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CHAPTER ONE
A world language
The English language is spoken today in parts of
Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand,
and in some of the islands of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific
Oceans. It is spoken as a first language by 370 to 400 million
people. It is also used as a second language by a similar
number of people, and as a foreign language by hundreds of
millions more. English is probably used in some way by
about a quarter of all the people in the world. Because so
many people, in so many places, speak or use English, it is
often called a 'world language'.
Who uses English, and why is it such a widely spoken
language? In countries like Britain and the US, English is the
first language of most people: in other words, it is the first
language people learn as children and they communicate in
English all the time. In other countries, like India, Kenya,
Singapore, and Papua New Guinea, large numbers of people
use English as a second language. They have their own first
language, but because English is one of the official
languages, they use it in education, business, government,
radio, and television. Finally, in many countries, English is
taught in schools as a foreign language, but it is not an
official language.
English is also used for many different kinds of
international communication. People in science, medicine,
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and business often communicate in English. English is the

language of much of the world's pop music and films. The
'languages' of international sea and air traffic control, known
as 'Seaspeak' and 'Airspeak', use English. They use a small
number of English words and sentences to make
communication clearer and simpler. (For example, in
Seaspeak instead of saying 'Sorry, what was that?' or 'What
did you say?' you say 'Say again'.) Much of the world's news
is reported in English on television, the radio, the Internet, or
in newspapers.
The spread of English around the world began with the
British settlement of North America, the Caribbean,
Australia, and Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. It continued in the nineteenth century when the
British controlled parts of Africa and the South Pacific.
English also became important internationally because in the
nineteenth century Britain was the most important industrial
nation in the world. Many new machines came from Britain,
so people had to learn English in order to learn how to use
them.
In the twentieth century, the use of English spread with
the growth in international business. Air travel developed,
making more international business possible. Faster ways of
international communication, like the telephone and more
recently the computer, became more widely used. Many
people wanted to do business with American companies
because the US was rich, and in order to do this they had to
speak English. When international companies and
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organizations developed, English was often chosen as the

working language. For example, English is the working
language of the European Central Bank, although the bank is
in Germany. In Asia and the Pacific, nine out of ten
international organizations work only in English.
English is important not because it has more first-
language speakers than other languages (Chinese has more)
but because it is used extremely widely. Will this situation
continue? This is an interesting question, but first let us look
at how English began.

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CHAPTER TWO
The beginnings of English
Our understanding of the history of English began at
the end of the eighteenth century when Sir William Jones, a
British judge who lived in India, began to study Sanskrit.
This is a very old language of India, and at the time was used
in Indian law. Like others before him, Jones noticed many
similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and other
European languages. For example:

pitr pater pater father

matar mater matr mother
asti est esti is
trayan tres treis three
sapta septem hepta seven

People had thought that Latin, Greek, and all European

languages came from Sanskrit, but Jones disagreed. In 1786,
he wrote that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin all came from a
'common source', which had perhaps disappeared. There was
a lot of interest in his idea and other people began to study
these three languages. Their work proved that Jones was
right. We now know that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, and

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many other languages all belong to one enormous 'family' of

languages called the Indo-European family.
Jones's 'common source' from which all these
languages developed is now known as Proto-Indo-European.
It is thought that a group of people called the Kurgans spoke
this language, or dialects of it, and lived in what is now
southern Russia from sometime after 5000 BC. In about
3500 BC the Kurgans probably began to spread west across
Europe and east across Asia. As groups of Kurgans travelled
further and further away from each other, they began to
develop stronger differences in their dialects. With the
passing of time, these dialects became different languages.
When some of them (the Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian
languages) appear in written form in about 2000 to 1000 BC
they are clearly separate languages.
Similarities between some languages as they are
spoken today suggest that they probably come from Proto-
Indo-European. For example, there are similar words in
European and Indo-Iranian languages for people in the
family (mother, father), animals (dog, sheep, horse), parts of
the body (eye, ear), the weather (rain, snow), and for
weapons. These similarities allow us to imagine something
of the life of the Kurgans: they worked on the land some of
the time, made clothes from wool, and used wheels.
More than 2 billion people speak an Indo-European
language as their first language. The speaker of Hindi in
India, the speaker of Portuguese in Brazil, and the speaker of

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English in Australia all express themselves in Indo-European

languages.
The Celts were the first group of Indo-European
speakers to move across Europe. Towards the end of the fifth
century BC, they began to leave their homeland north of the
Alps in central Europe. They went to the Black Sea, Turkey,
south-west Spain and central Italy, the whole of Britain, and
Ireland. As they travelled, different dialects of their language
developed. The Celts who settled in Turkey spoke Galatian,
those in Spain spoke Celtiberian, and those in France, Italy,
and northern Europe spoke Gaulish. The Celts who went to
Ireland and later Scotland spoke Goidelic (Gaelic) and those
who went to southern England and Wales spoke Brythonic
(or British).
Unfortunately, for the Celts in Britain, other people
wanted to take advantage of the island's good farming land
and valuable metals. In AD 43, the Romans invaded Britain.
They remained there for almost four hundred years, and
almost all of what is now England came under their control.
(They never went very far into Wales or Scotland.) They
introduced a new way of life and a new language - Latin.
British Celts in the upper classes and the towns became used
to life with laws and police, roads, baths, and theatres. Some
learnt to speak and write Latin. However, a new language did
not develop from Latin in Britain as French did in Gaul and
Spanish did in Spain.
From the middle of the third century AD, the Romans
grew weaker and weaker as the Germanic peoples of
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northern Europe invaded more and more Roman lands. In

AD 410, the Romans finally left Britain. Without the Roman
army to guard it, the country was in danger from other
invaders.
In AD 449, people from Jutland in modern Denmark -
the Jutes - arrived in southern Britain and the Angles - also
from Denmark - came and settled in eastern Britain. In 477
the Saxons, from what is now Germany, came and settled in
southern and southeastern Britain. These three Germanic
peoples were very different from the Romans. The Romans
had governed the British Celts, but they had not taken their
lands. The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons came in larger numbers
and they settled on the lands belonging to the British Celts.
Some of the British Celts left and went north, some went
west into Wales and Cornwall, and others went over the sea
to Brittany, in what is now northern France.
The Jutes stayed in Kent, in the southeast of Britain,
but the Angles moved north and the Saxons went south-west.
They slowly organized themselves into seven kingdoms in
what is now England and southeast Scotland. In the seventh
century, the kingdom of Northumbria, in the north, was very
strong and a great centre of learning. In the eighth century,
Mercia, in the centre, became the most important kingdom,
and in the ninth century, Wessex, in the south and south-
west, became the strongest kingdom.
The invaders called the British Celts wealas meaning
foreigners. Later this meant both Celts and servants. From
wealas comes the Modern English word Welsh. The British
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Celts called all the invaders 'Saxons' at first, but in the sixth
century the word Angli was used to mean the whole group of
invaders. Later Angli became Engle. Today we call them
'Anglo-Saxons'. From the various Germanic dialects used by
these people, English developed.

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CHAPTER THREE
Old English
Old English is the language that was spoken from the
middle of the fifth century to the middle of the twelfth
century in what is now England and southern Scotland.
During this time, the language changed and took in words
from other languages.
There were four main dialects of Old English: West
Saxon (in the south and south-west), Kentish (in the
southeast), Mercian (in the centre and east), and
Northumbrian (in the north). The dialects had small
differences of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
Unlike other invaders, the Anglo-Saxons kept their own
language and did not learn the language of the British Celts.
They did not take many Celtic words into their dialects
either; only about twenty Celtic words are found in Old
English. The Anglo- Saxons borrowed some Celtic words for
parts of the countryside, which were new to them: for
example, the words crag and tor meaning a high rock, and
cumb for a deep valley. The names of some English cities,
London and Leeds for example, are Celtic, and the word
dubris, which meant water, became Dover. Different Celtic
words for river or water survive in the river names Avon,
Esk, and Ouse, and Thames is also Celtic, meaning dark
river. However, there are very few ordinary Celtic words in
Old English, and no one is really sure of the reason for this.
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Old English in the fifth and sixth centuries did have

some words that were not Germanic. These were Latin
words, which the Anglo-Saxons had borrowed from the
Romans before invading Britain. But there were not many -
only about fifty. Some examples are straet (street), weall
(wall), and win (wine).
Most Anglo-Saxons could not read or write, but those
who could write used runes. These were letters, which had
been used by the Germanic peoples since about the third
century AD. They were cut into stone or weapons and were
often used to say that someone had made or owned
something.
The arrival of Augustine and about forty monks in 597
brought changes to Anglo-Saxon life in Britain and to Old
English. They had come from Rome to teach the Anglo-
Saxons about Christianity. Although Christianity was not
new in Britain, this was the first organized attempt to make
the people of Britain Christians. Augustine and the monks
were welcomed in Canterbury in the southeast by King
Aethelbert of Kent and Queen Bertha, who was a Christian.
In the following century, these monks and others took
Christianity over the south of the country. In the north,
people learnt about Christianity from the Irish monk Aidan,
who arrived there in 635. By the end of the seventh century
all, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were Christian.
The monks built churches and taught poetry, Greek,
and Latin as well as Christianity. As a result, a number of
Latin words entered Old English: about 450 appear in Old
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English literature. Some were about the life of the Church:

