Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English
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negotiability—all of which was made easier by a shared involvement with radio, television, cinema, computers, email, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.
technology, communication, war, and
realpolitik
At the end of the nineteenth century, many people had high hopes for the twentieth and, in terms of scientiWc, technological, and social breakthroughs, such hopes were more than fulWlled. By the end of the twentieth century, their grand-children were enjoying (if that is the right word) two remarkable facilities: on one side, a more-or-less standard variety (or set of varieties) of English which served an unprecedented number of people as both a home language and a global lingua franca, as well as fulWlling many personal, social, and professional needs at local, national, and international levels. On the other side, many millions had desk-top computers with which they could create, manipulate, transmit, and receive text, pictures, and other kinds of data predominantly—but not only—in English. The world-wide technological framework within which this took place was beyond the conception of typesetters, printers, and postal and telegraphic systems not just in 1900 but also in 1950. The key end-product, however, was not beyond anyone’s conception. A printed page is a printed page, however produced, and print on screen looks much the same as it does on a modern printed page.
Embedding scores of other linguistic transformations in both lexis and meaning, the textual and other information which those millions of computer users could transmit varied in scale from a single-line email to a Wle containing data that can be attached to such an email, which could be sent without leaving one’s own desk to an email address in another machine anywhere on the planet (where both Wle and attachment could be downloaded). As the italicized words in the former sentence conWrm, the discourse of computing has, in itself, been a signiWcant development of the twentieth century—not least perhaps in its familiarity to an increasingly wide range of users. Indeed, by the closing decade of the century, the writing of such messages, in English or any other appropriately developed language, had its own range of usages: from traditional publishing-quality prose with tidy headings, sentences, and paragraphs at one extreme to what might be termed e-anarchy at the other. Such email text may include emoticons (‘emotive
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icons’) intended to express feelings not normally expressed or exposed in text. Indeed, in ten years of the twentieth century (and Wve of the twenty-Wrst), this new communicative mode became commonplace more rapidly and pervasively than any earlier twentieth-century technical marvels had done, such as radio (originally AmE), wireless (BrE, especially c1950), TV (AmE and BrE) telly (BrE, although often with social marking, as in the citation from Muriel Spark’s The Go-Away Bird (1958) which accompanies this entry in the OED: ‘He said, ‘‘What do you do in the evenings, Lorna? Do you watch Telly?’’ I did take this as an insult, because we call it TV, and his remark made me out to be uneducated’), and the telephone (Wxed or mobile), with no transatlantic linguistic contrasts. As a result of all of which, English (especially in its US guise) became ever more securely the world’s primary language.
By 1900, English had been in wide use around the world for over two centuries, but no one could have imagined the communicative and technological support available to it (and to other ‘advanced’ languages) by 1999. Such developments were in large part the outcome of three sets of events that aVected many languages in many ways, and English more than most. These were:
1Two World Wars (1914–18, 1939–45) in which the key victorious nations were English-speaking. Especially in World War II [AmE and BrE] the Second World War [BrE], the use of English for military, political, economic, and other purposes expanded greatly in the various war zones. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and the PaciWc millions of people came into regular contact with English who would not otherwise have had much (or anything) to do with it. And where English arrived it tended to stay on after the hostilities ended,
for a variety of reasons that included reconstruction, trade, and education.
2A political and economic Cold War (1945–89) between a capitalist West and a communist East. In this long and often tense struggle for territorial and ideological inXuence, the USA was the foremost Western contestant. However, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the USA became the world’s sole ‘super-power’, the perceived prestige of which impelled many people in ex-Soviet satellites, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, to switch from Russian to English as their language of wider communication, having already regarded it for years as a—if not indeed the—language of freedom. Inevitably, Russians also began to Wnd it useful to know some English, especially in trying to catch up on a West that was now both technologically and economically far ahead of them.
