The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  What has been generally overlooked in all the brouhaha about declining educational standards is that there is nothing new in all this. As long ago as 1961, a body called the Council for Basic Education, in a report called Tomorrow’s Illiterates, estimated that more than a third of all American students were “seriously retarded in reading.” In his 1964 book The Treasure of Our Tongue, Lincoln Barnett noted that a professor at Columbia University tested 170 history graduate students on whether they could correctly identify twenty common abbreviations, such as B.C., A.D., ibid., i.e., and the like, and one large Roman numeral. “Of the 170,” Barnett wrote, “only one understood all 20 abbreviations, only 17 understood more than 15, about half the class understood no more than four, and of that half not one could translate MDCLIX into 1659.” These, remember, were graduate students in history at an Ivy League university.

  It must be said that it seems a trifle harsh to ask our youngsters to master their native language when we fail to demand the same of our national leaders. Consider for a moment President George H. W. Bush explaining why he would not support a ban on semiautomatic weapons: “But I also want to have—be the President that protects the rights of, of people to, to have arms. And that—so you don’t go so far that the legitimate rights on some legislation are, are, you know, impinged on.” As Tom Wicker noted in an article in The New York Times [February 24, 1988] critically anatomizing the president’s speaking abilities, “could he not express himself at least in, like, maybe, you know, sixth- or seventh-grade English, rather than speaking as if he were Dan Quayle trying to explain the Holocaust?” But compared with the vice president, Mr. Bush is an extemporaneous speaker of the first mark. Here is Vice President Quayle speaking off the cuff at a Thanksgiving festival in Charles City, Virginia: “I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family—which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be” [quoted in the Des Moines Register, November 23, 1988]. And they said oratory was dead.

  But perhaps the most important question facing English as it lumbers toward the twenty-first century is whether it will remain one generally cohesive tongue or whether it will dissolve into a collection of related but mutually incomprehensible sublanguages. In 1978, in a speech to 800 librarians in Chicago, Robert Burchfield, then the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, noted his belief that British English and American English were moving apart so inexorably that within 200 years they could be mutually unintelligible. Or as he rather inelegantly put it: “The two forms of English are in a state of dissimilarity which should lead to a condition of unintelligibility, given another two hundred years.” (And this from the man chosen to revise Fowler’s Modern English Usage!) The assertion provoked a storm of articles on both sides of the Atlantic, almost all of them suggesting that Burchfield was, in this instance, out of his mind.

  People, it must be said, have been expecting English to fracture for some time. Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, as we have seen, both expected American English to evolve into a discrete language. So did H. L. Mencken in the first edition of The American Language, though by the 1936 edition he had reversed this opinion, and was suggesting, perhaps only half in jest, that British English was becoming an American dialect. The belief was certainly not uncommon up until the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Henry Sweet, one of the most eminent linguistic authorities of his day, could confidently predict: “In another century . . . ​England, America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages.” But of course nothing of the sort happened—and, I would submit, is not likely to now.

  Following the controversy aroused by his speech, Burchfield wrote an article in the London Observer defending his lonesome position. After expressing some surprise at the response to his remarks, which he said had been made “almost in passing,” he explained that he felt that “the two main forms of English separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart and that existing elements of linguistic diversity between them will intensify as time goes on.” This is not quite the same thing as saying they are becoming separate languages, but it is still a fairly contentious assertion.

  The main planks of Burchfield’s defense rest on two principal beliefs. The first is that the divergence of languages is a reasonable historical presumption. In the past, most languages have split at some point, as when the mutually intelligible North Germanic dialects evolved into the mutually unintelligible languages of German, Dutch, and English. And, second, Burchfield observed that English already has many words that cause confusion. “It is easy to assemble lists of American expressions that are not (or are barely) intelligible to people in this country,” he wrote in The Observer, and cited as examples: barf, boffo, badmouth, schlepp, and schlock. That may be true (though, in point of fact, most Britons could gather the meaning of these words from their context) but even so the existence of some confusing terms hardly establishes permanent linguistic divergence. An Iowan traveling through Pennsylvania would very probably be puzzled by many of the items he found on menus throughout the state—soda, scrapple, subs, snits, fat cakes, funnel cakes, and several others all would be known either by other names or not at all to the Iowan. Yet no one would suggest that Iowa and Pennsylvania are evolving separate languages. The same is surely no less true for American and British English.

  In the late 1940s, the London Daily Mail ran an article discussing American expressions that would be “positively incomprehensible” to the average English person. These included commuter, seafood, rare as applied to meat, mean in the sense of nasty, dumb in the sense of stupid, intern, dirt road, and living room. Putting aside the consideration that the Daily Mail must have had a very low opinion of its readers to conclude that they could not surmise the meaning of seafood and dirt road even if they hadn’t heard them before, the simple fact is that all those terms are now known throughout Britain and several of them—seafood, commuter, rare meat—are now established as the invariable words for those items. There will no doubt always be a substantial pool of words that will be largely unshared by the two countries. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the pool is growing. As the Daily Mail example shows, what happens is that the unfamiliar words tend to become familiar over time and then are replaced by other new words.

  The suggestion that English will evolve into separate branches in the way that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian seems to me to ignore the very obvious consideration that communications have advanced a trifle in the intervening period. Movies, television, books, magazines, record albums, business contacts, tourism—all these are powerfully binding influences. At the time of writing, a television viewer in Britain could in a single evening watch Neighbours, an Australian soap opera, Cheers, an American comedy set in Boston, and EastEnders, a British program set among cockneys in London. All of these bring into people’s homes in one evening a variety of vocabulary, accents, and other linguistic influences that they would have been unlikely to experience in a single lifetime just two generations ago. If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should be not that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.

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