Literary Sampler: Essays, Book Reviews, and More...
Monthly Column by Charity Gingerich

 

Keeping a Language Alive

What Makes English Unique?

Exploring One of the 'New Englishes'
 

I. Keeping a Language Alive

When it comes to describing both the success and uniqueness of the English language, H.L. Mencken, “one of the greatest writers on English,” hits the proverbial nail on the head when he says that “a living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages [;] what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day [the language] begins to die” (quoted McCrum et al 44). When studying the history of the English language, it becomes apparent that there have been numerous attempts at “putting the gates” up, attempts made by misguided scholars (in England they reside in the House of Lords, while in the United States they are our “pop grammarians,” writing ponderous volumes on how English is going to the dogs) who view their language's “constant state of renewal” as being synonymous with erosion. These pitiable individuals seem unable or unwilling to shoot their errors of logic at the real target: the array of zoo animals parading in front of them, almost within touching distance. The truth is (and it sounds best when said in Received Pronunciation, as in “don't be silly”), English is a language of languages; it has and does come in many stripes, wearing different limbs and different kinds of fur. In short, it has never been a “single animal,” manageable, tame and subject to a single cage at the zoo. The fact that English is so diverse, unmanageable and in a state of constant change is, according to Mencken's theory, why it has survived and thrived this long and continues to do so. Though some scholars would take issue with me on what it means to “survive” and “thrive,” I would counter-argue by pointing out that A) we can read the works of Geoffrey Chaucer from Middle English (1100-1500) and still make some sense of it, and B) seven hundred and fifty million people around the world speak English.
 

II. What Makes English Unique?

Besides the fact that English is “everyone's second language” and has become our official global language, there are two specific factors that I would like to focus on that set English apart from other languages as being unique. These factors have everything to do with its origins, which in turn affect its present state and projected future. First, when looking up a word randomly in the dictionary, an English speaking person might find that the origins of the word could be anything from Greek to Spanish. The English vocabulary – which -- of the 2,700 languages of the world may be the richest vocabulary of any language (McCrum et al 10), derives eighty percent of its words from other languages. (This is the percentage given in The History of the English Language; other sources may put the number of borrowed words as high as ninety-eight percent.) The reason why the English vocabulary is so rich should not come as a great and terrible shock.  It is

precisely because its roots are so varied – Celtic, Germanic (German, Scandinavian and Dutch) and Romance (Latin, French, Spanish) --  it has words in common with virtually every language in Europe: German, Yiddish, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. In addition, almost any page of the Oxford English Dictionary or Webster's Third will turn up borrowings from Hebrew and Arabic, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Malay, Chinese, the languages of Java, Australia, Tahiti, Polynesia, West Africa and even from one of the aboriginal languages of Brazil [...] (42).

 This is perhaps the English language's most distinguishing trait. Most other languages do not have this; for example, a French or Polish person looking up a word in a French or Polish dictionary might come across some borrowed words (say, from English) but the greater percentage of their words will be of French or Polish origin.

 Secondly, what sets English apart from other languages stems from the fact that it is “such a hybrid (of Old Norse, German, Latin and Norman French) that it is peculiarly susceptible to pidginization” (41). The English language has been and is becoming such a polyglot (a word derived from the Greek poluglottos which means ‘many-tongued'), (AskOxford.com) that it is beginning to feed itself back into many of its source languages. It is because of its hybridity and the fact that it has made such an impact as a global language that we now have pidgins such as “Japlish” and “Franglais” sprouting around the world. In fact, it seems reasonable to argue that it is because of its hybridity that English has grown to be the powerful language that it is. And the fact is, “the more English-speaking the world becomes the more desirable the language becomes to all societies. English is the language of the 'media' industries – news-journalism, radio, film and television” (35). English has also become the language of unification, as is most apparent in the case of India, with its nearly two hundred native languages. However, just because English has become everyone's second language does not mean that it is remaining a singular language; quite contrarily, English is becoming more and more pluralistic “and has a life of its own in totally non-English situations” (31). Even between the two most “English” nations of world, Britain and the United States, “there are so many different expressions that America's Associated Press and Britain's Rueters news agencies have to translate English into English” (32).
 

III. Exploring one of the 'New Englishes'

To illustrate both the uniqueness of this “tongue of many tongues” and to explore the reasons why American English and British English must sometimes be translated for mutual understanding, it is necessary to look at the arrival and development of English in the New World.

American English today does not have the variety of speech that British English does; though we have southern drawls and Midwestern twangs, as we drive across our country, we are still relatively intelligible to one another. This, of course, is not so in England, where in London alone folks from different parts of the city cannot understand one another. The reason for this stems in large part back to the initial “mixing” of British-English peoples on their way over here:

The sea voyage across the stormy Atlantic provided a kind of language melting-pot in which the regional differences of speech began to intermingle. In the settlement that followed the voices of Kent and Yorkshire and Devon, as well as those of the East Anglia majority, blended together to mark the beginnings of American English (118).  

It is particularly fun to “think” in Received Pronunciation when imagining our British mother’s horror when she eventually arrived on our settled shores to check up on her “kids.” (They speak like garbled geese!) Another troublesome trait of American English was and is, that it went “backwards” and sort of “froze” in time. This is largely due to the fact that most of the colonists did not come from central England, and now “their” British English has become American speech. (Terrible, how those Yanks butcher the Queen’s English; pass me a crumpet, I’m developing an ulcer even as we speak).

This picture of the melting-pot of language on the voyage to the New World is not the only reason that American English has become so different from British English. The colonist’s faced a whole new life in this rough-tumble-land and thus had “a strange new landscape to explore and describe:” (123) words such as bluff, notch, gap, divide and clearing were added to the vocabulary to describe the landscape, sweet potato, eggplant, and squash pertained to new foods discovered and cultivated, and the names bullfrog, groundhog and garter snake were given to some of the settlers delightful cohabitants (123).

Last but not of lesser importance, the evolving English of the New World derived some very important vocabulary from their Native American neighbors. “Quite quickly, American English became enriched by what the settlers called ‘wigwam’ words” (121). Words borrowed from the Indians, though many are most likely mangled versions of what they once were, (for example askutasquash for squash) include hickory, pecan, chipmunk, hominy, pemmican and papoose (122). In all, about fifty American Indian words were eventually grafted into English, not counting, I presume, the many geographical names that have native origins (123).

Of course, we know that the “melting-pot” metaphor for language does not stop with the settlers; the American vocabulary was influenced by the men who tackled the Wild West, by our men and women fighting in World Wars I and II, and by our ever-changing technology. Not only this, in the last several hundred years America has become the home of peoples from around the world who have brought their languages with them. American-English has been enriched with Spanish, French, German African American, Scottish, Irish – and the list could go on.

When examining just a few of the changes that English has undergone since coming to the New World, it does not seem quite so ludicrous or difficult to understand why British English and American English have sharply diverged and thus need to be translated at times. Indeed, after studying the changes that English has undergone, it is amazing to me that British English and American English speakers are able to understand each other as well as they do! It is amazing that English remained somewhat “English,” and did not just become a new language altogether.

(Article II of this overview of the history of the English language will continue next month; in it I will explore the origins of the common family that gave birth to the English language as well as  the general evolution of this most colorful language).

Works Cited

McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil and William Cran. The Story of English, third revised ed. New York: Penguin, 2002.

“polyglot.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford UP. 4      Apr. 2000 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00181778>.

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