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3Globalization, the name of a process, set in train after the Soviet collapse, of world-wide social, cultural, and commercial expansion (and exploitation),
in which the USA was the center [AmE] or centre [BrE] of socio-economic, political, cultural, and linguistic interest. In the closing quarter of the century, English was not only a key socio-cultural language but also the communicative linchpin of both international capitalism and the world’s media. By this point, the American variety had also become the main inXuence not only on other languages but on other Englishes (including the British variety). In its standard spoken form, AmE was now also the primary model for teaching English as a second or foreign language. For many years, key publishers in the UK’s ‘English language industry’ had resisted this tide but when it became clear that the tide was becoming ever stronger, they began to publish courses in US usage from oYces in New York, alongside their continuing operations at home and elsewhere. In this, they proWted from both Englishes (and, if BrE ever did decline beyond a certain unwished-for point, they would be well placed to transfer more resources to selling the US variety).
Closely associated with the World Wars, the Cold War, and globalization were two ‘tides’ in the aVairs of the language, one internal, the other external. The internal tide was a growing awareness of two issues: Wrst, the major and the minor (but often subtle) diVerences between US and UK usage, despite their high level of mutual intelligibility and a relative lack of friction; second, the growing global signiWcance of US usage and the ease with which, and the extent to which, Americanisms were passing into British English, into other Englishes, and into other languages. The external tide, on the other hand, was a precipitous loss of competition from other once powerful languages of European origin.
the internal tide: from the uk to the us
In both the UK and the USA, as already noted, an ‘educated’ accent (whatever, precisely, that might be said to be) had, since at least 1900, been widely considered desirable and useful. Rural and urban accents which might for any reason be considered uncouth could be modiWed through contact with the ‘right’ people and/or as a result of elocution and personal eVort, avowedly making life smoother for their owners. By and large, accents from lower social levels and especially un-prestigious urban-industrial areas were seen as drawbacks as, for
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example, those of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow in the UK, and those of New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the USA. Again, by and large, and unaVected by universal education, such views of how the language was spoken (or should be spoken) continued well past mid-century, remaining—especially in the UK—a key social issue. In addition, however, a marked element of counter-prestige prevailed, as where the non-establishment speech styles of pop stars and other role models had a powerful impact, including a trending down or linguistic downshifting among young people who already possessed enviable speech styles.
Although pop stars’ accents did not serve widely as models, they may have contributed in the UK to accent levelling between RP and some local kinds of usage. Such levelling occurred, for example, in the Greater London area, as Wrst reported in the early 1980s, generating a relaxed but conWdent speech style to which the phonetician David Rosewarne gave the name Estuary English—referring to the estuary of the river Thames. This compromise younger-generation style emerged out of a levelling ‘up’ towards RP among speakers of lower-middle and workingclass London accents (notably Cockney), together with a levelling ‘down’ from RP and near-RP towards, with a concomitant relaxation of inter-class barriers.
Also by the 1980s, linguists, language teachers, and members of the media had become more aware of how varied the language was world-wide, and in ways that could not necessarily be described (or ‘explained’) in terms simply of standard, dialect, accent, and class. However, regardless of the general success of the language world-wide, the kind and quality of English that anyone might use had, during the twentieth century, been of increasing interest, including the often-stated desire to improve the language or rescue it from various dangers:
1 Concern for both the prestige and proper use of the language and the reduction of abuses of various kinds, individual or collective: a particular concern of the Queen’s English Society in the UK.
2Concern for clarity of usage and the welfare of people who might be misled or baZed by bureaucratic and other ‘jargon’: the key concern of the initially British grass-roots group the Plain English Campaign.
3Concern about preserving the key position of English against inroads of any kind, for example, the organization US English that seeks a constitutional amendment that would make it the oYcial language of the United States and
therefore protect it from a rapid increase in the use of Spanish.
4 Awareness of the importance of using the standard language well in terms of both lifestyle and career opportunities, regardless of past conceptions of class and more in terms of business values associated in the 1990s with the term globalization.
