HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

HISTORY OF GREAT BRITAIN

PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN
Neolithic period.
A major change occurred c. 4000 BC with the introduction of agriculture
by Neolithic immigrants from the coasts of western and possibly
northwestern Europe. They were pastoralists as well as tillers of the soil.
Tools were commonly of flint won by mining, but axes of volcanic rock
were also traded by prospectors exploiting distant outcrops. The dead
were buried in communal graves of two main kinds: in the west, tombs
were built out of stone and concealed under mounds of rubble; in the
stoneless eastern areas the dead were buried under long barrows
(mounds of earth), which normally contained timber structures. Other
evidence of religion comes from enclosures (e.g., Windmill Hill, Wiltshire),
which are now believed to have been centres of ritual and of seasonal
tribal feasting. From them developed, late in the 3rd millennium, more
clearly ceremonial ditch-enclosed earthworks known as henge
monuments. Some, like Durrington Walls, Wiltshire, are of great size and
enclose subsidiary timber circles. British Neolithic culture thus developed
its own individuality.
Bronze Age.
Early in the 2nd millennium or perhaps even earlier, from c. 2300 BC,
changes were introduced by the Beaker folk from the Low Countries and
the middle Rhine. These people buried their dead in individual graves,
often with the drinking vessel that gives their culture its name. The earliest
of them still used flint; later groups, however, brought a knowledge of
metallurgy and were responsible for the exploitation of gold and copper
deposits in Britain and Ireland. They may also have introduced an IndoEuropean language. Trade was dominated by the chieftains of Wessex,
whose rich graves testify to their success. Commerce was far-flung, in
one direction to Ireland and Cornwall and in the other to central Europe
and the Baltic, whence amber was imported. Amber bead spacers from
Wessex have been found in the shaft graves at Mycenae in Greece. It
was, perhaps, this prosperity that enabled the Wessex chieftains to
construct the remarkable monument of shaped sarsens (large

sandstones) known as Stonehenge III. Originally a late Neolithic henge,

Stonehenge was uniquely transformed in Beaker times with a circle of
large bluestone monoliths transported from southwest Wales.
Little is known in detail of the early and middle Bronze Age. Because of
present ignorance of domestic sites, these periods are mainly defined by
technological advances and changes in tools or weapons. In general,
the southeast of Britain continued in close contact with the continent
and the north and west with Ireland.
From about 1200 BC there is clearer evidence for agriculture in the south;
the farms consisted of circular huts in groups with small oblong fields and
stock enclosures. This type of farm became standard in Britain down to
and into the Roman period. From the 8th century onward, expansion of
continental Urnfield and Hallstatt groups brought new people (mainly the
Celts) to Britain; they came at first, perhaps, in small prospecting groups,
but soon their influence spread, and new settlements developed. Some
of the earliest hill forts in Britain were constructed in this period (e.g.,
Beacon Hill, near Ivinghoe, Buckinghamshire; or Finavon, Angus); though
formally belonging to the late Bronze Age, they usher in the succeeding
period.
Iron Age.
Knowledge of iron, introduced in the 7th century, was a merely
incidental fact: it does not signify a change of population. The centuries
700-400 BC saw a succession of small migrations, and the newcomers
mingled easily with existing inhabitants. Yet the greater availability of iron
facilitated land clearance and thus the growth of population. The
earliest ironsmiths made daggers of the Hallstatt type but of a
distinctively British form. The settlements were also of a distinctively British
type, with the traditional round house, the "Celtic" system of farming with
its small fields, and storage pits for grain. Thus Britain absorbed the
newcomers.
The century following 600 BC saw the building of many large hill forts;
these suggest the existence of powerful chieftains and the growth of
strife as increasing population created pressures on the land. By 300 BC
swords were making their appearance once more in place of daggers.

Finally, beginning in the 3rd century, a British form of La Tne Celtic art
was developed to decorate warlike equipment such as scabbards,
shields, and helmets, and eventually also bronze mirrors and even
domestic pottery. During the 2nd century the export of Cornish tin, noted
before 300 by Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek explorer, continued;
evidence of its destination is provided by the Paul (Cornwall) hoard of
north Italian silver coins. In the 1st century BC this trade was in the hands
of the Veneti of Brittany; their conquest (56 BC) by Julius Caesar, who
destroyed their fleet, seems to have put an end to it.
By 200 Britain had fully developed its insular Celtic character. The
emergence, however, of the British tribes known to Roman historians was
due to a further phase of settlement by tribesmen from Belgic Gaul. Coin
finds suggest that the earliest movements of this migration began before
the end of the 2nd century; the decisive settlements were made in the
1st century probably as a result of pressures in Gaul created by
Germanic and Roman expansion. The result was a distinctive culture in
southeast Britain (especially in Kent and north of the Thames) which
represented a later phase of the continental Celtic La Tne culture. Its
people used coins and the potter's wheel and cremated their dead, and
their better equipment enabled them to begin the exploitation of
heavier soils for agriculture.

Celts
The Celts were different groups of peoples who all spoke Celtic
languages and lived in most parts of Europe from the Balkan regions to
Ireland. Most powerful during the 4th-c BC, they probably originated in
present-day France, S Germany, and adjacent territories during the
Bronze Age. Celtic-speaking societies developed in the later first
millennium BC, expanding through armed raids into the Iberian Peninsula,
British Is, C Europe, Italy, Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania,
Thrace, and Macedonia.

They were finally repulsed by the Romans and Germanic tribes, and in
Europe withdrew into Gaul in the 1st-c BC. Celtic tradition survived most
and for longest in Ireland and Britain. They were famous for their burial
sites and hill forts, and their bronze and iron art and jewellery. Their
modern descendents are found chiefly in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
ROMAN BRITAIN
The conquest.
Julius Caesar conquered Gaul between 58 and 50 BC and invaded
Britain in 55 or 54 BC, thereby bringing the island into close contact with
the Roman world. Caesar's description of Britain at the time of his
invasions is the first coherent account extant. From about 20 BC it is
possible to distinguish two principal powers: the Catuvellauni north of the
Thames led by Tasciovanus, successor of Caesar's adversary
Cassivellaunus, and, south of the river, the kingdom of the Atrebates
ruled by Commius and his sons Tincommius, Eppillus, and Verica.
Tasciovanus was succeeded in about AD 5 by his son Cunobelinus, who,
during a long reign, established power all over the southeast, which he
ruled from Camulodunum (Colchester). Beyond these kingdoms lay the
Iceni in what is now Norfolk, the Corieltavi in the Midlands, the Dobuni
(Dobunni) in the area of Gloucestershire, and the Durotriges in that of
Dorset, all of whom issued coins and probably had Belgic rulers. Behind
these again lay further independent tribes--the Dumnonii of Devon, the
Brigantes in the north, and the Silures and Ordovices in Wales. The Belgic
and semi-Belgic tribes later formed the civilized nucleus of the Roman
province and thus contributed greatly to Roman Britain.
In the first 20 years of occupation some progress had been made in
spreading Roman civilization. Towns had been founded, the imperial cult
had been established, and merchants were busily introducing the Britons
to material benefits. It was not, however, until the Flavian period, AD 6996, that real advances were made in this field. With the occupation of
Wales by Julius Frontinus (governor from 74 to 78) and the advance into
northern Scotland by Gnaeus Julius Agricola (78-84), troops were
removed from southern Britain, and self-governing civitates,
administrative areas based for the most part on the indigenous tribes,
took over local administration. This involved a large program of

urbanization and also of education, which continued into the 2nd

century; Tacitus, in his biography of Agricola, emphasizes the
encouragement given to it. Roman conquest of Wales was complete by
78, but Agricola's invasion of Scotland failed because shortage of
manpower prevented him from completing the occupation of the whole
island. Moreover, when the British garrison was reduced (c. AD 90) by a
legion because of continental needs, it became evident that a frontier
would have to be maintained in the north. After several experiments, the
Solway-Tyne isthmus was chosen, and there the emperor Hadrian built his
stone wall (c. 122-130).
ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
the invaders and their early settlements
Although Germanic foederati, allies of Roman and postRoman authorities, had settled in England in the 4th century
AD, tribal migrations into Britain began about the middle of the 5th
century. The first arrivals, according to the 6th-century British writer Gildas,
were invited by a British king to defend his kingdom against the Picts and
Scots. A tradition reached Bede that the first mercenaries were from
three tribes--the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes--which he locates on the
Cimbric Peninsula, and by implication the coastlands of northwestern
Germany. Archaeology, however, suggests a more complex picture
showing many tribal elements, Frankish leadership in the first waves, and
Frisian contacts. Revolt by these mercenaries against their British
employers in the southeast of England led to large-scale Germanic
settlements near the coasts and along the river valleys. Their advance
was halted for a generation by native resistance, which tradition
associates with the names of Ambrosius Aurelianus and Arthur,
culminating in victory about 500 by the Britons at the Battle of Mons
Badonicus at an unidentified location. But a new Germanic drive began
about 550, and before the century had ended, the Britons had been
driven west to the borders of Dumnonia (Cornwall and Devon) and to
the Welsh Marches, while invaders were advancing west of the Pennines
and northward into Lothian.
The fate of the native British population is difficult to determine. The case
against its large-scale survival rests largely on linguistic evidence, such as

the scarcity of Romano-British words continuing into English and the use
of English even by Northumbrian peasants. The case against wholesale
extermination also rests on linguistic evidence, such as place-names and
personal names, as well as on evidence provided by urban and rural
archaeology. Certainly few Britons in England were above servile
condition. By the end of the 7th century people regarded themselves as
belonging to "the nation of the English," though divided into several
kingdoms. This sense of unity was strengthened during long periods when
all kingdoms south of the Humber acknowledged the overlordship
(called by Bede an imperium) of a single ruler, known as a bretwalda, a
word first recorded in the 9th century.
The first such overlord was Aelle of Sussex, in the late 5th century; the
second was Ceawlin of Wessex, who died in 593. The third overlord,
Aethelberht of Kent, held this power in 597 when the monk Augustine led
a mission from Rome to Kent; Kent was the first English kingdom to be
converted to Christianity. The Christian church provided another unifying
influence, overriding political divisions, although it was not until 669 that
the church in England acknowledged a single head.
The social system.
The Anglo-Saxons left England a land of villages, but the continuity of
village development is uncertain. In the 7th-8th centuries, in what is
called the "Middle Saxon shuffle," many early villages were abandoned,
and others, from which later medieval villages descended, were
founded. The oldest villages are not, as previously thought, those with
names ending in -ingas but rather those ending in -ham and -ingham.
English trading towns, whose names often end in -wich, from the Latin
vicus ("village"), developed in the Middle Saxon period, and other urban
settlements grew out of and date from the Alfredian and later defenses
against Viking attack.
The conversion to Christianity.
The conversion renewed relations with Rome and the Continent; but the
full benefit of this was delayed because much of England was converted
by the Celtic church, which had lost contact with Rome.