for example, munuc (monk) and scol (school). Others were
words for things in the house: fenester (window) and cest
(chest). Some verbs from Latin were spendan (to spend),
sealtian (to dance), and tyrnan (to turn).
At first, the monks wrote only in Latin, but then they
began to write in Old English. This was unusual: people in
other northern European countries did not begin writing in
their own languages until much later. Learning spread and
flowered among the Anglo-Saxons, and by the eighth
century England was a centre of learning in western Europe.
The vocabulary of Old English was almost completely
Germanic. Much of it - about 85 percent - has disappeared
from Modern English and has been replaced with words
from Latin or French. However, many of the words in
Modern English that are most often used come from Old
English. A few examples are: the, and, can, and get. Other
words in Modern English which come from Old English are
for very basic things and ideas. Some examples are: mann
(person), cild (child), hus (house), etan (eat), slsepan (sleep).
Other words which survive from Old English are names
of places. The Anglo-Saxons used ford for a place where a
river can be crossed, ham for village, ton for farm or village,
and wic for house or village. These words survive in many
names, for example, Oxford, Birmingham, Brighton,
Warwick.
Some Modern English names for the days of the week
come from the names of Anglo-Saxon gods and goddesses.
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Tuesday is named after Tiw, Wednesday after Woden (both

gods of war), Thursday after Thunor (god of thunder), and
Friday after Frig (goddess of love).
Like other Indo-European languages, Old English made
new words by putting two other words together. For
example: boccradft, book-skill, meant literature; sunnandaeg,
sun's day, meant Sunday. Poets often did this to make
beautiful descriptions; one expression for body was bone-
house and one for the sea was the water's back.
Old English also made new words by adding letters
before or after the main word. For example: gän (to go)
became ingän (to go in), upgän (to go up), and ütgän (to go
out). The word blöd (blood) became blödig (bloody), and
blind became blindlice (blindly).
The words in a sentence in Old English often appeared
in a different order from those in Modern English. In Modern
English, the girl helped the boy and the boy helped the girl
have different meanings, which we understand from the
word order. In Old English, people understood the meaning
of a sentence from the endings of each word, and these
endings changed to show the job that each word did in the
sentence.
Nouns also changed their endings for the plural: for
example, guma (man) became guman, stän (stone) became
stänas, and giefu (gift) became giefa. Nouns had three
genders, and adjectives and articles changed with the gender
of the noun. However, many of the possible changes to
words did not happen in practice.
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There were more personal pronouns than in Modern

English. For example, there was hine (him), him (to him), hi
(her) and hire (to her). Him also meant to it and to them.
There were also the pronouns wit meaning we two and git
meaning you two.
Verb endings changed, too. The past tense of most
verbs was made by changing a vowel in the present tense, so
sing changed to sang, for example. In Old English there were
about twice as many of these irregular verbs as there are
today. The past tense of regular verbs was made by adding
the endings -de, -ede, or -ode. For example, the past tense of
libban (to live) was lifde, the past tense of cnyssan (to push)
was cnysede, and the past tense of lufian (to love) was
lufode.
In the eighth century Britain was visited by the
Vikings, or 'Danes' as the Anglo-Saxons called them. From
787 they came in many small groups from Denmark and
Norway and stole gold and silver from towns and churches
on the north coast. In 793 and 794, they destroyed
Lindisfarne and Jarrow, two very important Christian centres
of learning in the northeast of England. In 850, a large
Viking army took London and Canterbury, and so a war
began which continued until 878. Then King Alfred (the
Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex from 871 to 899) won an
important battle, and made an agreement with the Vikings to
separate England into two parts. After that, the northern and
eastern part, known as the Danelaw, was controlled by the

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Vikings, and the rest of England was controlled by King

Alfred.
In order to bring back the centres of learning that had
been destroyed, King Alfred decided to make English, not
Latin, the language of education and literature. So at the age
of forty he learnt Latin and began translating books into Old
English. He described his plan in these words:
Therefore, it seems better to me... that we should also
translate certain books, which are most necessary for all men
to know into the language that we can all understand, and
also arrange it... so that all the youth of free men now among
the English people... are able to read English writing well.
Later he had other books translated into Old English.
One of these was Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum
(The History of the English Church and People), which had
been written in about 731 by a monk in Northumbria called
Bede. This is the most important source of information about
early English history that we have. In the translation, and in
other early English writings, we begin to see the word
Englisc (English) used to describe the people and the
language.
King Alfred also started a history of England in
English: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This was written by
monks in different parts of the country. It described what had
happened in the past in England, and also what happened
every year at the time of writing. It was the first chronicle in
Europe that was not written in Latin.

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Most of the Old English works that have survived were

written after King Alfred's death. One of the greatest writers
was a monk from Wessex called AElfric (955-1010). He
wrote many Christian works and a guide for young monks
called Colloquy. This was written in Latin as a conversation
between a teacher and a student, and it is important for two
reasons. It tells us a lot about the daily life of monks and
ordinary people, and it also tells us a lot about Old English,
because in one copy someone has written the Old English
words above the Latin words.
The greatest piece of literature in Old English that has
survived is a poem of about 3,000 lines called Beowulf. This
was probably made in the middle of the eighth century,
although it was not actually written down until about two
hundred and fifty years later. It tells the story of a brave man
from Scandinavia called Beowulf. He fights and kills a
terrible animal called Grendel, and then kills Grendel's
mother, who is just as terrible. It is a poem about life and
death, bravery and defeat, war and peace.
In the Danelaw, the Vikings and the English were able
to communicate quite well, because their two languages, Old
Norse and Old English, were both Germanic. One effect of
this was that Old English became simpler. Many of the
different word endings disappeared. Plural endings became
simpler as the - s ending was more widely used, and many
verbs which used to change their vowel to make the past
tense now began to take the - de ending instead.

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Another result was that thousands of words from Old

Norse (ON) entered Old English (OE). Between four and
five hundred remain in use today, with hundreds more in the
dialects of northern England and Scotland. We can see that
the speakers of the two languages lived together closely,
because the Old Norse words that came into Old English are
words from everyday life - words for the house (window),
parts of the body (leg, neck), and common verbs (get, take,
want). There are also many words beginning with sk- like
skin, skirt, and sky. Others are: bag, die, egg, husband, same.
Some Old Norse words replaced Old English words; for
example syster (ON) replaced sweostor (OE) for sister. In
some cases, both the Old Norse and Old English words for
the same idea were used. For example, there was wish (OE)
and want (ON), and sick (OE) and ill (ON).
The Old Norse word are replaced the Old English
sindon and the Old Norse verb ending -s for the third person
singular in the present tense began to be used. The Old Norse
they, their, and them slowly replaced the Old English hi,
hire, and hem in the following centuries.
The Vikings also left their mark on place names. More
than 1,500 places in northern England have Scandinavian
names. Over 600 end in -by, which means farm or town (for
example, Whitby). Others end in -thorp(e) (small village),
and -toft (piece of land)-, for example, Scunthorpe and
Blacktoft. Modern family names that end in -son, like
Johnson and Davidson, also come from the Vikings.

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Battles between the Vikings and the English continued

in the tenth century. From 1016 to 1041, England had Danish
kings, who were then followed by an English king, Edward.
When Edward died in 1066, Harold, the leader of Wessex,
was chosen to be the next king. However, William, one of
Edward's cousins, said that Edward had promised that he
would become king of England. William was the leader of
Normandy in northern France. He decided to take an army to
England and fight Harold.

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CHAPTER FOUR
The Normans in England
At the Battle of Hastings, on 14 October 1066, King
Harold was killed and his army was defeated by the
Normans. On Christmas Day 1066, William was made king
of England in London, and over the next four years, he
completed his conquest of England and Wales. This conquest
had a very great effect on the development of the English
language.
William had large stone castles built, from which
Norman soldiers controlled the towns and countryside. He
took very large areas of land from rich English families and
gave them to his Norman followers. Each of these new
landowners had his own group of soldiers, and each gave
land to his own followers, so there was usually one Norman
family in each English village. Normans worked in the
government and business and controlled the Church.
Norman French immediately became the language of
the governing classes and remained so for the next two
hundred years. French and Latin were used in government,
the Church, the law, and literature. Very little was written in
English, although English monks continued writing The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle until 1154. English was still spoken,
however, in its different regional dialects.
The use of French continued in England during the
twelfth century, partly because many of the Norman kings
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and landowners also had land in Normandy and other parts

of France and they spent a lot of time there. French was not
spoken only by people of Norman or French blood. It was
also spoken by English people who wanted to be important.
Slowly, however, English became more widely used by
the Normans. Many of the Normans married English women,
so they and their children spoke English. In 1177, one
English writer reported that with 'free men' it was impossible
to know who was English and who was Norman.
In 1204, King John of England lost Normandy to the
king of France, and during the next fifty years all the great
landowning families in England had to give away their lands
in France. They became less involved with France and began
to feel that England was their country.
The upper classes continued to speak French as a
second language, and it was still used in government and the
law. However, French started to become less important
socially in England, partly because the Norman French
spoken in England was not considered 'good' by speakers of
Parisian French in France. The upper classes began to feel
prouder of their English than of their French.
Most ordinary people could not speak French at all. At
the end of the thirteenth century, one poet wrote:
Lewede men cune Ffrensch non Among an hondryd
vrtnejns on.
Common men know no French Among a hundred
scarcely one.
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Ordinary people did not need to learn French, and

