The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

In Chapter 10, Bryson discusses the complexities of organizing the English language and examines some of its most celebrated dictionaries. He begins the chapter by saying that even the hundreds of thousands of words in the most famous English dictionaries do not represent how many words actually exist. One of the reasons for this is that many words have multiple meanings yet only one entry. Another reason is that many scientific and medical terms are not included. Bryson discusses how many words the average person knows and uses while acknowledging that studies on this question have been misleading. He argues that it is clear that “there is vastly more verbal information locked away in our craniums than we can get out at any time” (163). One of the issues with assessing vocabulary size via dictionaries is that English is constantly changing. A century ago, roughly 1,000 new words were being added to dictionaries each year, but by the end of the 20th century, more than 20,000 new words were being added each year (165).

In the latter half of the chapter, Bryson explores dictionaries, specifically the importance of three which serve as seminal works in the English language. Although dictionaries existed prior to the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, none were considered landmark achievements. Johnson’s dictionary took 9 years to complete and defined 43,000 words. More than 70 years later, in 1828, Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language was published. According to Bryson, Webster’s dictionary “was the most complete of its age, with 70,000 words—far more than Johnson had covered—and its definitions were models of clarity and conciseness” (172). The text was published in small fascicles in 1884, with the first volume covering only half of the words beginning with the letter “a” (173). The project, which attempted to record every word used in English since 1150, took more than 4 decades to complete. Edited primarily by James Augustus Henry Murray, the project became the Oxford English Dictionary and was completed in 1928 with 414,825 entries (175).

When the first pilgrims came to America in 1620, they arrived at “a time of considerable change in the structure of the language” (177). Breaking free from Britain, they were the first generation of people to use the “s” form of verbs—“has” rather than “hath” (177). They also borrowed from Native American terminology. The earliest American immigrants also took more than 500 words from early Spanish settlers and many more words from the French (179). Other changes to English in the New World included giving new meanings to old words and creating new words altogether, typically by making compound words like “bullfrog” and “eggplant” (180). One newly created word was “O.K.” or “okay”, which Bryson suggests is “arguably America’s single greatest gift to international discourse” because it can serve as an adjective, verb, adverb, noun, and interjection (181).

Another issue of langue in the New World was that of immigrant assimilation. Bryson points out that mass immigration to the United States did not begin in large numbers until the latter half of the 19th century, and this resulted in foreign language enclaves. Because of these linguistic pockets, many thought that the United States would evolve into a variety of regional tongues. Bryson explains that this did not take place and instead “people over the bulk of the American mainland continued to evince a more or less uniform speech” (186). The three reasons for this were the desire for a common national identity, the intermingling of people from diverse backgrounds, and social mobility; the frequent movement of people prevented this mobility (186-87). Chapter 11 then covers the linkage and carry-over of American English and British English. Many words of Elizabethan England were preserved by American English during the colonial period, just as they were dying out in England. On the other hand, America “introduced many words and expressions that never existed in Britain, but which have for the most part settled comfortably into domestic life there” (189).

In Chapter 12, Bryson reiterates his previous point that English is commonly used commercially worldwide—but often with mangled syntax. He argues that “products are deemed to be more exciting if they carry English messages even when, as often happens, the messages don’t make a lot of sense” (199). While it is difficult to pinpoint the actual number of people who speak English across the globe, it is clearly an important language. The teaching of English has become a billion-dollar industry worldwide: “there are more people learning English in China than there are people in the United States” (202). However, Bryson says “it would be a mistake to presume that English is widely spoken in the world because it has some overwhelming intrinsic appeal to foreigners” (207). Rather, English has become a world language out of necessity.

There are two reasons why many believe an international language should be adopted. The first reason is the costly, time-consuming nature of translation, while the second is the “frequency and gravity of misunderstandings owing to difficulties of translation” (209). Several efforts to devise a neutral, international language have taken root over the last century, but none have progressed to widespread usage. More recently, some have suggested that rather than create a devised international language, English should be simplified to be more accessible. One unsuccessful idea was Basic English of the 20th century, which reduced the language to 850 essential words and could be easily learned (213). A similarly unsuccessful idea was Anglic, English with phonetically consistent spellings. Bryson ends the chapter pointing out that while the rest of the world is learning English, the English-speaking world is learning foreign languages at its lowest rate in decades.