The rise of English is a remarkable success story. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly 2,000 years ago, English did not exist. Five hundred years later, Englisc, incomprehensible to modern ears, was probably spoken by about as few people as currently speak Cherokee–and with about as little influence. Nearly a thousand years later, at the end of the 16th Century, when William Shakespeare was in his prime, English was the native speech of between 5 and 7 million Englishmen, and it was, in the words of a contemporary, ”of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this iland of ours, naie not there over all.”
Four hundred years later the contrast is extraordinary. Between 1600 and the present, in armies, navies, companies and expeditions, the speakers of English–including Scottish, Irish, Welsh, American and many more–traveled into every corner of the globe, carrying their language and culture. Today English is used by at least 700 million people, and barely half of those speak it as a mother tongue. Some estimates have put that figure closer to 1 billion. English at the end of the 20th Century is more widely spoken and written than any other language ever has been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language.
The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world`s languages
(which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words, and an additional half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighboring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as ”le snacque-barre” and ”le hit-parade.” About 350 million people use the English vocabulary as a mother tongue: about 1/10th of the world`s population, scattered across every continent and surpassed, in numbers though not in distribution, only by the speakers of the many varieties of Chinese. Three-quarters of the world`s mail and its Telexes and cables are in English. So are more than half the world`s technical and scientific periodicals; it is the language of technology from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. English is the medium for 80 percent of the information stored in the world`s computers. Nearly half of all business deals in Europe are conducted in English. It is the language of sports and glamor, the official language of the Olympics and the Miss Universe competition. English is the official voice of the air, of the sea and of Christianity; it is the ecumenical language of the World Council of Churches. Five of the largest broadcasting companies in the world
(CBS, NBC and ABC in the U.S.; the BBC in Britain and CBC in Canada)
transmit in English to audiences that regularly exceed 100 million.
English has a few rivals but no equals. Neither Spanish nor Arabic, both international languages, have this global sway. Another rival, Russian, has the political and economic underpinnings of a world language, but far from spreading its influence outside the Soviet empire, it, too, is becoming mildly colonized by new words known as Russlish, for example ”seksapil” (sex appeal) and ”noh-khau” (know-how). Germany and Japan have, in matching the commercial and industrial vigor of the United States, achieved the commercial precondition of language power, but their languages have also been invaded by English, in the shape of Deutchlish and Japlish.
The remarkable story of how English spread to become the predominant language in societies such as the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand is not, with the benefit of hindsight, unique. It is a process in language as old as Greek or Chinese. The truly significant development, which has occurred only in the last hundred years or so, is the use of English, taking the most conservative estimates, by 300 or 400 million people for whom it is not a native language. English has become a second language in countries like India, Nigeria and Singapore, where it is used for administration, broadcasting and education. In these countries English is a vital alternative language, often unifying huge territories and diverse populations. When Rajiv Gandhi, now India`s prime minister, appealed for an end to the violence after the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi, he went on television and spoke to his people in English. In anglophone Africa, seizures of power are announced in English.
Then there is English as a foreign language, used in countries (like Holland or Yugoslavia) where it is backed by a tradition of English teaching or where it has been more recently adopted, Senegal, for instance. Here it is used to aid contact with people in other countries, usually to promote trade and scientific progress, but also to the benefit of international
communication generally. A Dutch poet is read by a few thousand. Translated into English, he can be read by hundreds of thousands.
The emergence of English as a global phenomenon–as either a first, second or foreign language–has recently inspired the idea (undermining the above claims) that we should talk not of English but of many Englishes, especially in Third World countries where use of English is no longer part of the colonial legacy but the result of decisions made since their independence. Throughout the history of English there has been a contest between the forces of standardization and the forces of localization, at both the written and the spoken levels. The appearance of the first substantial English dictionaries in the 18th Century was a move towards written standardization. It was Victorian England that realized the idea of ”the Queen`s English,” a spoken standard to which the ”lesser breeds” could aspire. The industrial revolution meant roads, canals and, above all, trains: People traveled more, both geographically and socially. The pressures of class ambition speeded the emergence of a standard form of English speech.