Augustine's mission in 597 converted Kent; but it had only temporary

success in Essex, which reverted to heathenism in 616. A mission sent
under Bishop Paulinus from Kent to Northumbria in 627 converted King
Edwin and many of his subjects in Northumbria and Lindsey. It received a
setback in 632 when Edwin was killed and Paulinus withdrew to Kent.
About 630 Archbishop Honorius of Canterbury sent a Burgundian, Felix, to
convert East Anglia, and the East Anglian church thenceforth remained
faithful to Canterbury. Soon after, the West Saxons were converted by
Birinus, who came from Rome. Meanwhile, King Oswald began to restore
Christianity in Northumbria, bringing Celtic missionaries from Iona. And it
was the Celtic church that began in 653 to spread the faith among the
Middle Angles, the Mercians, and the peoples of the Severn valley; it also
won back Essex.
The Anglo-Saxons attributed their conversion to Pope Gregory I, "the
Apostle of the English," who had sent Augustine. This may seem less than
fair to the Celtic mission. The Celtic church made a great impression by
its asceticism, fervour, and simplicity, and it had a lasting influence on
scholarship. Yet the period of Celtic dominance was only 30 years. The
decision at Whitby made possible a form of organization better fitted for
permanent needs than the looser system of the Celtic church.
The golden age of Bede.
Within a century of Augustine's landing, England was in the forefront of
scholarship. This high standard arose from a combination of influences:
that from Ireland, which had escaped the decay caused elsewhere by
the barbarian invasions, and that from the Mediterranean, which
reached England mainly through Archbishop Theodore and his
companion, the abbot Adrian. Under Theodore and Adrian, Canterbury
became a famous school, and men trained there took their learning to
other parts of England. One of these men was Aldhelm, who had been a
pupil of Maildubh (the Irish founder of Malmesbury); under Aldhelm,
Malmesbury became an influential centre of learning. Aldhelm's own
works, in Latin verse and prose, reveal a familiarity with many Latin
authors; his writings became popular among admirers of the ornate and
artificial style he had learned from his Celtic teachers. Before long a
liberal education could be had at such other West Saxon monasteries as
Nursling and Wimborne.

The finest centre of scholarship was Northumbria. There Celtic and

classical influences met: missionaries brought books from Ireland, and
many Englishmen went to Ireland to study. Other Northumbrians went
abroad, especially to Rome; among them was Benedict Biscop.
Benedict returned from Rome with Theodore (668-669), spent some time
in Canterbury, and then brought the learning acquired there to
Northumbria. He founded the monasteries at Wearmouth (674) and
Jarrow (682), where Bede spent his life. Benedict and Ceolfrith, abbot of
Jarrow, brought books from the Continent and assembled the fine library
that was available to Bede.
Bede (c. 672-735) is remembered as a great historian whose work never
lost its value; but he was also a theologian regarded throughout the
Middle Ages as second only to the Church Fathers. Nonetheless, even
though he was outstanding, he did not work in isolation. Other
Northumbrian houses--Lindisfarne, Whitby, and Ripon--produced saints'
lives, and Bede was in touch with many learned men, not only in
Northumbria; there are also signs of scholarly activity in London and in
East Anglia.
Moreover, in this period religious poetry was composed in the diction and
technique of the older secular poetry in the vernacular. Beowulf,
considered the greatest Old English poem, is sometimes assigned to this
age, but the dating is uncertain. Art flourished, with a combination of
native elements and influences from Ireland and the Mediterranean. The
Hiberno-Saxon (or Anglo-Irish) style of manuscript illumination was
evolved, its greatest example--the Lindisfarne Gospels--also showing
classical influence. Masons from Gaul and Rome built stone churches. In
Northumbria stone monuments with figure sculpture and vine-scroll
patterns were set up. Churches were equipped with precious objects-some from abroad, some of native manufacture (even in heathen times
the English had been skilled metalworkers). Manuscripts and works of art
were taken abroad to churches founded by the English missions, and
these churches, in turn, became centres of production. The great Sutton
Hoo ship burial, discovered in 1939 at the burial site of the East Anglian
royal house and perhaps the cenotaph of the bretwalda Raedwald (d.
c. 625), is further evidence of influences from abroad, revealing
important Anglo-Saxon contacts with Scandinavia, Byzantium, France,
and the Mediterranean.

ENGLAND IN THE NORMAN PERIOD

Despite, or perhaps in part because of, the political strains of this period,
these were constructive years. The economy, for which Domesday Book
is a magnificent source, was essentially agrarian, the main unit being the
manor, where the lord's land (or demesne) was worked by unfree
peasants who held their land in return for performing labour services.
Towns, notably London, flourished, and many received new privileges
based on continental practice. The church benefited from closer
connections with the Continent in many ways. One such benefit was the
arrival of new religious orders: the first Cluniac house was established at
Lewes in 1077, and the Cistercians came to England in 1129. A great
many Augustinian houses were founded in the first part of the 12th
century. Imposing buildings such as Durham Cathedral and the Tower of
London give eloquent testimony to the architectural achievement of the
Normans, while the illuminated Winchester Bible and Psalter, made for
Henry of Blois, bear witness to the artistic excellence of the age.

THE MIDDLE AGES

To understand the development and the history of the English language,
we must first situate ourselves in the context of the time it originated. The
Middle Ages, the period in European history from the collapse of Roman
civilization in the 5th century AD to the period of the Renaissance
(variously interpreted as beginning in the 13th, 14th, or 15th century,
depending on the region of Europe and on other factors). The term and
its conventional meaning were introduced by Italian humanists with
invidious intent; the humanists were engaged in a revival of classical
learning and culture, and the notion of a thousand-year period of
darkness and ignorance separating them from the ancient Greek and
Roman world served to highlight the humanists' own work and ideals. In a
sense, the humanists invented the Middle Ages in order to distinguish
themselves from it. The Middle Ages nonetheless provided the foundation
for the transformations of the humanists' own Renaissance.
The sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in AD 410 had enormous impact
on the political structure and social climate of the Western world, for the
Roman Empire had provided the basis of social cohesion for most of
Europe. Although the Germanic tribes that forcibly migrated into

10

southern and western Europe in the 5th century were ultimately

converted to Christianity, they retained many of their customs and ways
of life; the changes in forms of social organization they introduced
rendered centralized government and cultural unity impossible. Many of
the improvements in the quality of life introduced during the Roman
Empire, such as a relatively efficient agriculture, extensive road networks,
water-supply systems, and shipping routes, decayed substantially, as did
artistic and scholarly endeavours. This decline persisted throughout the
period of time sometimes called the Dark Ages (also called Late
Antiquity, or the Early Middle Ages), from the fall of Rome to about the
year 1000, with a brief hiatus during the flowering of the Carolingian court
established by Charlemagne. Apart from that interlude, no large
kingdom or other political structure arose in Europe to provide stability.
The only force capable of providing a basis for social unity was the
Roman Catholic church. The Middle Ages therefore present the
confusing and often contradictory picture of a society attempting to
structure itself politically on a spiritual basis. This attempt came to a
definitive end with the rise of artistic, commercial, and other activities
anchored firmly in the secular world in the period just preceding the
Renaissance.
After the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the idea arose of Europe as
one large church-state, called Christendom. Christendom was thought
to consist of two distinct groups of functionaries, the sacerdotium, or
ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the imperium, or secular leaders. In theory
these two groups complemented each other, attending to people's
spiritual and temporal needs, respectively. Supreme authority was
wielded by the pope in the first of these areas and by the emperor in the
second. In practice the two institutions were constantly sparring,
disagreeing, or openly warring with each other. The emperors often tried
to regulate church activities by claiming the right to appoint church
officials and to intervene in doctrinal matters. The church, in turn, not only
owned cities and armies but often attempted to regulate affairs of state.
During the 12th century a cultural and economic revival took place;
many historians trace the origins of the Renaissance to this time. The
balance of economic power slowly began to shift from the region of the
eastern Mediterranean to western Europe. The Gothic style developed in
art and architecture. Towns began to flourish, travel and communication

11

became faster, safer, and easier, and merchant classes began to

develop. Agricultural developments were one reason for these
developments; during the 12th century the cultivation of beans made a
balanced diet available to all social classes for the first time in history. The
population therefore rapidly expanded, a factor that eventually led to
the breakup of the old feudal structures.
The 13th century was the apex of medieval civilization. The classic
formulations of Gothic architecture and sculpture were achieved. Many
different kinds of social units proliferated, including guilds, associations,
civic councils, and monastic chapters, each eager to obtain some
measure of autonomy. The crucial legal concept of representation
developed, resulting in the political assembly whose members had plena
potestas--full power--to make decisions binding upon the communities
that had selected them. Intellectual life, dominated by the Roman
Catholic church, culminated in the philosophical method of
Scholasticism, whose preeminent exponent, St. Thomas Aquinas,
achieved in his writings on Aristotle and the Church Fathers one of the
greatest syntheses in Western intellectual history.
The breakup of feudal structures, the strengthening of city-states in Italy,
and the emergence of national monarchies in Spain, France, and
England, as well as such cultural developments as the rise of secular
education, culminated in the birth of a self-consciously new age with a
new spirit, one that looked all the way back to classical learning for its
inspiration and that came to be known as the Renaissance.

12

ORIGINS
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
Indo-European is the name of a family of languages that by
1000 BC were spoken over most of Europe and in much of
Southwest and South Asia; since the second half of the 15th century the
Indo-European languages have spread to most other inhabited parts of
the world. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite
and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of IndoEuropean but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together;
thus, Indo-Hittite has been used for a family consisting of Indo-European
proper plus Anatolian. As long as this view is neither definitively proved
nor disproved, it is convenient to keep the traditional use of the term
Indo-European.
Overview of the language family
LANGUAGES OF THE FAMILY
The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly
into the 10 main branches listed below; these are arranged according to
the age of their oldest sizable texts.
Anatolian.
Now extinct, Anatolian was spoken during the 1st and 2nd millennia BC in
what is presently Asian Turkey and northern Syria. The oldest Hittite texts
date from the 17th century BC, the latest from approximately 1200 BC.
Indo-Iranian
Indo-Iranian comprises two main subbranches, Indo-Aryan (Indic) and
Iranian. Indo-Aryan languages have been spoken in what is now
northern and central India and Pakistan since before 1000 BC. Aside from
a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the
2nd millennium BC, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the
Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda (Rgveda), the oldest of the sacred
scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 BC. Examples of modern
Indo-Aryan languages are Hindi, Bengali, Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka),
and the many dialects of Romany, the language of the Gypsies (Rom).

