The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The English Language

  David Crystal was born in 1941 and spent the early years of his life in Holyhead, North Wales. He went to St Mary’s College, Liverpool, and University College London, where he read English and obtained his Ph.D. in 1966. He became lecturer in linguistics at University College, Bangor, and from 1965 to 1985 was at the University of Reading, where he was Professor of Linguistic Science for several years. His research interests are mainly in English language studies and the applications of linguistics, and in the development of book and electronic reference materials. He is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.

  David Crystal has published over ninety books, including Linguistics (Penguin, 1971; second edition, 1985), Child Language Learning and Linguistics, Introduction to Language Pathology, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Clinical Linguistics, Profiling Linguistic Disability, Who Cares About English Usage? (Penguin, 1984; new edition, 2000), Listen to Your Child (Penguin, 1986), Rediscover Grammar, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (Penguin, 1994), Language Play (Penguin, 1998), The Penguin Dictionary of Language (Penguin, 1999), Language Death and Language and the Internet. His reference books editing includes a family of general encyclopedias and he is currently editor of the New Penguin Encyclopedia. Words on Words, a collection of quotations on language and languages, written in collaboration with Hilary Crystal, appeared in 2000 (Penguin), and Shakespeare’s Words, written in collaboration with Ben Crystal, will be published in 2002 (Penguin).

  David Crystal now lives in Holyhead, where he works as a writer, lecturer and consultant on language and linguistics, and as a reference books editor. He is also a frequent broadcaster. In 1995 he was awarded the OBE for services to the English language.

  DAVID CRYSTAL

  The English Language

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in Pelican Books 1988

  Second edition published in Penguin Books 2002

  11

  Copyright © David Crystal, 1988, 2002

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192930-9

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The English Language Today

  Pidgins and Creoles

  PART I THE STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH

  2 Grammar

  Grammar and You

  3 Vocabulary

  How Large is Your Vocabulary?

  4 Pronunciation

  Received Pronunciation

  5 Spelling

  Spelling Reform

  PART II THE USES OF ENGLISH

  6 Language Variety

  Trucker Talk

  7 English at Play

  Sound Symbolism

  8 The Effect of Technology

  Texting

  9 Personal English

  Statistical Laws?

  PART III THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

  10 Old English

  Casting the Runes

  11 Middle English

  The Origins of Modern Standard English

  12 Early Modern English

  Words Then and Now

  13 English Around the World

  British and American English

  14 English Today

  Plain English

  15 English Tomorrow

  Appendix A: Some Events in English Language History

  Appendix B: A Guide to the Guides

  Appendix C: Data Sources

  Index

  List of Maps

  English in the world

  Three British accent boundaries

  Regional forms of ‘newt’

  Old English dialects

  Scandinavian parish names in England

  Family names ending in –son

  Middle English dialects

  Linguistic influences in Scotland and Ireland

  English settlements on the east coast of America

  American dialect divisions

  English-speaking immigration in Canada

  English-speaking areas in the Caribbean

  Australia and New Zealand

  South Africa

  Acknowledgements

  I am most grateful to the following sources for permission to use their material in this book: BBC Hulton Picture Library, for the picture of Noah Webster; the Bodleian library and Curators for MS Laud. Misc. 636, folio 89 verso (the Peterborough Chronicle); the British Library, for the opening page of the Beowulf manuscript, Psalm 23 from the King James Bible, pages from the Shakespeare First Folio and the page from Johnson’s Dictionary; The Fotomas Index, for the facsimile illumination of Geoffrey Chaucer, the opening lines of The Squire’s Tale, as recorded in the Ellesmere manuscript (photograph John R. Freeman) and the picture of Samuel Johnson; Orient Longman Limited, for the extract from Kamala Das, taken from The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973); Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, for the use of National Savings standard letter SB205B; the University of Leeds, for the use of the dialect map of newt from the Survey of English Dialects; Manchester University Press, for the Shaw alphabet key and extract, taken from W. Haas, ed., Alphabets for English (1969); Bengt Odenstedt, University of Umeå, for the drawing of the Undley bracteate; Picture Point, for the photograph of Ye Old Fighting Cocks; and Clement Wood, for ‘Death of a Scrabble-master’, in W. R. Espy, Another Almanac of Words at Play (Crown Publishers).

