PDF Summary:The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson

Around 1.5 billion people around the world speak English—roughly 20 percent of the human population. How has our language achieved this global status? How did English evolve over time into the language we speak and write today? What are its unique quirks, strengths, and shortcomings that set it apart from the world’s other languages? The Mother Tongue takes us on a journey through the history of the English language, exploring its richness and variety, and pointing the way toward what the future might have in store for it.

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The most comparable figure in America was Noah Webster. Webster’s English dictionary was the most thorough of its day, with over 70,000 words catalogued. Driven by a fierce patriotic pride in his young nation and a conviction that American English was just as worthy of exaltation as British English, Webster contributed to some of the distinctive features and pronunciations of the language on his side of the Atlantic.

The crown jewel of all English dictionaries is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Originally published in 1884, the OED set out not only to list and define every word used in the English language since the 12th century, but also to trace their etymologies and evolving meanings and spellings throughout history. With nearly half a million word entries, the OED is a staggering intellectual achievement, one of the greatest pieces of scholarship in world history. Nothing comparable exists in another language.

Word Origins

We’ve seen how different migrant groups to the British Isles shaped the overall structure of the language, aided by individual innovators like Shakespeare, Johnson, and Webster. But now, let’s take a closer look to see how specific words came to be formed. Words come into being by five main processes:

1. Accident or mishearing—sweetheart was once sweetard, but evolved into its present form through persistent misuse.
2. Borrowing or adapting from other languages, as with a word like breeze, derived from the Spanish briza (although this particular word has become so thoroughly anglicized that we forget it is actually derived from a foreign source).
3. Invention out of whole cloth like, as in the way hound became dog, with no known explanation as to how it took place.
4. Shifting meaning over time—nice, for example, has meant everything from foolish to strange to wanton to lascivious. Only in the mid-18th century did it acquire something akin to its present meaning.
5. Alteration through prefixes and suffixes, like how an adjective like diverse can easily become a verb like diversify or a noun like diversification.

Pronunciation and Dialect

As we’ve seen, English words are derived from many different sources. This helps to explain why English is rich with varied pronunciation and dialects. There are an astonishing variety of dialects within England (let alone Wales, Scotland, and Ireland). The linguist Simeon Potter has observed that there is more difference in speech between two points 100 miles distant from each other in England than there is in the whole of North America.

One of the clearest manifestations of local dialect is slurring—the addition, subtraction, or substitution of letters in spoken English that aren’t reflected in the spelling. The general trend is one of subtraction, losing letters and syllables over time and letting pronunciations become looser and more casual. The words that tend to be slurred the most are local and familiar place-names—like how “Baltimore” becomes “Balamer” in the mouths of locals.

But it’s not just geography—social class can also be a powerful influence on English dialects. The American dialectologist William Labov observed in the 1930s that middle-class New Yorkers were far more likely to pronounce the r sound in words like door, car, and more than were their fellow working-class New Yorkers. Pronouncing one’s r sounds was an indicator of higher social status.

American English

American English differs in many respects from British English. Earlier, we explored the astonishing variety of dialects that can be found in the UK, even between towns that are short distances apart from one another. American speech, on the other hand, is comparatively homogenized, to such an extent that speakers on the East and West Coasts (roughly 3,000 miles apart) speak with virtually indistinguishable accents.

Indeed, despite the massive waves of immigration during the 19th century, American speech patterns did not diverge over time; instead, they converged. The movement of people within the US created a linguistic melting pot of intermingling, which homogenized speech patterns. As time went on, people faced social pressures to conform to “normal” American speech, especially the children of immigrants, who faced even stronger pressure to shed the accents and idioms of their parents.

Over time, English-speaking Americans developed their own unique vocabulary and pronunciations, many of which became widely adopted in England, as well as in whole other languages. The ubiquitous ok is maybe the best example, having worked its way into languages across every inhabited continent. Its history and origins are unclear, although linguists believe it may have arisen out the ironic wordplay of early 19th century American jokesters. Around this time, some well-educated young people in American cities led a fad of creating acronyms for deliberately misspelled phrases—thus, “ok” came from “oll korrect,” meaning “all correct.”

America has exerted a powerful influence over English, especially as the reach of US media and Hollywood films has extended around the world. American idioms like don’t have are replacing haven’t got in Britain, while truck is gradually edging out the more uniquely British lorry. We can also see this in British spelling, as the u in humour and colour is slowly becoming extinct in the UK.

The Success of English Around the World

We’ve seen how English evolved over a long historical process, spreading to America where it took on its own unique form—which, in turn, shaped how the language was spoken in the mother country. But the reach of English, of course, extends far beyond Britain and America—English is a world language, with official status in 59 countries, a higher figure than for any other language. Of course, not everyone in these countries actually speaks English (in fact, many people in the US and the UK don’t) but its widespread reach can’t be denied. How did it achieve this global status?

