The way in which a few tribal and local Germanic dialects spoken by a hundred fifty thousand people grew into the English language spoken and understood by about one and a half billion people has all the characteristics of a tremendous adventure. That is the story of this book. English, like a living organism, was seeded in England a little over fifteen hundred years ago. England became its first home. From the beginning it was exposed to rivalries, dangers and threats: there was an escape from extinction, the survival of an attempt at suffocation; there was looting, great boldness, chances taken and missed; there were and there are casualties. It has often been a fierce war over words — whose language rules? — but also there were and are treasures: literatures, unified governance, and today the possibility of a world conversation, in English.
This book is about where the English language came from and how it achieved the feat of transforming itself so successfully. It is about the words which describe the way we live, the words we think in, sing in, speak in; the words which nourish our imagination, words which tell us what we are. Although English only exists in the mouths, minds and pens of its many individual users, I came to feel that English had a character and presence of its own. This is not how professional linguists see it, but just as some historians see “England” with a life of its own at certain times, so the language itself, in my view, can be seen as a living organism.
It is not known with any certainty as yet when language evolved: one hundred thousand years ago? Later? It probably began as signs and calls, gestures and facial and bodily expressions, many of which we retain still. We speak of “body language.” We can tell what someone is “saying” by their expression. We “talk” in our expressions still and our extreme calls of fear or ecstasy may not be much different from those of the first Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago. But then language began to build. We will never know who laid the foundations. Stephen Pinker and others think that Homo sapiens arrived with the gift of language innate — the language instinct. What remained to be done was to find the methods and opportunities to turn that instinct into words.
But who found the first words? Who finds new words today? We know that Shakespeare put into print at least two thousand new words, but the majority of words come out of the crowd. An American frontiersman like Davy Crockett can be as good a word spinner as a Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Early words came from those who worked the land, those whose centuries of nose to the earth made them acquainted with the minutiae of nature, and most likely it was they who, often out of necessity, had to name what they saw: basic things, and creatures which might endanger or nourish them. The giving of names could be called the most democratic communal effort in our history. Language is the finest achievement of culture — and in my view, the English language is the most remarkable of the many contributions those islands have made to the world.
Some years ago I made twenty-five programmes for BBC Radio 4 called The Routes of English, whose general starting point was the way in which English had changed and developed on the tongue. My own starting point was a childhood in which I spoke a heavily accented dialect based on an Old Norse vocabulary unintelligible to all my teachers at the grammar school, for which I had to adopt Standard English, or what was more commonly known in England as BBC English. Also in the dialect I spoke there was a seam of Romany, and the whole of the language was still based squarely in the world of agriculture, a world outside the city wall.
There was, though, I thought, another set of programmes I wanted to make, programmes which would describe the history of English, combining, I hoped, the history I had read at university with the English I had read before, during and since. England’s ITV accepted this as a series. Although this book is far fuller than the programmes I wrote, it is based on their structure, which I decided early on would work best as an adventure story.
I am not a linguistic scholar, but I have been very greatly helped by scholars whose work is acknowledged in the book. But there is, in this country, a tradition, across many disciplines, of the permitted amateur — doctors who were biologists and ornithologists, landed gentlemen who were scientists, zoologists and historians, clergymen who were encyclopaedic — and I hope I will be admitted to the ranks of those amateurs.
One of the consequences of this is that the book, though as thoroughly researched as I could make it, is not an academic text. It is for the general reader. The spelling of words, for instance, which has changed so often and so radically, has been the subject of difficult decisions. Where the original spelling of the word is vital to the story, I have kept it. Where, in my opinion, the argument and the examples flow convincingly in a more modern version, I have opted for that.
Daniel Defoe famously wrote of “Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.” Were he to reformulate this today he would have to add several other sources: Indian, West Indian, your global-technical, but most of all your American. The American influence on English has been and continues to be crucially important, and one of the lucky turns in the adventure is that it was English and not, as it just might have been, French or Spanish or German which adopted or was adopted by that new-found land — that engine of the new and the modern world. America has brought much treasure to the word-hoard, but also, like the British Empire it succeeded, its English has caused casualties, and in both empires they are part of this story.
This book travels across time and space from fifth-century Friesland to twenty-first-century Singapore, from the Wessex of King Alfred to the Wild West of Buffalo Bill, from the plains of India to the monasteries of Holy Island, from the Palace of Westminster to the Deep South of America. Along the way it reaches back to claw in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit: on its journey it takes from French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese and scores of other languages. English still uses the basic vocabulary of those first invaders but has added tower after tower of new words and new ideas. It has released feelings and thoughts all over the planet. It continues to reinvent new Englishes wherever it goes and shows no sign at all of slowing down.