A through analysis of the social context in which English functions demands a knowledge of linguistic attitudes towards evaluations of and beliefs about the language, its varieties and specific features.
Nowadays the English language through changes and development has become an international language of communication. Many people speak it as their language and there is a great more for whom it is a second language.
The fortune of English is different in different countries throughout the world. In some countries it was survived the political and linguistic independence and has remained the mother tongue of some nations. It caters for the full range of functions required from the language today: beginning with the everyday communication and ending with the higher and loftier levels of sophistication. In other countries it has occupied the politically attractive neutral position and has become prominent as an official language of government, law, education and of interpersonal communication between those who have no other language in common. And lastly, it is the foreign language to be studied that gives access to science, technology, commerce and economic aid. The present status of English worldwide is the result of the economic and technological predominance of the United States and the English-speaking countries.
The language functions of English were not always as multiform and varied as today. English encountered other rival languages within the bounds of England. It was not in constant use among particular social classes and in some regions, as well as it was not at first the normal language for learned writing. Later on among various arguments against it were language instability and wide variation, deficiency of syntax and vocabulary, lack of desired rhetorical stylistic effects abounding in Latin. During the later period the vocabulary of English was expanded and a range of styles introduced. By the end of Renaissance period its deficiencies were minimized and English was considered to be in good shape, adequate for discourse. The standardization of English spelling, syntax and vocabulary was under way.
The 18th century developed new ideas about English. By that time it was in a near-perfect condition, purified of its inconsistencies. But the scholars were worried about possible future deterioration and corruption by the uneducated. Writers feared that changes would make their works of imaginative writing unintelligible to public in the long run. The linguistic correctness was in the limelight of public attention with both social status and rhetorical requirements of language taken into account.
In the 19th century social correctness was the subject of permanent discussion. The 18th century writers were accepted as models to imitate. The idea of good English was in the air. This tradition has gradually continued into next century. Misuses and abuses of language have been made debatable in the society. It has also been made clear that that language can serve double purpose, that in manipulation of public consciousness through various devices to mislead, confuse and simulate negative attitudes. Linguistic engineering can be introduced to improve language standards, but there must be public awareness of possible corruptions that might influence human behaviour.
At the end of the 20th century the existence of one undivided English language seems somewhat misleading. One may insist with certainty on the existence of different national varieties spoken in the United States and in England. The similar approach can be applied to other Englishes, like Indian English and Nigerian English gaining their recognition as local norms of speech independent from British English.
Differences that exist within each national variety of English can be viewed as regional, socio-economic, ethnic and educational, when they are recognized by the majority of speakers of this or that variety as distinctive. Then the separate varieties of the language begin to evolve: American English and Canadian English, Appalachian and Cockney dialects, Black English and Jewish English, standard English and non-standard English. Language differences reflect differentiation in sex and age. Specific language features are associated with particular groups. Some of these features provoke positive or negative attitudes to their users.
The English language is very much alive today due to the constant increase in number of speakers in the world. Despite the disintegration process, problems of comprehension between national varieties, pronunciation differences, there exists the written public language, a neutral variety understandable by al educated users: the mass media, the personal contacts maintain convergence and favour a common written language.
National and group variations go hand in hand with language variation, that is appropriateness for particular situations. Speech and writing, ments, academic article, newspaper reports – all these samples of human brain activity present the changing standards of appropriateness alongside with the plain English movements, the extended use of taboo words, the presence of informal styles instead of more formal, the disputed usages and so on.
Similarities in language strengthen social unity, divergences may be socially dangerous. Our perception of other people either promote understanding or lead to misunderstanding of them. Prejudices in the sphere of language affects our everyday attitudes to others. The latter, in its turn, influence the teaching of English in particular and education in general.
English has made steady inroads upon French as the language of diplomacy and of other international intercourse, and upon German as the language of science. In the latter case, Russian is beginning to offer competition, and in the former, French still offers sturdy resistance. Nevertheless, in the United Nations not only English but Chinese, Russian and Spanish are recognized as official languages. Perhaps the turn of the tide came with Versailles Conference of 1919, where the two representatives of the English-speaking countries, Wilson and Lloyd George, had no French, whereas the French spokesman, Clemenceau, spoke English fluently — with a strong American accent. Thus English became the language of negotiation, and it has been heard round council tables with increasing frequency ever since.