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In the seventeenth century, the norms of upper-class England were, in general, suYcient to serve the language at large as a broadly-deWned reference model, despite the fact that most people would never achieve them and indeed seldom came into direct contact with them. In eighteenth-century Great Britain, upperand middle-class people in Edinburgh and Dublin developed their own styles and usage while still acknowledging polite (‘socially reWned’) London views and usages. Thus, while the Edinburgh and Dublin e´lite generally deferred to the prestige usage of London, they developed ‘polite’ usages of their own, notably in terms of pronunciation (although these too, as Chapter 9 has shown, could also be discarded in favour of London norms). Just as such usages gained in prestige at home and in due course elsewhere, and just as the USA by the later nineteenth century acquired the sense of linguistic autonomy noted above, so—especially in the later twentieth century—the usage of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa gained in autonomy, as manifested in, for example, the creation of dictionaries of their national Englishes. By mid-century, however, in such places, the term that replaced such expressions as polite, good, the best, and received was standard, and the ‘standard’ in this sense was increasingly located at home: that is, to use a term usually reserved for the constitution of Canada, it had been patriated (‘brought home’). In the course of the last two decades of the twentieth century it therefore became possible for both the world at large and, more importantly, the citizens of such nations to believe in (and, more signiWcantly, to be comfortable about) such entities as Standard Australian, Standard Canadian, Standard New Zealand, and Standard South African English, all of which were backed by national dictionaries of their own.
The traditional approach to such matters as language, nation, capital, and provinces, and whether kinds of usage are ‘better’, ‘worse’, or simply ‘diVerent’, appears as a result to have led over the course of the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries to a situation which can be summarized as follows:
1A nation has, or should have, a state of its own, and be the home and focus of the language of that nation, as with Portuguese in Portugal. On this basis, French is the national language of the French, and the citizens of France are assumed to have a prior or greater claim to it than Belgians, Cameroonians,
Canadians, Swiss, or any others who use it.
2A nation-state is seen as having a primary, perhaps even exclusive role in using and standardizing its language whether or not that language is used elsewhere. Thus, Hungary is the land of the Hungarians, who speak Hungarian, and any ethnic Hungarians elsewhere should consider the usage of Hungary the norm.
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3 All nation-states have, or should have, national languages, and, if a new nation-state is created, it should have a constitutionally established national language: a position taken up after the Second World War as various territories in the British Empire became independent, regardless of the complex relationships of communities and languages within any such new state.
4 If there is more than one language in a state, the majority language, especially if its name echoes the name of the state or the major ethnic group in the state, should be selected, and may have its name adapted, as with Bahasa Malaysia (‘the Malaysian language’), the form of Malay which is, for example, deemed oYcial in Malaysia.
It is, however, uncommon for one language to Wt neatly and to the exclusion of all others within the boundaries of one nation-state. In the case of France, for example, Basque, Breton, Occitan/Provenc¸al, as well as German have all long been in everyday regional use. The situation of English in England in particular, and in Britain at large, may therefore serve as a ‘national’ starting point for considering what happened to the language elsewhere in the world during the twentieth century. In England, there has for many centuries been no rival to English. On its own, therefore, England meets the ideal of a nation with a single tongue, and this is true regardless of how many hundreds of imported tongues are currently in use there among speciWc communities.
However, when one steps beyond England into the rest of Britain, this USlike condition ceases to apply. In Wales, English continues to co-occur with Welsh (in spite of the various disincentives evident throughout the history of these language varieties; see further p. 338). In Scotland, English co-occurs with Gaelic and with Scots, a Germanic vernacular which, like English, emerged from Anglo-Saxon. Both are recognized as minority languages of the European Union but, like English, have no legally-established status in the UK: there is, for instance, no written constitution and the law does not oYcially recognize any language. In Ireland, matters are equally complex. In Northern Ireland (part of the UK), a local variety of English co-habits with both Irish Gaelic and Ulster Scots (these being equivalent to Scottish Gaelic and Scots); all are nonoYcial, as in England, Wales, and Scotland, but English is the only language used oYcially. In the Irish Republic, Irish (Gaelic) is the oYcial language and is taught universally in school, but is not in wide constant use, while Irish English (sometimes called Hiberno-English), although it is used everywhere by everyone, is constitutionally second to Irish Gaelic. Few people speak Gaelic on a consistent, regular basis, but it appears above English on the bilingual road
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signs (if in smaller letters). As such real-life illustrations demonstrate, there is in fact usually nothing simple about the relationships between languages and nation-states.
