Images of World English: Writing English as an International Language

Defining World English

It might appear that nothing should be easier than to define the subject matter of a book about English. Given that the book is written in the medium of its topic, English, the author might reasonably operate on the tacit assumption that this is one subject, at the least, about which she and her reader have a shared knowledge. It is, after all, the language of their communication. Thus, while this is certainly not the first book to investigate the (international) history of English, it might be the first to begin by questioning the subject of the investigation.

In what does the shared knowledge of English consist? Just what is it that we know about this language? Perhaps, the answer to those questions is suggested by its name: English, a language born in England, the language of England. That notion locates the language in a particular nation, or more accurately, a particular people. It is their language, to spread, to change, to share or withhold from the world. By that view, World English is the means and results of the spread of English from its historical (perhaps even natural) boundaries to its current position as the preeminent global means of communication.

Every language has its history, real or imagined – or, perhaps, real and imagined. English was not precisely "born" in England. It was transported there from another place, or more exactly, it traveled there together with the Anglo-Saxon migrants to the island. That is why we call it a Germanic language. And there is another consideration. Those Anglo-Saxons who first made the trip across the English Channel would be utterly at a loss to understand the English of the fourteenth century, that of Chaucer's day. For in the intervening centuries, the language was irrevocably altered by the Norman Conquest in 1066, which Latinized the Germanic language of the Angles and Saxons.

Perhaps recognition of those two caveats solidifies the common notion of English. For certainly the final result is an English language suitably distinct from the Germanic languages that gave rise to it. The language was, after all, all the more English for its specifically English history and thereby all the more at home in the British Isles, or more exactly, the non-Celtic portion of them. Then again, does not that history immediately call to mind the other inhabitants of those islands, who spoke various Celtic languages amongst others? Did their languages not inhibit the islands first, and was English not an interloper in their midst, just as were, initially, the Angles and Saxons who migrated there (or invaded)?

What should be made of the fact that the process by which the English language became a distinctively English product involved the subjection of the English people at the hands of a French-speaking people, the admixture of the two languages, a change so dramatic that the language had become incomprehensible to its forbears? In a crowning irony to the attempt to associate the language with a land, a nation, and a people, English became associated with all three precisely because its history was so mobile, its context so transnational, and the people who made it so diverse: Germanic, Celtic, French and Nordic.

Of course, all of that might be said to belong to the prehistory of the language, just as every social phenomenon must have roots in some more remote past. Perhaps the investigator need not trace the language back quite that far. The discussion might be confined to a more recent period, what is often called "the modern world." If so, how is it to be decided what constitutes the proper frame of reference for English between our own day and the aftermath of the Norman invasion some nine centuries ago? Should we split the difference – say, some 450 years or so, or approximately the time of the English Renaissance? Already by that time, however, English was not confined to its earlier "natural" (or is it "historical"?) boundaries: within the British Isles it was, or was on the verge of, spreading to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was, moreover, making trans-Atlantic voyages to the "New World," opening up vast new territories for itself. And it was soon thereafter to begin its world historic tour de monde – Asia, Australasia, and Africa. Nevertheless, it continued to belong to the English, who, after all, had the longer claim on it.

At the least, if a consideration is carefully delimited to a brief historical window, some few centuries in the middle of the past millennium, it seems justifiable to claim English as the language of England, and so return to the comfortable notion, the imagined history, with which textbooks on the history of English begin. Or is it? What makes those few centuries so special in the history of English? What sets them apart from the other centuries of English's development? Why should those centuries and those peoples be privileged over others? And just who were those peoples? Were they really Anglo-Saxons? Or were they not also Celts, Norse French, and others? So just what, then, are we so sure about that we do not question what we mean by English?

There is another problem with this familiar, commonsense, interpretation of the history of English. It may suggest a conception of stages in the history of English, a prehistory (linguistic origins), a developmental stage, and a finished product – presumably an unalterable linguistic entity that we stamp with the name English. Implicit in this notion is a teleological and normative view of language development in which the language as process gives rise to language as final product, its whole development leading to that point. Prior to some arbitrary point in time (perhaps the English Renaissance), the language was incomplete. Now it is complete. It is English.

The same, however, holds true for any language at any stage in its development: insofar as it exists, is spoken, it is a language and not a stage in the development of some future language. To measure it by a fixed standard ("modern English") applies a subjective standpoint, just as surely as when we divide history into the pre-Christian (or pre-Muslim, or pre-Hindu, or pre-Buddhist) epoch as opposed to "ours." Those who spoke the language of Beowulf did not view themselves as speaking "old English." They did not view their language as a developmental stage of some future language, any more than we do so today. And yet the one is no more justified than the...