probably did not want to. It was the language of the
Normans, who had destroyed many English towns and
villages. English was the language of the country, and people
were proud of it and of their history. A poet in around 1300
wrote in his introduction to the poem Cursor Mundi:
pis ilk bok es translate Into Inglis tong to rede For the
love of Inglis lede,
Inglis lede of Ingland,
For the commun at understand.
This book is translated
Into the English language
For the love of the English people,
English people of England,
And for the common people to understand.
The continuing bad feeling between England and
France resulted in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453).
During this time, national feeling grew and the English
language was seen more and more as an important part of
being English.
Between 1348 and 1375, England was hit several times
by the illness known as the Black Death and almost a third of
the people in England died. Many churchmen, monks, and
schoolteachers died and were replaced by less educated men
who spoke only English. There were fewer ordinary working
people, so they could ask for better conditions from the
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landowners. Many left the land and went to work for more
money in the towns. As ordinary people became more
important, their language - English - became more important
too. It was used more and more in government, as fewer and
fewer people could understand French. In 1362, English was
used for the first time at the opening of Parliament.
When Henry the Fourth became king in 1399, England
had its first English-speaking king since 1066. In the
following century, English took the place of French in the
home, in education, and in government. It also became the
language of written communication so that after 1450 most
letters were in English, not Latin.
English had survived - but it had changed.

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CHAPTER FIVE
Middle English
In the four centuries that followed the Norman
Conquest, the English language changed more than in any
other time in its history. Thousands of words from French
came into the language, and many Old English ones left it.
At the same time, the language changed grammatically,
mainly by becoming simpler. The English used in this time is
called Middle English.
One way the grammar grew simpler was by losing
some of the different endings for nouns, adjectives, and
pronouns. For example, by the fifteenth century the plural
noun ending - (e)s was accepted everywhere in England,
although some plurals with - en survived (children is one of
them). Other noun endings which have survived are the 's
(the boy's book) and the s' (the boys' books). Adjectives and
nouns also lost their grammatical gender, and the became the
only form of the definite article.
The main change to verbs was to the past tense. Some
of the Old English verbs began to end in -ed. For example,
the past tense of climb was clomb, but the word climbed also
began to appear in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth
century, most of the thousands of verbs which had entered
the language from French also formed the past tense with -
ed. Sometimes the change went the other way, so knowed
became knew, but usually -ed was used. There are still about
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250 'irregular' past tense verbs in English, but this is only

about half the number that there were in Old English.
In Old English, there were two main tenses: past and
present. In Middle English other tenses developed which
used be, have, shall, and will. Shall and will began to be used
to express the future. Have and be were both used for the
perfect tenses at first, but in the end have was used for
perfect tenses (as in they have gone) and be was used for the
passive (as in it was done). Be was also used for the
continuous tenses (as in he is coming). These tenses were not
used very often at this time, but later they were used much
more.
When the different noun endings disappeared, people
had to put words in a particular order to express meaning.
The most common order they used was subject - verb -
object. They also used prepositions, for example in, with,
and by, instead of noun endings, so the expression daeges
and nihtes became by day and by night in Middle English.
All these grammatical changes were possible because
from 1066 until the end of the twelfth century very little was
written in English. The official papers of the government and
the Church were written in Latin or French. This meant that
people were free to make changes to their spoken language
very easily.
If English grammar was much simpler by the end of the
fifteenth century, its vocabulary was much richer. Between
1100 and 1500, about ten thousand French words were taken
into English, three-quarters of which are still in use. French
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words came into every part of life. The words blanket,

ceiling, chair, dinner, fruit, lamp, and table described things
in the home. Science and the arts were enriched by the ideas
and words dance, grammar, literature, medicine, music,
painting, poet, square, and many more. New words arrived to
describe the law: crime, judge, prison, and punish, for
example. And some things in nature received new names:
flower, forest, mountain, river, and ocean.
French (F) words very often replaced Old English (OE)
words: for example, people (from the French peuple)
replaced leode (OE). But sometimes both the French and the
Old English words survived, with small differences in
meanings: for example ask (OE) and demand (F), wedding
(OE) and marriage (F), king (OE) and sovereign (F).
Sometimes French words were used for life in the upper
classes, and Old English ones for life in the lower classes.
For example, the words for the animals in the fields were Old
English (cows, sheep, and pigs) but the words for the meat
on the table were French (beef, mutton, and pork).
New English words were made from some of the new
French words almost immediately. For example, the English
-ly and -ful endings were added to French words to make
gently, beautiful, and peaceful.
At the same time, several thousand words also entered
English from Latin. They came from books about law,
medicine, science, literature, or Christianity these books
often used words, which could not be translated into English.
One translator wrote:
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... there ys many words in Latyn that we have not

proper English accordynge thereto.
... there are many Latin words that we do not have
English words for.
So translators often took the Latin word and made it
into an English one. Some words which came into Middle
English from Latin at this time were: admit, history,
impossible, necessary, and picture. One important source of
Latin words was the first translation of the Bible from Latin
to English, which was made by John Wycliffe and his
followers between 1380 and 1384. They followed the Latin
very closely, using many Latin words. More than a thousand
Latin words appear for the first time in English in their
translation of the Bible.
The changes to the grammar and vocabulary of Middle
English did not happen at the same time everywhere. The
Old English dialects continued to develop differently from
each other. The main dialects in Middle English were similar
to those of Old English, but they used different words, word
endings, and pronunciations. Understanding people from
different places, even those which were quite close, was
difficult. There is a famous description by William Caxton,
who later brought the printing machine to England, of a
conversation in Kent between a farmer's wife and some
sailors from London (about eighty kilometres away). The
sailors asked for some eggys but she did not know this word
(in her dialect eggs were eyren). Thinking that they must be

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speaking a foreign language, she told them she 'coude speke

no frenshe' (couldn't speak French)!
When people wrote, they used the words and
pronunciations of their dialects. For example, the sound /x/
in the middle of words was spelt gh in the south and ch in the
north, so night (pronounced /nixt/ at that time) could be spelt
as night or nicht. One word could have a number of different
spellings. There were more than twenty ways of spelling
people (for example, pepylle, puple, peeple), more than five
hundred ways of spelling through, more than sixty ways of
spelling she and many more variations. Sometimes a spelling
from one dialect has survived, together with the
pronunciation from another. For example, busy is the
spelling from one dialect, but the pronunciation /bizi/ is from
another.
From the thirteenth century, English was used more
and more in official papers, and also in literature. Much more
literature has survived from this time than from the earlier
time of Old English. There are songs, long poems, and
explanations of Christianity and the Bible. Here is part of a
song from around 1225. It is about the cuckoo - a bird that
visits Britain in the early summer.
Svmer is icumen in Lhude sing cuccu!
Growe sed and blowe med And springje wde nu.
Sing cuccu!
Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
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The seed grows and the field comes into flower And
the wood comes up now.
Sing, cuckoo!
The greatest writer in Middle English was Geoffrey
Chaucer (1343-1400). Chaucer, who lived in London, was
both a poet and an important government official. He wrote
in the East Midlands dialect (spoken by people living in the
Oxford-London-Cambridge triangle) and used many words
from French. He also used rhyme, which was used in French
and Italian poetry. His best-known work, The Canterbury
Tales, written in the 1390s, begins with these famous words:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And
bathed every veyne in swich licuor,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...

When April with its sweet showers

Has pierced the drought of March to the root
And bathed every vein in such liquid
From which strength the flower is engendered...
Then people long to go on pilgrimages...

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The poem is about a group of ordinary people who

journey to the large church at Canterbury together, telling
each other stories on the way. They are a varied group of
characters, and Chaucer describes them colorfully. There is
the Wife (woman) of Bath, the Cook, the Clerk (a student at
Oxford), the Man of Law, the Shipman, the Monk, and many
others. In their stories and conversations, Chaucer gives us
plenty of details about their lives. For example, he makes fun
of the French spoken in England:

And Frensh she spak ful faire and fetisly,

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe For Frensh of
Paris was to hir unknowe.

And French she spoke extremely beautifully With an

accent from Stratford-at-Bow Because the French of Paris
was unknown to her.

Chaucer was very good at describing people and also at

writing conversation which sounded very real. He had a great
effect on writers in the fifteenth century, and many of them
copied him.
Another very popular poem in the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries was Piers Plowman by William
Langland (1330-1400). In this, Langland wrote about the
difficulties of the poor in England, the bad customs of the
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Church, and also the perfect Christian life. It was a 'dream'

poem, in which the writer describes what he has seen in a
dream. This kind of poem was popular in France and Italy at
the time, but Langland wrote it in the way Old English
poems were written. He did not use rhyme; instead, in each
line he used several words that begin with the same sound.
This short piece from near the beginning of the poem shows
how he did this:

I was wery, forwandred, and went me to reste Vnder a

brode banke bi a bornes side,
And as I lay and lened and loked in e wateres,
I slombred in a slepyng, it sweyued so merye.
Thanne gan I meten a merueilouse sweuene - That I
was in a wildernesse, wist I neuer where.