  Acknowledgement is also made to the following sources: Rot Sefti Long Niugini (Department of Information, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea); John Geipel, The Viking Legacy (David and Charles Publishers); the Sun and Star newspapers; Loreto Todd, Modern Englishes (Blackwell); the Plain English Campaign; Dr Seuss, The Cat in a Hat (Random House); F. J. Schonell, The Essential Spelling List (Macmillan); the Guardian; A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh; Ernest Wright, Gadsby. The Punch cartoons are reproduced by kind permission of Punch.

  Thanks also to Charles Barber, Tom McArthur, Bengt Odenstedt, Matti Rissanen, and Loreto Todd for information and comments received while this book was in preparation.

  Introduction

  This book is a mixture of what, in the world of travel, tourists would expect to find in a ‘guide’ or a ‘companion’. In the main, it provides a systematic account of the most import
ant characteristics of the English language, such as you would hope to receive from a professional guide. At the same time, it includes a number of special features and illustrations which are off the beaten track, and which would be more likely to come from a knowledgeable companion. In exploring a new country, both kinds of approach have their value; and so I believe it is in exploring a language. In the space available, I have been able to cover most of the topics that would be considered central, or orthodox, in any account of English; but I have devoted a great deal of space, especially in the panels and end-of-chapter features, to topics which have no other justification than that I find them fascinating. My hope is that my tastes and yours will coincide, at least some of the time.

  I have organized the book so that it can be dipped into. The chapters are numbered in sequence, but each is self-contained, and they do not have to be read in order. There is an element of the country ramble in this account of the language. Some parts can be read quickly; others invite you to pause and consider – and at times to act.

  There are three main parts. Part I (Chapters 2–5) is anatomical, dealing with the structure of the language – its grammar, vocabulary, sounds and spellings. Part II (Chapters 6–9) is physiological: it shows the language in use in a wide variety of settings. And Part III (Chapters 10–15) is historical. Here we do not have an appropriate biological term, for a language does not grow like a plant or person. Part III traces the development of English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, and its movement out of England to all parts of the globe.

  There are three appendices. Appendix A provides a chronology of the language – a résumé of the significant dates in English language history. Appendix B lists recent books about English, with some comments about their coverage or emphasis. And Appendix C gives in full any references made in the body of the text. The whole is preceded by a general chapter reviewing the current state of English world-wide.

  Introduction to the Second Edition

  For the second edition, the book has been thoroughly revised to take account of the many social and political events which have taken place since the 1980s. All statistics of English usage have had to be reworked, especially those to do with the spread of English as a global language. The remarkable technological innovations of the 1990s, notably the spread of the Internet and the emergence of the World Wide Web, have so many implications for the future character of the language that an extra chapter has been devoted to them (Chapter 8). The pace of contemporary language change is reflected in a range of modifications and additions to the original text, taking account of such developments as Estuary English, shifting dialect preferences, recent neologisms, and the new sociolinguistic situation encountered in countries (such as South Africa) which have experienced significant political change. The new edition, accordingly, gives an overview of the language as it appears at the very beginning of the new millennium, and also provides a perspective for the discussion of the issues surrounding its future growth which seem as intriguing and controversial today as they were when this book was first written.

  1

  The English Language Today

  In the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth (the first, that is, from 1558 to 1603), the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between five and seven million. At the beginning of the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth, in 1952, the figure had increased almost fiftyfold: 250 million, it was said, spoke English as a mother tongue, and a further 100 million or so had learned it as a foreign language.

  Fifty years on, the figures continue to creep up. The most recent estimates tell us that mother-tongue speakers are now over 400 million. But this total is far exceeded by the numbers of people who use English

  ‘Would you like an English “You’re too late for breakfast” or a Continental “You’re too late for breakfast”?’

  Punch Extra, 20 June 1984, p. 13

  as a second or foreign language – at least a further 500 million, according to the most conservative of estimates, and over a billion, according to radical ones. ‘Creep’, perhaps, is not quite the right word, when such statistics are introduced.

