vernacular English

AmE American English
AustE Australian English
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
BrE British English
eModE Early Modern English
EE Estuary English
EFL English as a foreign language
ELF English as a lingua franca
EU European Union
GA General American (pronunciation)
ME Middle English
MOOC Massive Open Online Course
NZE New Zealand English
OE Old English
PresE Present-day English
RP Received Pronunciation
ScotE Scottish English
UK United Kingdom
US, USA United States (of America)
WAPE West African Pidgin English
WSE World Standard English
WSSE World Spoken Standard English

xvii
1
English: The Working Tongue of
the Global Village

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

Salman Rushdie
The Times (3 July 1982)

Ahead of his time, the Canadian writer Marshall McLuhan predicted that elec-
tronically connected media would eventually transform the world into a huge
‘global village’. English has become the working tongue of that village.
It is a new feature in the history of languages and language learning that this
demand for English comes largely from the grass roots, not from society’s elite,
as was the case with Latin forced down the throats of previous generations of
school pupils, or as the English language itself was imposed in earlier times on
speakers of many other languages. The most remarkable thing about English
today is not that it is the mother tongue of over 370 million people, but that it
is used as an additional language by so many more people all around the globe.
Non-native speakers in fact hugely outnumber native speakers – probably a
unique situation in language history. There are estimates suggesting that about
a third of the world’s population know, or think they know, some English. But,
of course, sheer numbers mean little here – the expression ‘know English’ has
plenty of latitude.
According to Ethnologue, a database maintained by the Summer Institute of
Linguistics in Dallas, Texas, there are today about 7,000 living languages in the
world. Yet just five languages – Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi –
are spoken by more than half of the world’s population. And English cannot
claim the highest number of native speakers; Chinese has about three times
as many. What gives English its special status is its unrivalled position as a
means of international communication. Most other languages are primarily
communicative channels within, rather than across, national borders. Today,
English is big business and the most commonly taught foreign language all
over the world.

1
2 English – One Tongue, Many Voices

So why this demand for English among language learners around the world?
The reason is not that the language is easy, beautiful or superior in linguistic
qualities. Most people who want to learn it do so because they need it to func-
tion in the world at large. Young people, finding it both practical and cool, are
attracted by things they can do with English, such as listening to music, watch-
ing films and surfing the web. For scientists and scholars, English is a necessity
for reaching out to colleagues around the globe, publishing results from their
research and taking part in international conferences. For tourists, English is
the most useful tool for getting around and communicating with people all
over the world.

English is spoken in circles

The Indian-American scholar Braj Kachru has taught us to think of English, as

used around the world, in the form of three concentric circles (see Figure 1.1).
The Inner Circle represents a handful of countries where most of the inhabit-
ants speak English as a first language. The Outer Circle includes a larger number
of countries where English is a second, often official or semi-official language,
but where most users of the language are not native speakers. Beyond the Inner
and Outer Circles, English is learned and used as a foreign language in the huge
Expanding Circle, which in fact includes every country in the world.

Inner Circle

Expanding Circle
Outer Circle

Figure 1.1 The three concentric circles of English worldwide

 English: The Working Tongue of the Village 3

The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle includes, above all, three geographical blocs: the United
States, Canada and the West Indies in the New World; the United Kingdom
and Ireland in Europe; Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the Southern
Hemisphere. In these eight regions there are over 370 million people speaking
English as a first language, and two out of three of them live in North America.
Speaker estimates are always very approximate, because censuses typically do
not distinguish clearly between levels of fluency in production and compre-
hension, or take account of such factors as bilingualism; and estimates increase
greatly if they include all the creoles and pidgins that historically derive from
English. But certain general trends are apparent in the data reported below,
taken from censuses since the year 2000 or United Nations surveys.
In some countries there are different figures for total population and speakers
of English as a first language. For some 38 million Americans the first language
is Spanish – in fact, Hispanics have now replaced African Americans as the
largest minority group of the United States. Canada is officially a bilingual
country where almost a quarter of the population report French to be their
mother tongue. In addition, native Americans and Canadians speak various
indigenous languages. The Republic of Ireland has two official languages, Irish
Gaelic and English, but only a small proportion of the population use Gaelic.
In the United Kingdom, Welsh is an official language in Wales, spoken by about
a fifth of the population, alongside English. Taking the United Kingdom and
Ireland together, English is the first language of around 64 million inhabitants,
with a steadily growing number of immigrants (especially from the European
Union) who have a mother-tongue other than English. What many people
find surprising is that neither in the United States nor the United Kingdom,
the two countries that historically have had the major role in the spread of
their language around the world, has English ever been formally declared the
official language.
In the Southern Hemisphere, English is spoken as a first language by around
20 million Australians and New Zealanders. While this is a modest figure
compared with the number of native speakers in North America and Europe,
English is an important means of communication around the expansive Pacific
basin. South Africa is a special case with 11 official languages, one of which is
English. The number of speakers of English as a first language is less than 10 per
cent, yet this total is comparable in size to those of Ireland and New Zealand,
and in South Africa today English retains a dominant position: it is the main
medium of instruction in higher education and the language most commonly
used in Parliament and courts of law.
People who happen to be born in the Inner Circle of course enjoy a privilege
since they learn, for free (more or less), to speak this global language as part
4 English – One Tongue, Many Voices