In the world at large, the following statements were, for example, largely true at the end of the twentieth century. Many people in the USA, the UK, Nigeria, India, and other English-using nation-states spoke more than one language, as did many mainland Europeans, Arabs, and others. Indeed, as Chapter 12 has stressed, multilingualism has been at least as normal in the world as monolingualism and is as common in the English-speaking world as elsewhere. Moreover, although the people of England are now famously monolingual (although see further pp. 334–5), a signiWcant minority both here and in Great Britain at large do in fact use other languages, many on a daily basis. Such variety is equally true of other English-speaking nation-states. At the turn of the twentieth/twenty-Wrst centuries, the USA is widely polyglot, notably in such cosmopolitan cities as New York and Los Angeles and, because of a large Spanish-speaking minority, this is especially so in the western states. At the same time, however, the USA is massively English-speaking, and many of its citizens (as in the UK) have little knowledge of any other language. Canada, on the other hand, has had a major French-speaking minority for centuries as well as many smaller communities with indigenous languages, such as Kwakiutl (spoken on northern Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland), as well as immigrant languages, such as Cantonese. In addition, Australia has both its aboriginal languages and the ethnic languages of immigrants, while New Zealand has Maori, other Polynesian languages, and immigrant languages from further aWeld. South Africa is a large-scale multilingual (‘rainbow’) nation, as is Singapore on a small scale, with four oYcial languages: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Furthermore, in mainland western Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, English is not an oYcial language but is successfully used as a high-level lingua franca in, for example, academic teaching, publishing, and business. It is therefore probably safe to say that in the twentieth century (and the early twenty-Wrst), English in the world is as often used alongside other languages as it is used on its own, even in massively Anglophone countries.
Although many commentators have emphasized a reluctance among native English speakers to learn and use other languages, a more likely reason in the modern era is a lack of need and opportunity, a lack that can be seen in part as the result of traditional geographical isolation at home, and more perhaps as a consequence of the enormous success of the language abroad. By the end of the twentieth century, if someone were a reasonably competent speaker, reader, and writer of English, in many situations and locations world-wide there might be no
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pressing need for anything else, especially as non-native speakers are often more than willing to practise their English with anyone who happens to come by.
What is perhaps the most signiWcant shift in the role of English world-wide in the twentieth century—that from UK to US predominance—began slowly, then accelerated with World War II [AmE and BrE] or the Second World War [BrE] and the subsequent dismantling of empire. The independence of Jordan in 1946 was the Wrst step in a process that ended thirty-seven years later in 1984 with the independence of Brunei (for the entire process, see the timeline 424 V). In addition, vast numbers of people were on the move both during and after the Second World War, initially in armies and as refugees, then as migrants, business travellers, and (as the world recovered) as tourists. The presence of US soldiers in Europe was part of what, for the British, was the defe´nce of the free world (stress on second syllable) and, in the US, its de´fe´nse (stress on both syllables). An awareness of US/UK language diVerences in fact tended to become stronger after the 1930s, when the movies [AmE] or the pictures/the cinema [BrE] became more enticing than the radio [AmE] and what the British were, by the 1950s, learning not to call the wireless. Both nations, however, had the same word and acronym for television/TV, although the British also reduced it to the telly—something neither did to the telephone, both sides favoring [AmE] or favouring [BrE] the short form phone. As trade and travel increased, so did mail [more AmE] or post [which remains more BrE], both of which were increasingly carried over longer distances as airmail (although never *airpost) in airplanes [AmE] and aeroplanes [BrE], or, by both, in planes and aircraft.
In the second half of the century, foreign learners of English, wherever they lived, increasingly needed to pay attention to both varieties, if not productively then receptively. If a choice had to be made regarding their target, many favored [AmE] or favoured [BrE] US over UK usage, only adopting such other varieties if they had associations with, or became immigrants to, for example, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. By the century’s end, many teachers and more conservative users of English in mainland Europe and elsewhere still favoured the BBC as their model (although this too was becoming increasingly diverse), but others, especially if they were younger speakers, tended to prefer the racier idiom evident in programs and movies [AmE] rather than the traditional programmes and Wlms [BrE]. Indeed, a transatlantic coup de grace came in the 1980s when the US spelling program was adopted in computing everywhere. Even so, however, the Brits have kept programmes for use in theaters [AmE] or theatres [BrE], on the telly, and on the radio (seldom called the wireless in the later decades of the century).
