The Spread of English
For most of its history, the English language has imported words, usually as the result of invasion and settlement (the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans). But from the 17th century onwards, as the country’s colonial and commercial ambitions grew, Britain turned into a linguistic exporter. America is the prime example, but many other territories around the world were claimed and colonized. Wherever the Union flag went, the language followed. But it was a two-way process, with the cultures of newly acquired lands supplying new loan-words to English.
The foundations of the British empire were laid in the space of around 100 years, beginning in c.1750. During this imperial heyday Britain acquired, by military conquest or annexation or by diplomatic settlement, vast territories in every continent except Europe. Extending from British Guyana and British Honduras (now Belize) in central America to India, Australia and New Zealand, British authority also reigned supreme over colonies of a few square miles such as Gibraltar on the tip of Spain or Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, a volcanic outcrop that now serves as a naval staging-post. Given this global spread, Britain’s claim that her empire was one on which the sun never set was less a piece of imperial boasting than a bald statement of fact. By the time of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, the British empire covered more than a fifth of the Earth’s land surface.
Within any particular territory the question of whether English became the official language or the most widely spoken language – the two are not necessarily the same – depended on the circumstances under which it had fallen into British hands, the history of its settlement and so on. Where substantial Anglophone colonies had been established from the earliest days, as in America and Australia, and where there was only a scattered indigenous population, English acquired pre-eminent status without, in a sense, having to strive for it. Where there was already a highly organized social structure and written culture (or cultures) as in India and elsewhere in Asia, then English was able to achieve pre-eminence only through a mixture of education and official decree. To these factors should be added the desire of at least some of the indigenous population to align their own ambitions to those of their new rulers by learning the language. After independence, English tended to lose its ‘official’ status but to remain quite widely used.
In other colonies or protectorates, the status of English either was, or subsequently became, less clear-cut. The Mediterranean island of Malta was acquired by the British in 1799 and was a linchpin of Allied strategy in the Second World War but Italian was its official language until 1934. In Malta today English is widely spoken and understood, and will continue to be so since it is the preferred medium for higher education, but the visitor is more likely to hear Maltese spoken. Similarly in Egypt, which became a protectorate in 1914 after long-standing British involvement, English (and sometimes French) may be found in business or educated circles but otherwise the language tends to be confined to the usual tourist contexts.
Officially bilingual, Canada is tugged in two directions (between English and French) although English is the majority language. But Canadian English has also felt the impact of its US neighbour and imports some usages including spellings, although at an official level it conforms to British English (colour, flavour, etc.).
In the complicated history of South Africa, a country made up of British colonies and the Boer Republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State, the English language took on the unlikely role of the liberators’ speech during the long years of apartheid which kept the black and white races separate from each other. Since the language of the ruling white élite was Afrikaans, a tongue descended from the Dutch of the first white settlers in South Africa, the use of English by black leaders could be seen as an implicit act of protest. Not only were they communicating with their followers, they were also talking directly to the outside world, something that they would never have achieved by using Afrikaans, from which language the word apartheid (meaning ‘apartness’) comes.
India
The East India Company was established by London merchants in 1600 to foster trade with India, and later China. British involvement with India at a governmental level really began in the 18th century. What had been a commercial project slowly turned into an imperial one, with a booming trade in the English language as well as in more tangible goods.
In 1786 the philologist William Jones gave a speech at the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, in which he outlined his belief that Sanskrit, an Indian language surviving only in ancient texts, was a source for many other Indo-European languages (see A Universal Language?). Jones was convinced of the superiority of this ur-language: ‘The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin.’
Within 50 years, though, it was the superiority of English that was being asserted against the indigenous languages by Thomas Macaulay (1800–59), author of a best-selling History of England. Indeed, Macaulay was in no doubt about the superiority of all things English, once declaring that an ‘acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia’. Before writing the History, which made him rich and helped him to gain a place in the House of Lords, Macaulay had served on the Governor-General’s Council in India. There he had seen the impossibility of the small number of British administrators having a direct effect on the mass of the population or even having any line of communication with them. What was needed was a class of ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern’. In a document written in 1835, Macaulay proposed the education of a group of Indians so that they became ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.