13

Iranian languages were spoken in the 1st millennium BC in present-day

Iran and Afghanistan and also in the steppes to the north, from modern
Hungary to East (Chinese) Turkistan. The only well-known ancient varieties
of Iranian languages are Avestan, the sacred language of the
Zoroastrians (Parsis), and Old Persian, the official language of Darius I
(ruled 522-486 BC) and Xerxes I (486-465 BC) and their successors. Among
the modern Iranian languages are Persian (Farsi), Pashto (Afghan),
Kurdish, and Ossetic.
Greek.
Greek, despite its numerous dialects, has been a single language
throughout its history. It has been spoken in Greece since at least 1600
BC, and, in all probability, since the end of the 3rd millennium. The
earliest texts are the Linear B tablets, some of which may date from as far
back as 1400 BC (the date is disputed), and some of which certainly
date to 1200 BC. This material, very sparse and difficult to interpret, was
not identified as Greek until 1952. The Homeric epics--the Iliad and the
Odyssey--probably dating from the 8th century BC, are the oldest texts of
any bulk.
Italic.
The principal language of the Italic group is Latin, originally the speech of
the city of Rome and the ancestor of the modern Romance languages:
Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on. The earliest
Latin inscriptions apparently date from the 6th century BC, with literature
beginning in the 3rd century. Scholars are not in agreement as to how
many other ancient languages of Italy and Sicily belong in the same
branch as Latin.

14

Germanic.
In the middle of the 1st millennium BC, Germanic tribes lived in southern
Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their expansions and migrations
from the 2nd century BC onward are largely recorded in history. The
oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the
4th century AD. Other languages include English, German, Dutch,
Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.
Armenian.
Armenian, like Greek, is a single language. Speakers of Armenian are
recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia
as early as the 6th century BC, but the oldest Armenian texts date from
the 5th century AD.
Tocharian.
The Tocharian languages, now extinct, were spoken in the Tarim Basin (in
present-day northwestern China) during the 1st millennium AD. Two
distinct languages are known, labeled A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian)
and B (West Tocharian, or Kuchean). One group of travel permits for
caravans can be dated to the early 7th century, and it appears that
other texts date from the same or from neighbouring centuries. These
languages became known to scholars only in the first decade of the 20th
century; they have been less important for Indo-European studies than
has Hittite, partly because their testimony about the Indo-European
parent language is obscured by 2,000 more years of change and partly
because Tocharian testimony fits fairly well with that of the previously
known non-Anatolian languages.
Celtic.
Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Christian
era over a wide area of Europe, from Spain and Britain to the Balkans,
with one group (the Galatians) even in Asia Minor. Very little of the Celtic
of that time and the ensuing centuries has survived, and this branch is
known almost entirely from the Insular Celtic languages--Irish, Welsh, and
others--spoken in and near the British Isles, as recorded from the 8th
century AD onward.
Balto-Slavic.

15

At the beginning of the Christian Era, Baltic and Slavic tribes occupied a
large area of eastern Europe, east of the Germanic tribes and north of
the Iranians, including much of present-day Poland and what was
formerly the western Soviet Union--namely, Belarus, Ukraine, and
westernmost Russia. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small,
perhaps centred in what is now southern Poland. But in the 5th century
AD the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of the 20th
century the Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of eastern
Europe and northern Asia. The Baltic-speaking area, however,
contracted, and by the end of the 20th century Baltic languages were
confined to Lithuania and Latvia.
Albanian.
Albanian, the language of the present-day republic of Albania, is known
from the 15th century AD. It presumably continues one of the very poorly
attested ancient Indo-European languages of the Balkan Peninsula, but
which one is not clear.
In addition to the principal branches just listed, there are several poorly
documented extinct languages of which enough is known to be sure
that they were Indo-European and that they did not belong in any of the
groups enumerated above (e.g., Phrygian, Macedonian). Of a few, too
little is known to be sure whether they were Indo-European or not (e.g.,
Ligurian).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE
ENGLISH
Angle-ish belonging to the Angles
Engl- Angles -ish belonging to
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
BROTHER
broeder (Dutch), Bruder (German), phrater (Greek), brat (Russian),
brthair (Irish), bhratar (Sanskrit)

16

the language was brought to Britain by Germanic tribes, the Angles,

Saxons, and Jutes, influenced by Latin and Greek when St Augustine
converted England to Christianity, enriched by the Danes, and finally
transformed by the French-speaking Normans

The true Britons spoke Celtic. Celtic languages spoken

today include Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic, all found in Great Britain
and Breton, the native language of Brittany, on the northwest coast of
France.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The history of the English language begins with the migration of the Jutes,
Angles, and Saxons from Germany and Denmark to Britain in the 5th and
6th centuries. Their Anglo-Saxon language is known as Old English. The
formation of separate kingdoms in Britain to some extent coincided with
the development of the Old English dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian,
West Saxon, and Kentish. Northumbrian was in a position of cultural
superiority until the destructive Viking raids of the 9th century caused
cultural leadership to pass to the West Saxon kingdom of Wessex.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 set in motion the transition to Middle
English. For the first century after the Conquest, a vast number of
loanwords entered the English language from the dialects of northern
France. The Conquest also served to place all four Old English dialects on
the same cultural level and to allow them to develop independently. So
West Saxon lost its supremacy, and the centre of culture gradually shifted
to London. During this Middle English period the Northumbrian dialect
split into Scottish and Northern, and Mercian became East and West
Midland. Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was the adoption
of the Carolingian script, then in use on the European continent, and
changes in spelling.

17

Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following

stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and
Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and
the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking
invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Statute of
Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in
English); the setting up of Caxton's printing press at Westminster in 1476;
the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of
the King James Bible in 1611; the completion of Johnson's Dictionary of
1755; and the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th
century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.
OLD ENGLISH
Old English language, also called ANGLO-SAXON, language spoken and
written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and
Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of
West Germanic languages.
Four dialects of the Old English language are known: Northumbrian in
northern England and southeastern Scotland; Mercian in central
England; Kentish in southeastern England; and West Saxon in southern
and southwestern England. Mercian and Northumbrian are often classed
together as the Anglian dialects. Most extant Old English writings are in
the West Saxon dialect; the first great period of literary activity occurred
during the reign of King Alfred the Great in the 9th century.
In contrast to Modern English, Old English had three genders (masculine,
feminine, neuter) in the noun and adjective, and nouns, pronouns, and
adjectives were inflected for case. Noun and adjective paradigms
contained four cases--nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative-while pronouns also had forms for the instrumental case. Old English had
a greater proportion of strong verbs (sometimes called irregular verbs in
contemporary grammars) than does Modern English. Many verbs that
were strong in Old English are weak (regular) verbs in Modern English
(e.g., Old English helpan, present infinitive of the verb help; healp, past
singular; hulpon, past plural; holpen, past participle versus Modern English
help, helped, helped, helped, respectively).

18

MIDDLE ENGLISH
Middle English language, the vernacular spoken and written in England
from about 1100 to about 1500, the descendant of the Old English
language and the ancestor of Modern English.
The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early
Middle English, from about 1100 to about 1250, during which the Old
English system of writing was still in use; (2) the Central Middle English
period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the
gradual formation of literary dialects, the use of an orthography greatly
influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation
of final unaccented -e, and the borrowing of large numbers of AngloNorman words; the period was especially marked by the rise of the
London dialect, in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey
Chaucer; and (3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500,
which was marked by the spread of the London literary dialect and the
gradual cleavage between the Scottish dialect and the other northern
dialects. During this period the basic lines of inflection as they appear in
Modern English were first established. Among the chief characteristic
differences between Old and Middle English were the substitution of
natural gender in Middle English for grammatical gender and the loss of
the old system of declensions in the noun and adjective and, largely, in
the pronoun.
The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large groups:
(1) Southern (subdivided into Southeastern, or Kentish, and
Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of the River Thames; (2)
Midland (corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old
English times) in the area from the Thames to southern South Yorkshire
and northern Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish Lowlands,
Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham, northern Lancashire, and most of
Humberside and West and North Yorkshire.
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
The transition from Middle to Modern English started at the beginning of
the 15th century. This century witnessed three important developments:

19

the rise of London English, the invention of printing, and the spread of
new learning. The Renaissance in England produced many more scholars
who were knowledgeable in foreign languages, especially Greek and
Classical Latin. Their liberal attitude toward language made possible the
introduction of a great number of words into English. Scholars generally
date the beginning of the Modern English period at 1500. The language
was subsequently standardized through the work of grammarians and
the publication of dictionaries, and its vocabulary underwent another
vast expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries to accommodate
developments in the sciences and technology.
English language, language that originated in England and is now widely
spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States,
the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and
various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries
in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English is a member of the
western group of the Germanic languages (itself part of the IndoEuropean language family) and is closely related to Frisian, German, and
Netherlandic (Dutch and Flemish).
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
In the 16th century, English was the mother tongue of only a few million
people living in England, but owing to that nation's colonization of other
parts of the globe and other historical factors, English was the native
language of more than 350 million people by the late 20th century. It is
thus the mother tongue of more people than any other language
except Mandarin Chinese. English is the most widely taught foreign
language and is also the most widely used second language--i.e., one
that two people communicate in when they cannot understand each
other's native speech. It became the international language of scientific
and technical discourse in the 20th century and was also widely
adopted for use in business and diplomacy. In the entire world, one
person in seven speaks English as either a primary or secondary
language.

20

English is an analytic (i.e., relatively un inflected) language, whereas

Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most European, Iranian,
and North Indian languages, is synthetic, or inflected. (Inflections are
changes in the form of words to indicate such distinctions as tense,
person, number, and gender.) Over thousands of years, English has lost
most of its inflections, while other European languages have retained
more of theirs. Indeed, English is the only European language in which
adjectives have no distinctive endings, aside from determiners and
endings denoting degrees of comparison.
Another characteristic is flexibility of function. This means that one word
can function as various parts of speech in different contexts. For
example, the word "book" can be an adjective in "book review," a noun
in "read a book," or a verb in "book a room." Because other European
languages retain more inflectional endings than does English, they
almost never have this characteristic. A third feature, openness of
vocabulary, allows English to admit words freely from other languages
and to create compounds and derivatives.
In England, British Received Pronunciation (RP) is the usual speech of
educated people. In the United States, Inland Northern (popularly known
as General American) is commonly used. In both countries, however,
other pronunciations are acceptable.
British Received Pronunciation and American Inland Northern show
several divergences: (1) After some vowels American has a
semiconsonantal glide. (2) The vowel in "cod," "box," and "dock" is
pronounced like "aw" in British and a sound similar to "ah" in American. (3)
The vowel in "but," "cut," and "rung," is central in American but is fronted
in British. (4) The vowels in the American "bath" and "bad" and in the
British "bad" are all pronounced the same, but the vowel in the British
"bath" is pronounced like "ah," since it is before one of the fricatives s, f, or
th (as in "thin"). (5) When a high back vowel is preceded by t, d, or n in
British, a glide (consonantal y) is inserted between them (e.g., "tulip,"
"news"); in American the glide is omitted.
The 24 consonantal sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g;
the fricatives f, v, th (as in "thin"), th (as in "then"), s, z, sh (as in "ship"), zh
(as in "azure"), and h; two affricatives, ch (as in "church") and j (as in