The emergence of Received Pronunciation (RP)–the outward and visible sign of belonging to the professional middle class–went hand in hand with the rise in England of an Imperial Civil Service and its educational infrastructure. The Education Act of 1870 not only established the English public school as the melting pot of upper- and middle-class speech and society, but it also started a boom in English preparatory schools.
The contrast in the English speech of the educated elite before and after the Education Act is startling. Before 1870 many of the most eminent Victorians retained their regional accents throughout their lives.
By the 1890s all this had changed. A new generation of post-Education Act schoolmasters would rebuke the boy who said ”loike” for ”like.” Accent leveling was applied not only from above: Peer pressure among the schoolboys themselves was a powerful incentive for a new boy to acquire the approved tone. From the 1880s, at Bedford Modern School, local boys with a North Bedfordshire accent, according to one account, ”were so mercilessly imitated and laughed at that if they had any intelligence, they were soon able to speak standard English.” Nonstandard Engish was now seriously stigmatized as the mark of the undereducated. At Oxford University it had become virtually a condition of social acceptance among undergraduates that one should ”speak the Queen`s English with a specific accent and intonation.”
This ”specific accent” was RP–a term that entered a common currency at the end of the 19th Century, the educated accent of London and southeast England. There was nothing wholly new in this. Three centuries before, an Elizabethan writer had described the most desirable form of English as ”the usuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London. . . .” But now, for the first time, the public and preparatory schools were spreading this preferred English nationwide, so much so that in 1917 the phonetician Daniel Jones christened standard spoken English ”Public School Pronunciation (PSP),” a label that did not stick.
RP was not confined to the public schools, which had a special and wider administrative role to play within Victorian society: to provide the British Army and the Imperial Civil Service with a steady flow of well-spoken recruits. At the height of the Empire, RP was widely recognized throughout the colonies as the voice of authority. Indeed, it was jealously preserved as such. In George Orwell`s ”Burmese Days,” when the Burmese butler at the club shows an unacceptable proficiency (”I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now”), he is rebuked by the white sahib:
Don`t talk like that, damn you–”I find it very difficult!” Have you swallowed a dictionary? ”Please, master, can`t keeping ice cool”–that`s how you you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well.
Within privileged parts of the Empire–the officer corps of the Indian Army, for instance–the aspiration towards RP became total. As one retired Indian officer remarked, ”Our teachers drilled into our minds that the thing to aspire to was what is known as the King`s English.”
During the First World War, RP and Cockney collided not merely face to face but down telephone wires. We had entered the age of the recorded voice and electrically transmitted sound. For the first time in the history of language it was possible to listen to another voice without being in the presence of the speaker–and to hear that voice again and again. Today we take these inventions for granted, but the first recordings of the speech of Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson (with a noticeable Lincolnshire burr), and even Queen Victoria herself (the old lady pronounced a high-pitched ”Good evening” for posterity) must have seemed miraculous.
The years from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the end of the Second World War in 1945 were the great years of radio in Britain and the U.S., the years of Franklin Roosevelt`s fireside chats to the American people and of Winston Churchill`s wartime broadcasts. The establishment in Britain in 1922 of the first radio broadcasting service, the BBC, was a milestone for the English language. As one of its first executives wrote: ”The broadcasting of aural language is an event no less important than the broadcasting of visual language (printing), not only in its influence on human relations but in its influence upon the destinies of the English language.” From the first the BBC had a global–and in those days imperial–attitude towards the English language. The motto on its crest ran, ”Nation shall speak peace unto nation,” and no one doubted what the tongue should be. The question was: What kind of English?
