The Stories of English

"David Crystal is a friend of mine. Conveniently he has said in print that English may find itself in the service of mankind forever. When I challenged him he said: “I only said it may ”, suggesting that he also thinks it may not. From my attempt to show that the world’s linguistic future may be very diverse, he’s a useful straw man to attack. But he’s an extremely estimable linguist and knows he can’t know the future any more than I can. This is an attempt to provide a standard history of English and it does that very well. It starts with the origins of Anglo-Saxon and moves on to the advent of the printing press and so forth. But what he does in addition is look at how English was not one language or one unified system – it was rather a family of systems that were growing up on the same island. That’s why he calls it ‘stories’ of English rather than ‘story.’ After each major chapter, he has a sort of counter-chapter, which tells you how the standard story is only one dimension and that different things were going on in different minority communities at every stage of the story. For example, before English got established in this country as a result of invasions of Germanic-speaking people from the Continent, we were speaking British, which is a direct ancestor of Welsh. Furthermore, we were dominated for 400 years by Roman soldiers who spoke Latin. Yet the funny thing is that English is surprisingly bare of borrowings from Welsh and Celtic languages and indeed of early borrowings from Latin, which one might have expected. Crystal draws attention to this black hole that there is in that early part of the history of English, and makes it clear to readers what a paradoxical process has created the English language. There have been different assaults on the diversity of English at different times. In the ninth century King Alfred attempted to make the particular dialect that was spoken in Wessex into a literary standard for English. It succeeded for a time but then English literature died away for various historical reasons and a new standard was then established after the age of Chaucer. When printing came in there was another reason to have a standard. Then as British commerce grew and imposed itself more widely around the world, there was stuff coming into English from all over, and another attempt – associated with the activities of Dr Johnson in the 18th century – was made to provide a central core of what was really English and what was peripheral English. It’s a complex story and the good thing about David Crystal’s books is that he does justice to this complexity without losing the thread."