A continuation of empire by other means

Melvyn Bragg’s superb new history of the English language is told as an adventure story, and rightly so. Brought to the British Isles in the 5th century AD by Germanic warriors, ‘this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects’, until today, with 1.5 billion speakers, it is poised for global domination. Nearly strangled first by the Danes and then by the Normans, its special genius is for morphing its enemies into itself, like some monstrous sci-fi extra-terrestrial growing ever stronger by gobbling up its opponents’ tongues.

As in any great adventure story there are nail-biting moments, such as King Alfred saving the language by beating the Norsemen, or the battle for survival that Old English had to fight after the Norman Conquest, and Bragg rightly emphasises that the struggle could easily have gone the other way, with English ending up as a fringe language like Gaelic. Yet because ‘English’s most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all is its capacity to absorb others’, the tongue simply soaked up ten thousand French words into the vocabulary and survived for the three-and-a-half centuries it took before our kings spoke English again.

Now English is wreaking a horrific revenge upon its 11th-century tormentor; Europeans who speak English now outnumber those who speak French by three to one. In 1994 the French government’s attempt to outlaw ‘le weekend’, ‘les drinks’, ‘l’aftershave’ and ‘le babysitter’ on pain of hefty fines, collapsed in ignominy. Once China embraces English as its second language, we will — cue Bond villain’s hysterical cry — rule the world!

Also, as in any great adventure story, there are heroes: men such as William Caxton and his bestselling author Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Wycliffe, whose samizdat version of the Bible in English made him so unpopular with the Latin-dominated clergy that his corpse was dug up from consecrated ground.