All over the Far East, English has been a lingua franca since the Eighteenth Century, at first in the barbarous guise of Pidgin English, but of late in increasingly seemly forms, often with an American admixture. In Japan it is the language of business. In India and Pakistan, it not only competes with Hindu-Urdu in business, but is often the language of politics. Those Indians who know it, says Sir John A.R.Marriott, “are the only persons who are politically conscious. Indian nationalism is almost entirely the product of English education; the medium of all political discussion is necessarily English”. It is, adds R.C.Goffin, “the readiest means of obtaining (a) employment under the government; (b) employment in commercial houses of any standing, whether Indian or foreign; (c) command of the real lingua franca of the country — for Hindustani is of very little use in the south; (d) knowledge of Western ideas, both ancient and modern. ... English in other ways has shown itself a useful instrument for a country setting out to learn the habits of democracy. It is most convenient for the politician, for example, to be able to employ a language with only one word (instead of three or even four) for you. ... There is no country today where a foreign language has been thoroughly domesticated as has English in India.” The Indian Congress Party had hoped to replace English by Hindi within a few years of independence. But they now recognize that for generations to come it will be the medium through which their countrymen acquire the science and technology of the modern world. And the experience of India is being repeated as each of the former British colonies becomes an independent nation. Paradoxically, the liquidation of the British colonial empire seems destined to bring a wider dissemination of the English language.
It has become a platitude that one may go almost anywhere with no other linguistic equipment, and get along almost as well as in large areas of New York City. My own experience may be cited for whatever it is worth. I visited, between the two wars, sixteen countries in Europe, five in Africa, three in Asia and three in Latin America, besides a large miscellany of islands, but I don’t remember ever encountering a situation that English could not resolve. I heard it spoken with reasonable fluency in a Moroccan bazaar, in an Albanian fishing port and on the streets of Istanbul. In part, of course, its spread has been due to the extraordinary dispersion of the English-speaking peoples. They have been the greatest travelers of modern times, and the most adventurous merchants and the most assiduous colonists. Moreover, they have been, on the whole, poor linguists, and so they have dragged their language with them, and forced it upon the human race. Wherever it has met with serious competition, as with French in Canada, with Spanish along our southwestern border and with Dutch in South Africa, they have compromised with its local rival only reluctantly. If English is the language of the sea, it is largely because there are more English ships on the sea than any other kind, and English ship captains refuse to learn what they think of as the barbaric gibberishes of Hamburg, Rio and Marseilles.
But there is more to the matter than this. English, brought to close quarters with formidable rivals, has won very often, not by mere force of numbers and intransigence, but by the weight of its intrinsic merit. “In riches, good sense and terse convenience (Reichstum, Vernunft und gedrangter Fuge)”, said Jacob Grimm nearly a century ago, “no other of the living languages may be put beside it”. To which the eminent Otto Jespersen adds: “It seems to me positively and expressively masculine. It is the language of a grown-up man, and has very little childish or feminine about it”. Jespersen then goes on to explain the origin and nature of this “masculine” air: it is grounded chiefly upon clarity, directness and force.
Jespersen then proceeds to consider certain peculiarities of English morphology and syntax, and to point out the simplicity and forcefulness of the everyday English vocabulary. The grammatical baldness of the language, he argues (against the old tradition in philology), is one of the chief sources of its vigor.
The prevalence of very short words in English, and the syntactical law which enables it to dispense with the definite article in many constructions “where other languages think it indispensable, e.g., life is short, dinner is ready” — these are further marks of vigor and clarity, according to Jespersen. “First come, first served”, he says, “is much more vigorous than the French Premier venu, premier moulu, or Le premier venu engrene, the German Wer zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst, and especially than the Danish Den der kommerforst til molle, farforst extrao”. Again, there is the superior logical sense of English — the arrangement of words according to their meaning. “In English”, says Jespersen, “an auxiliary verb does not stand far from its main verb, and a negative will be found in the immediate neighborhood of the word it negatives, generally the verb (auxiliary). An adjective nearly always stands before its noun; the only really important exception is where there are qualifications added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex serves the purpose of a relative clause”. In English, the subject almost invariably precedes the verb and the object follows after. Once Jespersen had his pupils determine the percentage of sentences in various authors in which this order was observed. They found that even in English poetry it was seldom violated; the percentage of observances in Tennyson’s poetry ran to 88. But in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it fell to 61, in Anatole France’s prose to 66, in Gabriele D’Annunzio to 49 and in the poetry of Goethe to 30. All these things make English clearer and more logical than other tongues. It is, says Jespersen, “a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon”. Even when we concede the effects of Jespersen’s personal bias and of the illusion of inevitable progress which he inherited from the Nineteenth Century, we must still recognize the facts on which his opinions are based.
