I speak and write in a language which calls itself English. It's a member
of a group of languages with a common ancestor, roughly the language of the folk
who lived in England in the aftermath of the wars of the roses
(but the
other British nations all have versions of the language which had diverged by
this time). Within that group of languages, the word English
is used to
mean of or pertaining to [the people of] England
except when it is used
as the name of a language, when it is used to refer to the whole group of
languages, notwithstanding its propagation all round the planet (and beyond). I
propose the name Anglic
for the group, so as to liberate the
adjective English
from this exception.
Throughout the anglic group of languages, where there is a group of anglic
speakers with a consciously separate cultural identity, those anglophones are
collectively described by an adjective whose meaning is of or pertaining
to
them. This adjective is then used as the name of their particular
variant of anglic (except in the case of English, which I'm trying to render
capable of conforming to this pattern). Thus the people of Canada speak Canajan
and the New Zealanders speak Kiwi; and, in each case, are politely proud of
their difference and respectful of those of their peers.
Inconveniently, the group is woefully short of an adjective for of or
pertaining to [the people of] the United States of America
; which says
something, it's not immediately clear what, about the cultural identify of that
nation. For the present, I'll use the emerging term USAish when I need such an
adjective (although one former colleague suggested gringo
as an
alternative with an established user-base – perhaps the right remedy is to
use this until the gringos get round to offering an acceptable
replacement). The adjective American
is widely used in this rôle,
but collides horribly with the adjective for of or pertaining to [the people
of] the pair of continents called America
: a Mexican, Peruvian or Canadian
is indisputably American (as is the afore-mentioned former colleague), yet is
not USAish, as the U.S.A.'s immigration officers routinely insist.
The U.S.A. (despite the afore-mentioned issues with its cultural identity)
is presently being the world's cultural imperialist (a rôle lately
relinquished by Britain, substantially through recognition that no-one has the
right to so mis-treat the world) so its member of the English-derived group of
languages has wide currency: but lacks a name for itself other than the
generic, English
. This has lead to the silly situation where the
language I speak and write gets to be referred to as British English
to
distinguish it from American English
when, given the above, they might
properly be called English
and USAish
without ambiguity.
I contend that the addition of one word, anglic, would greatly reduce the
amount of idiocy presently surrounding the word English. It's a natural word to
introduce, given that anglophone
is a word (in English, as well as in
various other languages) for someone fluent in an English language; it also fits
the form for Hispanic
and Germanic
(also applied, in anglic, to
groups of languages), is short and rolls easily off an anglophone's tongue.
While the evolution and classification of languages is significantly messier
than that of species (if nothing else, a language need not arise from only one
parent, or even only two, as any half-way decent pidgin or creole will show
you), it remains appropriate to employ the methodology of cladistics (grouping
several species into a clade
if they have a common ancestor – or,
for those who have problems with the idea of species evolving, commonalities of
morphology and genetic material such as would make shared ancestry seem credible
if only you'd get over your problems) when devising nomenclature for
languages. In these terms, the Anglic group clearly forms a clade. It is then
worth considering how this clade may be sub-divided. The good folks at MIT have
a project to discover your
dialect of English, for those who speak it.
One can make a fairly good argument for a clade, within the group, comprising the English of England and those of its erstwhile colonies outside Europe. It would be fair to charge that 'Strine owes so much to the English of Ireland as to undermine its inclusion in this clade; but then, the North American branch of this clade is similarly indebted to a host of other (mostly European) languages; but, to the extent to which cladistics is a reasonable model for language classification, this will do fairly well. I'll refer to this clade as Tudor-derived, since its members diverged from England's English after the reigns of the Tudors.
Crucially, the English of Scotland (sometimes called Lallands) diverged
significantly from that of England before the separation of English and USAish:
and it is significantly distinct from the Tudor-derived clade – as anyone
reading Robbie Burns' poems in the original will realise. It may fairly be
argued that Scotland's English is a richer and more expressive language: in any
case, it clearly owes much more to Norwegian than does the Tudor-derived
clade. The status of the English spoken in Ireland, Wales and Cornwall is a bit
more complex: both were well established dialects diverged from England's
version before the world had to endure English colonies, but their speakers
(particularly on the mainland) were subjected to heavier pressure to conform to
the language of their rulers (so that the analogy with cladistics becomes a bit
furry). I am inclined to regard the assorted forms of Anglic spoken in the
British nations with Celtic heritage as separate individuals, within the whole
group but outside the Tudor-derived clade – I do not expect them to form a
clade of their own (just as lizards
can only be construed as a clade by
counting mammals and birds as lizards).