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Although the trend towards the dominance of US usage among foreignand second-language learners has therefore undeniably gained strength, by 1999 BBCstyle English had kept much of its social gloss, including among admiring middle-class Americans (who might consider it ‘cute’ but would never think of adopting it). Equally, in the UK and other parts of the world, US usage and slang had become so easy to adopt and so familiar that no one any longer recalled their origins, and US accents had little inXuence among native-speakers anywhere else, although they did increasingly inXuence foreign learners, especially in mainland Europe and East Asia. Not even the English of the net and the Web tipped the scales. Computer-literate people beyond the USA continued to manage US usage without diYculty, on the whole keeping their own styles, even if they logged on with America Online (AOL).
the external tide: loss of competition
Perhaps the most signiWcant factor that aVected the English language increasingly through the twentieth century was loss of (linguistic) competition. Many situations and institutions could in fact be highlighted as important in this regard, but one in particular needs attention, not least because it is often overlooked. Out of the Cold War between a capitalist West and a communist East emerged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), probably the most powerful military bloc ever known, the bulk of whose members are Western European nation-states. The working language of NATO has, from the start, been English; this pre-eminence as a NATO-associated language has in turn helped to promote its use in mainland Europe (notably in Germany, where US troops have been stationed since the end of the Second World War).
In terms of NATO, the United Nations (UN), the British Commonwealth, world business, and many national and international institutions and activities, English became, in the closing quarter of the century, (to borrow a phrase from computing) the world’s default mode. That is, given no compelling reason or need to use any other medium, those not born to English straightforwardly opted for it, both for themselves and their children. Among the many situations in which the primacy of English became manifest, one of the most patent at the century’s end was international conferences. Even where simultaneous translation was provided, participants from many backgrounds preferred to listen ‘straight’ to deliveries in English. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the ways in which modern communicative and information-storage systems
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developed, English had the serial publications (such as print and online journals), the libraries, and the databases to handle them. Closely comparable was the use of English by the world’s media, not only directly for journalism, radio, and television, but as a behind-the-scenes source for output in languages other than English. Routinely, material gathered in English by such agencies as Reuters and the Associated Press was, every day, round the clock, translated into and then transmitted in other languages.
SigniWcantly (and for many, ominously), the external tide included a weakening in competition, notably from other European languages. German fared particularly badly. Although in the early twentieth century it was a signiWcant medium for science and scholarship, it suVered as a consequence of being the medium of Germany and Austria, nations defeated in two world wars. This happened, moreover, despite the economic resurgence in West Germany after the war and its reuniWcation with East Germany in 1990. Comparably, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian lost its international clout not only in the Third (Non-Aligned) World, but also in the vanishing Second World of communism: in both, former Eastern European satellites such as Poland and Hungary, and former Asian Soviet republics such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, took a new interest in English as the language of both the USA and capitalism.
The retreat of German and the displacement of Russian contrast strongly with the twentieth-century vigour of both Spanish and Portuguese whose users in Iberia, Latin America, and elsewhere escaped many of the eVects of the World Wars and the Cold War. Because they have secure roles in Europe and the Americas, both remain strong, a situation diVerent, therefore, not only from that of German and Russian, but also from that of French. In the Wrst decades of the century, for example, the inXuence of French in Europe changed little from its role in the nineteenth century as the language of diplomacy and high culture. Nevertheless, its world role declined greatly as a consequence not only of the World Wars (in the second of which it was partly occupied and fully controlled by Germany), but also because of events within its empire after 1945, especially its protracted wars to keep control of Algeria and Vietnam. Even so, however, there emerged a loose post-imperial league of French-speaking nations known as La Francophonie (‘The French-speaking Community’), a considerable success through which, as a counter-force to a far less formal community of world English, they were able to promote their shared language as le franc¸ais mondial (‘world French’).
The post-war fate of the British Empire was complex. As a consequence of at least four factors (pressure from the USA, great economic loss, considerable