21

"jam"); the nasals m, n, and ng (as in "young"); the lateral l; the vibrant or
retroflex r; and the semivowels y and w. American and British consonants
have the same pronunciation with two exceptions: (1) When r occurs
after a vowel, it is dropped in British but pronounced in American. (2) A t
between two vowels is pronounced like t in "top" in British, but in
American the sound is close to that of a d.
English is a strongly stressed language, with four degrees of stress:
primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak. A change in stress can change
the meaning of a sentence or a phrase. Although in comparison with
other languages English stress is less predictable, there is a tendency
toward antepenultimate (third syllable from the last) primary stress. This is
apparent in such five-syllable words as equanmity, longitdinal, and
notorety. French stress is often sustained in borrowed words, e.g., bizrre,
critque, and hotl.
Pitch, or musical tone, may be falling, rising, or falling-rising. Word tone,
which is also called pitch, can influence the meaning of a word.
Sentence tone is called intonation and is especially important at the end
of a sentence. There are three important end-of-sentence intonations:
falling, rising, and falling-rising. The falling intonation is used in completed
statements, commands, and some questions calling for "yes" or "no"
answers. Rising intonation is used in statements made with some
reservation, in polite requests, and in certain questions answerable by
"yes" or "no." The third type of intonation, first falling and then rising pitch,
is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts. American
intonation is less singsong and stays in a narrower range than does British.
The words of the English language can be divided according to their
function or form into roughly eight categories, or parts of speech: nouns,
pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and
interjections. Modern English nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected,
but adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are
not. Most English nouns have the plural inflection (-e)s, though some
remain unchanged (e.g., deer). Five of the seven personal pronouns
have separate forms for subject and object. English verbs are not
complex. Regular or weak verbs have only four forms, strong verbs have
five, and "to be" has eight. Some verbs ending in t or d have only three
forms.

22

Besides employing inflection, English exhibits two other main

morphological (structural) processes-- affixation and composition--and
two subsidiary ones--back-formation and blend. Affixes, word elements
attached to a word, may either precede as prefixes (pre-, dis-) or follow
as suffixes (-able, -er). They can be native (over-, -ness), Greek (hyper-),
or Latin (-ment). English makes varied use of affixes; often, many different
ones have the same meaning, or the same one has many meanings.
Suffixes are attached more closely to the stem than are prefixes and
often remain permanent.
Composition, or compounding, describes putting two free forms together
to form a new word. The new word can differ from the previous forms in
phonology, stress, and juncture. Five types of compounds are defined by
describing the relationship of the free forms to each other: (1) a
compound in which the first component noun is attributive and modifies
the second noun (e.g., cloverleaf, beehive, vineyard); (2) one made up
of a noun plus an agent noun, itself consisting of a verb-plus-agent suffix
(e.g., icebreaker, landowner, timekeeper); (3) a verb plus an object
(e.g., pastime, scarecrow, daredevil); (4) an attributive adjective plus a
noun (e.g., bluebell, grandson, shorthand); and (5) a noun and a present
participle (e.g., fact-finding, heartrending, life-giving).
Back-formation, the reverse of affixation, is the analogical formation of a
new word falsely assumed to be its derivation. The verbs "to edit" and "to
act" have been formed from the nouns "editor" and "actor," respectively.
Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as "bash" from "bang"
and "smash," and (2) telescoped forms, called portmanteau words, such
as "motorcade" from "motor cavalcade."
In English syntax, the main device for indicating the relationship between
words is word order. In the sentence "The girl loves the boy," the subject is
in initial position, and the object follows the verb; transposing the order of
"boy" and "girl" would change the meaning. In contrast to this system,
most other languages use inflections to indicate grammatical
relationships. In puerum puella amat, which is the Latin equivalent of "The
girl loves the boy," the words can be given in any order (for example,
amat puella puerum) because the -um ending on the form for "boy"
(puerum) indicates the object of the verb regardless of its position in the
sentence.

23

English sentences generally start with the subject first, followed by the
verb and then by the object. Adjectives or other single words that modify
nouns are placed before the noun, while whole phrases acting as
modifiers are usually placed after the noun. Adverbs are normally more
mobile than adjectives, and they can occur either before or after the
verb they modify. As their etymology implies, prepositions usually
precede nouns, but there are a few exceptions, e.g., "the whole world
over." Because of the laxity of syntactic principles, English is a very easy
language to speak poorly.
English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world, chiefly
because of its propensity for borrowing and because the Norman
Conquest of England in the 11th century introduced vast numbers of
French words into the language. The vocabulary of Modern English is thus
approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half
Romance or Italic (French and Latin), with copious importations from
Greek in science and borrowings from many other languages. Almost all
basic concepts and things come from Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, as do
most personal pronouns, all auxiliary verbs, most simple prepositions, all
conjunctions, and almost all numbers. Many common nouns, adjectives,
and verbs are of Scandinavian origin, a fact due to the Scandinavian
invasions of Britain. The English language owes a great debt to French,
which gave it many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine, politics,
law, society, literature, and art. Comparison between French and English
synonyms reveals the former to be more intellectual and abstract, and
the latter more human and concrete. Many of the Greek compounds
and derivatives in English have Latin equivalents with either similar or
considerably different meanings.
The English adopted the 23-letter Latin alphabet, to which they added
the letters W, J, and V. For the most part, English spelling is based on that
of the 15th century. Pronunciation, however, has changed greatly since
then. During the 17th and 18th centuries, fixed spellings were adopted,
although there have been a few changes since that time. Numerous
attempts have been made to reform English spelling, most of them
unsuccessful.

24

Orthography.
The Latin alphabet originally had 20 letters, the present English alphabet
minus J, K, V, W, Y, and Z. The Romans themselves added K for use in
abbreviations and Y and Z in words transcribed from Greek. After its
adoption by the English, this 23-letter alphabet developed W as a
ligatured doubling of U and later J and V as consonantal variants of I
and U. The resultant alphabet of 26 letters has both uppercase, or
capital, and lowercase, or small, letters.
English spelling is based for the most part on that of the 15th century, but
pronunciation has changed considerably since then, especially that of
long vowels and diphthongs. The extensive change in the pronunciation
of vowels, known as the Great Vowel Shift, affected all of Geoffrey
Chaucer's seven long vowels, and for centuries spelling remained untidy.
If the meaning of the message was clear, the spelling of individual words
seemed unimportant. In the 17th century during the English Civil War,
compositors adopted fixed spellings for practical reasons, and in the
order-loving 18th century uniformity became more and more
fashionable. Since Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
(1755), orthography has remained fairly stable. Numerous tacit changes,
such as "music" for "musick" (c. 1880) and "fantasy" for "phantasy" (c.
1920), have been accepted, but spelling has nevertheless continued to
be in part unphonetic. Attempts have been made at reform. Indeed,
every century has had its reformers since the 13th, when an Augustinian
canon named Orm devised his own method of differentiating short
vowels from long by doubling the succeeding consonants or, when this
was not feasible, by marking short vowels with a superimposed breve
mark (). William Caxton, who set up his wooden printing press at
Westminster in 1476, was much concerned with spelling problems
throughout his working life. Noah Webster produced his Spelling Book, in
1783, as a precursor to the first edition (1828) of his American Dictionary
of the English Language. The 20th century has produced many zealous
reformers. Three systems, supplementary to traditional spelling, are
actually in use for different purposes: (1) the Initial Teaching (Augmented
Roman) Alphabet (ITA) of 44 letters used by educationists in the teaching
of children under seven; (2) the Shaw alphabet of 48 letters, designed in
implementation of the will of George Bernard Shaw; and (3) the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), constructed on the basis of one

25

symbol for one individual sound and used by many trained linguists.
Countless other systems have been worked out from time to time, of
which R.E. Zachrisson's "Anglic" (1930) and Axel Wijk's Regularized English
(1959) may be the best.
Meanwhile, the great publishing houses continue unperturbed because
drastic reform remains impracticable, undesirable, and unlikely. This is
because there is no longer one criterion of correct pronunciation but
several standards throughout the world; regional standards are
themselves not static, but changing with each new generation; and, if
spelling were changed drastically, all the books in English in the world's
public and private libraries would become inaccessible to readers
without special study.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately half Germanic (Old
English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin),
with copious and increasing importations from Greek in science and
technology and with considerable borrowings from Dutch, Low German,
Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and many other languages. Names of
basic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon:
heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, beginning and end,
day and night, month and year, heat and cold, way and path, meadow
and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as do all the
ordinal numerals except "second" (Old English other, which still retains its
older meaning in "every other day"). "Second" comes from Latin
secundus "following," through French second, related to Latin sequi "to
follow," as in English "sequence." From Old English come all the personal
pronouns (except "they," "their," and "them," which are from
Scandinavian), the auxiliary verbs (except the marginal "used," which is
from French), most simple prepositions, and all conjunctions.
Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English
or Scandinavian: father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife;
ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter; cliff, dale. Many verbs would
also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs--bring, come, get, hear,
meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full
and wise; the colour names gray, green, and white; the disjunctive
possessives mine and thine (but not ours and yours); the terms north and

26

west (but not south and east); and the prepositions over and under. Just
a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in current speech: no
and nay, yea and ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., to bring up) and raise, shirt
and skirt (both related to the adjective short), less and loose. From
Scandinavian, "law" was borrowed early, whence "bylaw," meaning
"village law," and "outlaw," meaning "man outside the law." "Husband"
(hus-bondi) meant "householder," whether single or married, whereas
"fellow" (fe-lagi) meant one who "lays fee" or shares property with
another, and so "partner, shareholder." From Scandinavian come the
common nouns axle (tree), band, birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg, gait,
gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill, sky, snare, thrift,
and window; the adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten,
rugged, sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong; and many verbs, including call,
cast, clasp, clip, crave, die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp, glitter, life,
rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint, thrive, thrust, and want.
The debt of the English language to French is large. The terms president,
representative, legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all
French. So, too, are duke, marquis, viscount, and baron; but king, queen,
lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City, village, court, palace, manor,
mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town, borough, hall,
house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between English
and French synonyms shows that the former are more human and
concrete, the latter more intellectual and abstract; e.g., the terms
freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love and
affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and
mendacity. The superiority of French cooking is duly recognized by the
adoption of such culinary terms as boil, broil, fry, grill, roast, souse, and
toast. "Breakfast" is English, but "dinner" and "supper" are French. "Hunt" is
English, but "chase," "quarry," "scent," and "track" are French. Craftsmen
bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller,
shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright, and weaver, or webber. Names of
skilled artisans, however, are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher,
joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and tailor. Many terms relating to dress
and fashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and diplomacy, drama and
literature, art and ballet come from French.
In the spheres of science and technology many terms come from
Classical Greek through French or directly from Greek. Pioneers in

