Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  * Much later, in 1944, after Nazi atrocities in the region, Stalin deported the remaining 190,000 Crimean Tatars en masse to central Asia. In the 1990s about 50,000 of them returned (Dalby 1998: 616).

  * The word Kazakh has the same Turkic etymology as Cossack; but here it refers to a real Turkic tribe of nomads, closely related to the Kyrgyz.

  * The Bible was actually available in Kalmyk and Tatar (not to mention Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian and Georgian) half a century before it came out in Russian. Publication of the Russian Bible could not be authorised until 1876, by chance just after the first Russian edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Hosking 1997: 138-42, 233-4).

  * In 1994, there were 436,600 Russians in Estonia, comprising 29.0 per cent of the total population; in Latvia, there were 849,000, 33.1 per cent. Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the Russian population stood at 316,000, just 8.5 per cent (Europa World Yearbook, 1995).

  † A May 1995 referendum granted Russian the status of an official language, along with Belarusian. Russian is the language of instruction in virtually all university departments in Belarus. And whereas in 1994 220 schools in Minsk, the capital city, had taught in Belarusian, two years later under twenty did so.

  § At high cost, but with dubious symbolism, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, speaking Turkic languages, all converted their alphabets back from Cyrillic to Latin in the decade after independence. But each system is a little different, and none has adopted Turkey’s own spelling conventions of 1928.

  * Another Germanic language, Norse, was also being taken far afield by its speakers in the latter centuries of this millennium: the Normans took it to Normandy, the Varangians to Rus, the Vikings to England, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland. In every case but one, they gave up their own language for that of the people with whom they settled: the only exception was in Iceland, where the Norse settlers found that they were the first human beings to arrive.

  † The decisive battle on a frozen Lake Peipus, in Livonia, was memorably conceived on film by Sergei Eisenstein.

  * These are not so much Japanese as strings of Chinese characters in Japanese pronunciation. This did not inhibit their effectiveness.

  * Of course, Japanese imperialism was an extremely restless force, and did not stop here: for brief periods Japan also held parts of eastern Siberia as far as Irkutsk (1918-22), northern Sakhalin and the Lower Amur (1920-5), Manchuria (1931-45), north-eastern China (1934-45) and then, during the Second World War, the whole of South-East Asia, the East Indies, New Guinea, the Philippines and Burma (for various periods in 1941-5). But all these conquests were disputed, and so held on a temporary, military, basis. It was only in the older ‘formal empire’ that the Japanese had something of a chance to put down linguistic roots.

  * The French advice came from Michel Lubon, suggesting that Taiwan should be ‘a prefecture of Japan in future, if not now’, immediately subject to the Imperial Consitution, a solution reminiscent of France’s approach to Algeria. The British advice, from Montague Kirkwood, suggested viewing Taiwan as a colony with its own legislative council, and as many Taiwanese as possible as legislators, judges and administrators. Among other reasons, it was rejected on the grounds that the Japanese and Taiwanese belonged to the same race and used the same script (Chen 1984: 249-51).

  * As it was, the islands became part of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (gaining independence in 1986), and their own languages still predominate; in 1998, the UN put their total population at 114,000, with some 3500 English speakers (Grimes 2000).

  12

  Microcosm or Distorting Mirror?

  The Career of English

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’1

  The career of the English language, like that of most of the world’s major languages, is often retold to its own speakers, and seldom without some element of triumph. The glories of any language community are hard for a speaker-patriot to resist, and few have any true conception of ages other than their own.

  But even from the perspective of this book, there is still a sense in which the story of English deserves a special position among world languages. True, it happens to be the language with the widest spread in the era when these words are written. And in this era the world has become a single community linked by instant communications, making English uniquely prevalent, and leaving us wondering whether there could still be anywhere for a successor language to spring from. But the material fact for us is that English is a language with a remarkably varied history. This history is short: English as an identifiable language is no more than 1.5 millennia old, and its substance changed radically about halfway through its short life. But it has packed into this short span such a variety of crises and unpredictable outcomes that it can almost be seen as a personal summary of the adventures of its predecessors, all the way back to Memphis, Patna, Chang-an and Babylon.

  One advantage of viewing English in the light of so many parallels is to reveal the essential strangeness of many developments that are usually taken for granted. We have already noted the success of Germanic Anglo-Saxons and Frisians in implanting their language, a striking feat when set against the achievement of other Germanic invaders, above all their contemporaries the Franks and the Goths settling in other parts of the western Roman empire. More than a thousand years later, the early English settlers in North America were spontaneously to establish a populous English-language community, while the French Crown was having to send out filles à marier to prevent the young settlers from going native and bringing up families without French. And a century after that, the activities of the English East India Company led to the spread of its own language, English, while the Dutch East India Company, over the same period, succeeded only in spreading a pre-existing lingua franca, Malay. These are just three of the cases where a certain kind of situation has contributed to the expansion of English, but has had no similar effect on other languages. The historic spread of a language is a hard thing to account for fully; but keeping a range of languages in mind may at least help us to escape some half-truths.

