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Questions and Answers
Where does English come from?
By Jonathan Culpeper j.culpeper@lancaster.ac.uk
If you wound the clock back 2,000 years and were listening to some people in Britain having a conversation, you would not hear the English you are familiar with, nor even an old-sounding form of English. This is because you would be listening to a Celtic language (to give yourself a rough idea of what this would sound like, think of today's Welsh). So, where does English come from? If you were standing in northern Germany, the chances are that you would recognise the odd word. English has its roots in the Germanic dialects of the tribes of north-western Europe.
How did this 'English' end up in England? According the Venerable Bede, a monk writing at Jarrow, the year AD 449 saw the arrival of three Germanic tribes - Angle, Saxon and Jutish. The problem is that Bede made this remark about three hundred years after the event, so we must treat it with some caution. It is unlikely that there were three distinct tribes. Moreover, it is not the case that that particular year saw some kind of dramatic conquest by the Anglo-Saxons. Prior to that date, Britain had had trading links with northern Europe and some settlement had taken place; after that date, although the influx of Anglo-Saxons increased, there was no instant conquest, but a rather slow movement from the east of Britain to the west, taking place over some 250 years.
What happened to the native Celtic-speaking tribes of Britain? Where the Anglo-Saxons settled there is evidence of some integration with the local population. However, the Anglo-Saxons never got as far as the northern and western extremes of Britain. The Celtic languages - notably Cornish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic - proceeded relatively independently of English in what are now Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.
So, can one say that the English spoken today comes from the Germanic dialects of those tribes from northern Europe? Not exactly. In terms of the structure of English (its grammar and sound system) and also its most commonly used words, one can trace a clear line back towards those settlers and one can draw parallels with other Germanic languages. But the English we speak today has been influenced by many other languages. This is most noticeably true of vocabulary, where English has assimilated a multitude of words from other languages, but particularly from French and Latin.
Which is the most popular language in the world?
By Paul Baker p.baker@lancaster.ac.uk
The language which has the most native speakers (e.g. people who speak a language as their first language) is Chinese, which accounts for about 1 in 5 speakers on the planet. After that, come English, Spanish and Hindi-Urdu (two languages which are written down differently, but sound similar enough to be understood by both sets of speakers when heard) - each of these account for about 1 in 20 speakers at the moment, although it's predicted that English is likely to slip to 5th place and be replaced by Arabic at some time in this century.
However, as well as first-language speakers, we can also count people who learn a language as a second language at school (second-language speakers). If we consider these people, then Mandarin Chinese is still at the top, with 1,052 million speakers, English comes second with 508 million speakers, Hindi-Urdu is third with 487 million speakers and Spanish is fourth with 417 million speakers.
We can also consider the number of countries across the world that use certain languages. So while English doesn't have more speakers than Chinese, it's spoken in many more countries than Chinese. As well as been spoken as a first language in the UK, the USA, Ireland, Australia, it's also the "official language" of countries like India and Singapore. And it has a special status in countries like China, Russia, Japan, Greece and Poland, where it is often taught as a foreign language.
English also has a special status in that it's used as a "world" language in lots of different ways. So about 80% of internet communication is in English, many global satellite television channels broadcast in English (CNN, Sky News, MTV), certain products (McDonalds, Coke, Pepsi) bring the English language to many places in the world (the picture above shows an example of one form of global English being used in McDonalds advertising), about 99% of European organisations use English as an official language, and the universal form of language used across the world by air traffic control centres is a simplified version of English. Therefore, English has impacted on the world more than any other language, even though it doesn't have the most speakers.
Whether English will continue to be known as the closest thing to a global language we have though is another matter.
See http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf for more information.
What is the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme?
By Francis Katamba f.katamba@lancaster.ac.uk
PHONEME The term phoneme refers to a segment of sound that is used to distinguish the meanings of words in a particular language.
Example: In English the sounds the sounds /b/ and /m/ are distinct phonemes. (Conventionally a phoneme is written between slant lines.) How do we know? We know that if you substitute /p/ for /b/ you change the meaning of the word. For instance, 'bat' and 'mat', 'rib' and 'rim' etc., are words with different meanings.
Note that phonemes are not the same as letters in the writing system (cf. 'lap' and 'lapp' (native of Lapland) , which are spelled differently but pronounced the same) and the 'ough' sequences in 'cough' and 'bough' which are spelled the same but pronounced differently.
MORPHEME The term 'morpheme' refers to the smallest linguistic unit that carries some sort of meaning or is used to indicate that a word has some particular grammatical function. For instance, the word 'uneventful' has three morphemes un- 'not', 'event' and '-ful' and the word 'pets' has two, namely 'pet' and 'plural', which is indicated by '-s'
To find out more read:-
Crystal, D.1991 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
What is a word?
By Francis Katamba f.katamba@lancaster.ac.uk
The word is the smallest grammatical unit which is capable of occurring on its own as an utterance. In speech it can be preceded and followed by a pause; in writing it can be preceded and followed by a space.
That is a very bare answer. I suggest you follow it up by reading one or more of the following sources:
Crystal, David The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987. p. 91.
Katamba, F. English Words. London: Routledge 1994. Chapter 2.
McArthur, T. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. (Abridged edn.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1996 pp.1024-33.
What is the difference between a language and a dialect?
By Mark Sebba m.sebba@lancs.ac.uk
This question is as much a political as a linguistic one. Linguists have a saying: "a language is a dialect with an army". What this means is that there is no systematic linguistic difference between a language and a dialect. Both are linguistic systems with grammar and vocabulary and are or can be learnt natively by their speakers. There is nothing inherently better, more systematic or more logical in a "language" than in a "dialect", or vice versa. However, if we go to the dictionary to see how these words are generally used, we find there is a clear notion of a difference between "language" and "dialect": "language" always has associations of statehood or nationhood. "Dialect" on the other hand is defined as a "subordinate variety of a language with non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation, or idioms." (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1982), or "a form of a language that is considered inferior." (Collins Concise English Dictionary 1985) or "a peculiar manner of speaking." (Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary 1972).
The association of language with a "country" or "nation" and of "dialect" with an inferior or non- (i.e. sub-) standard variety of speech is very strong. This is what is meant by "a language is a dialect with an army." We can see from this that what are called languages are often standard languages, which are associated with nationhood, with centralised power, with statehood. Nonstandard varieties of language are often termed dialects, implying that they have less status and prestige. But historically, standard languages are just dialects which have acquired a special status, and nonstandard dialects were just language varieties which lay far from the centres of power. Looked at as linguistic systems, languages and dialects have the same characteristics; but looked at from a social point of view, we can say that a language has higher status than a dialect.
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