27

research and development now regard Greek as a kind of inexhaustible

quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By prefixing
the Greek adverb tele "far away, distant" to the existing compound
photography, "light writing," they create the precise term
"telephotography" to denote the photographing of distant objects by
means of a special lens. By inserting the prefix micro- "small" into this
same compound, they make the new term "photomicrography,"
denoting the electronic photographing of bacteria and viruses. Such
neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have been unintelligible to Plato
and Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have Latin
equivalents with slight or considerable differentiations in meaning
At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as
"metamorphosis" and "transformation," are sufficiently synonymous to
make one or the other redundant. In fact, however, "metamorphosis" is
more technical and therefore more restricted than "transformation." In
mythology it signifies a magical shape changing; in nature it denotes a
postembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a frog, a
cocoon into a silkworm, or a chrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on
the other hand, means any kind of change from one state to another.
Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made
homes in East Anglia, Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech.
For centuries a form of Low German was used by seafaring men in North
Sea ports. Old nautical terms still in use include buoy, deck, dock,
freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in New
Amsterdam (later New York) and adjacent settlements gave the words
boss, cookie, dope, snoop, and waffle to American speech. The Dutch in
Cape Province gave the terms apartheid, commandeer, commando,
spoor, and trek to South African speech.
The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the
18th and 19th centuries it lay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy
and in abstractions relating to literature, philosophy, and psychology. In
the 20th century this contribution has sometimes been indirect. "Unclear"
and "meaningful" echoed German unklar and bedeutungsvoll, or
sinnvoll. "Ring road" (a British term applied to roads encircling cities or
parts of cities) translated Ringstrasse; "round trip," Rundfahrt; and "the turn
of the century," die Jahrhundertwende. The terms "classless society,"

28

"inferiority complex," and "wishful thinking" echoed die klassenlse

Gesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das Wunschdenken.
Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as
the language of music. The names of voices, parts, performers,
instruments, forms of composition, and technical directions are all Italian.
Many of the latter--allegro, andante, cantabile, crescendo, diminuendo,
legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato--are also
used metaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor,
cupola, grotto, pedestal, pergola, piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are
accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto, extravaganza, stanza, and
many more are used.
From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar,
galleon, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla,
some of these loanwords going back to the 16th century, when sea dogs
encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of animals and
plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish:
"potato" through Spanish patata from Taino batata, and "tomato"
through Spanish tomate from Nahuatl tomatl. Other words have entered
from Latin America by way of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and
California; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso, mustang,
pueblo, and rodeo. Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza,
originally denoting "goodness," came through miners' slang to mean
"spectacular windfall, prosperity"; maana, "tomorrow," acquired an
undertone of mysterious unpredictability.
From Arabic through European Spanish, through French from Spanish,
through Latin, or occasionally through Greek, English has obtained the
terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, alkali, almanac, arsenal,
assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir, naphtha, sugar,
syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has recently
borrowed the term loofah (also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by
way of Vulgate Latin, come the terms amen, cherub, hallelujah, manna,
messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph; jubilee, leviathan, and
shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher, and kibbutz
English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other
languages, acquiring them sometimes directly and sometimes by

29

devious routes. Each word has its own history. The following lists indicate
the origins of a number of English words: Welsh--flannel, coracle,
cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod; Cornish--gull, brill, dolmen; Gaelic and
Irish--shamrock, brogue, leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney,
hooligan, clan, claymore, bog, plaid, slogan, sporran, cairn, whisky,
pibroch; Breton--menhir; Norwegian--ski, ombudsman; Finnish--sauna;
Russian--kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka,
samovar, tundra (from Sami), troika, pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik,
intelligentsia (from Latin through Polish), borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz,
salyut, lunokhod; Polish--mazurka; Czech--robot; Hungarian--goulash,
paprika; Portuguese--marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port
(wine), dodo; Basque--bizarre; Turkish--janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk,
caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh; Hindi--nabob, guru, sahib,
maharajah, mahatma, pundit, punch (drink), juggernaut, cushy, jungle,
thug, cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka, gymkhana, mantra,
loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo; Persian--paradise, divan, purdah, lilac,
bazaar, shah, caravan, chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki; Tamil-pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny; Chinese--tea (Amoy), sampan;
Japanese--shogun, kimono, mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang, judo,
jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai, tsunami, satsuma, No (the dance
drama), karate, Kabuki; Malay--ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck,
orangutan, compound (fenced area), raffia; Polynesian--taboo, tattoo;
Hawaiian--ukulele; African languages--chimpanzee, goober, mumbo
jumbo, voodoo; Inuit--kayak, igloo, anorak; Yupik--mukluk; Algonquian-totem; Nahuatl--mescal; languages of the Caribbean--hammock,
hurricane, tobacco, maize, iguana; Aboriginal Australian--kangaroo,
corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, paramatta, budgerigar.

VARIETIES OF ENGLISH
British English.
The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes the speech of
educated people living in London and the southeast of England and of
other people elsewhere who speak in this way. If the qualifier educated
be assumed, RP is then a regional (geographical) dialect, as contrasted
with London Cockney, which is a class (social) dialect. RP is not
intrinsically superior to other varieties of English; it is itself only one
particular regional dialect that has, through the accidents of history,

30

achieved more extensive use than others. Although acquiring its unique
status without the aid of any established authority, it may have been
fostered by the public schools (Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so
on) and the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Other varieties
of English are well preserved in spite of the levelling influences of film,
television, and radio. In the Northern dialect RP /a:/ (the first vowel sound
in "father") is still pronounced // (a sound like the a in "fat") in words
such as laugh, fast, and path; this pronunciation has been carried across
the Atlantic.
English dialects. In parts of Northumberland, RP "it" is still pronounced "hit,"
as in Old English. In various Northern dialects the definite article "the" is
heard as t, th, or d. In those dialects in which it becomes both t and th, t
is used before consonants and th before vowels. Thus, one hears "t'book"
but "th'apple." When, however, the definite article is reduced to t and
the following word begins with t or d, as in "t'tail" or "t'dog," it is replaced
by a slight pause as in the RP articulation of the first t in "hat trick." The RP
/t/, the sound of the ch in "church," becomes k, as in "thack," ("thatch,
roof") and "kirk" ("church"). In many Northern dialects strong verbs retain
the old past-tense singular forms band, brak, fand, spak for RP forms
bound, broke, found, and spoke. Strong verbs also retain the past
participle inflection -en as in "comen," "shutten," "sitten," and "getten" or
"gotten" for RP "come," "shut," "sat," and "got."
In some Midland dialects the diphthongs in "throat" and "stone" have
been kept apart, whereas in RP they have fallen together. In Cheshire,
Derby, Stafford, and Warwick, RP "singing" is pronounced with a g
sounded after the velar nasal sound (as in RP "finger"). In Norfolk one
hears "skellington" and "solintary" for "skeleton" and "solitary," showing an
intrusive n just as does "messenger" in RP from French messager,
"passenger" from French passager, and "nightingale" from Old English
nihtegala. Other East Anglian words show consonantal metathesis
(switch position), as in "singify," and substitution of one liquid or nasal for
another, as in "chimbly" for "chimney," and "synnable" for "syllable."
"Hantle" for "handful" shows syncope (disappearance) of an unstressed
vowel, partial assimilation of d to t before voiceless f, and subsequent loss
of f in a triple consonant group.

31

In South Western dialects, initial f and s are often voiced, becoming v

and z. Two words with initial v have found their way into RP: "vat" from
"fat" and "vixen" from "fixen" (female fox). Another South Western feature
is the development of a d between l or n and r, as in "parlder" for
"parlour" and "carnder" for "corner." The bilabial semivowel w has
developed before o in "wold" for "old," and in "wom" for "home,"
illustrating a similar development in RP by which Old English an has
become "one," and Old English hal has come to be spelled "whole," as
compared with Northern hale. In South Western dialects "yat" comes
from the old singular geat, whereas RP "gate" comes from the plural
gatu. Likewise, "clee" comes from the old nominative clea, whereas RP
"claw" comes from the oblique cases. The verbs keel and kemb have
developed regularly from Old English celan "to make cool" and kemban
"to use a comb," whereas the corresponding RP verbs cool and comb
come from the adjective and the noun, respectively.
In Wales, people often speak a clear and measured form of English with
a musical intonation inherited from ancestral Celtic. They tend to
aspirate both plosives (stops) and fricative consonants very forcibly; thus,
"true" is pronounced with an audible puff of breath after the initial t.
Lowland Scottish was once a part of Northern English, but two dialects
began to diverge in the 14th century. Today Lowland Scots trill their r's,
shorten vowels, and simplify diphthongs. A few Scottish words, such as
bairn, brae, canny, dour, and pawky, have made their way into RP.
Lowland Scottish is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic
language still spoken by about 90,700 people (almost all bilingual) mostly
in the Highlands and the Western Isles. Thanks to Robert Burns and Sir
Walter Scott, many Scottish Gaelic words have been preserved in English
literature.
Northern Ireland has dialects related in part to Lowland Scottish and in
part to the southern Irish dialect of English. Irish pronunciation is
conservative and is clearer and more easily intelligible than many other
dialects. Its literature has reached worldwide audiences, whether written
by Englishmen born in Ireland, such as Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne,
Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, and
George Bernard Shaw, or by authentic Irish, such as James Joyce,
William Butler Yeats, and John Millington Synge. The influence of Irish

32

Gaelic on the speech of Dublin is most evident in the syntax of drama

and in the survival of such picturesque expressions as "We are after
finishing," "It's sorry you will be," and "James do be cutting corn every
day."
By the time the English language began to spread overseas in the wake
of British military and mercantile expansion, the written language was
already on the way to standardization. Leaving aside some differences in
vocabulary--and some minor variations in spelling, such as British colour
and American color--essentially the same written form has been
adopted worldwide. In the absence of a true standard of pronunciation,
correct spoken English was assumed to be the preserve of polite London
society, a view that was eventually formalized in the British Received
Pronunciation of the early 20th century.
In America, and later Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, new
varieties of English were developed by native speakers coming from the
British Isles. Early colonists would not in general have moved in
fashionable circles in London, and consequently colonial speech was
generally regarded by Londoners as an inferior form of English. The first
Americanism to be condemned was the use of bluff as "headland," first
recorded in 1735. Even among quite advanced ancient Asian
civilizations, 19th-century colonial administrators sought to impose the
English language and culture. In 1813 the official education policy in
India was to impart "to the Native population knowledge of English
literature and science through the medium of the English language."
English came to be used as an official language not only in southern Asia
but also in Singapore and Hong Kong, Malaya and the East Indies, and
later in East Africa.
A very different situation developed in West Africa. There special trade
languages, or pidgins, had long been in use for communication with
Portuguese traders, and they used elements from Portuguese and
African languages. When the British arrived, they began to incorporate
elements from English. Mixed groups of Africans transported to the
Caribbean by slave traders would not have a language in common, and
pidgins would form the most effective means of communication.

