LanguageWhen Prince Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck was once asked what development he believed was the most significant for the future of humanity, his answer was simple: it was the fact that the Americans spoke English.
The Chancellor's blunt prophecy has now realised itself in the more than one billion people on the planet who use English as a primary or secondary means of communication. Melvyn Bragg's book sets out to explain how a clutch of Germanic tribal dialects spoken by around 150,000 people in the fifth century gradually became a global language. The book is linked to the series, The Adventure of English: 500AD to 2000AD, that Bragg wrote and produced for ITV.
The story that Bragg tells the reader is basically one of indomitable Englishry. From the initial encounter with the Celts through to the Danish invasions and defeat at the hands of the Norman French, the tale of English is one of struggle, resilience and triumph. The prose throughout is a kind of breathless hybrid between Look and Learn and Tiger and Jag, as Bragg uses the stock metaphors of violent conflict to describe the glorious revolutions of English: "For English to grow to its full power, others had to be felled or chopped back savagely." On occasion, his enthusiasms court parody. Churchill's famous speech including the lines, "we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender", becomes the subject of Bragg's musings on the relics of Old English, "Only 'surrender' is not Old English. That, in itself, might be significant". Or it might not and might simply be a fanciful fiction of national chauvinism. One of the difficulties for the reader is that "we" and "our" is used continuously throughout The Adventure of English but it is difficult to know who is being included in the inclusiveness of the chummy pronoun. Bragg talks of the exploits of English going from "these small islands" to the ends of the earth but he perhaps wisely omits to tell the reader about how English came to be the majority vernacular on the smaller of the "small islands" in the 16th and early 17th century. The violence that shadowed the Tudor Kulturkampf and which is detailed in Patricia Palmer's excellent study, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland, means that for many Irish readers, at least, the "we" of Bragg's matey prose is going to be somewhat problematic.
Bragg is good on acknowledging debts and writes well on the importance of translators such as John Wycliffe and William Tyndale to the emergence of modern English. He is right, too, to show how women and in particular women as readers of that despised genre, the novel, contributed to the elaboration of the English language in the 19th century. Bragg discusses accent in English, although he never asks himself why it should be an Irishman, Thomas Sheridan, who would be the first to want the English and the Scots to talk proper. He finds the fact amusing but no explanation is forthcoming. The failure to probe more deeply shows up a more general fault of the book which is evident in the subtitle. Languages do not make for good biographical subjects. Seeing a language as a living organism suggests that what happens to it is somehow inscribed in the natural order of things. Hence, in Ireland, the repeated references to the "death" of the Irish language as if language extinction was the inevitable if regrettable outcome of old age rather than the explicit result of social, political, military and economic decisions made by human beings.
So Bragg can only explain the expansion of English in terms of a kind of Darwinian bloody-mindedness and instinctual canniness and fails to detail the operations of power that sustained the two great Anglophone empires, the British and the American.
Bragg's enthusiasm for English makes him careless with detail. He claims at one point that "no other language in the Christian world could match the achievements of the Beowulf poet and his anonymous contemporaries inside and outside the Church". The author of The Adventure of English should be given the Táin Bó Cuailinge and a tutorial in Old Irish.
The French language is consistently misrepresented as a purist's paradise, a notion that has been thoroughly rubbished by linguists like Henriette Walter. But Bragg's passion is understandable. The English language has proved to be astonishingly resilient and creative down through the centuries and it has bequeathed a remarkable body of literature to humanity. One question, though, which might be asked is will English in the future be the poorer for its popularity? In other words, as more and more people use the language as a lingua franca, will the language become a lifeless code of minimal expressiveness or will it further expand and be enriched by contact with other cultures and languages?
One answer might be that the question will be decided not so much by humans as by their machines. The close association of the language with science and technology has meant that growth in the English word hoard is driven primarily by scientific research and technical inventiveness. In addition, the technology itself, from the Internet to the mobile phone, is shaping the uses to which the language is put. So English as the primary idiom of the informational society is expanding endlessly but whether more (information) literally "means" less is the dilemma for a language that has come so far from its Frisian origins. Perhaps the misadventure of English is only beginning.
Michael Cronin is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dublin City University. His most recent publications are Time Tracks: Scenes from the Irish Everyday (New Island) and a collection of essays, co-edited with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, entitled The Languages of Ireland (Four Courts Press)
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language By Melvyn Bragg Hodder & Stoughton, 354pp. £20