Watch Your Language!

by Denis Lyons

John Bull World War I Recruiting Poster

Published by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1915

Sensational headlines about the rising toxic tide of Americanisms inundating our defenceless language produce predictable, periodic paroxysms of pearl-clutching among the proper-parlance set. For example, with admirable clarity, one recent article was headlined “Americanisms are poisoning our language”. 

Americanisms are now so numerous that it is impossible to avoid hearing or reading them, even if you do not actually use them. There are too many to repeat them all here, but how would some in this country now manage without words and phrases like you guys, heads up, have a nice day, my bad, touch base, you’re welcome, where we’re at, going forward, winningest, so fun, reach out for, ballpark figure, I’m good, 24/7, gotten, way, shape or form, ideate, and schedule with a ‘k’?

The ‘repel Americanisms’ argument is based partly on the belief that, because we have perfectly serviceable English words and expressions, it is unnecessary to replace them with foreign imports which will gradually smother our distinctive national language. Margot Asquith undoubtedly had this in mind when she observed, archly, “What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.”

England is not the only country which is defensive about its language. It might come as a shock to some that, in several countries, it is English which is viewed as the unwanted invader and is charged with linguistic imperialism. Since 1635, the redoubtable Académie Française, has been attempting, with qualified success, to stem the immigration of foreign, particularly English, words. French linguist Claude Hagège estimated that France had established over 200 different bodies to help defend its mother tongue, according to a report in 2008.

French success can be gauged by clues in a study by one such body, the Académie’s Commission d’étude sur la communication institutionnelle en langue française. Their report is not happy about, for example, some rather surprising English language travel and tourist slogans, used within France itself, like “I Love Nice”, “My Loire Valley”, “Annecy Mountains” and “Air France, France is in the air”.

Another state guardian of linguistic purity - the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française – creates officially approved French neologisms to replace unwanted English imports. For example, with a straight face and a delicious soupçon of French satire, it suggests “infox” (with the final 'x' pronounced) instead of, as it describes it, “the Anglo-Saxon phrase ‘fake news’’’.

In 2019, alarmed by the “suffocation” of their language, 100 signatories from 25 countries urged French President Emmanuel Macron to "protect the French language from Anglo-American colonialism.”

Germany also has a long, if slightly less robust, history of defending its language.  In 1617 the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (The Fruitbearing Society) was formed to repel foreign word imports. Today, the Verein Deutsche Sprache (German Language Society, the VDS), founded in 1997, conducts similar work.

The VDS’s main goal is to “preserve and promote the German language as an independent cultural language”, and to prevent it from being "pushed to the margins" by the increasing domination of Anglo-American language and culture. With this in mind, the 356-page VDS Anglicism Index suggests new German alternatives for English imports so that, for example, pop-up becomes Aufspringwerbung and brainstorming becomes Geistesblitzsammelung.

Noble as their intentions might be, the only problem with these efforts at linguistic purity is that, quite simply, they do not work. One of our greatest lexicographers, Dr Samuel Johnson, arrived somewhat painfully at the same conclusion as he toiled for nine years to complete his monumental work - A Dictionary of the English Language - in 1755. 

Like other language purists, Johnson set out with the idea that he could “fix our language” which had become “resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.” Later he concluded that “neither reason nor experience can justify” the idea that he could “embalm his language”. Trying to impose artificial constraints on a living language would be like trying, in Johnson’s words, “to lash the wind.”

A Dictionary of the English Language- Dr Samuel Johnson

London: W. Strahan, 1755. First edition.

Reproduced by kind permission of Whitmore Rare Books, Inc., Pasadena, California

Interest in genealogy is booming and well over 30 million people have now researched their family trees through over 100 genealogy websites. Using a specialised DNA test, the major platforms like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage provide information ranging from the identity of DNA relatives, to estimates of an individual’s ancestral ethnicity.

Many have welcomed this dramatic expansion of information about their family histories. Others, however, have been bewildered and perhaps even dismayed to discover that their impeccable pedigrees are slightly more mongrel than they would ever want to admit. “The test shows that some of my ancestors come from Northern Ostrobothnia and Outer Mongolia? But how can that be? My family has always lived in Pimlico?!”

This is similar to the belief that our English language is pure, thoroughbred and largely carved in stone. Yes, of course, just to show willing and demonstrate our legendary English tolerance, we can accept the odd je ne sais quoi or kindergarten – but not too many, thank you very much. Noblesse oblige, by all means but, goodness me, there are limits.

Reality is rather different and if Ancestry.com looked at the English language it would find a family orchard, rather than just a tree. For three centuries, John Bull has been the personification of all that is British, but a stroll with him through the many versions of the language which he has spoken might surprise the purists.

If the original John Bull had been born 2,500 years ago in the southern part of what later became known as England, he would probably have spoken a Celtic language now known as Common Brittonic. When the Romans arrived in force in 43 AD, John Bull saw immediately that the writing on the wall was mostly Latin. A good-natured fellow, John might also have appreciated the playful comment, a few centuries later, by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman in 1066 and All That, “The Roman Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time”.