So it was that English became the official language of instruction in higher education when universities were set up in cities such as Bombay and Madras. Perhaps more significantly, English became the language of aspiration. Those who wanted success or, simply, esteem took the trouble to master it and ensured that their children did so too. The effect of Macaulay’s original proposal was long-lasting. Even after the declaration of Indian Independence in 1947, English was recognized as an ‘associate’ official language of the subcontinent. Today, there are probably more speakers of English in India than there are in Britain.
English adopted several hundred expressions from the Indian languages. Some of them came into the language early, like curry (first recorded 1598) from Tamil, or juggernaut (1638) from an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu – Jagannatha – whose devotees were said to throw themselves under the wheels of a great chariot bearing his image. The succeeding centuries brought a miscellany of useful terms, ranging from pariah (Tamil) to pundit (Hindi) to pyjamas (US pajamas; from Persian/Urdu).
The 19th century was the high-point of the British love affair with India. From 1877 until her death in 1901, Queen Victoria was empress of India, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of British possessions. The title of empress, bestowed upon her by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, proclaimed her status in a country that she never visited. Nevertheless the impact of India on England and English was marked. In Osborne House, Victoria’s grand summer villa on the Isle of Wight, there is a Durbar Room, a vast audience chamber modelled on those in Indian palaces. Meanwhile, those who worked in the country itself, soldiers or civil servants or engineers, might at the end of a long day sit on their verandahs, sipping their hot toddies, sucking their cheroots and reflecting on the white man’s burden as the sun went down, while indoors one of the household wallahs folded the mem-sahib’s jodhpurs.
Australia
There is a story, almost certainly (and unfortunately) untrue, that the kangaroo got its name from a question put by a crew member of HMS Endeavour, after Captain James Cook made land at Botany Bay, on the east coast of Australia, in April 1770. Pointing at one of these peculiar, two-legged, bounding animals, the sailor asked a native what it was called. ‘Kangaroo,’ was the reply, or ‘I can’t understand you.’
In all likelihood, kangaroo was simply an indigenous name for the beast. It would probably have been one of several terms; contrary to popular belief among the first explorers, the original inhabitants of Australia did not speak a single language, but many. As with the early European colonizers of America, there was a constant tendency to simplify and underestimate indigenous culture. Even so, the contribution of the Aboriginal languages to English is both small and largely restricted to those animals and plants that were unfamiliar to the first arrivals, like the koala and wallaby. Out of all Aboriginal-derived terms, boomerang is probably the most widely used. In a broader cultural context, the term walkabout was coined to denote an Aboriginal rite of passage that involved young men spending time alone in the bush; in modern English usage, its sense has shifted to describe politicians and royals ‘meeting the people’.
The Australian treatment of the English language is distinctive, but it has rarely prompted the same snobbish attitude that the British occasionally direct at America and Americanisms (not that Australians would care if it did). Australians have often played up to British perceptions and turned their pronunciation, in particular, into a kind of assertive national joke. In the mid-1960s there appeared a cod-dictionary entitled Let Stalk Strine, which both celebrated and sent up the accent. The joke started with the pseudonymous author, Afferbeck Lauder (alphabetical order), real name Alastair Morrison. His examples included Ebb Tide meaning ‘hunger’ (as in: ‘I jess dono watser matter, Norm, I jess got no ebb tide these dyes’) and Sly Drool defined as ‘An instrument used by engineers for discovering Kew brutes’.
It has been suggested that the vigorous, colourful style of Australian English is attributable to the forced transport of a convict population and to voluntary immigration by those desperate or daring enough to journey to the far side of the world in search of a new start. These were natural rebels, malcontents, people who didn’t know their place. Perhaps so. Certainly, Australian English preserves some traces of its origins. Swag was underworld slang in the 17th and 18th centuries for thieves’ loot and was transmuted in Australia to the bag carried by the itinerant worker (‘jolly swagman’) of the national song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Another term that has been going almost as long as Australia itself is sheila for a woman. This Irish-derived name is a reminder of the significance of Irish settlement, both forced and voluntary, in the early days.