  What accounts for the scale of these increases? The size of the mother-tongue total is easy to explain. It’s the Americans. The estimated population of the USA was 284 million in 2001, of whom about 240 million spoke English as a mother tongue. The British, Irish, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, and South Africans make up most of the others – but even combined they are only some 115 million. There’s no doubt where the majority influence is. However, these figures are growing relatively slowly at present – at an average rate of about one per cent per annum. This is not where the drama lies.

  A much more intriguing question is to ask what is happening to English in countries where people don’t use it as a mother tongue. A highly complicated question, as it turns out. Finding out about the number of foreigners using English isn’t easy, and that is why there is so much variation among the estimates. There are hardly any official figures. No one knows how many foreign people have learned English to a reasonable standard of fluency – or to any standard at all, for that matter. There are a few statistics available – from the examination boards, for example – but these are only the tip of a very large iceberg.

  English as a ‘second’ language

  The iceberg is really in two parts, reflecting two kinds of language learning situation. The first part relates to those countries where English has some kind of special status – in particular, where it has been chosen as an ‘official’ language. This is the case in Ghana and Nigeria, for example, where the governments have settled on English as the main language to carry on the affairs of government, education, commerce, the media, and the legal system. In such cases, people have to learn English if they want to get on in life. They have their mother tongue to begin with – one or other of the local languages – and they start learning English, in school or in the street, at an early age. For them, in due course, English will become a language to fall back on, when their mother tongue proves to be inadequate for communication – talking to people from a different tribal background, for example, or to people from outside the country. For them, English becomes their ‘second’ language.

  Why do these countries not select a local language for official use? The problem is how to choose between the many indigenous languages, each of which represents an ethnic background to which the adherents are fiercely loyal. In Nigeria, for example, they would have to choose between Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Fulani, and other languages belonging to different ethnic groups. The number of speakers won’t decide the matter – there are almost as many first-language speakers of Yoruba as there are of Hausa, for instance. And even if one language did have a clear majority, its selection would be opposed by the combined weight of the other speakers, who would otherwise find themselves seriously disadvantaged, socially and educationally. Inter-tribal tension, leading to unrest and violence, would be a likely consequence. By giving official status to an outside language, such as English, all internal languages are placed on the same footing. Everyone is now equally disadvantaged. It is a complex decision to implement, but at least it is fair.

  To talk of ‘disadvantaged’, though, is a little misleading. From another point of view, the population is now considerably ‘advantaged’, in that they thereby come to have access to a world of science, technology, and commerce which would otherwise not easily be available to them.

  But why English? In Ghana, Nigeria, and many other countries, the choice is motivated by the weight of historical tradition from the British colonial era. A similar pattern of development can be observed in countries which were influenced by other cultures, such as the French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch. French, for example, is the official language in Chad; Portuguese in Angola. But English is an official or semi-official language, or has informal special status, in over seventy countries of the world (see p. 5) – a total which far exceeds the range of thes
e other languages.

  Does this mean that we can obtain an estimate of the world’s second-language English speakers simply by adding up the populations of all the countries involved? Unfortunately, it isn’t so easy. Most of these countries are in underdeveloped parts of the world, where educational opportunities are limited. The country may espouse English officially, but only a fraction of the population may be given an opportunity to learn it. The most dramatic example of this gap between theory and practice is India.

  In 2001 the population of India was estimated to be well over 1,000 million. English is an official language here, alongside Hindi. Several other languages have special status in their own regions, but English is the language of the legal system; it is a major language in Parliament; and it is a preferred language in the universities and in the all-India competitive exams for senior posts in such fields as the civil service and engineering. Some 3,000 English newspapers are published throughout the country. There is thus great reason to learn to use the language well. Estimates of English awareness in the general population are difficult to make, but an India Today survey in 2000 concluded that perhaps a third of the population (well over 300 million) had some competence in the language. And even if we use a very high level of educated fluency, the figures would still be between 5 and 10 per cent (50–100 million), which suggests that English language use in India is now well in excess of the English-speaking population of Britain.

  When all the estimates for second-language use around the world are added up, we reach a figure of around 400 million speakers – about as many as the total of mother-tongue users. But we have to remember that most of these countries are in parts of the world (Africa, South Asia) where the population increase is three or four times as great as that found in mother-tongue countries. If present trends continue, within a generation mother-tongue English use will have been left far behind. I shall discuss the implications of this unprecedented scenario in a later chapter (p. 276).