How English took over the world

By Steffani McChesney

JAKARTA (JP): According to the 1995 World Almanac, 470 million people speak English worldwide, 322 million of which are native speakers. English is the second most widely spoken language in the world after Mandarin. These are unbelievable statistics considering the inauspicious beginnings of the language which only developed into its present form about 400 years ago on and off the coast of Europe.

Linguists place English within the Indo-European family of languages alongside such dissimilar ones such as Sanskrit and Persian. English developed from the West Germanic branch which includes German, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and other related dialects. The links are obvious when examining words common to several languages. The English word brother is bruder in German, bhrathair in Gaelic, bhara in Sanskrit and biradar in Persian.

English did not begin life as a native language on the island that gave it its name. According to Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, the roots of the language were brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons in the form of a Germanic dialect. The Anglo- Saxons had liberally borrowed many Roman words before making the voyage, particularly names for common household articles. Jespersen dubbed the result "rich in possibilities". The language spread across the island along with Christianity and literacy with the help of St. Augustine who arrived in 597 and converted King Ethelbert of Kent to the faith.

The island and the language were under attack for the next 300 years by Viking invaders. Many Scandinavian and Danish words replaced the old English ones or became synonyms such as the words craft and skill. The language also adopted grammatical forms such as they, them and their from Scandinavian.

The Norman Conquest in 1066 opened the door to 10,000 words, from a rural form of French spoken only in the northern parts of that country. Their domination was so complete that no English king spoke English for the next 300 years. English remained the language of the people. The lords of the manors had to be bilingual so they could speak to both the peasants who farmed their land and the nobility at court.

English proved to be a persistent language. Because of its lowly position, English became a simpler, less inflected language, losing noun genders and many declinations and conjugations. Intermarriage between the natives and the Norman helped English overcome French as the language of the court. By the end of the 14th century the children of noble families had to be sent to Paris to learn a proper form of French needed for diplomatic relations with the continent.

English speakers have always been willing to accept new words from the successive waves of invaders of the Misty Isles, enriching the language and developing the nuances and subtleties which make English literature and poetry the glory that it is.

The freewheeling rules of the language and its changing structure allowed artists to express themselves in ways that never existed before. For example, Shakespeare and his contemporaries used nouns as verbs and adverbs as adjectives. Shakespeare personally coined some 2,000 words and countless phrases still used in everyday speech by people who may never have read a word or seen a play written by him. He can be thanked for such colorful phrases as "the sound and the fury", "flesh and blood", "play fast and loose", "vanish into thin air", "foul play" and "tower of strength".

For all that, English still didn't get the respect it deserved. Scholars considered it a second-rate language as late as 1582 when sage Richard Mulcaster said "The English tongue is of small account, stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all." In 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, William Harvey wrote his treatise on the circulation of blood in Latin. Edward Gibbon thought so little of the language that he wrote his histories in French before translating them into English.

Spelling, still a problem for both native and non-native speakers, is a result of all the outside influences that have given English its texture and richness. The development of the printing press helped to standardize English spelling but this coincided with a period when the language was undergoing one of its frequent upheavals. So the spelling reflects the pronunciation of people living 400 years ago. The practice of freely adopting words from other languages and retaining their spelling further confuses the issue.

Over the centuries there have been efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to simplify English spelling. British proponents included Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Conan Doyle. George Bernard Shaw felt it was so necessary that he left the bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. Americans from Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain through Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt also called for simplified spelling.

Noah Webster of dictionary-writing fame has been blamed for changing American spelling from British. The truth is he decried the practice of dropping the u from words such as color and humor. In the preface of his American Dictionary of the English Language he argued that "it was desirable to perpetrate the sameness of British and American spelling and usage".

Some experts over the centuries have suggested that spelling reform should be phonetic. Considering the many different accents of English speakers around the world, spelling reform based on pronunciation would never work. So the world is stuck with inconsistencies as they stand.

That other major headache of the English language, grammar, is so complex because it uses the rules and terminology of a language with which it has nothing in common. About the only thing Latin and English share are some word roots and an alphabet, though the grammar of the language has obsessed scholars over the centuries. The noted French grammarian Dominique Bonhous is purported to have said on his deathbed: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die ; either expression is used."

After the American Revolutionary War, there was some discussion of further separating America from Britain by adopting a new language. The idea was not taken seriously. A perusal of the literature of the period shows no widespread debate and the Founding Fathers thought so little of the idea that there is no mention of it in the Constitution. Besides, educated Americans of the time loved the language for all the same reasons it is still appreciated, though people such as Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster expected American English and British English to evolve into separates languages over time.

Benjamin Franklin was worried that different speech communities would develop based on the language of the immigrants living in the area. His home state of Pennsylvania had a large German-speaking population. He needn't have worried. The continuous movement of Americans across the continent ensured that English would be widely disseminated.

Even with the huge influx of non-English speaking immigrants in the 1800s and early 1900s there was no danger of English being overtaken. From 1607 to 1840 almost all of the one million immigrants were either slaves or came from the British Isles. By time the rest of the immigrants got to American shores, English was firmly entrenched. And the broad influence of the British Empire in the 19th century was to spread the language around the rest of the world.

In the first half of the 20th century the problem for English was to keep from changing so much that native speakers around the world could not talk to each other. As early as the 1880s Henry Sweet, an eminent linguist, said "In another century England, America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages." In 1936, H.L. Mencken, an American journalist, only half in jest, said that British English was becoming an American dialect. And in 1939, the preface of An Anglo-American Interpreter suggested than an American could be taken ill on the streets of London and die before he was able to make himself understood enough to ask for help.

The greatest divergence between British and American English occurred before World War II, but the war changed all that. So did the advent of global communications in the form of telephones, television, telecommunications satellites and the Internet.

English has become a communications medium on countries with many languages. India, home to 1,652 languages and dialects, adopted English as an official language even though only about 40 to 50 million people speak it. English is also an official language in 44 other countries around the world.

So, love it or hate it, English is here to stay. Not necessarily because it is better than any other language, it just happened to be in the right places at the right times.