Countries in the Inner Circle

Countries English as a first language Population (2015 est)

United States 260 million 321 million
United Kingdom 59 million 64 million
Canada 20 million 35 million
Australia 16 million 23 million
Caribbean 5 million 5 million
Ireland 4 million 4.5 million
New Zealand 4 million 4.5 million
South Africa 5 million 54 million
Totals 373 million 511 million

of the normal process of child language acquisition. This gives them a certain
global reach and an advantage in many walks of life, whereas those who
happen to be born into the Outer and Expanding Circles have to put years of
time and effort into attaining an advanced level of mastery of the language. For
obvious reasons, in English-speaking communities there is a widespread lack
of enthusiasm for learning other languages. But life in this ‘fast language lane’ of
native English speakers comes at a price. Having English as your only tongue
means you lose the direct experience of feeling at home in other cultures and
life-styles. You view the world through English-tinted glasses. The other side of
this coin is that, among speakers of the world’s other languages, there are fears
that the pervasive influence of English will undermine their own cultural and
linguistic identities.

The Outer Circle

In countries outside the Inner Circle, English has different societal functions,
and it is therefore practical to place these countries in two different circles: the
Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. Yet there are linguists who argue that,
today, a distinction between English as a second and a foreign language is not
relevant. In their view, it doesn’t really matter whether you learn English in,
say, Nigeria (where it has official status) or Japan (where it hasn’t). Recently,
English linguistic influences have been penetrating further into countries like
China, Mexico and Norway, for which it has always been a foreign tongue.
In the Outer Circle we mostly find people who live in former British colo-
nies, such as Kenya and Tanzania in Africa, and India, Pakistan, Malaysia and
Singapore in Asia. In many of these countries, English is an official language
and widely used in administration, education and the media. India is a strik-
ing example of the spread and importance of English in the Outer Circle.
 English: The Working Tongue of the Village 5

In this country, with more than a billion inhabitants and over 400 languages,
English has held its position and is widely used in government administra-
tion, the law courts, secondary and higher education, the armed forces, the
media, commerce and tourism. Estimates suggest that at least 10 per cent of
the population – more than 125 million people – now make regular and flu-
ent use of English as a second language. If more basic conversational abilities
are included, the figure is probably two or three times this. Whichever total
we accept – and such estimates are bound to be hazy – India is clearly among
the leading English-using nations in the world.
However, as we shall see, the question of whether a country belongs to one
circle or another – like the question of what makes a speaker a native speaker
of English – is trickier than one may think.

The Expanding Circle

The Expanding Circle encompasses large parts of the world where English is
learned as a foreign language because it is found useful, or indeed indispen-
sable, for international contacts in such areas as industry, business, politics,
diplomacy, education, research, technology, the Internet, sports, entertainment
and tourism. Today there are hundreds of millions of people who, though not
living in an English-speaking country, have acquired a good working know-
ledge of English. This circle now seems to be ever-expanding, strengthening
the claims of English as the international language of today. Is this expansion
of world English going to reach saturation point? Arguably, it is, and in the
not-too-distant future, it will be appropriate to rename the ‘Expanding Circle’
the ‘Expanded Circle’.

Do we need a world language?

In the history of the world up to now, there has never been a situation where one
language could claim global currency. There have been languages, like Latin dur-
ing the Roman Empire, that gained widespread international currency through
military might or economic influence. But this was not a worldwide conquest:
even in Roman times there were ‘barbarian hordes’ living beyond the empire, and
there were vast tracts of the world that the Roman legions never reached. So why
should we now think in terms of a world language? Is there any need for one?
The answer to such questions, above all in the globalized society we live in
today, must be ‘Yes’. To overcome the confusion of tongues, people have tried
in the past to make up artificial international languages, such as Esperanto,
Ido, Volapük, Novial, Interglossa and Interlingua. The most successful of these
has been Esperanto, yet, despite the high hopes of previous generations that
Esperanto would take over the world, artificial languages have met with little
6 English – One Tongue, Many Voices

