Mother Tongue

Title: Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Penguin, 2008 (First published 1990)

ISBN: 9780141037462

Pages: 270

English is the most ubiquitous language used in the world. Even though the number of people who use it as their mother tongue is really small, the rapidly expanding clientele who employ it as a second language make it the world’s most common tongue. It is the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, sciences, education and politics. Other countries excel the US and UK in many aspects of the language’s everyday usage. In India, there are more than 3000 newspapers in English while there are more students of English in China than there are people in the US. Even this humble blog is the contribution of a person who uses English as a second language and the fact that it has used some 600,000 words so far makes him a little smug! This book was published in 1990, but its point has become further relevant with the spread of computers and the internet. Bill Bryson needs no introduction and he remains one of my favorites.

Bryson’s humour is legendary, but it is strangely subdued in this volume. Anyway, the very first sentence of the book carries the author’s signature with the candid assertion that “more than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to”. This book is not a history of the language nor can it be termed a thorough study in the linguistic sense. Bryson examines many aspects of the tongue’s everyday usage like spelling, American and British varieties, pronunciation, origin of common names, word play and even a chapter on swearing. The narrative is liberally suffused with wit, but not as much as Bryson’s other books.

English now dominates the world beyond doubt, but there was a time when it hung tenaciously on to its home country base whose political power had changed hands many times to foreigners who didn’t even speak a word of it. England remained for a long time under external occupation. The Roman conquest brought civilization to the island, but Viking invasions transformed its structure. Then came the Norman Conquest when the French ruled the roost. No king of England spoke English till 1399 CE when Henry IV began to use it. As recently as the eighteenth century, England chose to install George I, a German, even though he didn’t know English but reigned for thirteen years. The language assumed an inferior position in the Norman society in which the aristocracy was French-speaking while the peasantry spoke English. Linguistic influence of Normans tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion and high living. That’s why we still see a lot of French-derived words in these domains. However, Bryson points out that it is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

There are about 2700 languages in the world, of which India leads with 1600 languages and dialects. English has borrowed without any let or hindrance from most of them. Bryson reviews the pathways in which foreign words accrued into his mother tongue. Probably, this makes the English extremely reluctant to learn other languages. The author wonders at the staggering quantity of words accrued. Bryson does not elaborate on one important source of words for English – India. A good number of Indian words have entered the lexicon of the colonial masters after nearly two centuries of imperialist rule over India. Great literary figures have also contributed to the language in the case of new words. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings of which at least a tenth had never been used before, which is an astonishing display of ingenuity. It is also true that the great dramatist and poet lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since.

The book hints at the powerful urge for standardization when a language loses its insularity and whole societies start to handle them simultaneously. This process began in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press. This brought a measure of much needed uniformity to English spelling. Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. London spellings became increasingly fixed and standardization was achieved by 1650. With television, the differences between the two most favorite flavors of English are disappearing fast. Since this book came out just before the internet boom, its effect is not analysed.

This book includes a delightful array of words, phrases and comparison with other languages which is ideal for novices and experienced readers of English. This book is a page-turner, but the chapter on names and pronouncing place names is rather clumsy and uninteresting to non-US and UK readers.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star