I was tired of wandering and went to rest under a broad

bank by the side of a brook,
And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the water,
I fell into a sleep, it sounded so pleasant.
Then I began to dream a marvellous dream - That I was
in a wilderness, I did not know where.

All poems were written to be read out to other people,

so the sounds of the words were very important.
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A different kind of development in the fourteenth

century was the growing use of family names. People began
to need these as they moved away from their village or as
their village grew larger. Sometimes the family name had the
father's name (Johnson), as in Anglo-Saxon times. Other
names showed where a person lived (Rivers, Hill), or his
town (Burton, Milton), his country (French, Holland), or his
work (Cook, Fisher). A person's family name could change
five or six times during his lifetime.
In the fifteenth century, a machine was brought to
England, which had a great effect on English. This was the
printing machine, which William Caxton brought to London
in 1476. Suddenly it was possible to produce thousands of
copies of books. But what words and spellings should be
used? Caxton wrote:

And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre

varyeth from a nother... Certaynly it is harde to playse every
man by cause of... chaunge of langage.

And the common English that is spoken in one region

varies from another... Certainly, it is hard to please every
man because of... the change in the language.

Caxton and other printers decided to use the East

Midlands dialect, mainly because it was spoken in London
and used by government officials. The printers did not make
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their decisions in a particularly organized way, but slowly

standard spellings developed. However, after this time, the
sounds in many words changed or disappeared. As a result,
there are now thousands of words that are spelt in the way
that they were pronounced in Caxton's time. For example,
the letter k in knee, the letter w in wrong, and the letter l in
would were pronounced at this time.
By the end of the fifteenth century, English was starting
to be read by thousands of people.
In the next century it was read by many more, and used
by the great star of English literature - William Shakespeare.

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CHAPTER SIX
Modern English begins
The sixteenth century was a time of changes in Europe.
Europeans began to explore the Americas, Asia, and Africa,
and learning in all areas flowered. In England, the English
language grew in order to express a large number of new
ideas.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Latin was the
language of learning in all of Europe, and it was seen as
richer than English and the other spoken European
languages. However, with the growth of education, the
introduction of printing, and the new interest in learning, this
began to change. More and more people wanted to read
books by Roman and Greek writers, and in England, they
wanted to read them in English. So these books were
translated, and other books about learning were written in
English. Using English meant that a writer could reach more
people, as one sixteenth-century printer explained to a writer
who preferred Latin:
Though, sir, your book be wise and full of learning,
yet... it will not be so saleable.
However, the acceptance of English as a language of
learning was not complete until the end of the seventeenth
century. For example, in 1687 Isaac Newton chose Latin
when he wrote his Principia, but fifteen years later, he wrote
Opticks in English.
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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers

in English borrowed about 30,000 words from about fifty
languages, mainly to describe new things and ideas. About
half of these words are still used today. This very large
growth of vocabulary was the main change in English at this
time. The new words came mainly from Latin; for example,
desperate, expensive, explain, fact. Other important sources
for new words were French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and
Portuguese. And as the Europeans travelled to more and
more places, so words came into English from America,
Africa, and Asia. For example chocolate and tomato came
from Mexico; banana from Africa, coffee from Turkey, and
caravan from Persia.
Not everyone liked this borrowing of words. Some
thought that the strange words were unnecessary and hard to
understand. English could express everything quite well
without them and the writers were only showing how much
Latin they knew. One man, Sir John Cheke, wrote in 1557:

I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written

cleane... unmixt... with borowing of other tunges.

I think, we should write our own language without

borrowing words from other languages.

But the borrowing continued, and the new words which

survived slowly lost their strangeness.
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New words were also added to English in other ways.

People were adventurous with language: they used verbs as
nouns (laugh and invite), or nouns as verbs, or made
adjectives from nouns (shady from shade). Or they put two
words together (chairman), or they added new parts to
words; un- to comfortable, for example.
The age of Queen Elizabeth the First (Queen of
England 1558-1603) was one of a great flowering of
literature. There were the poets Spenser and Sidney, and the
writers of plays Marlowe, Jonson, and, of course, William
Shakespeare.
Shakespeare (1564-1616) is considered the greatest
writer of plays. He expressed his understanding of human
nature in extraordinarily rich language in his plays and
poems. He had the largest vocabulary of any English writer
and made about two thousand new words, and a large
number of expressions, which are now part of Modern
English. For example, he wrote: it's early days (it's too soon
to know what will happen)-, tongue-tied (unable to speak
because you are shy); the long and the short of it (all that
needs to be said about something)-, love is blind. His success
and fame during his lifetime meant that his plays had a very
great effect on English.
When Elizabeth the First died in 1603 she left no
children, so her cousin, King James the Sixth of Scotland,
became King James the First of England. In 1604, the new
king ordered a translation of the Bible into English. There
were many different English translations of the Bible and he
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wanted to have one main translation. It was made by fifty-

four translators who worked together in small groups, using
older translations as their guide.
The translators did not follow Shakespeare's example
and make new words; instead, they used old ones, even ones
that were out of date or were becoming unusual. For
example, they used ye instead of you as a subject pronoun,
and the -eth ending for verbs instead of -s. They did not use
as many different words as Shakespeare either: he had used
twenty thousand and they only used eight thousand. They
aimed to make the language sound like poetry when it was
read out and usually they succeeded. Here is a short piece
from a teaching of Jesus as an example:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love

thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you,
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you... That ye may be the children of your
Father, which is in heaven: for he maketh the sun to rise on
the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on
the unjust.

The King James Bible appeared in 1611 and was read

in churches everywhere in England, Scotland, and Wales for
the next three hundred years. It was also read in people's
homes and taught at school, and for many people it was the
only book that they read again and again. As a result, it had
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an important effect on the English language. Many

expressions from it became part of the language; for
example, the apple of somebody's eye (a person who is loved
very much by somebody); by the skin of your teeth (you only
just manage to do something); the salt of the earth (a very
honest person); the straight and narrow (an honest way of
living). Its poetry had a great effect on many English writers
in the centuries that followed.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there
were some grammatical changes to English, although not as
many as those that had happened to Middle English. People
began to use do with a main verb. For example, you could
say I know not or I do not know. You could say I know or I
do know. And you could say know you? Or do you know? In
the seventeenth century, people began to use I know, I do not
know, and do you know? more often. Another verb change
was the ending of the third person singular in the present
tense. By 1700 the -th was no longer used and all verbs took
-s; for example loveth was now loves.
Pronouns also changed a little. In 1500 the words ye
and you were used in the same way as he and him, but by
1700 ye had disappeared. Thou and thee were also used
instead of you to children or people who were less important
than yourself, but these also disappeared in many dialects in
the seventeenth century.
Also during this time, the word its replaced his to talk
about things without gender. The leg of a chair was now its
leg not his leg.
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Changes in pronunciation were continually taking

place. From the middle of the fifteenth century, the seven
long vowels began to change. For example, in Chaucer's time
the word for life was pronounced /li:f/ and this became /leif/
and then /laif/ by the eighteenth century. Similar changes
happened to house, which was /hu:s/ in Chaucer's time. After
two changes, it finally arrived at its modern pronunciation
/haus/.
Sounds in some other words disappeared; for example,
the /k/ and the /w/ at the beginning of knee and write were
lost. The pronunciation of /t/ in castle and the /1/ in would
also disappeared.
The big growth in vocabulary and the flowering of
literature happened when England was quite peaceful.
However, in the middle of the seventeenth century, this
peace was destroyed, and the changes that followed had
some interesting effects on the language.