Several years ago Walter Kirkconnel undertook to count the number of syllables needed to translate the Gospel of Mark into forty Indo-European languages, ranging from Persian and Hindi to English and French. He found that, of all of them, English was the most economical, for it took but 29,000 syllables to do the job, whereas the average for all the Teutonic languages was 32,650, that for the Slavic group 36,500, that for the Romance group 40,200 and that for the Indo-Iranian group (Bengali, Persian, Sanskrit, etc.) 43,100. It is commonly believed that French is a terse language, and compared with its cousins, Italian and Spanish, it actually is, but compared with English it is garrulous, for it takes 36,000 syllables to say what English says in 29,000. “If it had not been for the great number of long foreign, especially Latin, words”, says Jespersen, “English would have approached the state of such monosyllabic languages as Chinese”.
For these and other reasons English strikes most foreigners as an extraordinarily succinct, straightforward and simple tongue — in some of its aspects, in fact, almost as a kind of baby talk. When they proceed from trying to speak it to trying to read and write it they are painfully undeceived, for its spelling is as irrational as that of French, but so long as they are content to tackle it viva voce they find it loose and comfortable, and at the same time very precise. The Russian, coming into it burdened with his six cases, his three genders, his palatalized consonants and his complicated pronouns, luxuriates in a language which has only two cases, no grammatical gender, a set of consonants which (save only r) maintain their integrity in the face of any imaginable rush of vowels, and an outfit of pronouns so simple that one of them suffices to address the President of the United States or a child in arms, a lovely female creature in camera or the vast hordes of television and radio. And the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian and the Frenchman, though the change for them is measurably less sharp, nevertheless find it gratifying too. Only the Spaniard brings with him a language comparable to English for clarity, and even the Spaniard is afflicted with grammatical gender.
The huge English vocabulary is likely to make the foreigner uneasy, but he soon finds that nine-tenths of it lies safely buried in the dictionaries, and is never drawn upon for everyday use. That the language may be spoken intelligibly with even less than 1,000 words has been argued by C.K.Ogden, the English psychologist. Ogden believes that 850 are sufficient for all ordinary purposes, and he has devised a form of simplified English, called by him Basic (from British American Scientific International Commercial), which uses no more. Of this number, 600 are nouns, 100 are adjectives, 100 are “adjectival opposites”, 30 are verbs and the rest are particles, etc. Two hundred of the nouns consist of the names of common objects, e.g., bottle, brick, ear, potato and umbrella; the rest are the names of familiar groups and concepts, e.g. people, music, crime, loss and weather. No noun is admitted (save for the names of a few common objects) “which can’t be defined in not more than ten other words”. The reduction of verbs to 30 is effected by taking advantage of one of the prime characteristics of English (and especially of American) — its capacity for getting an infinity of meanings out of a single verb by combining it with simple modifiers. Consider, for example, the difference (in American) between to get, to get going, to get by, to get on, to get onto, to get off, to get ahead of, to get wise, to get religion and to get over. The fundamental verbs of Basic are ten in number — come, go, put, take, give, get, make , keep, let and do. “Every time”, says Ogden (writing in Basic), “you put together the name of one of these ten simple acts (all of which are free to go in almost any direction) with the name of one of the twenty directions or positions in space, you are making a verb” — and, point out his critics, creating a new lexical unit whose meaning is unpredictable from the meanings of its parts, and therefore a greater problem to the stranger than an undisguised new word might be. In addition to its 850 words, of course, Basic is free to take in international words that are universally understood, e.g., coffee, engineer, tobacco, police and biology, and to add words specially pertinent to the matter in hand, e.g., chloride and platinum in a treatise on chemistry. It is interesting to note that of the fifty international words listed by Ogden, no less than seven are Americanisms, new or old, viz., cocktail, jazz, radio, phonograph, telegram, telephone and tobacco, and that one more, check, is listed in American spelling.