success. It is true that the grammar of artificial languages has been planned to
be regular and easy to learn and their vocabulary combines elements from dif-
ferent languages. Yet somehow, these advantages have not weighed against the
built-in advantages of a natural language that already has a head start in the
international language stakes. English already had this head start, and gradu-
ally extended its hegemony through the twentieth century.
As a bonus, a natural language also offers a cultural milieu and a rich canon
of literature. In the case of English, this literary canon originates both in the
Inner and Outer Circles, embracing not only William Shakespeare, Jane Austen,
Ernest Hemingway, Patrick White and William Butler Yeats, but also Arundhati
Roy, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgı̃ Wa Thiong’o and Derek Walcott.

Why English?

English did not become a world language on its linguistic merits. The pro-
nunciation of English words is irritatingly often at odds with their spelling,
the vocabulary is enormous and the grammar less learner-friendly than is
generally assumed. There are people who think it is much to be regretted that
some other language, like Italian or Spanish with their pure vowel sounds and
regular spellings, did not achieve the status of a global lingua franca. David
Abercrombie, a well-known Scots phonetician with a keen interest in English
teaching, once suggested that spoken Scottish English, not English English,
should be used internationally because of its superior clarity. In fact, foreigners
often find Scottish English with its clear r’s easier to pronounce and understand
than Southern British English with its r’s either not pronounced (as in girl)
or obscurely pronounced (as in right) – see pp. 125, 147. Also, with few diph-
thongs, Scottish vowels are similar to those widely heard throughout the world,
including on the European Continent. But, as we shall see, the southern British
English accent is changing, and is in any case dominated in terms of numbers
by speakers of American English, who for the most part articulate those final r’s.
True, English grammar has few inflectional endings compared to languages
like German, Latin or Russian, but its syntax is no less complex than that of
other languages. A comprehensive grammar of English is definitely no shorter
than, say, a grammar of French or German, as has been demonstrated by
Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language with more than 1,800 pages. So it is totally wrong to suppose, as
some native speakers actually do, that English has no grammar. The grammar
of English not only exists, but has been subjected to more detailed study than
that of any other language.
As everybody knows, the English word stock is vast. Any major dictionary
of the English language has over 100,000 headwords, and the most compre-
hensive of them all, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defines a total of
 English: The Working Tongue of the Village 7

over 600,000 word-forms. With its 20 volumes this lexical whopper occupies
a great deal of shelf space but, fortunately, is now available in electronic form.
Oxford University Press feels it unlikely that it will ever be printed but will
probably appear only in electronic form. Yet, while all these words exist in
the dictionary, no native English speaker knows them all. The average native
speaker probably uses no more words than a speaker of any other major
language.
So what made English the world language? Behind its success story there
are two main factors: first, the expansion and influence of British colonial
power – by the late nineteenth century the British Empire covered a consid-
erable part of the earth’s land surface, and subjects of the British monarch
totalled nearly a quarter of the world’s population; second, the status of the
United States of America as the leading economic, military and scientific
power of the twentieth century.
And there are yet other contributing factors. One is the increasing need for
international communication as a result of modern technology: such innova-
tions as the telephone, radio, television, jetliner transport and computers each
introduced a step-change in the potential for international communication.
Air traffic controllers all over the world use English when talking to pilots,
whether Russian or Danish or Chinese, and whether at John F. Kennedy
or Schiphol or Narita airport. And, of course, in information technology,
American English is king.
Yet another factor: in countries or groups of countries where people have
several or many different first languages, English may be the preferred lingua
franca because it is felt to be neutral ground. In the global economy, many
multinationals have adopted English as the workplace vernacular. Half of all
Russian business is said to be conducted in English. In the European Union
(EU), the practical ‘working language’ in communication across language
barriers is usually English, often reluctantly adopted as the only language that
is sufficiently widely used. Across the EU (excluding the British Isles), nine
out of ten students choose to study English as a foreign language. English is
said to permeate EU institutional activities and many areas of cultural and
economic life more and more thoroughly. Today, it is hardly possible to
pursue an international career without English. As a window on the world,
English is looked upon as the best means to achieve economic, social and
political success.
The aim of this book is to explore this astonishing global phenomenon. The
history of English as a separate language started about CE 500, when its ances-
tor was a collection of dialects spoken by marauding Germanic tribes who
settled in the part of the British Isles nearest the European Continent. Over
the next 500 years, this proto-English came to be spoken by less than half a
million illiterate people. Compared with the prestigious Latin language, which
8 English – One Tongue, Many Voices

dominated western Europe at that time, it was a totally insignificant tongue.