  The history of English, at least as viewed from the beginning of the twenty-first century, falls into two very unequal periods: one of formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain; and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world.

  We have already considered the beginning of the formation period, when, as part of the turmoil at the end of Rome’s empire, it coalesced from a group of Germanic dialects (see Chapter 7, ‘Against the odds: The advent of English’, p. 310). Despite political disunity and military threat, it had developed by the ninth century into a major literary language. Nevertheless, two centuries later, French-speaking conquerors were to stifle its written expression. Somehow, in the course of the next two centuries, it succeeded in assimilating the language community that was dominating it, to re-emerge as the foremost language of the realm. In the same period, it also spread geographically, establishing bridgeheads in every kingdom in the British Isles, among the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. There was a further period of turmoil, in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, when the population was halved by the plague, the royal succession repeatedly disrupted by war, the Church shaken by protest and schism, and the currency racked by inflation. During all this time, English was spoken and written, but with no national standard uniting the various dialects. Linguistic stability came at much the same time as political stability, both focused on London, and mass readership of the Bible.

  In the propagation period, when English speakers begin to travel and settle abroad, the temper of the English, and so by association their language too, becomes much m
ore worldly, in both literal and figurative senses; the world is opened up to the English, but above all to their business and trading enterprise, with government and Church concerns very much in the rear. This idea of ‘English—the Businessman’s Friend’ may be what is really distinctive about the spread of this language, though equally distinctively reinforced by English-speaking science and technology. Certainly, this commercial and scientific character sets it apart from such major rivals as Spanish, French and Russian. It has become even more dominant in the very recent history of the twentieth century, when a single English-speaking ex-colony has become the world’s greatest power, competence in the language itself has become a major industry, and the spread of the language has accelerated well beyond the influence of the states that speak it natively. It is estimated that those who use English for convenience as a lingua franca now outnumber–by perhaps three to one—the total population of all native English speakers. Language prestige does not go much higher than this.

  This apparent autonomy acquired by English means that, unlike most of the languages considered in this book, it is not yet possible to trace the beginnings of a downward trend in use of the language, even if the political and economic forces that put English up there have largely peaked. But we shall not be deterred. The life-histories of the many languages we have considered have shown various factors that can end the reign of a world language. It will be instructive to finish our account of English by using them to conjecture various paths downward from its present heights, unassailable as they appear.

  Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French

  In a sense, the Norman conquest of England in the mid-eleventh century was an anachronism, the last of the Germanic invasions to convulse a European country, a couple of centuries too late.*

  The Normans, after all, were only five or six generations away from their Norwegian ancestry as Vikings, and Normanni is just a Latinisation of NorδrTcross;menn, ‘north men’, which is still the word for Norwegians in Icelandic Norse. At the end of the ninth century, under their leader Rollo, they had been living by their swords, but they sailed south, and settled in what became Normandy, having coerced the Frankish king Charles III (the Simple) into granting them title, by the Treaty of St-Clair-sur-Epte, c.911. There they proceeded to put away their roving and marauding ways, including the Norse language; as typical Germanic invaders, in a couple of generations they had given up using their own language, and adopted the local Romance tongue, which on their lips is known as Norman French. When Rollo’s descendant, William the Bastard, led his successful invasion of England in 1066, he brought this language into England with him.

  English overlaid

  But the Norman invasion of England was quite unlike the previous Germanic conquests of England in both scale and political consequence.

  In scale, it was small, at least by comparison with the then population of England: William came with some five thousand knights, and the total numbers who ‘came over with the Conqueror’, all told, will have amounted to at most four times this number, twenty thousand to set against an English population of 1.5 million.2 So in the first generation of Norman rule, perhaps one person in a hundred spoke Norman French.

  In political consequence, it was not a raid, nor a mass migration, but a discrete invasion, grounded on a serious casus belli: William claimed that the king of England owed him allegiance, and went on to prove God’s support for his right through battle. The result was almost instant conversion of England from a Saxon to a Norman kingdom. The Normans, though few, effectively decapitated the English regime.