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CHAPTER SEVEN
Bringing order to English
Charles the First, the son of James the First, was not a
popular king, and in 1642 war began between those who
wanted him to be king and those who did not. In 1649, he
was killed, and England, Wales, and Scotland remained
without a king until 1660, when his son Charles the Second
returned to England. Charles the Second died in 1685 and his
brother James became king in 1685. But James the Second
was so unpopular that in 1688 he left England and was
replaced by his daughter Mary and her husband William of
Orange.
All these changes made people wish for order and
regularity in their lives, and some people also wanted more
regularity in their language. The great growth in new words
between 1530 and 1660 - the fastest in the history of the
language - had left people uncertain. What was happening to
the language? If so many foreign and newly made words
continued to come into it, would it remain English?
Some people in England wanted to create an official
organization to control the English language, similar to the
Accademia della Crusca which had been started in Italy in
1582, and the Académie Française which had been started in
France in 1635. One of these people was the writer Jonathan
Swift, who in 1712 wrote 'A Proposal for Correcting,
Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue' (ascertain
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here means fix). Swift disliked spelling changes, newly

fashionable words, the habit of shortening words, and 'bad'
grammar. He wanted a group of people to 'fix' the language
by making grammar rules, making lists of words that were
incorrect, and deciding on correct spellings.
The idea never succeeded, partly because other people
realized that change in a language was unavoidable. But it
made people think about the need for everyone to use the
same spelling and grammar. As a result, different spelling
guides, dictionaries, and grammar books began to appear.
Although printing had brought some regularity into
spelling, many variations had remained in the sixteenth
century, even for personal names. For example, there are six
known examples of Shakespeare's name that he wrote
himself, and in each one, he spelt his name differently.
People used their own spellings, which usually showed their
own pronunciation. Other variations were introduced to show
that words came from Latin. For example, the letter о was
put into people, the letter b into doubt, and the letter c into
scissors, because the Latin words populus, dubitare, and
cisorium had these letters. And different spellings were given
to words like sonne (a male child) and sunne (the star that
gives light) which sounded the same but had different
meanings. In the end, this freedom to change spellings led to
confusion.
In the seventeenth century, people wanted to end this
confusion, and the appearance of the first English
dictionaries slowly brought about more regularity in spelling.
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During the eighteenth century, ways of spelling that differed

from these dictionaries were seen as incorrect and a sign of
stupidity or a bad education. Even today, many people do not
like making spelling mistakes, and often use the spellcheck
tool on their computers.
Dictionaries were not unknown before the seventeenth
century, but they were Latin-English ones. The first English-
English dictionary appeared in 1604 and was written by a
schoolteacher called Robert Cawdrey. It was called A Table
Alphabeticall and was a list of about 2,500 'hard usuall
English wordes' with explanations of their meaning and
sometimes which language they had come from - French (fr)
or Greek (gr). Here are some examples of the words in the
Table:
(fr) accomplish, finish, or make an end of;
barbarian, a rude person;
eclipse (gr), a failing of the light of the sunne or
moone;
obsolete, olde, past date, growne out of vse or custome;
A Table Alphabeticall became very popular and similar
dictionaries followed. In the eighteenth century, dictionary
writers began explaining more ordinary words, not just
difficult ones.
In 1746, a group of booksellers asked a young writer
called Samuel Johnson to prepare an English dictionary.
Johnson worked on this dictionary for nine years, with the
help of six other people. For three years, he read the works of
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hundreds of English writers and found examples for words in

the dictionary. Then he began to write the meanings of the
words. He chose 'hard' words but also many ordinary ones.
When Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language
appeared in 1755, it was an immediate success. It explained
more than 42,000 words, and as well as the meaning of each
word, it gave the pronunciation and history of the word, and
sometimes how it was used. A 'cant' word was used only by
one group; a 'low' word was informal and not suitable for
writing. Johnson gave as many different meanings of a word
as he could (there are 66 for take). He very often gave an
example from literature to show how the word was used. In
fact, there are about 114,000 examples in the dictionary, and
they are a very large part of it. Most of them come from
literature written between 1560 and 1660.
Here are some examples of words and their meanings
from Johnson's Dictionary:
to bubble To cheat: a cant word.
to nab [nappa, Swedish.] To catch unexpectedly; to
seize without warning. A word seldom used but in low
language.
woman [wifman, wimman, Saxon; whence we yet
pronounce women in the plural, wimmen.] The female of the
human race.
That man who hath a tongue is no man,
If with his tongue, he cannot win a woman.
Shakespeare.
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yellowboy A gold coin. A very low word.

To bubble and yellowboy have both disappeared from
English, but to nab has survived, with this meaning. It is still
an informal word.
The dictionary was not perfect: some of Johnson's
explanations were harder to understand than the words
themselves, some expressed his personal opinions, and some
words were not listed because he disliked them. Also, he
could not fit in all his examples, so words at the end of the
dictionary have fewer examples than those at the beginning.
However, it remained the most important English dictionary
in Britain for more than a century.
Help with spelling came from dictionaries; help with
grammar came from 'grammars'. There had been a few
grammar books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
but in the second half of the eighteenth century, a very large
number suddenly appeared. Many of them told the reader
how to write and speak 'correctly', which really meant how to
use language in the same way as in serious pieces of
literature. They were written for the rich, and aimed to show
the difference between the upper and lower classes. They
were widely used because people wanted to show that they
were educated.
The writers of these grammar books considered that the
grammar of much spoken language and of regional dialects
(especially Scots) was wrong. They believed that the
grammar of English should be the same as that of Latin. For
example, they thought that a sentence should not end with a
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preposition because this did not happen in Latin. So it would

be correct to say I like the town in which I live, but not I like
the town which I live in.
The two most widely used grammar books were Robert
Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar, which
appeared in 1762, and Lindley Murray's English Grammar of
1795. These books had a great effect on people's views of
grammar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and still
have some effect today. Some people believe that there is
only one 'correct' way of saying things, and argue, for
example, about whether it is correct to say different to or
different from. As a result, many first-language speakers of
English think that the way they speak and write is incorrect
and are ashamed of it. The opposite view - that all ways of
expressing an idea are grammatically correct if they can be
understood clearly, and that grammar is always changing - is
becoming more popular. As a result, some grammar books
today simply describe how English is used, instead of telling
us how we should speak or write.
There were also some attempts in the second half of the
eighteenth century to decide on one correct pronunciation.
There were many different ways of pronouncing words, as
there were a large number of regional accents. Until this
time, regional accents were not considered to be bad in any
way, or to be a disadvantage. However, many people now
wanted to speak correctly as well as write correctly. The first
person to teach people 'correct' English pronunciation was an
Irishman called Thomas Sheridan. In the 1750s and 1760s,
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he gave talks to large numbers of important people about the

'correct' sounds and pronunciation of English words. Like
correct spelling and grammar, correct pronunciation was a
sign of education and class. Sheridan wrote in one of his
talks:
Pronunciation... is a sort of proof that a person has kept
good company...
Sheridan was followed by John Walker who wrote A
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English
Language in 1791. He took the pronunciation of educated
people in London as his guide and saw other regional
pronunciations as wrong. His dictionary was very successful
in both Britain and the US in the nineteenth century. Many
people began to feel disadvantaged because they did not
speak correctly. It was a long time before regional accents
became acceptable again.

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CHAPTER EIGHT
Modern English grows
If speakers of English from 1800 were able to speak to
those of today, they would notice a few differences in
grammar and pronunciation, but not very many for the
nineteenth-century speakers the biggest problem would be
the extremely large number of new words they would meet.
The developments in science in the last two hundred
years have led to hundreds of thousands of new words and
expressions for new ideas, machines, materials, plants,
animals, stars, diseases, and medicines. Many of these words
and expressions are used only by scientists, but others have
become part of ordinary English. We know that if we have
bronchitis (this word first appeared in writing in 1814) we
can take antibiotics (1944) and we know that our genes
(1911) come to us from our parents in our DNA (1944). We
argue about whether we should use pesticides (1934) in
farming, or nuclear energy (1945) to make electricity.
The use of English in different parts of the world and
easier and faster communication have together resulted in the
appearance of thousands of other new words. Most of them -
about 65 percent - have been made by putting two old words
together, for example: fingerprint (1859), airport (1919), and
street-wise (1965). The world of computers has introduced
many of this type: online (1950), user-friendly (1977) and
download (1980). Some new words have been made from
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Latin and Greek; for example, photograph (1839), helicopter

(1872), aeroplane (1874) and video (1958). Others are old
words that have been given new meanings.
For example, pilot (1907) was first used to mean the
person who directs the path of ships, and cassette (1960)
used to mean a small box. About 5 percent of new words
have come from foreign languages, like disco (1964) from
French, and pizza (1935) from Italian. And a few words have
come from the names of things we buy or use: for example,
to google (1999) from Google, the popular Internet search
engine, and podcast (2004). This word, meaning a recording
that you can get from the Internet and play on your
computer, comes from iPod, the popular music player, and
broadcast.
Beginnings or endings have been added to make new
words: disinformation (1955) is false information; touchy-
feely (1972) describes people who express their feelings too
openly. Sometimes both a beginning and an ending have
been added: for example, unputdownable (1947) describes a
book, which is so interesting that you cannot stop reading it.
Some words have been shortened: photo (1860) for
photograph, plane (1908) for aeroplane, and TV (1948) for
television. Some words have put together sounds from two
other words: for example motel (1925), a hotel for car
drivers, is made from motor and hotel. Only a very few new
words have not been made from other words. Two examples
are nylon (1938) to describe a man-made material, and flip-
flop (1970), a type of shoe that makes a noise as you walk.
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The growth in vocabulary is clear when we look at the

making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dictionary contains
all English words since 1150, even those that are no longer
used. It shows, with examples, when each word was first
used in writing and how the meaning of a word has changed
over the centuries.
Finding all this information was a very big job,
although no one realized at the beginning exactly how big. A
Scotsman called James Murray was appointed as the director
of work on the dictionary in 1879, and the plan was to finish
the job in ten years. Murray organized a very large reading
programme: hundreds of people sent him examples of how
words were used. After five years, the first part of the
dictionary was completed, but it only went from A to ANT.
Everyone realized that the job was going to take a lot longer
than ten years; in fact, it took another forty-four. Sadly,
Murray did not live to see its completion: he died in 1915,
aged seventy- eight, while he was working on the letter U.
However, he knew that he had helped to make a dictionary,
which would give a detailed history of the English language.
The first OED was completed in 1928 and explained
the meaning and history of 414,800 words and expressions,
with examples from literature and other writing. The second
OED, completed in 1989, explained the meanings of 615,100
words, although many of these - perhaps 20 percent - are no
longer used. It shows how the words were or are used and
has 2.5 million examples from all kinds of books. It contains
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some scientific words and words from North America,

Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean, India,
and Pakistan, but not all scientific or regional words in
English.
The second OED went online in 2000, and every three
months new material is added to this online dictionary, as
part of the writing of the third OED. At the same timework is
continuing on the words and meanings already in the
dictionary, and changes are made if necessary. For some
words, there are more details of their history to add, or
earlier or later examples. North American and other regional
pronunciations are given as well as British ones. These are
the first changes to Murray's work since the first OED
appeared in 1928. The work on the third OED, begun in
1993, will probably finish in 2018.
The OED has had a great effect on our knowledge and
understanding of English. It has given us a lot of information
about the history of words and expressions and has helped us
understand how language changes over time.
The way dictionaries are made has been changed by
computers. There are now extremely large collections of
examples of English works on computer that dictionary
writers can use. They can look through these for examples of
words and see how they are used, and they can use the
Internet to search for words. They can also ask readers all
over the world to send examples to a website, which means
that they can get words from a very wide variety of places.
Information about informal words and slang, for example, is
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now much easier to find because of the Internet. And when a

dictionary is written, it can be kept on computer and put on a
website.
For about the past hundred years new words have been
able to travel fast around the English-speaking world because
of the telephone, newspapers, radio, television, films, pop
music, and the Internet. These ways of communication can
reach extremely large numbers of people. Television and
radio have also influenced pronunciation.
In the 1920s the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) chose an accent for all its speakers to use on the
radio. This was the accent of the educated: people in
government, at the universities, in the army, and the Church.
It was known as 'Received Pronunciation' or 'RP', or 'the
King's English'. The use of RP on radio and later on
television meant that more people heard it and thought that it
was the accent that socially important people used. It was not
acceptable to use strong regional accents on television and
radio, or in teaching and government. However, in the 1960s
social differences in Britain began to break down, and
regional accents became more acceptable everywhere. And
as the number of radio and television programmes grew,
more people with different accents had to be employed.
Today RP is no longer an important accent and most
educated people in England (not Scotland, Wales, or
Northern Ireland) now speak a kind of RP, which has some
of their regional accent in it. Television has also made some
regional dialects popular. For example, you can now hear
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parts of the dialect called Estuary English, which is from

London and the southeast of England, in many other parts of
England. (See Chapter 10 for more about dialects.)
The biggest technological development in recent years
is, of course, the Internet. People can now communicate in
writing on their websites, through e-mail, on message
boards, and in chat rooms. The Internet has had a number of
effects on English. Firstly, new words have been made to
describe the Internet itself and its activities; for example,
cyberspace (1982), e-mail (1982), website (1993), and blog
(1999). Or new meanings have been given to old words; for
example, link (1951), chat (1985), virtual (1987), and surf
(1992).
Secondly, people have developed a new informal way
of writing in chat rooms and on message boards. Many users
shorten a lot of words, using just single letters or numbers,
and often they do not use capital letters or much punctuation.
Many use their own spellings, or spellings that are often used
in chat rooms. Some people also use smileys (little pictures
of faces with different expressions) to show how they feel.
They also use groups of letters for some expressions. For
example: lol means laughing out loud; btw means by the
way; bbl means be back later. Sentences you could see in a
chat room or on a message board are:
r u alryt? (Are you all right?) im good thx © (I'm good,
thanks) duz nel know how 2 make carrot cake? (Does anyone
know how to make carrot cake?)

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People also use similar language when they send

messages by phone. For example:
thx 4 ur msg. How r u? (Thanks for your message. How
are you?)
im fine, c u @ work (I'm fine. See you at work.)
After learning the rules of written English at school,
many people are now enjoying playing with language:
breaking the old rules and making new ones.

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CHAPTER NINE
English in the US
'England and America are two countries separated by
the same language,' wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1942. Is
this true today? Do Americans speak a different kind of
English from the British? If so, why? And why do they speak
English at all?
To answer the last question we must go back to the
year 1607, when a group of English people sailed across the
Atlantic and reached the east coast of America. They called
their settlement Jamestown, after King James the First and
they called that part of the country Virginia. They were not
the first English people in America: in 1585 and 1587,
people had tried to settle on the island of Roanoke, in what is
now North Carolina. They were not the first Europeans to
settle in America either: the Spanish had lived in Florida
since 1565. But the people of Jamestown were the first
successful English settlers, and they were followed by other
English adventurers who also settled in Virginia.
Then in 1620, more English settlers landed north of
Virginia, in what became Massachusetts, New England.
These were the people from the ship called the Mayflower,
who came because they wanted to follow a different kind of
Christianity from the kind in England. Others followed, and
by 1640, about 25,000 English people were living in New
England.
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At this time, sailors from England and other European

countries were taking Africans to America and selling them
as slaves. The first twenty African slaves were brought to
America in 1619. The Africans had to live in terrible
conditions during the long sea voyage, and many did not
survive. This inhuman business was ended in 1808, but
people were allowed to own slaves until the end of the
American Civil War in 1865. By that time there were more
than 4 million Africans living in America.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more
and more people arrived in America. The British government
sent prisoners to America as a punishment, and other settlers
arrived from France, Germany, the Caribbean, and the north
of Ireland. The people from the north of Ireland were called
the Scots-Irish (because their families had moved to Ireland
from Scotland). By the year of American independence
(1776), about one in seven settlers in America was Scots-
Irish.
In the nineteenth century, large numbers of people left
Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other European countries for
America. Many were Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
By 1900 there were 75 million people living in America. In
the later part of the twentieth century, people from Asia and
Spanish-speaking countries also arrived, and by 2000, there
were more than 280 million people in America.
American English developed from the languages used
by these different people. The first English settlers
immediately discovered animals, birds, and plants that were
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new to them, and which needed names in English.

Sometimes the settlers used English words (for example
blackbird for a bird that looked similar to the English
blackbird). Sometimes they made new words from other
English words, for example backwoods (a forest with few
people), and bluegrass (a kind of grass with blue-green
leaves). They also named thousands of places and rivers
using words from the languages of the Native Americans; for
example, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Potomac. The Spanish
and French controlled some parts of the country until the
nineteenth century, so some place names are from French
(like Detroit, St Louis, and Illinois) and some from Spanish
(like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Santa Fe). New York
was first New Amsterdam, until the English took it in 1664,
and the names Brooklyn (from Breukelyn), Harlem
(Haarlem), and the Bronx (Bronck's) are reminders of its
Dutch beginnings. Occasionally the English settlers
borrowed words for things or people from other European
languages, for example, cookie from Dutch, cent and dime
from French, plaza from Spanish. The settlers also began to
give some old words new meanings: for example, bill began
to mean a piece of paper money, and it replaced note.
Some words from the English of the seventeenth
century survive in American English but are not used now in
British English. For example, fall meaning autumn, mad
meaning angry, and gotten as the past participle of 'get' (as in
Your dinner has gotten cold).

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Some of the pronunciation of the first settlers also

survives in Modern American English. They pronounced the
a in grass /as/ as in hat, because the long/a:/ sound only
began to be used instead of /as/ in England in the eighteenth
century. This short /as/ is part of American pronunciation
today. Most Americans also pronounce the r at the end of
words (for example car) and before a consonant (for example
hard) as the early settlers did.
As the settlers moved west in the nineteenth century,
they added many colourful new expressions to American
English. These are now part of British English too; for
example, to face the music (to accept the unpleasant results
of your actions); to kick the bucket (to die); hot under the
collar (angry). Some expressions come from the time when
the railroads were built: to go off the rails (to behave
strangely), and to reach the end of the line (to be unable to do
any more with something).
American English has borrowed only a few words from
the languages spoken by the nineteenth-century immigrants.
The reason for this is social. People who had recently arrived
in the US wanted to become American, and they and their
children learned English to do so. However, some words and
expressions from other languages have found their way into
American English. For example, check (a bill for food or
drinks), and kindergarten (a place where very young children
play and learn) have come from German; pasta, spaghetti,
and other words for food have come from Italian; from
Yiddish, the language of the East European Jews, there are
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schmuck (a stupid person), and shlep (to pull, or a long,

tiring journey).
African-Americans developed their own varieties of
English, which are all known today as African-American
English or Black English. They had an effect on American
English, especially in the twentieth century when large
numbers of African-Americans left the South and moved
north. Some words that they brought to American English
are jazz (a kind of music first developed by African-
Americans), cool meaning excellent; and dude, another word
for man.
At the time of independence in 1776, Americans began
to take an interest in their language. They wanted to be
separate from Britain in every way, and to feel proud of their
country and way of life. Someone who felt very proud of
American English was a teacher called Noah Webster (1758-
1843). Between 1783 and 1785, Webster wrote a speller, a
grammar, and a reader for American schools. The speller
was later sold as The American Spelling Book, and was
extremely successful, selling more than 80 million copies in
the next hundred years. With the money from the speller,
Webster was able to write dictionaries. In these, he wanted to
show that American English was as good as British English,
and that Americans did not have to copy the British. His first
dictionary appeared in 1806, followed in 1828 by his famous
work An American Dictionary of the English Language. This
was longer than Johnson's dictionary (it explained about