As an ambitious young man, eager to make a name for himself, he quickly became fluent in Latin so that he could work with the ruling classes, but he kept up the Celtic language skills essential elsewhere. This meant that when John met Julius Caesar and, later, Claudius, he could converse easily with them in Latin, but he could also share a joke with Boadicea, even though her Brittonic dialect - from what is now Norfolk - was probably slightly different from John’s which came from the area later known as London.

By 500 AD the Roman Empire was declining and so too was the use of colloquial Latin which diverged into regional dialects. Then, influenced by Germanic languages in the West and Slavic languages in the East, Latin evolved into today’s Romance languages – notably French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

Unlike many others in the Roman Empire, John Bull was spared the fate of a Romance language by the arrival of Germanic tribes, the Angles (who gave their name to England), Saxons and Jutes, in around 450 AD.  The languages of these Anglo-Saxons began to replace Brittonic and Latin, and evolved into Old English which, over the next few centuries, John Bull spoke fluently. So when John met King Alfred in 900 AD he understood Alfred’s West Saxon dialect of Old English quite easily.

John’s spoken Latin became increasingly rusty because colloquial Latin had all but died out by around 700 AD, although it survived among the religious, legal, academic and diplomatic communities until the 1700s.

By 900 AD John had picked up some Old Norse from the Vikings who had conquered large chunks of eastern and northern England, roughly from the Tees to the Thames. In 1016 the Danish Prince Canute became King of England and by 1028 he had formed his North Sea Empire by also becoming King of Denmark and Norway. When John Bull met Canute in London over a goblet of mead, John’s norsified Old English was probably enough to help them understand each other quite well.

Until 1000 AD John Bull and his fluent Old English continued to flourish and he was probably aware, but little concerned, that Celtic languages were still being spoken in faraway places like Scotland, Wales, Cumbria, Cornwall and Ireland. His reading list at the time included the popular epic poem Beowolf written in a variety of dialects, but mainly in the West Saxon version.

In 1066 John might have wondered which way the linguistic winds would blow when one Viking descendant, the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror(who spoke Norman French), defeated another Viking descendant, King Harold II (who spoke Old English), at the Battle of Hastings. But John probably did not anticipate that when William was crowned King of England, it would be over 300 years before another King of England (Henry IV) would speak English, rather than French, as his mother tongue. 

John spoke to William the Conqueror and the new French aristocracy in Norman French which developed into Anglo-Norman, the very first version of Franglais. At the same time, John continued speaking to most of his fellow countrymen in Old English which merged gradually with Anglo-Norman to form Middle English. Meanwhile, John remembered enough Latin to be able to read academic and official documents such as the Magna Carta in 1215.

By the time John met Geoffrey Chaucer in 1395 for a pint at The Tabard Inn in London, they were chatting about Geoff’s latest manuscript, The Canterbury Tales, in the London dialect of Middle English which included French, Norse and Latin words.

In 1485 John returned to The Tabard Inn where he complimented William Caxton on the first printed English blockbuster, Le Morte d’Arthur. John told Caxton that he was particularly delighted with the new publication because, in addition to blending the various regional dialects of Late Middle English, it also incorporated a large amount of John’s London dialect, as Chaucer had done.

John was now becoming familiar with Chancery English which the Court of Chancery clerks had started developing in the 1430s. Based significantly on the Central Midlands dialect, Chancery English also contained elements of the London and East Midlands dialects, and it gradually replaced French and Latin in legal and official records. Chancery English was one of many influential linguistic tributaries which flowed into Early Modern or Elizabethan English, and this was in full swing when John met William Shakespeare in 1611 at one of his local pubs, The George Inn, not far from The Globe Theatre. Will had just finished writing The Tempest, and the King James Bible came out the same year.

Frontispiece to the King James Bible

First Edition, 1611

During the following centuries John Bull strode manfully through the increasingly mighty British Empire. A pukka fellow if ever there was one, did he turn his nose up at new Indian imports like chutney, Blighty, veranda, pyjamas, khaki, guru? Apparently not.

And then of course, in the Late Modern English era, came those early Americanisms which John viewed warily at first before embracing them with gusto. There were new words like telegram, an American import in the 1850s, caucus in the 1870s, platform -  in the sense of a political position or manifesto – around 1900, and others like big hitter. In 1921, the American writer H.L. Mencken noted the rapid influx of Americanisms in England – for example, walk-out, lengthy, dead-beat, frazzle, to stump, to belittle, to graft, to pan out, to swear off, to boom, to bust.

Since then, John Bull has continued to assimilate the trickle of Americanisms which has developed into a flood. Alistair Cooke, the British-American journalist noted the phenomenon in a 1950s edition of his famous weekly Letter from America, broadcast on what was then called the wireless. He commented that the little black book, in which he recorded the occasional Americanism in the late 1930s when he moved to the US, needed to be replaced by a much bigger tome.