  The linguistic effect of this looks devastating, especially to us reading the written record a millennium later. Now that the king and the nobility are French speakers, there is a new audience for the literary production of England; English vernacular literature—which with Irish had been the earliest to flower in the whole of Europe—ceases, and in its place comes Anglo-Norman courtly romance. From now on, laws, court judgments and legal depositions are almost all in French, a switch that shows up blatantly in the records; for increasingly it is legal documents which set the rules for Norman society and become the main objects of political struggle. The new order had less concrete effect among monks and clerics, since Latin remained the basic language of their intellectual work; but beside liturgy and theology, Latin also took over the functions of record-keeping and the writing of history. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which had been kept continuously since the reign of Alfred in the ninth century, dies out in 1155. By the mid-twelfth century, this division of functions between the languages had become rigid. There was little apparent role left for English, at least in written form. But this does not mean that the language was endangered in use: despite its low profile in the records, there is no reason to believe that it was spoken any the less among the vast majority of the people.

  Partly, the spread of Norman French would have been limited by the very rigidity in the social hierarchy over which the Normans presided. Within the feudal system, the status of every English man and woman was largely determined by birth, with the Church providing the only paths for advancement through merit, and that severely limited through constraints of celibacy. As a result, the French-speaking nobility remained almost a closed society—though fresh blood, and hence no doubt some English in childhood, came in through marriages to Saxon maidens—and there was little or no scope for people to better their prospects through aping their masters. In feudal England, people knew their place, one usually defined within a village, and had little opportunity even to meet people with wider horizons.

  Spreading the Anglo-Norman package

  Such social dynamics as did occur in these centuries were more horizontal than vertical, and due to the unmatched prowess of the Normans in fighting wars against their neighbours. Normans were fine cavalrymen, in fact the first invaders to bring their mounts with them across the Channel.* Once won on the battlefield, however, their power was cemented by the building of castles, fortified strongholds so permanent that many of them stand to this day. These were their main innovation. The Normans rapidly unified the somewhat loosely coordinated state of the Saxons, and proceeded to push back its borders. Beyond them lay Celtic-speaking regions, the north and west of the British Isles. Cornwall had already been part of the Anglo-Saxon weal, but in each of Cumbria, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Normans now made serious inroads.

  Cumbria was the scene of a struggle that lasted from 1092 to 1157. Wales took longer; G went in the south-east was taken by 1087, but although ‘Marcher Lordships’, dependent on the Norman king, were soon established across the whole of southern Wales, resistance did not die away. In the twelfth century, most of the country aside from the southern coast and western borders had reasserted its independence, and there was a period of de facto acceptance of an indigenous Pura Wallia, surrounded by a Norman Marchia Wallie. Only in 1283 did the Angevin king Edward I complete the conquest. Even then, there were two more Welsh rebellions, a decade and then a century later.*

  The penetration of Scotland, hitherto largely Gaelic-speaking, was less warlike. Lothian, in the south-east, had already been English-speaking since the Angles had taken Edinburgh in 638. King Malcolm III,† on the throne at the time of the Norman conquest of England, had been exceptionally Anglophile; he had spent some of his youth in England, ‘knew the English language quite as well as his own’, and had married an English princess, Margaret, who opened the Scottish court (then still at Perth) as a market for luxury goods from England. No natural ally for the advancing Norman power, then, Malcolm actually spent much of his reign on aggressive raids into Northumbria. Nevertheless, his successors, particularly David I (1124-53), were highly partial to Norman influence: Anglo-Norman became the language of the court, so that in the thirteenth century the Englishman Walter of Coventry remarked: ‘The more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen, both in race and in manners, language and culture; and after reducing the Scots [i.e. Gaels] to utt
er servitude, they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service.’3

  But French-speaking nobles brought English-speaking attendants. And to sustain their way of life, they were joined by communities of burgesses, English-speaking, who profited from cross-border trade. Cross-border influence swelled, and people began to refer to their language as ‘Inglis’, and later (equivalently—for this was a very distinctive kind of English) as ‘Scottis’. It hardly mattered that the Scottish and English crowns remained intermittently at war through the late thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.

  In Ireland, the Normans had accepted an invitation around 1166 from Diarmait Mac Murchada, newly deposed king of Leinster, to intervene on his behalf against the Irish High King. It was an act of opportunism on the part of the English king Henry II—neatly backed by a papal bull, Laudabiliter—but enabled him to channel some of the animal spirits of Marcher Lords looking for new conquests beyond Wales. The result was a settlement of Normans around Dublin, soon spreading out northward and westward, which became a permanent feature of the Irish landscape, and ultimately expanded to give the English Crown fitful control of the whole island.

  In all these extensions to its domain, Norman influence brought the same rather complex linguistic regime: French for the rulers, English for their retinue, and Latin for technical support. In the long run, the English apex of the triangle proved the most influential, although functionally it was the most gratuitous: in all these lands, after all, it had to be superimposed on a subject population who spoke yet another language, Cumbrian, Welsh or (as in Scotland and Ireland) Gaelic, and which in the Gaelic case had as strong a literary tradition as English.