The residual historical legacy of the British Empire, plus the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, naturally played major roles in rendering English the global lingua franca. But certain features of the language itself aided in its worldwide adoption by native speakers of other languages: Its spelling is relatively phonetic; it is almost entirely free of gendered nouns; and it lacks the accent marks and diacritics that subtly transform pronunciation. Thus, it is relatively easy to speak and write English.

Moreover, English is based on a phonetic alphabet. That is, the written characters correspond to particular sounds. This is a great advantage and makes writing and pronouncing words simple, because there are only so many sounds that can be represented by the letters. It limits the number of characters that comprise the writing system.

We’ve seen how, even in its earliest stages, English was highly flexible in accepting new words from Norse and Norman French. The process also works the other way around—English words themselves have been readily adopted by other languages, often with only slight modifications to fit the native tongue. The Japanese, in particular, are adept at adapting English words into their notoriously difficult and inaccessible language. These are known as wasei-eigo, or “Japanese-made-English.” Thus, smart became sumato, rush hour became rushawa, idol became aidoru, and so on.

Quirks of English

We’ve explored the origins of English, its evolution over time, and its emergence as a dominant language of global business and politics. But English is also a language of literature and oratory, capable of eloquently expressing the most powerful human emotions and desires. It possesses a number of unique properties, quirks, and complexities that set it apart from other tongues. What, then, are some of the language’s unique traits that make it so rich and evocative?

One of the best ways to get a true flavor of the English language is through its swear words. Unlike some other languages, like Japanese, English features a rich vocabulary of swear words. English swear words derive their power from the fact that they are highly emotive, as well as forbidden, and tend to be oriented around two themes: obscenity, which is either the disgusting and/or taboo (often having to do with bodily functions or sex); or blasphemy, which involves sacrilege or invoking the name of God in vain. In English, shit, piss, fuck, and cunt would fall into the former category; hell, damn, goddamn and Jesus Christ (in certain contexts) would fall into the latter.

Cunt is perhaps the most obscene word in the English language, but it was entirely commonplace and inoffensive a few centuries ago, existing even in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Throughout the history of the English language, however, there have been shifting definitions of which words were and weren’t considered offensive. What was perfectly acceptable in one era could be considered highly offensive in another.

By the Victorian Age (1837-1901), many English words that would have scarcely raised an eyebrow in the Middle Ages or in Shakespeare’s time were considered totally out of bounds. Indeed, this era was famous for its prudishness and squeamishness. Even non-taboo parts of the body were considered too delicate to mention in polite society. Thus, legs became limbs and belly became midriff.

Beyond the ingenuity one can deploy with swearing (fuck alone is incredibly versatile, able to express the full range of emotions and be used as any part of speech), English affords ample opportunity for wordplay and creativity. The forms of wordplay are greatly varied.

Palindromes (sentences spelled the same backwards and forwards) are among the most creative and most challenging to write. Consider how difficult it is to come up with a palindrome like “Rise to vote sir” or “A nut for a jar of tuna” that satisfy the criteria and form coherent statements.

Anagrams (words or phrases made from rearranging the letters of other words and phrases) are also highly popular. Thus, one can turn Emperor Octavian into “Captain over Rome” or Osama Bin Laden into “Is bad man alone.”

Perhaps the most famous wordplay in spoken English is the phenomenon of cockney rhyming slang. This is a linguistic characteristic specific to the cockneys of London’s East End, believed to have started around the mid-19th century. In this rhyming slang, the speaker replaces a word (like mate) with a multi-word phrase (like china plate), the last word of which rhymes with the word that’s been replaced. Thus, “How are you, mate?” would become “How are you, china plate?” But in reality, it goes a step further. The second, rhyming word is often dropped. Thus, “How are you, mate?” would really become “How are you, china?” This renders the etymology of these phrases deeply obscure and often baffling to outsiders.

Next Steps for English

Given its dominant status, it is convenient, advantageous, and expedient for people around the world to have a working knowledge of English. Yet even within countries that have high levels of English proficiency, people are still quite proud of their native languages and wish to preserve them. Indeed, many parts of the world view the English language itself as a symbol of western colonialism.

For these reasons, English speakers should never be reduced to complacency by the seeming triumph of their language. Things can always change, and the supremacy of English may one day be supplanted by a rival claimant.

What, then, is the future of the language? With America’s powerful economic and cultural influence over the world, the likely trajectory seems to be a homogenization of English to conform to the way it's spoken in the United States. These trends are reinforced by the influences of mass media, which expose us to dialects of speech that we would never have otherwise heard. Thus, a melting pot of English, rather than a polarization of different dialects, looks to be where we’re headed.

On the one hand, this is positive. Americans, Britons, Australians, Canadians, South Africans, Jamaicans, and all other English-speaking nations will understand one another better, creating stronger conditions for political, social, and economic cooperation. But, on the other hand, something irreplaceable would be lost—the variety and flavor of our rich and beautiful language.