The approach to a solution, reached in 1926, was to set up the so-called Advisory Committee on Spoken English (ACSE). This high-powered group of experts included the poet Robert Bridges, a northerner who argued
unsuccessfully for the adoption of a Northern Standard; the American scholar Logan Pearsall Smith; and the Irishman George Bernard Shaw. But it was composed chiefly of RP speakers, men such as lexicographer C.T. Onions, scientist Julian Huxley, art historian Kenneth Clark and Alastair Cooke, then a young journalist. The committee`s declared task was to arbitrate on the usage and pronunciation of words, English and foreign. Decisions were reached by a simple vote. Arbitrations on usage were probably much less influential for the evolution of a spoken Standard English than judgments about pronunciation. Alastair Cooke remembers how the ACSE settled the pronunciation of ”canine”:
Shaw brought up the word ”canine,” and he wanted the recommendation to be ”cay-nine” . . . And somebody said, ”Mr. Shaw, Mr. Chairman, I don`t know why you bring this up; of course, it`s ”ca-nine.” Shaw said, ”I always pronounce things the way they are pronounced by people who use the word professionally every day.” And he (the chairman) said, ”My dentist always says `cay-nine` .” And somebody said, ”Well, in that case, Mr. Chairman, you must have an American dentist.” And he said, ”Of course, why do you think at 76 I have all my teeth!”
Within the British Isles the spread of RP by the BBC, first on radio, then on television, helped to reinforce what was an already strong connection in many people`s minds between education and ”Standard English”–usually perceived as the pronunciation found in the public schools, the universities, the professions, the government and the church. The influence of this association was, in its day, enormous, even though RP was spoken by only about 3 percent of the British population, a tiny fraction of the world`s English-speaking community. Henry Cecil Wyld, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1920 to 1945, expressed a common view when he wrote of RP that it was: ”The best kind of English, not only because it is spoken by those often very properly called the best people, but also because it has two great advantages that make it intrinsically superior to every other type of English speech–the extent to which it is current throughout the country and the marked distinctiveness and clarity of its sounds.”
Even in the U.S. a refined pronunciation of the King`s English became desirable: In the Hollywood films of the 1930s stars playing upper-class Americans affected ”posh” accents. (The fascination was not entirely one-way. Writer Raymond Chandler, now wholly identified with Los Angeles, liked to stress his English public-school education. In 1958, the year before his death, he wrote to producer John Houseman, a friend from Hollywood days, ”I have had a lot of fun with the American language; it has fascinating idioms, is constantly creative, very much like the English of Shakespeare`s time; its slang and argot is wonderful. . . .”) In the 1950s Wall Street and Madison Avenue hired English secretaries to add a touch of class to their dealings with the public.
An accent has two vital functions: First, it gives us a clue about the speaker`s life and career; second, an accent will give a good indication of the speaker`s community values and what he or she identifies with. A New York taxi driver who says, ”Toid and Toity-toid” is not only giving away his Brooklyn origins but expressing pride in his roots. Jimmy Carter`s unabashed Southern accent proclaimed his determination to be an outsider in Washington. Research into popular attitudes towards accents in Britain reveals a surprisingly uniform reaction. Speakers of RP–identifiable only by voice–are credited with qualities such as honesty, intelligence, ambition, even good looks. Some local accents rate a higher score than RP for sincerity and friendliness but not many. The RP speaker, compared with the speaker of nonstandard English, has a better chance of asserting his rights, whether in a court of law or when negotiating credit with a shopkeeper–in any situation, in fact, where credibility is at a premium.
”The Cold War,” a phrase that entered dictionaries in 1947, marked the emergence of the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the two superpowers. For the first time in its history, English–American English–was unequivocally ”the language of democracy.” It was Winston Churchill who championed this identification: ”We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man, which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which, through the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the habeas corpus, trial by jury and the English common law find their expression in the Declaration of Independence.”
Now, with English-speaking America ranged against the Soviet Union, both its democratic ideals and the language of those ideals–”life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”–became closely identified with a fundamental geo- political struggle. The radio station Voice of America conducted many broadcasts in American English. For underground movements in Soviet Russia and the Eastern-bloc satellite countries, it was the publication of their manifestos in English that drew world attention to their struggles. Many
”liberation movements” and ”freedom fighters” in the Third World adopted local versions of the Declaration of Independence to inspire followers –often against the retreating British Empire.