Australians have always been very tolerant of what they call ‘larrikins’ – otherwise known as villains, bohemians, unconventional people. Larrikin, which may derive from a defunct English Midlands dialect word, is widespread enough to give rise to larrikinism, a style of behaviour and speech in which colourful abuse rates highly. A former Australian prime minister once described a political opponent as a ‘painted, perfumed gigolo’ and another as a ‘mangy maggot’. By contrast, the British should count themselves lucky to be characterized merely as ‘poms’ or ‘pommies’ (apparently derived from pomegranate, rhyming slang at two removes for immigrant).
Yet aside from such high-spirited colloquialisms, in its fundamentals Australian English is indistinguishable from British English. Only very few usages are shared with US English (e.g., ‘cookie’ for ‘biscuit’, ‘teller’ for ‘cashier’).
Pidgin English
Pidgin – or Pidjin – English is a very simplified form of the language. The word itself is supposedly a Chinese rendering of the word ‘business’, and indicates the link between pidgin and trade. Pidgin English has its origins in the slave trade, specifically in the transport of tens of thousands of West Africans across the Atlantic from the early 17th century onwards. The victims of this traffic were drawn from many different tribes speaking different languages. Before the crossings, the European traffickers frequently broke up the tribal groupings. If the captives could not speak the same language they would be less capable of plotting together to cause ‘trouble’ en route. Pidgin English probably developed from two requirements: the need for the sailors to communicate with the slaves, and the need for the slaves to communicate with each other. Once the survivors of the crossings had arrived and been set to work, pidgin would also have been a means of communication between the slaves and slave-owners.
Pidgin English then spread round the world, following sailors and trade-routes. A distinctive branch of it is found in Papua New Guinea and its nearby islands. Pidgin language is not unique to English. There is also Pidgin French, Pidgin Portuguese, and so on. Savv(e)y, a useful and almost global word which can be verb, noun or adjective, derives from the Portuguese sabe or ‘know’.
Unsurprisingly, pidgin tongues tend to be associated with European colonizing nations. A significant exception is Swahili, which developed from a pidgin language based on a Zanzibar dialect and which was spread by Arab slave traders.
A pidgin language will be simplified by comparison with its source language. It may dispense with word endings or drop certain words altogether, such as pronouns or the definite and indefinite articles. It will be simple, therefore, but it is not the equivalent of baby-talk or of a tourist raising his voice and speaking very slowly to make himself understood by the locals. Pidgin can be defined, rather, as a language pared to the bone. ‘Long time, no see’ and ‘no can do’ are examples of the compressed way in which pidgin English works. If used by enough people for long enough, pidgin will develop into creole, a more elaborate form of language with an expanded vocabulary and a more complicated syntax.
Gaelic and the Spread of English
English has not always been received with enthusiasm. Where it is seen to displace an existing language, there may be resistance to its encroachments. Even when English is the tongue used by almost everybody, there will still be attempts to restore the original language. This is the case in Wales and also in Ireland.
The proportion of native Irish speakers of Gaelic is small. This, the descendant of the original tongue used by the Celtic settlers of the island, is spoken natively by scarcely 1 in 70 of the population (though, as a compulsory subject in Irish schools, many more speak it as a second language). Despite the fact that Gaelic is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, English is used in 99 per cent of the debates conducted in the Dáil Éirann, or Irish parliament.
The relationship between the indigenous people of Ireland and the English across the water has always been problematic, to put it mildly, and Irish sensitivity towards the language of those who were regarded as occupiers continues to this day. In 2005 a law was passed that took away legal status from English place names in the west of Ireland, the area with the highest concentration of Gaelic speakers. For example, two villages with the English names of Dunquinn and Ventry were changed to Dun Chaoin and Ceann Tra on road signs and Ordnance Survey maps. In other parts of the country outside the officially designated Gaeltacht (Gaelic-speaking areas), English place names remain legal as long as the Gaelic version is displayed alongside.