33

Eventually they would be adopted as a native language, called a

creole.

American and Canadian English.

The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along
the Atlantic littoral, where the earlier settlements were made. Three
dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has its
subdialects.
The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief subdialects
comprise northeastern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and
eastern Vermont), southeastern New England (eastern Massachusetts,
eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), southwestern New England
(western Massachusetts and western Connecticut), the inland north
(western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and
metropolitan New York (Figure 15).
The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in
New Jersey, to Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise
the Delaware Valley, the Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley,
northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac and Shenandoah, southern
West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western Carolina, and eastern
Tennessee.
The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to
South Carolina. Its five chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva
Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle
Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee valleys, and the
South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.
These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United
States and Canada, are highly tentative. To some extent these regions
preserve the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England,
where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers who came to
Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old
words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the
local Indian languages for unknown trees, such as hickory and
persimmon, and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoons and
woodchucks. Later they took words from foreign settlers: "chowder" and
"prairie" from the French, "scow" and "sleigh" from the Dutch. They made
new compounds, such as "backwoods" and "bullfrog," and gave new

34

meanings to such words as "lumber" (which in British English denotes

disused furniture, or junk) and "corn" (which in British English signifies any
grain, especially wheat).
Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the
immigrants had come from England, but after that date they arrived in
large numbers from Ireland. The potato famine of 1845 drove 1,500,000
Irish to seek homes in the New World, and the European revolutions of
1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Middle
West. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians,
Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the
North Central and Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina
and Georgia the American Negroes who had been imported to work the
rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language called
Gullah, or Geechee, that made use of many structural and lexical
features of their native languages. This remarkable variety of English is
comparable to such "contact languages" as Sranan (Taki-Taki) and
Melanesian Pidgin. The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far
greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than
that of any area in the North Central States, the Upper Midwest, the
Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick
transport, and television have tended to level out some dialectal
differences in the United States.
The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to any boundary
between dialects, and the influence of United States English is strong,
being felt least in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland.
Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to the United States,
British influences are still potent in some of the larger cities; Scottish
influences are well sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. Onefourth of its people, living mostly in the province of Quebec, have French
as their mother tongue. Those provinces in which French is spoken as a
mother tongue by 10 percent or more of the population are described
as "federal bilingual districts" in the Official Languages Bill of 1968.

35

LANGUAGES AND CULTURES IN CONTACT

Considered from the point of view of vocabulary, there are few, if any,
pure languages. Historically, English has been notorius as a word
borrower, but it is equally true that every Western European language
has supplemented its lexicon by adoptions from other languages. In this
respect then, English was like the other immigrant languages brought to
the New World, and in a broader sense, like every other language that
has ever existed. Loan words occur even in the languages of aboriginal
peoples. Even Indo-European, the hypothetical parent of most
languages found in Europe today and many of those in Western Asia,
appears to have borrowed words some 4000 years ago from Finno-Ugric,
and have furnished others in return. In the same manner, American
Indian languages soon picked up the European word like kabay ( a
vaiant of Romance language, caballo, cheval, etc.) for horse, and the
international European vocabulary soon had words like canoe, tobacco,
and hammock from the Indians.
One great impetus toward word borrowing arises from the necessity of
talking about new things, qualities, operations, concepts and ideas.
Inevitably the movement of a people to a markedly different enviroment
not only creates a problem of communication but makes it an urgent
requirement. Almost as soon as he struck land, Columbus seized by
force several Indians on the first island in order that they might learn from
us, and in like manner tell us about those things in these lands of which
they themselves had knowledge; and the paln succeeded, for in a short
time we understood them and they understood us, sometimes by gesture
and signs, sometimes by words; and it was a great advantage to us.
None of the early reporters tell us, however, the answer to the most

36

interesting question for language historians: What were those words (and
gestures), and how did the interlocutors put them together?
We do know that the migration of the English to North America, the first
stage in what was to culminate in a dramatic sweep across the
continent, posed quite the same problems and created the same
vocabulary need that Columbus and his men experienced. We know too
that, even earlier than Columbus, Mediterranean sailors had faced the
same problems and had worked out a solution by creating a common
language, the Lingua Franca. The members of the Smith and Bradford
companies who put themselves ashore in Virginia and Massachusetts,
respectively, encountered not only plants, fish and animals new to them
but found themselves among tribes of indigenous peoples who spoke
strange languages, wore strange clothing, prepared strange foods (like
hominy), and maintained tribal customs quite different from anything the
English had previously encountered. Even the landscape was different
from the neatly tailored English countryside. Names had to be provided
for all these unfamiliar aspects of their new life.
The same situation was constantly repeated, for all European settlers, as
colonization proceeded westward (or northward). The flora and fauna of
the prairie states, the deep South, the Rocky Mountain area, the
Southwest, and the Pacific coast presented a different appearance and
therefore required new names. The Indian tribes, their languages, and
their customs also presented naming problems, as did other features of
colonial and frontier life. Among the relatively early expeditions to the
west, the Lewis and Clarck expedition, ostensibly political and economic
in purpose, also had a scientific aim. President Jefferson, a man of wide
curiosity, was eager to learn as much as possible about the newly
acquired Lousiana Purchase, and therefore assigned the leaders the task
of ascertaining the geography of the country, the nature and customs of
the Indian nations, the plants, animals, mineral resources, and the
climate. It was quite natural then to find in the notebooks of the
expedition party such statements as These natives have a large
quantaty of this root bread which they call commass (camass), and
that subsequent references to the plant would employ the same word.

37

LANGUAGES OF THE AMERICAS

Languages indigenous to the Americas were brought from Asia by the
forebears of modern American Indians (including Eskimos), who left Asia
after the dog was domesticated but before other animals were
domesticated. Something is known about the culture of these peoples
but nothing about their languages, which are known only after contact
with European languages.
Today there are six European languages in the Americas that serve as
languages of both education and government administration. (Several
Indian languages, however, function in this dual role--Guaran of
Paraguay, Greenlandic of Greenland, and Quechua and Aymara of
Peru.) These official languages and their number of primary political
divisions are Spanish (18); Portuguese (1); Dutch (2)--1 in Latin America
and 1 in the Caribbean; English (2 in North America and 11 in the
Caribbean); French (1 in North America and 3 in the Caribbean); and
Danish (1 in Greenland). Before the colonial period in Latin America and
during the first century or two of that period, the following American
Indian languages could also be classed as official or semiofficial: Nahuatl
(Nahua), the language of the Aztec in Mexico and Central America;
Chibcha-Muisca in Colombia; Quechua, the language of the Inca, in the
Andean area; Tup in Brazil; and Guaran in and around Paraguay. In
addition to American Indian languages, two pidgin-creole languages
are official in their own political divisions, Sranan (Taki-Taki) in Suriname
and Papiamento in Curaao. Other pidgin-creoles in the Caribbean,
such as Haitian Creole, are being increasingly written.
Genetic diversity among languages of continental-sized areas can be
expressed in terms of the number of minimum genetic classes taken as
the usual basis for discussion by specialists of that area. Research may
lead to a downward (or upward) revision, and a new number of
minimum genetic classes is used as a basis for further discussion. For North
America (north of Mexico) and for the 20th century, the basis for
discussion has shifted three times so far: from about 50 families in the
classification of the U.S. scholar J.W. Powell to six phyla in the
classification of the U.S. anthropological linguist Edward Sapir, which was
revised at the 1964 Conference on North American Indian Languages by
splitting and reclassification (e.g., of Sapir's Hokan-Siouan) and by
merging (e.g., the Muskogean family and a few isolates were added to

38

Algonquian [Algonkian] in the Macro-Algonquian phylum). This third

classification is summarized below. Proposals for a minimum number of
genetic classes in South America range from more than 100 families to
three phyla (in a recent liberal classification).
The Plains Indian sign language (hand talking) is still known, but Chinook
Jargon and other pidgin-creoles in North America fell into disuse as soon
as American Indians became bilingual in English, French, or Spanish.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Social dimensions.
Language is probably the most important instrument of socialization that
exists in all human societies and cultures. It is largely by means of
language that one generation passes on to the next its myths, laws,
customs, and beliefs, and it is largely by means of language that the
child comes to appreciate the structure of the society into which he is
born and his own place in that society.
As a social force, language serves both to strengthen the links that bind
the members of the same group and to differentiate the members of
one group from those of another. In many countries there are social
dialects as well as regional dialects, so that it is possible to tell from a
person's speech not only where he comes from but what class he
belongs to. In some instances social dialects can transcend regional
dialects. This is notable in England, where standard English in the socalled Received Pronunciation (RP) can be heard from members of the
upper class and upper middle class in all parts of the country. The
example of England is but an extreme manifestation of a tendency that
is found in all countries: there is less regional variation in the speech of the
higher than in that of the lower socioeconomic classes. In Britain and the
United States and in most of the other English-speaking countries, people
will almost always use the same dialect, regional or social, however
formal or informal the situation and regardless of whether their listeners
speak the same dialect or not. (Relatively minor adjustments of
vocabulary may, however, be made: an Englishman speaking to an
American may employ the word "elevator" rather than "lift" and so on.) In
many communities throughout the world, it is common for members to

39

speak two or more different dialects and to use one dialect rather than
another in particular social situations. This is commonly referred to as
code-switching. Code-switching may operate between two distinct
languages (e.g., Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans in New York)
as well as between two dialects of the same language. The term
diglossia (rather than bilingualism) is frequently used by sociolinguists to
refer to this by no means uncommon phenomenon.
In every situation, what one says and how one says it depends upon the
nature of that situation, the social role being played at the time, one's
status vis--vis that of the person addressed, one's attitude towards him,
and so on. Language interacts with nonverbal behaviour in social
situations and serves to clarify and reinforce the various roles and
relationships important in a particular culture. Sociolinguistics is far from
having satisfactorily analyzed or even identified all the factors involved in
the selection of one language feature rather than another in particular
situations.
Among those that have been discussed in relation to various languages
are: the formality or informality of the situation; power and solidarity
relationships between the participants; differences of sex, age,
occupation, socioeconomic class, and educational background; and
personal or transactional situations. Terms such as style and register (as
well as a variety of others) are employed by many linguists to refer to the
socially relevant dimensions of phonological, grammatical, and lexical
variation within one language. So far there is very little agreement as to
the precise application of such terms.