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70,000 words) and so gave American English the same

importance as British English in the minds of Americans.
Sixty years earlier, Benjamin Franklin had suggested
many changes to English spelling, and his ideas influenced
Webster. In both his dictionaries, Webster suggested new
spellings, and many of these are now the accepted American
spellings; for example, center, color, and traveled. Some of
his other suggestions were not followed: soop (soup), bred
(bread), and medicin (medicine), for example. Webster also
influenced American pronunciation by saying that each part
of a word must be clearly pronounced: for example, se-cre-
ta-ry not se-cre-try.
So what are the differences between American and
British English today? As well as differences in
pronunciation, there are some small differences in grammar
and spelling. But the main difference is in vocabulary.
Thousands of words are used differently. Firstly, different
words are sometimes used in American and British English
to talk about the same thing. For example, the street-level
floor of a building is called the first floor in American
English, and the ground floor in British English. You drive
on the freeway in the US, but on the motorway in Britain.
There are also different expressions in American and
British English. For example, the American expressions to
drop the ball (to make a mistake), to be in the chips (to
suddenly have a lot of money), and to go south (to become
less valuable) are not used in British English. Similarly,
many British expressions are not part of American English.
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Some British people dislike the effect of American

English on British English, but this has not stopped
thousands of American words entering British English and
becoming completely accepted; for example, OK (1840),
supermarket (1933), teenager (1941), and fast food (1951).
Although there are clear differences between the
American and British varieties of English, television, music,
films, and more recently the Internet have helped people on
both sides of the Atlantic to understand each other's English
more easily.

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CHAPTER TEN
All kinds of English
I'm ganen doon the toon the day. (I'm going into town
today. Northeastern England)
Dinna fash yoursel. (Don't upset yourself. Central and
Southern Scotland)
They work hard, isn't it? (They work hard, don't they?
Wales)
I'm after seeing him. (I've just seen him. Ireland)
Y'all come here! (Come here everyone! Southern US)
It's a beaut! (It's wonderful! Australia)
She sing real good. (She sings very well. Jamaica)
I am not knowing. (I don't know. India)
Make you no min am. (Take no notice of him/her.
Nigeria)
All over the world, people speaking English as a first or
second language use different vocabulary, grammar, and
accents in a large number of varieties of English. A variety
of English is a type of English spoken by one group of
people. In each English-speaking country, one variety of
English is used nationally. This is the 'Standard English' of
that country. It is taught in schools and spoken on radio and
television. Everyone in the country uses the same grammar,
vocabulary, and spelling when they use their country's
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Standard English, though they may speak it with different

accents. Different countries have different Standard
Englishes. For example, Standard Australian English is
different from Standard British English.
In England, as well as Standard British English there
are regional and social dialects of English. The most
noticeable differences between them are those of
pronunciation. A well-known difference is the sound of the
vowel a in words like grass. In the south grass is pronounced
as /gra:s/, and in the north as /grass/. The vowel u in words
like up is pronounced /Ap/ in the south and /up/ in the north.
In some parts of the north happy is pronounced as /happi/ or
/happe/, and in the northeast night is pronounced as /ni:t/.
In Estuary English, which began in the southeast of
England, some sounds are pronounced in the same way as in
Cockney - the dialect of East London. The /t/ in the middle
and at the end of words disappears; so the word better
becomes /be'te/ and the word what becomes /wnT. /0/
becomes /f/ and /6/ becomes /v/, so think becomes /firjk/ and
mother becomes /mAva/. This dialect has become popular
among young people because of radio and television.
Many new British dialects are developing. People from
the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe have
settled in the big cities in Britain. Young people from these
groups use some of their own languages with the local
dialect, their friends copy them, and in this way, they make a
new dialect.

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There are also differences in grammar between the

dialects. Some of the older dialects from the countryside use
grammatical forms, which Standard English has lost: for
example, thee and thou for you singular. Modern dialects
also use grammar that is different from Standard English: I
don't want no dinner (I don't want any dinner), them books
(those books), she ain't come (she hasn't come). And in some
dialects young people use innit? at the end of a sentence. For
example, Now I can start calling you that, innit? (can't I?),
We need to go now, innit? (don't we?)
All dialects have some words and expressions, both old
and new, that are different from Standard English. For
example, butty (a piece of bread and butter) has been used in
the north of England since the nineteenth century; nang
(good) has come in recently to Cockney in London from
Bengali.
Outside England, in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland,
and the Republic of Ireland, there are other varieties of
English. Scots is very different from Standard British
English - more so than any other British variety. There are
many differences in pronunciation, grammar, and
vocabulary. Some Scots vocabulary is also used in northern
English dialects (for example, bairn for child and lass for
girl), but a very large number of words (20,000 are listed in
one book) are used only in Scots.
The English spoken in Wales also has its own
character. The voice rises and falls in a way, which is similar
to Welsh, and there are some words and expressions, which
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have been borrowed from Welsh. Sometimes word order is

changed to give something more importance; for example,
Great those are! (Those are great!)
In Northern Ireland, Scots has had a great effect on
English because large numbers of settlers came to Ireland
from Scotland in the seventeenth century. For example, wee
(a Scots word meaning little) is used. In the Republic of
Ireland, Gaelic and dialects from the west of England have
had the most effect on English. Gaelic is still spoken in the
west of Ireland and the dialects of English in this part of the
country show its effect more strongly than others. For
example, people say Is it cold you are? (Are you cold?) or
He's after doing that (He's just done that). The Irish English
spoken on radio and television is closer to Standard British
English.
From the seventeenth century onwards, regional
varieties of English were taken to North America, the
Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Asia, and
they can still be heard in the varieties of English in these
places. For example, in some dialects of American English
there are many similarities to Irish English in pronunciation
and some in grammar. Youse, which means you plural,
comes from Irish English, and so does anymore in positive
sentences (for example, They live here anymore which is
They live here now in British English).
The three main regional dialects of American English
are Northern, Midland, and Southern. These show the
movement of settlers to the West. Settlers from New England
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in the northeast moved past the Great Lakes; those from the
middle of the east coast moved through the middle of the
country, and those in the south went along the coast to the
south. Because the Midland dialect is spoken over the largest
area, and by perhaps two-thirds of the people, this dialect is
the best known outside America, and is sometimes called
'General American'.
African-American English, or Black English, was born
between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when
millions of people from West Africa were brought to
America and the Caribbean to work as slaves on large farms
growing cotton and sugar. The slave buyers and the African
slaves communicated on the slave ships in pidgin English - a
simple kind of English that allowed speakers of different
languages to communicate with each other. When the
Africans arrived in America and the Caribbean, they
continued to use pidgin English both with the slave owners
and with each other, as they often spoke different African
languages. Later, this pidgin English developed into a creole
language when the slaves' children and grandchildren started
to use it as their first language. African-American English
probably developed from this creole. Today African-
American English has some grammatical differences from
American English; for example, she come (she's coming),
you crazy (you're crazy), twenty cent (twenty cents).
French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese creoles have
also had a big effect on the English of the Caribbean. (Other
influences have been local languages and Hindi spoken by
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settlers from India.) In the Caribbean today there are a large

number of English creoles, as well as local varieties of
Standard English. Each creole has a different vocabulary, but
their grammar and pronunciation are similar. For example,
there is de for the, ting for thing, and ax for ask. Here is part
of a poem in Jamaican Creole by Louise Bennett. It is called
'Noh Lickle Twang!' ('Not Even a Little Accent!'). In it, the
poet complains that her son has come back from America
without an American accent:
Ef you want please him meck him tink Yuh bring back
someting new.
Yuh always call him 'Pa' dis evenin'
Wen him come sey 'Poo'.
If you want to please him [your father] make him think
You've brought back something new.
You always call him 'Pa'; this evening
When he comes say 'Poo'.
The English of Canada is similar to both American and
British English. It uses some British words and some
American ones. For example, Canadians fill their cars with
gas (American English) but ask for the bill (British English).
They often add eh? to the end of a sentence. For example, it's
cold, eh? The pronunciation of Canadian English is very
close to that of American English, but one difference is the
pronunciation of /au/, which Canadians pronounce as fau/ in
some words. So the word about sounds like aboat.