The primary import of this is that, when it comes to classifying the Anglic
languages, the only clade which includes the English and Scottish vernaculars is
the whole group – these two were already evolving separately before
Columbus sailed the ocean blue. This makes the term British English
ridiculous. Those who use the term seem to actually mean England's English
(and, at that, the posh forms of it), thereby revealing a failure to understand
that Britain and England are by no means the same entity. Indeed, the ancient
Celtic peoples ruled by the Romans were the aboriginal British who were
displaced by the peoples who formed the English nation, so it seems
inappropriate to use the term British
unless at least they (and not
necessarily the English) are to be understood as being referenced. To use it
where they are specifically excluded is to fail to use the adjective English
where it is clearly the correct word. Britain is a group of islands, whose
peoples constitute several nations, within each of which are to be found
significant dialect variations.
Within the Tudor-derived clade, there is some sense in separating the
English spoken in the U.S.A. from that spoken in the commonwealth countries that
fall within this clade. This might fairly be described as Commonwealth
English
and it includes the English spoken in India and much of Africa,
among other places. However, the term Commonwealth English
is presently
in use to refer to the sub-clade, within this, comprising the parts of The
Commonwealth where descendants of European colonists predominate.
One can salvage both of the above usages by the somewhat undemocratic
expedient of excluding the vernacular from discussion. Since the educated
Irish, Welsh or Scots generally (albeit out of kindness to ignorant peers of
other nationalities) defer to English usage, in public discourse, anglophones
outside Britain can be forgiven for supposing a homogeneity within these
islands. None the less, this would better be described as British Educated
English
.
Likewise one can salvage Commonwealth English
: even in the countries
of The Commonwealth where aboriginal peoples predominate (and, in this, we could
include Scotland, Ireland and Wales), the educated classes employ a version of
English which falls within a clade shared with the educated classes of England
and the colonist-dominated commonwealth. This is, indeed, separable from the
dialect of the educated classes of the U.S.A. – but, as for British
English
, this should really be described as Commonwealth Educated
English
.
The thing to note from both salvagings is that Educated English
is
what is actually being sub-divided. Indeed, Educated English
is
a clade within the Anglic family. Though it diverged only after (at least)
Scottish – the educated classes were, that early, using Latin rather than
their mother tongue – it is fair to say that the educated classes
throughout the anglophone world have, since abandoning Latin, evolved a shared
dialect of English which stands apart from the vernacular in any of their home
countries. We may thus identify a sub-clade of the Tudor-derived clade, which
may be described as Educated English
. This is the language used (when
any form of English is) by the community of letters
and in most published
writing; when they are not talking legalese
, it is also the language of
courts, laws and legislatures. It has become the international language of
science (and, to varying degrees, other academic disciplines).
Within each Anglic-speaking community, Educated English lives alongside the
language of the people – called the vernacular
– and the
educated folk who use the former also at least understand the latter and
generally speak it, without necessarily thinking of it as a separate
language. These various languages are what I mean (and am confident any serious
student of languages would mean) by the languages of the assorted countries: the
English of the U.S.A. is the USAish vernacular, notwithstanding the
presence of an indigenous branch of the Educated English
clade.
Naturally, usages from the vernacular forms of English sneak into what their
speakers contribute to the evolution of Educated English
. None the less,
the strongly international character of this dialect has caused it to fragment
relatively little (though it has evolved a lot – in particular, over the
last two centuries, casting off the legacy of Latin, which shaped its early
grammar). That, in turn, has caused it to diverge significantly from the
vernacular in each community. Within Educated English
, even USAish
Educated English
differs from the rest – Commonwealth Educated English
– in little more than its spellings (and even these are slowly leaching
into the rest of the group).
The important thing to understand about this is that the sub-divisions within Educated English do not parallel those within the English group as a whole. While the spelling of the written forms of English exhibit a split which does run across from the educated form to the vernacular – separating the U.S.A. from the rest – this is just a consequence of spelling falling primarily under the control of the educated, even when writing in the vernacular. While Educated English has become the international language of science and English has become the international language generally, the local variations in how English is spoken by the general population are separate from the variations in how it is spoken by the educated classes.
The web, being world-wide, includes infrastructure for naming languages:
this is based on
the naming
scheme of a standard called ISO
639. The specification of
HTTP elaborates
on this by providing for language tags
which are hyphen-joined
sequences of tokens, such as fr (for French), en-US (for
USAish), la-UK-legal (which I just made up, but it means the form of
Latin used in the legal jargon of the UK's court system). The specification
says that, if the first token (fr, en and la in the
examples above) in the sequence is exactly two letters long it must be
an ISO 639 code; also that, if there is a second (US and UK)
and it is two letters long, then this must be
an ISO
3166 country code (in which case it indicates that country's version of the
language specified by the first token). The HTTP
specification further
countenances (though with a warning that this does not guarantee
intelligibility) using one language as an acceptable surrogate for another if
the former's tag is obtained from the latter's by hyphen-joining some more
tokens on its right – thus, if a visitor to a web site has indicated they
want a document in fr (French) and the site has the document
in fr-CA (Quebeçois), the latter is suitable to meet the
visitor's request.