SOCIAL DIALECTOLOGY
The methodology of generative grammar was first applied to
dialectology in the 1960s, when the use of statistical means to measure
the similarity or difference between dialects also became increasingly
common. The most important development of that time, however, was
the rapid growth of methods for investigating the social variation of
dialects; social variation, in contrast to geographic variation, is prominent
in the United States, above all in large urban centres. In cities such as

40

New York, a whole scale of speech variation can be found to correlate

with the social status and educational level of the speakers. In addition,
age groups exhibit different patterns, but such patterns of variation differ
from one social stratum to another.
Still another dimension of variation, especially important in the United
States, is connected with the race and ethnic origin of a speaker as well
as with the speaker's date of immigration. So-called Black English has
been influenced by the southeastern U.S. origin of most of the black
population of non-southern U.S. regions: many Black English peculiarities
are in reality transplanted southeastern dialectal traits.
Normally, speakers of one of the social dialects of a city possess at least
some awareness of the other dialects. In this way, speech characteristics
also become subjectively integrated into the system of signs indicating
social status. And, in seeking to enhance their social status, poorer and
less educated speakers may try to acquire the dialect of the socially
prestigious. Certain groups--e.g., blacks and the working class--however,
will, under certain conditions, show a consciousness of solidarity and a
tendency to reject members who imitate either the speech or other
types of behaviour of models outside their own social group.
As a consequence of an individual's daily contacts with speakers of the
various social dialects of a city, elements of the other dialects are
imperceptibly drawn into his dialect. The collective result of such
experiences is the spread of linguistic variables--i.e., groups of variants
(sounds or grammatical phenomena) primarily determined by social
(educational, racial, age, class) influences, an example being the
existence of the two forms "He don't know" and the standard "He doesn't
know." Traits representing variables in intergroup relations can become
variable features in the speech of individuals as well; i.e., an individual
may employ two or more variants for the same feature in his own
speech, such as "seeing" and "seein' " or "he don't" and "he doesn't." The
frequency of usage for each variable varies with the individual speaker
as well as with the social group. There are intermediate stages of
frequency between different social groups and entire scales of transitions
between different age groups, thus creating even greater variation
within the dialect of an individual. The variables also behave differently in
the various styles of written or spoken language used by each speaker.

41

The study of variables is one of the central tasks of any investigation of

the dialects of American cities. Applying the statistical methods of
modern sociology, linguists have worked out investigative procedures
sharply different from those of traditional dialectology. The chief
contributor has been William Labov, the pioneer of social dialectology in
the U.S. The basic task is to determine the correlation between a group
of linguistic variables--such as the different ways of pronouncing a
certain vowel--and extralinguistic variables, such as education, social
status, age, and race. For a reasonable degree of statistical reliability,
one must record a great number of speakers. In general, several
examples of the same variable must be elicited from each individual in
order to examine the frequency and probability of its usage.
Accordingly, the number of linguistic variables that can be examined is
quite limited, in comparison with the number of dialectal features
normally recorded by traditional fieldworkers in rural communities; in
these situations, the investigator is often satisfied with one or two
responses for each feature.
A completely new, flexible, and imaginative method of interviewing is
needed for such work in urban centres, as well as new ways of finding
and making contact with informants. One example is Labov's method for
testing the fate of final and preconsonantal r in speakers of different
social levels. Choosing three New York City department stores, each
oriented to a completely different social stratum, he approached a large
number of salesladies, asking each of them about the location of a
certain department that he knew to be on the fourth floor. Thus, their
answers always contained two words with potential r's--"fourth" and
"floor." This shortcut enabled Labov to establish in a relatively short time
that the salesladies in the store with richer customers clearly tended to
use "r-full" forms, whereas those in the stores geared to the poorer social
strata more commonly used "r-less" forms.
Social dialectology has focused on the subjective evaluation of linguistic
features and the degree of an individual's linguistic security, phenomena
that have considerable influence on linguistic change. Linguistic
scientists, in studying the mechanism of such change, have found that it
seems to proceed gradually from one social group to another, always
attaining greater frequency among the young. Social dialectology also
has great relevance for a society as a whole, in that the data it furnishes
will help deal with the extremely complex problems connected with the

42

speech of the socially underprivileged, especially of minority groups.

Thus, the recent emphasis on the speech of minority groups, such as the
Black English of American cities, is not a chance phenomenon. Specific
methods for such investigation are being developed, as well as ways of
applying the results of such investigation to educational policies.
DEFINITIONS OF LINGUA FRANCA, PIDGIN, AND CREOLE.
When a language is used as a means of communication between
persons having no other language in common (e.g., French in 18thcentury diplomacy), it is a lingua franca. A lingua franca native to none
of those using it and with a sharply reduced grammar and vocabulary is
called a pidgin. (This definition of pidgin excludes both the broken English
of a beginning learner and the skillful but nonnative use of English in such
countries as India.) When a whole speech community gives up its former
language or languages and takes a pidgin as its mother tongue, the
pidgin becomes a creole (is creolized).
Pidgins and creoles.
Some specialized languages were developed to keep the outsider at
bay. In other circumstances, languages have been deliberately created
to facilitate communication with outsiders. This happens when people
speaking two different languages have to work together, usually in some
form of trade relation or administrative routine. In such situations the socalled pidgins arise, more or less purposively made up of vocabulary
items from each language, with mutual abandonment of grammatical
complexities that would cause confusion to either party. Pidgins have
been particularly associated with areas settled by European traders;
examples have been Chinook Jargon, a lingua franca based on an
American Indian language and English and formerly used in Washington
and Oregon, and Beach-la-mar, an English-based pidgin of parts of the
South Seas.
Sometimes, as the result of relatively permanent settlement and the
intermixture of two speech communities, a pidgin becomes the first
language, or mother tongue, of later generations, ultimately displacing
both the original languages. First languages arising in this way from
artificially created pidgins are called creoles. Notable among creoles is

43

the language of Haiti, Haitian Creole, built up from the French of the
settlers and the African language of the former slaves; it shows lexical
and grammatical features of both sources.
Creoles differ from pidgins in that, as first languages, they are subject to
the natural processes of change like any other language (see below
Linguistic change ); and, despite the deliberately simplified form of the
original pidgin, in the course of generations creoles develop their own
complexities. The reason is plain to see. The restricted uses to which
pidgins were first put and for which they were devised did not require
any great flexibility. Once such a language becomes the first or only
language of many people, it must perforce acquire the resources (i.e.,
the complexity) to respond adequately to all the requirements of a
natural language.
Louisiana Creole,
Louisiana creole is the language spoken in Louisiana by persons of mixed
French, African, and Indian descent. Louisiana Creole, which is closely
related to Haitian Creole, should not be confused with either Louisiana
provincial standard French, spoken by the descendants of the French
upper classes in and around New Orleans, nor with the language of the
Cajuns; both of the latter are dialects of French, with some archaic or
provincial features, whereas Louisiana Creole is a creole language
based on French.

ENGLISH IMPERIALISM
The total number of English speakers was small before 1800, but since
then the number has grown rapidly. Great Britain was indisputably the
dominant English-speaking power in the 19th century, but it was already
being overtaken by the United States both in population and as an
economic power. International English in the 20th century has
consequently been dominated by American rather than British English.
The use of English has spread far beyond the old British Empire. It has

44

even begun to replace French in Francophone Africa--e.g., Algeria and

the former Zaire. English has some special status as official or second
language in more than 70 countries. (See Map.) By the 1990s immigration
and natural growth in the former colonies had created a population of
some 350 million people who spoke English as their mother tongue, most
of them in the United States. A further 250 million to 350 million people use
English in some way as a second language. The number of people using
English as a foreign language is impossible to assess, since it is arbitrary at
what point someone with a limited knowledge counts as an English
speaker. Something like a quarter of the world's population has some
competence in English, and the vast majority are not native speakers of
the language.
The demand for English from nonnative speakers has created a huge
international English-language-teaching industry. Although American
English has been the dominant partner, the British Council was set up
after 1945 to promote the English language and British culture. By the
1990s the council had some 120,000 students learning English through its
offices abroad and some 400,000 candidates for its English exams.
Up to the late 19th century, developments in mass communications-printing, newspapers, and the telegraph--had involved the written
language. For the next century, beginning with the telephone and the
phonograph, developments were to involve the spoken language. The
film industry grew rapidly in importance after the addition of sound to
moving picture, and since the main centre was in Hollywood rather than
London, it was American English that was spread with the new medium.
At about the same time, the broadcasting industry--initially radio and
later television--developed first in Great Britain but was soon dwarfed by
its American counterpart. People's lives began to be controlled, in
English-speaking countries and elsewhere, by the American-dominated
advertising industry. Popular music found its way onto the airwaves, but
following the introduction of rock and roll in the 1950s, broadcasters
began to determine what kind of music was popular. The dominant
language in this medium has always been American English.
The existence of modern mass communications has made it possible to
set up international bodies and organize events on a global scale. The
United Nations, the World Bank, and the European Union all have several

45

official languages, as do international conferences and learned journals.

Practical realities nearly always dictate that English be one of the official
languages and also the one most used. The use of several official
languages means that documents have to be translated from the
original language into other official languages, but this is often viewed as
a waste of time and money. There is thus a tension between the
demands of equity, leading to the recognition of the importance of
several languages, and the convenience of using only one.
Computer-based technology has led to a massive extension in the use of
English, both in computer software and on the Internet. Computer
languages are based on English, and English is the language normally
used to communicate with the user. Software can, of course, use other
languages, but it will doubtless make use of English-based commands.
Texts in other languages can be found on the Internet, including Arabic
and Japanese, but these few exceptions only underline the basic fact
that the vast majority (about 85%, according to one recent French study)
are in English. Anybody can in principle contact anybody else anywhere
in the world, but in practice they can do this only if they are sufficiently
proficient in English.
English is now used by so many people on an international scale and in
so many areas of everyday life that its role as the language of the world
might seem assured and permanent. Already within the last 50 years,
however, there have been signs of a reaction against English and in
favour of a local language, particularly where English was introduced as
an imperial language. One day people everywhere might want to use
their own languages. Erasmus wrote in Latin and modern Dutch
intellectuals write in English, but in the future Dutch scholars might want
to write in Dutch.
Moreover, the control exercised by the mass media is highly likely to
provoke a reaction. The media increasingly determine the details of
people's lives: the way they speak to each other, how they wear a
baseball cap, and even how they blow their noses. There could come a
time when people object to having their culture and their social identities
constructed by the mass media. As the means through which that power
of the media is exercised, such a reaction would in all probability lead to
a rejection of English, much as the reaction against church control once
led to the rejection of Latin.

46

Finally, there is an obvious threat from computer technology to the status

of English as an international lingua franca. Machine translation, if it can
be fully automated, will make it possible for users of any language to
access information. Translation linked to the technology that enables
computers to recognize and produce speech will lead to automatic
interpretation. Some automatic teller machines already give the user a
choice of language, and Web sites are beginning to appear on the
Internet with a choice of languages. In this way, although computer
technology has in the short term given a massive boost to the use of
English, it is likely in the longer term to make language use a matter of
choice. Of course, nobody can see into the future, but sooner or later
the dominant position of the English language is going to be successfully
challenged.

