In 1066, William the Conqueror and his army of Normans established themselves as the dominant power in Britain, and the form of French they brought with them quickly became the language of the powerful classes in British society, while the lower classes still spoke English (English Club, 3). For the second time in just over five-hundred years, a major conquest of the Isle of Britain was conducted by an invading tribe with a foreign tongue. This time, however, the existing language and people were not replaced, but instead the Latin influence of the Norman tongue began to seep into English, creating the first elements of a "bastard" tongue (Anglik.net, 6). Words such as "beef" and "cow" illustrate how the class difference that existed at first between speaker of the Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages eventually resulted in a language with a greater diversity of words than any other -- cow has a Germanic root, and was originally an Anglo-Saxon word, whereas beef is Latinate, and was spoken by the Normans, but now both are common English words (Anglik.net, 7). This effect only deepened when English came back into grace.
Isolation in the period following the Norman conquest was not so intense, but it was enough of a presence to allow English to romanticize slowly, absorbing and adding Norman elements rather than being replaced by them (Merriam Webster, 13). Certainly, the grammatical structure of the developing language did not find its root in Latin or the romance languages. Despite Marsh's assertions that the early Anglo-Saxon tongue had nothing in common with contemporary mainland grammatical structures, Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable assert that modern English has a definite grammatical relationship with the other Germanic languages (Baugh and Cable, 9). They all agree, however, that one of the benefits of English as a world language is in the breadth of its vocabulary and the subtle shades of meaning it is capable of, which would not be the case without the multiple sources of Middle English and the geographical ability of the language to ferment, as it were, into the intoxicatingly accurate and yet elusive language that it is today (Baugh and Cable, 9; Marsh, 93).
Of course, the language would not be a global one if it weren't...
The period of the British Empire nearly coincides with the mergence of Early Modern English, the dense yet entirely readable English of Shakespeare and others of his time (English Club, 7). This English was brought to the world through a series of expeditions and conquests, to Asia in
Hong Kong and
India, where native peoples were colonized and subjected to often violent British authority; to the New World, where native populations were simply decimated, to many coastal and even some inland parts of Africa for the purpose of enslaving the "gibbering savages" found there (Anglik.net, 12). Though the English were not alone in their
treatment of non-Europeans abroad, the widespread use of English today is a testament of their skill in this area.
Colonization and empire building ostensibly ended in the middle of the
twentieth century; and "since
World War II, English as an official territory has claimed progressively less territory" (Baugh and Cable, 8). As the world seems to be drawing closer together, it is clear that virtually all isolation has ended. Warfare, however, has not, and one wonders what this portends for the future of the English speaking world.
Works Cited
Anglik.net. "A Brief History of the English Language." Accessed 1 February 2009. http://www.anglik.net/englishlanguagehistory.htm
Baugh, Albert C. And Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. New York: Prentice Hall, 2001.
English Club.com. "History of the English Language." Accessed 31 January 2009. http://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm
Marsh, George P. The Origin and History of the English Language. New York: Scribner, 1896.
Merriam-Webster Online. "What are the Origins of the English Language?" Accessed 1 February 2009. http://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq/history.htm
