why do we speak english?

The Roman Empire achieved its greatest geographical extent in the reign of Trajanus, emperor from 98 to 117. His European boundaries, roughly speaking, were the rivers Rhine and Danube. Then there were territories in western Asia with seaports on the eastern Mediterranean; in Egypt and along the coastal strip of northern Africa. In the western part of the Empire the official language was Latin. In the eastern part the lingua franca was the Koiné Greek established there by Alexander the Great some four centuries before.

Trajanus was followed by Hadrianus, emperor from 117 to 138, who began to shorten his lines of communication. On the island called Britannia, for example, Hadrian’s Wall was built to delimit the far northern frontier. South of that barrier (as every schoolboy knows) most of the country was subject to Roman military occupation. The official language was Latin, spoken and written by the ruling élite and the Britons who were closest to them. The remainder of the population spoke – so far as we can ascertain – various Celtic dialects. Of their written language, remains are few and sparse.

In the year later to be denominated as Anno Domini 410, the Roman legions packed up their kit and marched away, leaving behind them a Britannia subjected to raids from the Picts on the northern side of The Wall as well as intermittent forays by seaborne intruders. It was all part of a catastrophic movement of tribes and nations. The Romans with their ‘us and them’ attitudes categorised them all as Barbarians, because their common speech was neither decent Latin nor Koiné Greek. Barbarians they may have been in Roman eyes. Uncultured rabble they were not. Gradually, inexorably, they spilled over the borders of the once impregnable Empire. They came. Some settled. Others walked on. And these incursions were not confined to Europe. Problems with powerful régimes in Asia forced the Empire to move its capital from Roma to Constantinopólis, and to divide the Empire with its Greek East having authority over a Latin West.

In that Western Empire – nominally still to the West and the South of the Rhine-Danube line – there was often turmoil leaving profound cultural changes in its wake. Historians have called these centuries ‘The Age of Invasions’. Another term is Völkerwanderung, typifying the mass migrations which took place as whole tribes and nations poured in while the defences crumbled. Collectively those ‘wanderers’ are labelled ‘Germanic’ in contradistinction to the earlier inhabitants who had formerly been governed from Roma. It is a fascinating time. ‘Dark Ages’ only to historians with too little documentary evidence to contradict the widely held view that civilisation came to and end with The Fall of the Roman Empire and was not regained until the Classical Renaissance associated, in some minds, with the Capture of Constantinopólis by the Turks in 1453, preceded by the exit and transhipment of Byzantine scholars with their precious manuscripts who ‘brought the Light of Learning’ to the Medici in Firenze from whence it flowed delightfully all over Europe to connoisseurs all too thankful to receive it.

It is a distorted view, of course. The ‘barbarian’ infiltrators carried their own cultures with them. They just did not go to the bother of learning to write things down. Only in the eyes of Men of The Book is this a serious flaw of character. When the new arrivals eventually settled in their final locations, they became the foundations of modern European Civilisation.

I have been fascinated by the ways in which some of the immigrant languages survived while others did not. My current paradigm, for what it is worth, has writing as the most significant factor. In the Italy of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (reigned 471 to 526), for example, the written language was the Latin of Boethius (c.475 to 524) and Cassiodorus (c.490 to c.580). The common spoken language eventually became the Italian branch of the Romance family. The Germanic Franks who crossed the Rhine became the Merovingian Kings chronicled in the Latin of the churchmen while the Franks who did not cross the Rhine continued with their own vernacular. By the time of the penning of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the details were set down twice : one in the Romance tongue of the West; the other in the Germanic of the East.

And what of the country we now call England? Why do we speak English?

Let us mentally go back to the time when global warming and rising sea levels finally cut off our country from the continental mainland. We may consider the islanders who survived as the original inhabitants of Britain. Cheddar Man, or one of his maternal ancestors, may or may not have been among them. We know nothing of their language. It is just possible, though not at all likely, it was not even IndoEuropean.

Before Julius Kaiser came on his exploratory raid, various Celtic dialects were in general use, including the Gallic spoken by those of the Belgae who had migrated from the mainland some decades before. Claudius engineered the landing of his taskforce (AD 43) and the general military annexation of Britannia. In some places they were welcomed. Some Britons assimilated. Others did not and sank into an underclass. Latin was the official spoken and written language. Where the Roman penetration was incomplete, Celtic dialects continued to be spoken and eventually achieved written status. But that was much later. In the year 410, as I have already mentioned, the legions sailed away. The mêlée on their continental frontiers demanded their prior attention. Britannia was expendable.

Enter the Saxons. A few of them had been here before, probing hither and yon, perhaps for trade, perhaps for loot, perhaps for Lebensraum. The story goes that postRoman Britannia was disturbed by the Picts from north of The Wall. Mercenaries were engaged to fight Britannia’s battles. They came in three keels to Ebbsfleet. They fought. They liked it here. They stayed. So the story goes.

More of them came. These were the tribesmen we may conveniently call Saxons. They were fighting men. As the situation resolved, the land now called England was occupied by a strongly stratified hierarchical society. At the top were the Saxon kings, commanding and supported by Saxon military aristocracy. Saxon landed gentry, with obligations of service to their overlords, completed the upper tier. The Saxon landed gentry were slave owners. We may assume that the Romano-British landed gentry assimilated into Saxon society, moved to the Celtic fringes of the islands, or crossed the Channel in sufficient numbers to colonise that part of the NorthWest now called Bretagne. In occupied Former Britannia, Saxon dialects were the official spoken tongues, solidly established and later committed to writing in a flourishing literature along with the scribal Latin of the churchmen.

When Guillaume le Bâtard headed his marauding battalions to victory at Hastings in 1066, they brought with them the Northman-tinted French of their adopted homeland. In their new territory Norman French remained the language of the military aristocracy. Latin the language of the Church. Old English, with its Saxon and Danish elements, survived because it already had, and continued to have, written form. In time English became the general lingua franca. French had its place in the law courts. Latin remained the language of international exchange even after Henry VIII (“Tudwr”) had taken the reins of the Church into his own hands and enacted an ordinance declaring English to the sole official language of his realm. (Some of the Welsh, rightly, have never forgiven him for this, nor have they ever given way to his will.)

Today the use of English is no longer confined to the Former Britannia. And even there its use is enhanced by a multitude of other tongues which arrived with yet more immigrants who also came and settled. The local delights of Regional Englishes are still with us despite, perhaps even because of, the ubiquitous telecasts.

Saxon military invaders brought their own regional variants with them. For six centuries or more their language coalesced, grew in strength and was committed to writing, firmly established and surviving. Spelling and orthography changed. Usage continues to change. Loan words proliferate. Neologisms attain prominence. Some fade away to become archaic or obsolete. Inflexions lose their force. Collective nouns modulate from singular to plural. Agendum is a thing needing to be done. Agendum pluralises as agenda. And like the neuter plurals of medieval Latin agenda in its turn is multiplied into agendas.

.. .. is now and ever shall be. So long as we continue to talk to each other.


© francis cameron
oxford, 15 june 2007