Appendix 1
THE CELTS
HISTORY
The earliest archaeological evidence associated with the Celts places
them in what is now France and western Germany in the late Bronze
Age, around 1200BC. In the early Iron Age, they are associated with the

47

Hallstatt culture (8th century to 6th century BC), named for an

archaeological site in what is now Obersterreich (Upper Austria). They
probably began to settle in the British Isles during this period. Between
the 5th and 1st centuries BC, their influence extended from what is now
Spain to the shores of the Black Sea. This later Iron Age phase is called
La Tne, after a site in Switzerland.
The word Celt is derived from Keltoi, the name given to these people by
Herodotus and other Greek writers. To the Romans, the Continental
Celts were known as Galli, or Gauls; those in the British Isles were called
Britanni.
In the 4th century BC, the Celts invaded the Greco-Roman world,
conquering northern Italy, Macedonia, and Thessaly (Thessalia). They
plundered Rome in 390, sacked Delphi in 279, and penetrated Asia
Minor, where they were known as Galatians. The "Cisalpine Gauls" of
northern Italy were conquered by the Romans in the 2nd century BC;
Transalpine Gaul (modern France and the Rhineland) was subdued by
Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC, and most of Britain came under
Roman rule in the 1st century AD. In the same period, the Celts of
central Europe were dominated by the Germanic peoples. In medieval
and modern times the Celtic tradition and languages survived in
Bretagne (in western France), Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and
Ireland.

WAY OF LIFE
The various Celtic tribes were bound together by common speech,
customs, and religion, rather than by any well-defined central
governments. The absence of political unity contributed substantially to
the extinction of their way of life, making them vulnerable to their

48

enemies. Their economy was pastoral and agricultural, and they had
no real urban life. Each tribe was headed by a king and was divided by
class into Druids (priests), warrior nobles, and commoners (see Druidism).
The nobles fought on foot with swords and spears and were fond of
feasting and drinking. Celtic mythology, which included earth gods,
various woodland spirits, and sun deities, was particularly rich in elfin
demons and tutelaries, beings that still pervade the lore of peoples of
Celtic ancestry.
CELTIC CHRISTIANITY
The Christian faith was well established in Celtic Britain by the 4th
century AD, but in the 5th century the Saxons and other Germanic
peoples invaded the country, driving most of the Celtic Christians into
Wales and Cornwall. At the same time, Saint Patrick and other British
missionaries founded a new church in Ireland, which then became the
center of Celtic Christianity. The Irish church developed a distinctive
organization in which bishops were subordinate to the abbots of
monasteries (see Columba, Saint). The Irish monks, devoted to learning
as well as religion, did much to preserve a knowledge of ancient
Roman literature in early medieval Europe. Between the late 6th and
the early 8th centuries, Irish missionaries were active in Christianizing the
Germanic peoples that had conquered the Western Roman Empire,
and they founded numerous monasteries in present-day France,
Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Celtic Christianity in Ireland was
weakened by the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries, and by
the 12th century its characteristic institutions, which were incompatible
with those of the dominant Roman church, had largely disappeared
from Europe.

ART
Celtic art is considered the first great contribution to European art
made by non-Mediterranean peoples. Its roots go back to the artisans

49

of the Urnfield culture and the Hallstatt culture (8th-6th century BC) at
the beginning of the Iron Age. It flowered in the period of the La Tne
culture. Although Celtic art was influenced by ancient Persian, Greek,
Etruscan, and Roman art and by that of the nomads of the Eurasian
steppes, it developed distinctive characteristics. These are evident in its
major artifactsweapons, vessels, and jewelry in bronze, gold, and
occasionally silver. Many of these objects were made for chieftains in
southern Germany and France and were recovered from their tombs.
The Celtic style is marked by a preference for stylized plant motifs,
usually of Greek origin, and fantastic animals, derived from the
Scythians and other steppe peoples; the human figure plays a
secondary role. Other favorite motifs are elliptical curves and opposing
curves, spirals, and chevrons, also derived from steppe art. These
elements were combined in dynamic yet balanced, intricate
geometrical patterns carried out in relief, engraving, or red, yellow,
blue, and green champlev enamel on shields, swords, sheaths,
helmets, bowls, and jewelry. They also appeared on painted pottery
cinerary urns, food vessels, incense bowls, and drinking cups. Examples
of Celtic art include torcs, or neck rings, with the two open ends
ornamented with animal heads; the silver repouss Gundestorp
cauldron (circa 100BC, National Museum, Copenhagen); a bronze
lozenge-shaped shield with circular medallions and small enamel circles
(1st century BC-1st century AD); and a bronze mirror with enameled
decoration (1st century BC) (both British Museum, London). Also
surviving are roughly carved stone monuments and wooden objects.
During the period of Roman domination of Western Europe in and
after the 1st century BC, the art of Celtic peoples on the Continent
gradually lost its distinctive style. The Celts of Ireland continued to work
with traditional motifs, but, as Christianity took hold, they combined
them with Christian motifs and employed their skills in the service of the
church.

50

CELTS
The Hallstatt people were expert bronze and iron workers who
colonized former Urnfield areas of central and western Europe in the
early first millennium B.C.E. Celtic speakers with a distinctive and
highly sophisticated La Tene technology spread north from the Rhine
and Danube Valleys into the Low Countries and Britain in the 4th
century B.C.E. The Celts were formidable warriors, who built large hill
forts and introduced the Romans to the short sword, sacking Rome
Lysimachus, who ruled Macedon, Thrace, and Asia Minor, was
defeated and killed at the Battle of Corupedium in Lydia by Seleucus,
who became master of Asia Minor. When he tried to seize Macedon,
however, he was treacherously assassinated by the disinherited son of
Ptolemy, Ptolemy Ceraunus, who then ruled Macedon until he was
killed opposing the Celtic invasion in 279.
The Celts ravaged Macedon, defeated the Greeks at Thermopylae,
and were turned back at Delphi. Celtic rule was then established in
Thrace, lasting until 210. In central Asia Minor the Celtic kingdom of
Galatia was established.
Meanwhile Demetrius's son, Antigonus Gonatas, recovered
Macedon from the Celts and established the Antigonid dynasty
which lasted until 168.
The advent of CELTIC peoples into the Alpine regions of Italy
occurred during the historical period. Since their movements were
nomadic and they mixed with previous inhabitants of regions, it is
difficult to date the earlier Celtic presence, but by the 5th century
they had begun to displace the Etruscans in the Po Valley.
Located in the Po Valley, Cisalpine Gaul had a continental climate
with summers that were cooler, and winters that were harsher, but not
as wet as those of peninsular Italy. Although rainfall was well

51

distributed over the seasons, melting snow caused frequent flooding

and permanent swamps, especially in the east. The region was
covered with dense forests that provided timber as well as a home to
large herds of pigs. Forest clearing and drainage made Cisalpine
Gaul into an enormously fertile land, producing prodigious yields of
grain and, in the southern regions, abundant wine harvests. Good
grazing land provided a wide variety of fine wools. Once drained, the
flat plain facilitated road building and overland trade, while
navigation on the Po River was possible as far as Turin. The Po Valley
was inhabited by three principal Celtic tribes: the Boii in the south, the
Cenomani in the center, and the Insubres in the north. To the east in
Venetia lived the Veneti, and to the west in the Apennines lived the
Ligurians, both non-Celtic peoples.
Origins of the invaders. The Germanic peoples were established in
Scandinavia (Denmark) and between the Elbe and Oder as early as
the 2nd millennium B.C.E. Eastward lay the Balts (Letts), and the west
of the Elbe were the Celts.
Expansion. The western Germans (Teutons) displaced (c. 1000
B.C.E.) the Celts, moving up the Elbe and Rhine (the Main reached c.
200 B.C.E.). South Germany was occupied (c. 100 B.C.E.); Gaul
threatened (cf. Caesar's Commentaries). These invaders were a
pastoral, agricultural folk, tending to settle down. By the time of
Tacitus's (c. 55-c. 117 C.E.) Germania they were wholly agricultural.
Later new tribal names and a new kind of federated organization
appeared. The eastern Germans (Scandinavians) crossed the Baltic
(c. 600-300 B.C.E.) and pushed up the Vistula to the Carpathians. The
northern Germans remained in Scandinavia.
Prehistoric Britain. The prehistoric inhabitants of Britain (called Celts
on the basis of their language) were apparently a fusion of
Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic strains that included a dark
Iberian and a light-haired stock. Archaeological evidence points to
contacts with the Iberian Peninsula (2500 B.C.E.) and Egypt (1300
B.C.E.)

52

 The true Celts are represented by two stocks: Goidels (Gaels),

surviving in northern Ireland and high Scotland, and Cymri and
Brythons (Britons), still represented in Wales. The Brythons were close
kin to the Gauls, particularly the Belgi. Their religion was dominated by
a powerful, organized, priestly caste, the druids of Gaul and Britain,
who monopolized religion, education, and justice.
Withdrawal of the Roman legions and the end of the Roman
administration coincided with an intensification of Nordic pressure
and the influx of Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, which permanently
altered the racial base of the island. By c. 615 the Angles and Jutes
had reached the Irish Channel and were masters of what is virtually
modern England. A Celtic recrudescence appeared in the highlands
of the west and northwest. The history of Britain for two centuries (c.
350-597) is obscure.
Oswald of Northumbria called Aidan from Iona, a monastery on an
island off the west coast of Scotland. His mission began the great
influence of Celtic Christianity, which for a time threatened to
replace the Roman Church.
Abbess Hilda of Whitby, a woman of great piety and administrative
ability, ruled a double monastery (housing both men and women in
two adjoining establishments), shared in the work of Christian
evangelization, and hosted the 664 Synod of Whitby at which
representatives of the Celtic Church in northern England agreed to
the Roman date of Easter and certain disciplinary practices, and thus
brought Britain back into the Roman and Continental religious and
intellectual orbit.
Ethelstan, Alfred's grandson. The descendants of Alfred were the first
true kings of England; his great-grandson Edgar (959-75) was
recognized as such. Archbishop Dunstan, Edgar's chief counselor, was
a great ecclesiastical reformer (simony and morals) of the Church
and the people. He followed a policy of fusion and conciliation
toward the Danes, and Oda, a full-blooded Dane, became (942)
archbishop of Canterbury. The absorption of the Danelaw by Wessex

53

left the Celtic fringe in Scotland and Wales independent under a

vague kind of vassalage to the king.

A wave of Neolithic peoples from the Mediterranean was followed

by Celts, Goidels, Brythons, Saxons in the 6th century B.C.E., and then
by Picts. The Romans arrived at the end of the 1st century C.E., but
made no permanent impression.

Neolithic inhabitants, followed by Celts and Goidels (c. 600-500

B.C.E.). The fifths (Ulster, Leinster, Connaught, East and West
Munster) may date from the Goidel arrival. Belgic and other Brythonic
migrations (300-150 B.C.E.) probably in the southeast. Supremacy of
the Brythonic kingdom of Tara in the 4th century C.E. The Picts pushed
into Antrim and Down. There is an enormous body of legend dealing
with the early origins.

Copyright 2001 Houghton Mifflin Company.

54