This tag truncation rule effectively provides for encoding of the cladistics of languages, albeit without guaranteeing that the encoding will be reliable. To encode the cladistics we would need each clade to have a name and each of its sub-clade's names to be obtained from it by adding at least one more token on the right. This would mess up the nation-part naming implicit in the ISO 3166 reading of two-letter tokens in the second position: at least for the nations whose versions of English fit into some clade, the country code would have to come after the clade identifier, rather than as second token – e.g. en-colonial-AU rather than en-AU.
Furthermore, the more clades we identify the longer we'll have to make the tags; we have a Tudor-derived clade, so let's call that (somewhat inappropriately, but this is only for illustrative purposes) en-tudor; this contains en-tudor-US, en-tudor-educated and the clade of Commonwealth English, en-tudor-empire (say); within this last, in so far as the colonist-dominated form a clade, we get en-tudor-empire-colonial and only within that do we get en-tudor-empire-colonial-AU. In practice, no-one wants to be so complex about language codes, so we don't try to encode so much of the cladistics in them: 'Strine is actually identified by en-AU.
While it's eminently practical – and not necessarily in conflict with the cladistics – to eliminate a lot of the cladistic information, we are still left with en-educated as a pertinent clade: its Australian version, to take an example, is distinct from the local vernacular, so should be identified as en-educated-AU. Crucially, Educated English was imported to Australia alongside the vernacular, and has evolved primarily in harmony with the world-wide Educated English, so it shouldn't be regarded as a dialect of en-AU, i.e. it isn't en-AU-educated – that would denote a dialect of Australia's English vernacular ('Strine) identified with the educated classes (if, in fact, such a dialect exists): after a day writing a paper in en-educated-AU for some academic journal, the Professor goes home, throws a shrimp on the barbie, cracks open a tube of beer and uses en-AU-educated when chatting with the neighbours; it may sound a bit posh to them, but it's definitely 'Strine and any visiting Poms would be apt to find some of it rather confusing.
Now, it happens that there are no ISO 3166 codes for the several nations of
The United Kingdom (although other parts of nations and subject territories do;
for example the Falkland islands, the Faroe islands, Svalbard and Jan Mayen,
Gibraltar, Greenland, Hong Kong and the United States Minor Outlying Islands:
but not nations, like Tibet, that have been robbed of their independence). Thus
there is no standard language tag (made of two two-letter tokens) for the forms
of English spoken in these nations, but the tag en-GB does fit this
pattern. That doesn't mean it's actually meaningful (any more
than cy-JP, which would be a dialect of Welsh peculiar to Japan), for
all that the HTTP specification uses it as an example and describes it
as British English
. Note, incidentally, that en-IE is Irish
English and Ireland is part of Britain (though not of Great Britain,
which technically means the biggest of the British isles, though it's commonly
used as a synonym for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
which includes several of the smaller islands in the group). Thus
calling en-GB British English
is a further infelicity, since it
omits en-IE, which is indisputably British (but not UKish).
Given the above discussion of cladistics, en-educated-GB would make sense – and is what is generally meant by en-GB – but as to vernacular English we would need en-England, en-Scotland and so on, just as we have en-US and en-IE. Now, of course, as a written medium, the web does generally use the educated form of any language, so an implicit -educated in en-GB is fairly harmless for writing: but the web is increasingly a multi-media domain, including the use of voice. An internet radio station would have good cause to advertise the language of its content, which may well be the vernacular: the lack of a standard form with which to identify that would cause complications. The late lamented John Ravenscroft was entirely fluent in en-educated-GB but is best known for radio broadcasts (under the pseudonym John Peel) in en-scouse.
English author Lindsey Davis wrote
a mild rant about the
absurdity of translating
her works for USAish audiences.
Ben Yagoda has a blog
devoted to watching out for USAish use of Not One-Off Britishisms
, as he
calls them; imports from the UK (usually England) taking root in the U.S.A.
Jan Terje Faarlund and Joseph Emmonds contend that English is a Scandinavian language rather than a southern germanic one.
On languages more generally, The World Atlas of Language Structures can distract interested parties at length.
Written by Eddy.