The first thorough mapping of Ireland by the British was an Ordnance Survey project beginning in 1825, intended to cover the island from top to bottom at a scale of six inches to the mile. Its ostensible purpose was to provide a basis for the reform of Ireland’s local taxation system and, in the course of the project, place names were to be checked and ‘standardized’. It is not hard to imagine how this would have been received by many of the locals on the ground. So it could be argued that the law of 2005 was simply an attempt to restore the status quo.
If Irish eloquence (or, less respectfully, ‘blarney’) is an attribute that the English half admire and half resent, the attitude of the Irish towards the English language has also been ambivalent. In previous centuries, those Irish who were ambitious to get on would naturally have turned to English. In the early 19th century the Anglo-Irish aristocracy sent their children to be educated in England. Ireland has produced a disproportionate number of writers of international renown, including Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. They would be largely unknown to most people if they had chosen to write in Gaelic. Different as they are from each other, there is a linguistic resilience and resourcefulness to these writers and others such as Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith from an earlier period. It is significant that they all had to escape from Ireland to achieve recognition, and that their ‘exile’ (James Joyce’s word) from their native country was also a way of coming to terms with it.
Home from Home
An intriguing sidelight in the spread of English around the globe from the 16th century onwards is provided by the distribution of place names deriving from Britain. When colonists arrived in uncharted territory, their instinct was to use names already familiar from home, occasionally with the prefix ‘New’. The northeastern region of the United States is dotted with town and city names familiar to English ears: within a few miles of Boston are to be found Worcester, Northampton, Marlborough, Norwich, Portsmouth and Manchester. In at least one case, not only the name but also its associations have been transplanted. Like the city of Cambridge in England, the Cambridge in Massachusetts is renowned for its world-famous university – in fact, two of them (Harvard and MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
The most popular British place name around the world, occurring 55 times, is Richmond. In second, third and fourth places are London (46), Oxford (41) and Manchester (35). Among the Richmonds is the capital of Virginia. This name supposedly occurred to its founder, William Byrd (1674–1744), because the view across the James River was like that across the Thames from Richmond in Middlesex.
Not all such acts of naming derive from picturesque views or a taste for nostalgia. Just as it was respectful or shrewd to name your settlement after a king or queen (Jamestown, Elizabethville), so it paid to do homage to potential patrons. The fashion for Richmonds owes something to a succession of dukes of Richmond who were active in other early US colonies. A similar aristocratic connection is with the duke of Wellington. There are only two Wellingtons in England – it was from the small Somerset town that Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), the first duke, took his title – but more than 30 of them around the world, including the capital of New Zealand.
The impact of Scottish explorers and settlers can also be seen worldwide, from Livingstone in Zimbabwe to the Falkland Islands, from New Glasgow in Nova Scotia (Latin for ‘New Scotland’) to the Murray River in Australia.
Whilst the fresh spaces opened up by imperial enterprise invited English speakers to make their mark when naming new settlements, existing place names were a different matter. The names of foreign cities and countries have until recently been known in English only in their Anglicized form. This still applies to major European cities, which tend not to be spelled or pronounced in the way that their own citizens would use (Florence rather than Firenze, Cologne not Köln). For an English speaker to use the ‘foreign’ designation is usually seen as an affectation. But changes occurring in place names in countries that were once under Western colonial rule are increasingly found in the English-speaking media. In India, Calcutta is now Kolkata and Madras is Chennai while Bombay, named by the British from the Portuguese for ‘good bay’ (bom bahia), is Mumbai, deriving from the goddess Mumba together with ai (‘mother’ in the regional Marathi language). Ceylon long ago became Sri Lanka. An exception is Burma; the ruling military junta renamed it Myanmar in 1989, but international condemnation of the regime means the old name is still preferred (a similar instance occurred when the Khmer Rouge renamed Cambodia ‘Kampuchea’).
KEYWORD
Bungalow
The spread and influence of English was not all one way. Expressions from other countries and cultures found a home in the English-speaking world. Literally so in the case of bungalow. Coming from the Hindi bangla, ‘belonging to Bengal’, and applying to a single-storey dwelling, the word is found as early as the late 17th century in English but achieved real popularity in the age of suburban mass housing and ribbon development. It also spawned the slightly disparaging term bungaloid.