ENGLISH NEXT • PART ONE • A WORLD IN TRANSITION p.57

The triumph of English

The history of English, or rather, the

traditional way the history is told,

represents an obstacle to a clear view

of the future. Global English may

represent an important discontinuity

with the past, rather than the triumph

of Modern English on the world stage.

The history of English is conventionally

divided into three parts: Old English,

Middle English, and Modern English. The

tripartite structure draws attention to particular

events in British history – especially the

Norman invasion, which heralded the rapid

‘frenchification’ of the English language,

and, later, the constellation of political, religious,

and economic developments which

surrounded the emergence of Britain as a

modern nation-state.

Now, we are talking about a fourth period

in the history of English: after Modern

English comes the period of ‘Global English’.

Rhetorically inconvenient though a fourth

period would be, it would allow an exploration

of the new status of English as a global

lingua franca and the new cultural, linguistic,

political and economic issues surrounding

English as it is used in a postmodern world.

There is, however, a great danger in

simply adding a new historical period to

cater for global English.

The traditional history of English, as taught in all

the main textbooks, was largely created in the

19^th century and reflects 19^th-century values

and world views. Just as archaeologists and

historians have argued that our modern

understanding of medieval life has been

distorted through a 19th-century lens, so

some linguistic historians are now urging a

reappraisal of the history of English.

The traditional history is constructed as

a grand narrative. It provides a myth of

national origins as a rags-to-riches folk tale

in which our hero, the English language,

emerges from humble and obscure origins

and flowers in Old English times – both as a

literary language and as the foundation of a

new Anglo-Saxon political awareness (presaging

the role of English in establishing a

future national identity).

Now comes the complication in the story;

the point at which the villain appears and disrupts

the status quo. In the grand narrative

of the history of English, it is French which

is positioned as the villain, with whom the

English language does battle – and eventually

triumphs. According to this account, the

linguistic and cultural integrity of Old English

was all but destroyed after the Norman invasion,

not least by relexification from French.

The whole business of recreating a literary

language and national identity had to begin

anew.

Hence the modern era – starting in the

16th century – represents the final triumph

of English. The language now overcomes its

historic villain and re-emerges as a national

language, with a literature provided by the

likes of Dryden and Shakespeare; scientific

writing by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries

in the Royal Society (17th century);

regulatory apparatus provided by the kind of

dictionary first compiled by Samuel Johnson

(18th century) and, most monumentally, by

the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th

century.

The values that permeate this conventional

story of English are those of the 19th

century, including Victorian concepts of

modernity.

As we have seen, modernity was

a discourse about progress and growth and

about constructing modern nation-state

identities. Linguistic modernity was not just

about constructing national monuments to

the language such as the Oxford English

Dictionary, but also embraced the need to

shoulder the ‘English speaker’s burden’ of

taking English, as a civilising force, to the

furthest reaches of empire.

If you take the view that the traditional

history of English reflects a very national,

modernist, 19th-century view of the world,

then tacking on a new chapter entitled

‘Global English’ may be a serious mistake. It

dangerously continues the grand narrative

by adding a coda, suggesting that English,

which in modernity triumphed as a national

language, has now triumphed as a global

language, overcoming its arch rival yet

again, but this time in the global arena by

displacing French as the preferred international

lingua franca, or as the preferred

working language of Europe.

This view of global English is altogether

too ethnocentric to permit a broader understanding

of the complex ways in which the

spread of English is helping to transform

the world and in which English, in turn, is

transformed by the world.