Demands for linguistic purity and the expulsion of foreign imports have thrived for centuries. Jonathan Swift vehemently opposed linguistic innovations in the early 1700s and even proposed an academy to regulate the English language. In the 1920s the composer Percy Grainger was advocating a form of Nordic or “Blue-Eyed English” which purged the language of French, Latin and Greek. In 1946 George Orwell wrote that “there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language.”

In a speech to the British Council in 1995 the then Prince Charles observed that American English was “very corrupting”, and complained that “people tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs, and make words that shouldn’t be”. 

Ironically, few of either the official or the self-appointed English language stormtroopers have had as much success as Nancy Mitford, one of our very own “bright young things” who, in the 1950s wittily popularised the terms "U" (upper class) and "non-U" language, coined by the British linguist Professor Alan Ross. The use of words like perfume, mantelpiece, mirror and notepaper were deemed to be completely non-U. In an epidemic of mass social insecurity, those who wished to retain their U credentials quickly dropped the offending words in favour of scent, chimneypiece, looking-glass, and writing-paper. To this day any inadvertent use of the word “toilet” in polite society is guaranteed to trigger disdain, derision and, most likely, permanent exclusion from the salons of Mayfair.

Nicky Haslam, the celebrity English interior designer, author, artist, man about town and occasional cabaret performer, follows in the Nancy Mitford tradition. An old Etonian, Nicky waggishly spring-cleans polite English language each year by highlighting words and phrases which he deems to be “common” and, in particular, those which betray irritating pretensions. For example, in his amusingly waspish way, he has targeted Farrow & Ball (gasp!), hedge funds, signet rings, coloured wellingtons (“should actually be ‘gumboots’”, Nicky writes), wine collecting, bottled water, baby showers, See it, Say it, Sort it, cushions on beds, bucket list, and destination weddings. This year, Selfridges has helpfully printed Nicky’s pet hates on £50 cotton tea towels - “itself a term common as muck, should be ‘drying-up clawth’”, he observes.

These tongue-in-cheek language monitors with their quivering social status antennae provide great entertainment, not to mention the occasional bout of insecurity, self-doubt and dyspepsia among those foolish enough to have allowed their interior designers to use Farrow & Ball in their country house. 

Title page of Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English language.

London: W. Strahan, 1755. First edition.

Reproduced by kind permission of Whitmore Rare Books, Inc., Pasadena, California

In reality, however, it is the English language’s absorption of so many different languages over so many centuries which (or, “that”, if our American readers prefer) has made it such a powerful instrument. Some sources indicate that nearly 60% of English words are derived from Latin, French and other Romance languages, with another 26% from Germanic languages. This muscular pedigree means that English is arguably unmatched in its ability to express fine shades of meaning so precisely, to convey diplomatic nuances with such elegant ambiguity, and to communicate any sort of message – from the scientific, dramatic, romantic or martial, to the commonplace – with equal eloquence and efficiency.

While US political and economic dominance have already consolidated English as the international language of business, science and diplomacy, the global internet and social media are accelerating the spread of English still more.

English is the modern lingua franca: about 400 million people now speak it as their main language, over 1 billion speak it as a second language, and 57 sovereign and 28 non-sovereign states recognise English as the official or co-official language. After Mandarin and Spanish, English is the third most spoken native language and is spoken by more people overall than any other language.

Throughout its complex evolution, English has remained a superb vehicle for clear, succinct communication – one of the key attributes commended by so many writers. George Orwell, for example, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, explains brilliantly the need for simple, direct language in order to combat linguistic slovenliness, “doublespeak” and clichés. 

Clearly, among the US imports there will always be some notable cringe-makers like advancements, prior to, 24/7, it is what it is, parenting, advocating for and impacting on. But if enough people cringe, the words and phrases will simply disappear like the Ford Edsel, New Coke – or toilet.

King Canute did not place his throne on the beach to show that he could stem the inevitable tide, but rather that he could not.  The English language has survived and prospered not by resisting cultural tides, but rather by adapting to them.

The fact that we “invented” English here will prompt some to ask “whose language is it anyway?” With about 15% of the world’s native English speakers in the UK, compared with about 60% in the US alone, this is now something of a moot point.

Alright, Uncle Sam, listen up. The bottom line, and the key takeaway from this deep dive, is that John Bull’s English language has totally knocked it out of the park, hit a home run, scored a touchdown and nailed it 100%. But this success didn't come from out of left field. The English language stepped up to the plate, swung for the fences, and became a worldwide MVP by toughing it out for centuries and learning to roll with the punches. Even better, going forward, the vibes are still strong. So that's where we're at, we’ve got this, we're locked and loaded, we’re good to go. That's a wrap, and once I've 86'd that fancy pants Farrow & Ball paint order, we're done here. High five!

Uncle Sam World War I United States Army Recruitment Poster

Illustration by James Montgomery Flagg, 1917

Available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division