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In a recent TV debate with Byline Times columnist Jonathan Lis, the populist thinker Matthew Goodwin reiterated his belief that English towns and villages were more ‘patriotic areas’ than more diverse Labour voting metropolitan areas.
But one of our greatest national achievements – the English language – is itself a product of migration and diversity, as Peter Jukes’ editorial from the February 2024 print edition explains
This month’s cover image of the rapper Stormzy performing at the 2019 Glastonbury Festival in an iconic Union Jack stab vest – designed by street artist Banksy – sums up the painful paradoxes of national identity.
Is the British flag a symbol of protection or aggression? Is Britishness an internal “prison of nations”, as Anthony Barnett puts it, or an external collective defence?
These questions are explored in all their dynamism and contradiction in this edition of Byline Times. And as always, we don’t have all the answers – but we do have some fascinating new quandaries.
Ambiguities over culture and identity have played out even more widely in the global rise of the English language – the most widely spoken language in the world. If first and second-language speakers are included, this is well ahead of Chinese and Spanish, with up to a quarter of the world’s population able to speak it.
Of these 1.5 billion English speakers, only a tiny fraction of these are in, or from, these isles.
Is this linguistic dominance simply a legacy of the British Empire and post-war US dominance? Or is there something in the nature of the language itself that allows assimilation, openness, adaptation and tolerance?
We must never forget, in this time of nationalist-populism, that the British Isles have – since time immemorial – been multi-linguistic, multicultural, and multi-ethnic.
But the origin of English as a language was at the expense of the ‘British’ and the various cultures that existed before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded from the Continent in the 4th Century.
Spreading up from the south-east with a mixture of coercion, violence and intermarriage, the Anglo-Saxons marginalised the indigenous Romano-British and Celtic cultures to the north and west, to Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and Scotland.
Though many Celtic place names survive today, the Anglo-Saxons only borrowed a few dozen words (such as ‘badger’ from brocc and ‘rock’ from torr), and their attitude to the natives is summed up in their word for ‘Briton’ – wealh – which came to connote ‘slave’.
My Welsh relatives would no doubt be unsurprised to hear that the plural form of ‘slaves’ is the origin of the word Wales.
This xenophobic ‘Little England’ mentality of the first English speakers was short-lived.
If the Angles, West Saxons, South Saxons, Middle Saxons and Mercians weren’t fighting each other (rather like the factions of the current Conservative Party), they were being invaded by other Scandinavian cultures from the east, most notably the Danes and Vikings.
An English linguistic identity was first systematically propagated by Alfred the Great who, from 871 to 899 BCE, not only built a series of defences – ‘burghs’ – to keep out the marauding Scandinavians, but embarked on a massive campaign of translation and education to enshrine early English as a Christianised, literary, official language.
But, much like Alfred’s political compromises with the Danes, his triumph was one of inclusion rather than exclusion. About a third of the words in Old English were of Norse origin. They still survive in haggle, hit, law, club, dirt, dregs, mire, muck, skate, bull, stagger, thwart, whisk and crawl and many more.
So one of the salient glories of the English language from the beginning is this radical talent for assimilation and integration of other languages.
The invasion of the Normans (Frenchified former Vikings) did little to change this. For 200 years, French was the language of the ruling class – a serf-master distinction which survives today in the French origin of our words for consumption and feasting (pork, mutton and beef) and the Anglo-Saxon words for the herding and care of animals (pigs, sheep and cows).
By the 14th Century, virtually everyone – the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate – spoke English as their mother tongue.
Two languages had died in England, Norse and Norman, but this time English had enlarged its vocabulary yet again by another third, with French or Latin origin words. It would continue to welcome an influx of immigrant words as its trade and empire spread for the rest of the millennium.
Beyond dominion and commerce, this alacrity with loan words, an inclination to linguistic promiscuity and hybrid mingling is a good reason why the English language is to be celebrated regardless of the origin of whoever speaks it.
In the recent Palme D’Or-winning film Anatomy of a Fall, the German suspect in the death of her French husband explains to investigators she mainly spoke to him in English as that was the couple’s “meeting place”.
On a trip this winter to the Arctic Circle, I shared a sleigh with a Japanese family who – it’s so obvious we don’t even think about it – conversed with our Finnish guide in English. By a network effect, the native language of most of the inhabitants of the UK has become – wait for another borrowing – a lingua franca for the whole world.
There are practical reasons for this beyond the appropriation or exploitation of other languages. Unlike other grammars, English has lost most of its most inflected noun and verb endings, allowing innovative new structures from pronouns, prepositions and auxiliaries that make it a fairly quick and easy language to pick up (if a fiendishly complex and irregular language to master).
What this does for us in these islands is a mixed blessing. We can be understood over much of the world, but British English is a small and diminishing variant of the broader international English. And, of course, this dominance could well be making us more stupid and insular, less adept at opening our minds to foreign languages, and making our purposes and biases transparent, while their cultures remain opaque. The false sense of global importance it gives us could well be behind the hubris of Brexit and other examples of us ‘punching above our weight’.
But as something which is now a global construction, spoken and written by billions, the immigrant and emigré history of the English language contains constant riches and possibilities.
As the Argentinian laureate Jorge Luis Borges explained in an interview in 1977, English is effectively a ‘bi-lingual’ language, with a constant choice of words between the “Latin and Germanic” registers. “For example, if I say ‘regal’ that is not exactly the same thing as saying ‘kingly’,” he told William F Buckley. “Or if I say ‘fraternal’ that is not the same as saying ‘brotherly’. Or ‘dark’ and ‘obscure’.”
Borges thought English was much more “physical” and flexible than his Spanish mother tongue and pointed out that “you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to ‘laugh off’ to ‘dream away’. To ‘live down’ something, to ‘live up to’ something – you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language”.
Meanwhile, we can only ‘dream away’ that our country will one day ‘live up to’ the richness, tolerance and openness of the language we helped originate. Hopefully, the articles ahead might help.