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Australian English has developed from a number of

varieties of English. Most of the 130,000 prisoners sent to
Australia between 1788 and 1840, and the 'free settlers' who
joined them, came from the south and east of England,
Scotland, and Ireland. The vowels in Australian English
sound similar to those in Cockney (for example, today
sounds similar to RP to die) and some Australian expressions
are from British, Irish, and American English. American
words are starting to be used more as a result of American
films and television programmes. Some words for plants and
animals, and many place names, have come from Aboriginal
languages. There are many very colourful expressions in
Australian English; for example: to be as full as a boot (to be
very drunk), first in, best dressed (the first people to do
something will have an advantage), couldn't lie straight in
bed (to be very dishonest).
New Zealand English and South African English have
some similarities to Australian English in their pronunciation
because all three countries were settled by English speakers
at about the same time. Each variety has small pronunciation
differences, though, and its own vocabulary. In New Zealand
English, there are words from Maori, and in South African
English, there are words from Afrikaans and African
languages.
Other countries were also governed by the British in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for example, India,
Singapore, Nigeria, Kenya, Papua New Guinea. Others were
governed by the US: the Philippines and Puerto Rico. In
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many of these countries, English is an official language,

although it is not most people's first language. In these
countries, the local languages and their regional dialects have
an effect on the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and use
of English, and new varieties of English develop. These are
sometimes called 'New Englishes'. They have not been
studied very deeply, or for very long, so it is difficult to get a
clear picture of each variety. However, people are collecting
information about these new varieties and studying them, so
in future we will know more about them.
In the newest varieties of English, words from another
language are very often used with English ones. These
varieties are often given amusing names. For example, in the
US some Spanish speakers speak 'Spanglish', which uses
English and Spanish words in the same sentence. English
words are borrowed and given Spanish sounds and spelling,
such as parquin (parking). Other examples of these varieties
are 'Singlish' in Singapore, 'Hinglish' in India (Hindi and
English), and 'Taglish' in the Philippines (Tagalog and
English).
All these varieties of English, from countries where
English is used either as a first language or as a second
language, are used more and more by writers and
filmmakers. In this way, many users of English are able to
hear and read more than their own variety and words and
expressions can cross from one variety to another.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jargon and slang
Jargon and slang are kinds of English that are not part
of Standard English. Jargon is the difficult or strange
language used by a group of people to describe things that
the rest of us do not know about. For example, doctors,
lawyers, university teachers, and business managers all use
words and expressions that the rest of us do not understand.
In business, some of this jargon comes from the world
of the Internet. For example, if you are in a big meeting with
someone and they suggest discussing something with you
offline, they mean they want to talk to you privately later.
Other management jargon is not from the world of
computers. For example, a manager could ask you: 'What
could you bring to the table if you got this job? Can you
think outside the box?' This means, 'What could you give to
our team? Can you think in unusual ways to find answers to
problems?'
There is also a lot of jargon in sports that is only
understood by people who do these sports. For example, if
you are not a mountain biker, you will probably not know
what a bunny hop is. (It is a jump that mountain bikers make
when they come off the ground with both wheels. Bunny is
an informal word for rabbit, a small animal that jumps a lot.)
People use jargon because they need to describe very

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detailed things or ideas and the rest of us have to try and

understand it.
Slang is an extremely informal kind of language - much
more informal than jargon. It is usually only spoken; jargon
is often written as well as spoken. Slang usually belongs to a
group of people who use it to show that they belong to that
group - and that others do not. Sometimes they need
language that others will not understand. For example, young
people, people in prison, and people in the army all have
their own kinds of slang. Slang is colourful, funny, and often
cruel. It gives us new words for things we already have
words for (for example, rock up for arrive). Jargon, on the
other hand, often gives us new words for new things or ideas.
Most slang changes quite quickly, because the people
who use it need to make new words to keep confusing
outsiders. But some slang lasts longer: pig for policeman has
been used since 1800. Other words become part of the
informal language. For example, row, meaning noisy
argument, was slang in Britain in the eighteenth century.
Some slang words become part of Standard English. For
example, joke, meaning something that someone says to
make people laugh, was a slang word at the end of the
seventeenth century. Other slang words change their
meaning over time. For example, in American English
previous meant arriving too soon in the 1900s; in 1920 it
meant tight (of clothes) and in the 1970s it meant a bit rude.
The slang used by African-American musicians has had
a great effect on British slang since the Second World War.
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This effect has grown recently as American rap music with

its fast spoken rhymes has become popular around the world.
Words from the US can now reach Britain in weeks through
the Internet and television. For example, awesome, wicked,
and bad (meaning excellent) have been widely used by
young people in Britain but they were first used in the US.
Many slang words show that you like or dislike
something. For example, in British slang lush means lovely,
Boom! Means the very best, and minging means bad. In
Britain, a stupid person is called a div, in the US a dummy,
in Australia a dill or a boofhead. A pretty but stupid girl is a
bimbo in Britain and the US, a boring person is a dweeb in
the US, a lazy man is a bludger in Australia. A good-looking
person is spunky in Australia or buff in the US and Britain.
The basic things in life are often given slang words:
food is grub in Britain and the US (a word that has been used
since the seventeenth century) and tucker in Australia;
money is wonga or dough in Britain, green or moolah in the
US. There are also many words for having no money, being
drunk, being sick, crimes and criminals, the police, and
different parts of the body.
Australians are very proud of their slang and often use
it. It has many shortened words: for example, arvo for
afternoon, Aussie for Australian, brekkie for breakfast, and
sunnies for sunglasses. The Cockneys of East London are
also proud of their 'rhyming slang', which is now widely
used. In this slang, part of the slang expression rhymes with
the word in Standard English. For example: garden plant
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means aunt, plates of meat means feet, bread and honey

means money. It can become more difficult to understand
when the rhyming word is not used. For example, I need
some bread means I need some money. Today most new
rhyming slang uses famous names. For example, Britney
Spears means beers. Rhyming slang is also used in Australia
and the US.
New slang words are always appearing and
disappearing. Some words are used only by the small groups
that made them, others become part of national or
international slang, and others cross into ordinary spoken
language. In this way, slang is an important source of new
words in Standard English.

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CHAPTER TWELVE
The future of English
'It's good that everything's gone, except their language,
which is everything.'
(Derek Walcott, 'North and South', 1982)

'... we no longer control English in any meaningful

way.
It is no longer our ship, but the sea.'
(Andrew Marr, 1998)

The Jamaican poet Derek Walcott knows that English

is still used in countries that were governed by Britain; the
British journalist Andrew Marr recognizes that English does
not belong just to the British or Americans, but to the whole
world. English continues to be used by speakers of other
languages all over the world, and to be changed by those
languages. But how will this situation change in the future?
In Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, English will remain the first language of most
people, but will continue to change. New slang and dialects
will develop, often from groups of people who speak other
languages, for example, Spanish in the US and South Asian
languages in Britain. In countries where English is used as a
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second language, it is possible that new languages will

develop which use English and local languages. An example
of this is Sheng, a new Kenyan language which uses words
from English, Swahili, and other African languages.
One guess is that the number of people who can use
English well will continue to grow - to over half the people
in the world by 2050, some believe - and that English will
remain a world language for many years. In this view, the
US will remain the richest country in the world, American
popular music and films will continue to be fashionable, and
English will still be the language of science, communications
technology, international business, education at universities,
and television news. English will continue to change, but it
will not lose its importance in the world.
However, other people think that the future of English
as a world language is not so certain. Mandarin Chinese,
Spanish, and Arabic may become other world languages, as
the numbers of people who speak these languages continue
to grow, and the countries where they are spoken become
richer. Although international business may grow, some of it
may be with countries in the same part of the world, and
other shared languages may be used instead of English.
There are now more users of the Internet who do not speak
English as a first language than those who do, so businesses
and organizations have to provide information and services
in different languages for these Internet users. In education,
international students may go to countries that are nearby:
for example, more Asian students may go to China. English
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may also lose its importance and popularity in the world of

films and music.
If English remains a world language, some
governments may try to stop its use in their own countries.
They may fear that the use of English will endanger their
own languages and customs. Some countries have already
tried to stop the borrowing of English words by passing laws
against the use of foreign words in some situations (for
example, France in 1977 and 1994, and Poland in 1997). In
other countries, India, for example, there is much discussion
about teaching children in English in schools. Some consider
it harmful for the children's learning, and also for the
survival of their own languages. Others, however, think that
it is necessary for the country's future survival in the world.
If English does remain a world language, how will it
change? Will it break up into a number of different
languages, as Latin developed into French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian? Or will the different
varieties disappear and only one kind of English survive?
It seems probable that as English is used internationally
more and more, the need for a standard grammar and
vocabulary, standard spelling rules, and some standard
pronunciation will remain. Perhaps a new simpler kind of
'World Standard English' will develop from the regional
varieties, one which all users can easily use and understand.
If a sound is hard for people to make, and words can be
understood without it, then it could disappear. For example,

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th is difficult for many speakers, and does not have to be

pronounced as /th/ or /zh/, so this sound could change.
On the other hand, it seems that the number of regional
varieties of English is growing and will continue to grow.
These varieties may become more and more different from
the World Standard kind of English, although they may not
become separate languages because they will have a lot of
contact with standard kinds of English through television,
radio, and the Internet.
As the number of second - and foreign-language
speakers of English grows larger than the number of first-
language speakers, other languages will have a greater effect
on English. Extremely large numbers of words from other
languages will probably continue to cross into English at
great speed.
The next step in the history of the English language is
hard to see clearly, because it depends on many things:
changes in business, science, technology, and numbers of
people. Will the speakers of English at the end of this
century speak a very different English from the one we use
now? Who will use it, and how? These are interesting
questions for all users of English.

- THE END –
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