In the 1,000 years since then, the English language has come heavily under
the influence of other languages, especially Old Norse, French, Latin and
Greek. Eight hundred years ago it was a humble medley of native dialects in a
country where the rulers spoke French. Yet it somehow survived as a basically
Germanic language, and has now come to be known to over two billion people
(see Figure 1.2).
This fantastic story needs to be told, and so, in Chapters 2–6, we look back
and trace the history of English as it developed in the British Isles and later
in territories conquered and settled through the growing British maritime and
commercial power. But when we reach the last two centuries, the story of
English becomes international and worldwide. Around 1880, the United States
became the leading English-speaking nation, in both population and wealth.
Chapters 7–8 tell the story of how the English language has evolved today in
the British Isles and the United States, building on the historical foundation
already described. Chapters 9–10 deal with pidgins, creoles and the stand-
ard language. Chapter 11 describes some of the ongoing changes in current
English. Chapter 12 deals with the current e-revolution and its effects on the
English language. Finally, Chapter 13 looks to the future: all languages being
works in progress, what will happen to English? Will it split into several differ-
ent languages, as Latin did? Or will it remain a single language, in spite of all
the variety of its manifestations around the world? Will it remain the leading
language of international communication? Or will it be overtaken by another
language? We don’t know the answers to these questions, yet they are worth
asking and debating in an informed way.

2000: 1.5—2 billion

1900: 116–123 million

1800: 20–40 million

1700: 8.5 million

1600: 6 million

1500: 4 million

Figure 1.2 The mushroom of English

 English: The Working Tongue of the Village 9

Over the centuries, the number of users of the English language can be seen as
forming a mushroom with a slim base and a huge cap. These statistics, necessarily
approximate of course, derive from Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English
Language (pp. 233–4) and David Crystal’s English as a Global Language (pp. 62–5).
Yet what can be stated with some certainty is that, in the long history of the English
language, the mushrooming effect is quite recent. In the 1936 edition of The American
Language, H. L. Mencken gave 174 million as the estimated number of native speak-
ers. As for speakers outside what we have called the Inner Circle, he wrote: ‘it is prob-
able that English is now spoken as a second language by at least 20,000,000 persons
throughout the world – very often, to be sure, badly, but nevertheless understand-
ably’ (p. 592). How things have changed!

One or two explanations

First, why are three chapters (2–4) of this book devoted to what happened
in remote periods of history? The answer is simple. What the English lan-
guage looks and sounds like today is fundamentally due to distant events: the
Germanic migrations and invasions, the Norman Conquest, the introduction
of printing, and the Renaissance. Recent centuries have brought their own
story of the growing international dispersion of English, but this story builds
crucially on more ancient foundations.
Second, we try hard to avoid confusion between describing linguistic reali-
ties (which we aim to do) and making value judgements (which we do not).
It is easy to fall into the trap of considering English a successful language
because of its inherent qualities, as Melvyn Bragg arguably does in his book
The Adventure of English, rhapsodizing over the Elizabethan age of English:
‘English was now poised to grow into a richness, a subtlety and complexity
which would enable it to become a world language.’ There is no room in this
story for triumphalism. On the other hand, it is easy to fall into the opposite
trap of seeing the spread of English on a global scale as a linguistic form of
imperialism, as has been argued by Robert Phillipson in his book Linguistic
Imperialism.
We believe it is better to see the rise of English in more objective terms. It has
won out in the linguistic ecology of the twentieth century rather as dinosaurs
won out in the battle for survival above other species in the Jurassic period, or
as homo sapiens is dominating other species in the survival battle of the present
age. But there is a crucial difference: the English language has won out, at least
for the present, because of the political, economic and military success, at a
crucial period, of the people who were its speakers, not because of the features
of the language itself. This is an amazing story to tell, but if we give any impres-
sion of glorifying English or the English, this is far from our intention.
10 English – One Tongue, Many Voices

The avoidance of value judgements is important, too, in discussing the differ-

ent kinds of English – the many varieties of the language, as they are called. We
have inherited a tradition of such judgements: for example, in the assumptions
that some kinds of grammar are ‘correct’ and others ‘incorrect’; that stand-
ard language is somehow superior to non-standard dialects; that English as a
mother-tongue is somehow superior to the English of non-native speakers. It
would be foolish to lay much store by such traditional attitudes. It is worthwhile
reminding ourselves that non-natives speakers of English in the world now out-
number native speakers by at least five to one. Further, it is quite possible, and
is seriously argued today, that the future of English will be more determined by
the majority of its users – those in the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle –
than by the Inner Circle, the traditional heartland of English. We return to this
discussion in our final chapter.
Part I
History of an Island Language
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