There is much splendid intellectual firepower in this book, as one might have expected from watching the ITV series on which it was based, and the story is not all one of imperialistic advance. ‘The more English spreads,’ Bragg tells us, relishing the paradox, ‘the more it diversifies, the more it could tend towards fragmentation.’ Just as we reach the tantalising possibility of that single global lingua franca, therefore, local dialects all over the world might so pidginise English that the opportunity slips away from us. It would be a pity were that to happen, but even if it did it would be small comfort to French linguistic chauvinists, whose own tongue seems doomed.
Although our language is a living and constantly growing organism, of the 100 most commonly used words in English worldwide almost all come from the Old English of a thousand years ago. Winston Churchill’s speeches rarely departed from the Old English lexicon, and, according to Bragg, ‘we can have intelligent conversations in Old English, and only rarely need to swerve away from it’. Of course the fact that the United States speaks English was central to the language’s 20th-century second wind, but as the keepers of the flame through the perilous Dark Ages, Bragg shows why the Anglo-English have every reason to be proud.
Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon and Wellington is published by Weidenfeld at £8.99.
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