Endangered English

What is it like to be a speaker of a minority language?

English is today the world’s dominant lingua franca; not, perhaps, the world’s most spoken language, but almost certainly the world’s most readily understood language. It has become the accepted language of scientific and scholarly communication, and the story of English is sometimes told as one of unstoppable progress towards ultimate triumph. Yet in the same way that human populations – even successful ones – sometimes pass through perilous demographic bottlenecks, so the English language almost didn’t succeed. History could have been very different – and, indeed, it is something of a historical mystery that English is still here at all. What if English had not succeeded as it had done - what if it had, in fact, slipped into the position of a marginalised minority language? Well, it nearly happened.

In 1066 England was conquered by the Normans. Not only did Norman French replace English as the language of the nobility and the landowning class, but in most places monks broke with Anglo-Saxon tradition by abandoning the English vernacular as a written language. Naturally enough, the socially aspirational sought to adopt or at least learn the new language, and in the 12th and 13th centuries Norman French was England’s elite lingua franca, while Latin was the language of learning and the Church.

It is a linguistic story we see repeated all over Europe, and all over the world; the language of a new elite filters down through society and, by a mixture of social pressure and everyday utility, the new language slowly supplants the old. Indeed, English itself may owe its existence in Britain to such a process, if (as many historians think) the descendants of Romano-Britons adopted the language of Germanic settlers as a matter of pragmatic convenience. The old language becomes steadily marginalised, and perhaps stigmatised as rustic, uncouth and uneducated. This was what happened to many of the vernaculars of Central and Eastern Europe, which became ‘peasant languages’ for centuries – rarely if ever written down – until their emergence in national revival movements in the 19th century.

But somehow, in England, the English language came back from the brink of this sort of marginalisation. Exactly when the turning point came, and why, are matters much debated by scholars. Was it down to a renewed sense of Englishness as England confronted France in the Hundred Years’ War? Was it down to the promotional efforts of advocates of English like John Trevisa? Was it down to the Church’s increasing concern with communicating with people in their own language by encouraging vernacular preaching in response to the outbreak of the Lollard heresy? Or was it because the Anglo-Norman language had simply reached some sort of natural or social limit of its penetration, and English was perfectly good enough for most people to use in everyday life? Whatever the answer, in the 14th century a language that had been largely oral and unwritten for two centuries re-established itself as a literary language, and English embarked on its world-conquering destiny.

But could it have been different? And if it had been, what might have happened to the English language? And what can we learn from imagining a different England where English did not revive in the late Middle Ages? Let’s slip for a moment into an alternative reality…

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It happened in London first. It became rare to hear anyone talking in the peasant tongue. Everyone spoke French now – or, if they didn’t, they pretended they did, or kept quiet. That was better than being thought an oik for stumbling out the old language. Of course, there was still plenty of English in the countryside, and it carried on that way until the Reformation. That was the real watershed; when the Latin mass was abandoned, there were a few royal counsellors who suggested the parish churches could make provision for a liturgy in English, but it was never a realistic option. The real power in the parish, the seigneur du manoir, had no desire to hear a service or sermons in a language he himself did not understand. And, in any case, the printers were unable to agree on how the sounds of the old language should be written on the page. The Livre de la Prière Commune was accordingly published in French, the language of the Crown and of anyone who had any desire to better himself, and the focus of linguistic reform was on purifying the French language of the English corruptions that had infiltrated it over the centuries.

A few allowances were made; in the absence of a prayer book in English, in parishes where English still predominated the Parlement d’Ouestmoutiers permitted the use of a liturgy in Latin until a translator could be found to undertake an English prayer book. It was an undertaking that took several decades, and by the time the English book arrived it was more of a curiosity than anything else. The ‘old tongue’ was being pushed to the fringes of the kingdom – the sort of thing you might find in Comté d’Everoïque du Nord, in Comté de Lincolne, in remote Comté de Norfolque; by the late 17th century it was surprising to find anyone speaking English in Comté d’Esseques, while the idea of anyone using the language in Comté de Kente or Comté d’Herteforde was laughable. Isolated from one another, the remaining pockets of English-speakers developed their own eccentricities, and dialects of the embattled tongue diverged, becoming almost separate languages scarcely comprehensible to one another.

Granted, the religious fervour of the 17th century brought some relief; radical sects proclaimed that the Gospel ought to be preached in everyone’s language, and a few scholars set to work on the task of translating the Bible into English; but the task was left unfinished on the Restoration of Charles II, a monument to broken dreams of a different Angleterre. In any case, the translators had been unable to agree on which English dialect to use, or how to write the language. It was not until the reign of La Reine Anne that a few scholars, enthusiasts of the Old English tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, became interested in the contemporary vernacular of the peasantry. Others, however, were contemptuous of the surviving anglais dialects, arguing that they did not constitute a language at all. They were merely linguistic oddities, a form of Dutch or Flemish that no-one could prove descended from the lost language of the Anglo-Saxons; in fact, some argued that peasant vernacular was just as likely to derive from Fleming mercenaries brought over in the reign of Henri II. There were even those bien pensant intellectuals who confidently stated that the langue Normande was not, in fact, a language that had been brought over by Guillaume le Conquerant but was really the direct descendant of the Latin of the Romans in Britain – and they questioned whether the Anglo-Saxons had really existed at all. It was in this period that a great number of surviving Old English manuscripts were regrettably lost, destroyed by scholars who were anxious about their social credit in a new atmosphere of Latinism and scepticism on la question Anglo-Saxone.

Then, in the era of the French Revolution, speakers of anglais came under some suspicion as the authorities wondered if the peasantry hid seditious plans to overthrow the king and government behind their ‘ethnic cant’, and in the 19th century moral reformers became concerned that rural children were growing up without a proper knowledge of Anglo-Normande. Accordingly, schools punished children for speaking anything other than the King’s French, and the slow death of the last pockets of la langue anglaise seemed assured. Revival came only after 1848, in the era of nationalism, when anything that conferred particularity and distinctiveness on a people was seized on by Romantics eager to capture the soul of their nation. It was thus that a few pioneering amateurs began proposing new orthographies for the English language and a unified approach to English as a modern vernacular, although no regulated spelling was agreed until the 1890s; until then, disputes raged among Anglicists about the precedence of northern, southern, eastern or western dialects in the transcription of the modern language. By the First World War, however, at least some of the stigma about speaking English had disappeared, and in the Interwar period it became fashionable for even the middle and upper classes to speak English.

While English can now be heard in many private conversations across the United Kingdom, and there are several cities (most notably Norwich) where learners of this historically interesting language can hold conversations with most residents in English, Anglo-Norman French remains dominant in London and the Home Counties, and in spite of political pressure from nationalist parties supporting a greater promotion of English, many remain convinced that the government’s commitment to English remains lukewarm. The future of English as anything more than a local eccentricity of certain regions of England remains rather uncertain…

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While this imagined counterfactual history of the English language might seem incredible, it is of course based on the actual historical experience of many languages, including languages in the United Kingdom like Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish. It is perhaps instructive for speakers of a language that has attained extraordinary global dominance to imagine themselves, for a moment, in the position of speakers of marginalised and minority languages. Because English almost became one.