Some man in the Daily Telegraph was going on about English not being only for the English. Dr Mario Saraceni, the man in question, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, goes further. He says: ‘It’s important the psychological umbilical cord linking English to its arbitrary centre in England is cut.’ But why should it be?
The next thing he says sounds truly deranged: ‘The origins of English are not to be found in the idea of it spreading from the centre to the periphery, but in multiple, simultaneous origins.’ Does he believe that in the fifth century some Jutes set sail from Schleswig-Holstein in clinker-built boats for Malaysia and started a little language community there?
Dr Saraceni (whose name, the OED warns us, probably does not come from the Arabic sharq, ‘sunrise’) has form. Last year he published a book called The relocation of English: shifting paradigms in a global era. The blurb says: ‘A paradigm shift is needed that would challenge the superiority of certain varieties of English, of the “native speaker” and of so-called “standard English”. Mario Saraceni shows that while these ideas have been widely accepted in academia, they are still alien in the public discourse.’ The last part may be translated as ‘Most people think this is rot.’
Of course the English need not remain the chief speakers of English. After all, there came a time when most people in Rome stopped speaking Latin. When Angles still lived in the Angeln of Jutland, St Augustine was speaking better Latin in Africa than the folks back in the capital.
Even so, I found it annoying to buy an audio course in Spanish only to find it was Latin-American Spanish. The Spanish of Cuzco is lovely, but I wanted the pure Castilian — speakers from Salamanca might be the thing.
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