This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

  From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again:

  Whilst we were busied hereabout, we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in…He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’.

  The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat.

  The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony.

  The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost anywhere—any country, any coast, any continent—and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality.

  That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers—from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman—who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time.

  It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today.

  Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms, Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionary-based word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000.

  The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms—bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Académie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too.

  What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible.

  Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student café, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in.

  Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled. What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance.

  There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean café. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard
English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos.

  LITERATURE

  LASHINGS OF POP

  I am—or was, until this book—a novelist by trade. I’ve sold five novels, each of which has been translated into a fair number of different languages. Every contract I sign stipulates that I’m sent a royalty statement, and each royalty statement contains information on books sold. So does that mean I know how many books I’ve sold in total? No. Nothing of the sort. I couldn’t even say to the nearest 10,000 copies.

  In large part, that’s due to my laziness. To work out an answer I’d have to crunch a lot of numbers, in order to produce a statistic that has no direct effect on my life and which will be out of date by the time I’ve crunched it. But in part too it’s because the system doesn’t make things simple. You’d think that a royalty statement from publisher to author would somewhere contain one simple figure equating to the total number of books sold. Not so. My own dear publisher sends me stats that make a phone bill from BT look like a model of limpid clarity. Nowhere on any document they’ve ever sent me is a single number that says, ‘We’ve sold this many of your books’-the one stat that authors are likely to be most interested in.

  When PR folk representing the likes of Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling claim that so many zillion copies have been sold, they probably have a pretty decent idea of the total, but decent isn’t the same as accurate. Does Dan Brown’s agent really know how many B-format paperbacks have been sold in the Ukraine? Or the exact number of cute little Japanese hardbacks, complete with facsimile signature and sash? Or the number of books printed in Braille for the Brazilian market? Personally, I doubt it.

  All this poses a problem. There is no systematic way of knowing which authors have sold the largest numbers of books. No central agency monitors such things. Even the Guinness Book of Records, whose job it is to know such things, ends up using well-informed guesstimates. For those of us who are list maniacs at heart, this dearth of information falls rather hard.

  Luckily, however, there is an alternative route to much the same goal. Ever since the advent of the printing press, books have been translated at the initiative of individual publishers and booksellers. In most markets, such practice would be regarded as normal, but to the orderly minds of the world’s national librarians, the system seemed little short of anarchy. In the absence of some central register, national collections, such as the British Library, would struggle to keep track of all the published translations of major authors, such as Dickens and Shakespeare. Consequently, back in 1931, the League of Nations was pressured into setting up the first systematic record of translations, the Index Translationum. Fifteen years and one world war later, the United Nations took over the chore. In 1979, the system was computerized and a true cumulative database began to take shape. The world may have kept no record of books sold, but we do now possess excellent data on the next best thing: the number of translations made from them.

  The statistics as presented by UNESCO don’t always make the most perfect logical sense. UNESCO’s top fifty includes a fair old number of authors who aren’t really authors at all (Walt Disney Inc., different versions of the Bible). It also counts the two Grimm brothers separately though they wrote together, and it takes seriously the output of authors (Lenin, Marx, Engels, John Paul II) whose translations owed more to supply-push than the demand-pull of eager consumers. If these oddities are tidied away, then just forty-one authors remain.

  Once cleaned up, the statistics confirm something that’s been easy to sense but hard to prove: that no country on earth writes like we British. Of the forty-one most translated authors in the world, no less than fourteen, a full third of the total, are British. The next most translated country is the United States, whose much larger population has contributed just eleven names to the list. The entire rest of the world, with sixteen names on the list, barely counts for more than our little islands.

  Authors by country (rank in brackets, correct at time of writing)

  Britain & Ireland United States Rest of World

  Agatha Christie (1) Danielle Steel (6) Jules Verne (2)

  Enid Blyton (3) Stephen King (8) Hans Christian Andersen (7)

  William Shakespeare (4) Mark Twain (10) Grimm brothers (9)

  Barbara Cartland (5) Isaac Asimov (11) Georges Simenon (12)

  Arthur Conan Doyle (14) Jack London (15) Alexandre Dumas (13)

  Robert Louis Stevenson (19) Robert Stine (22) Fyodor Dostoevsky (16)

  Charles Dickens (20) Nora Roberts (24) René Goscinny (17)

  Victoria Holt (23) Sidney Sheldon (28) Leo Tolstoy (18)

  Oscar Wilde (25) Ernest Hemingway (29) Astrid Lindgren (21)

  Alistair MacLean (27) Robert Ludlum (33) Rudolf Steiner (26)

  James Hadley Chase (32) Edgar Allan Poe (37) Hermann Hesse (30)

  J.R.R. Tolkien (34) Honoré de Balzac (31)

  Ruth Rendell (35) Charles Perrault (36)

  Rudyard Kipling (40) Plato (38)

  Franz Kafka (39)

  Anton Chekhov (41)

  It doesn’t require a very long look at the table above to see that what’s in question here isn’t a battle fought out between the greats of literature. Although Shakespeare and Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky all make the grade, the table is dominated by popular authors of every stripe. Hercule Poirot beats Hamlet. The Famous Five and their lashings of ginger pop have sold better than Chekhov, Kafka and Plato put together. English literature (the normal, if patronizing, term for English, Welsh, Scots and Irish literature in English) may well be among the strongest of world literatures, but it’s the success of Britain’s more commercial authors which is particularly striking.

  This success deserves to be celebrated rather than sneered at. British literature has given the world its most famous detectives: Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes. It has given the world its best-known spy, James Bond,* and its most literarily successful one, John le Carré’s Smiley. It has given the world its seminal work of fantasy literature: The Lord of the Rings. Walter Scott, in his day, was one of the very first novelists of genuinely international appeal. Robinson Crusoe and Jekyll & Hyde both added bold new archetypes to the imaginative resources of literature. It was a Briton, Wilkie Collins, who wrote the first true detective novel. Children around the world have thrilled to Alice in Wonderland, the Famous Five, Winnie-the-Pooh, Harry Potter, Peter Pan. These achievements are different from, and lesser than, the achievements of the Shakespeares and Chaucers, Dickenses and Austens—but they’re achievements all the same.

  It’s tempting to ascribe these popular literary successes to the dominance of English as an international language. So universal has English become that it is surely easier for foreign translators to pick from English-language texts than ones in, say, Norwegian, Portuguese or Uzbek. UNESCO certainly appears to believe just that. On its website, it commented: ‘This is perhaps one way of controlling the market and maintaining the cultural dominance of English and the market is controlled through what is on offer, through the availability of products sold by the industry of culture—whether it is music, or films or books.’ (The atrociously mangled syntax of this sentence suggests that the ‘industry of culture’ would be in mortal danger if left to writers such as this.)

  UNESCO, however, is just plain wrong. Just who exactly is thought to be ‘controlling the market’? A conspiracy of top executives at News International and Walt Disney? An undercover alliance between the CIA and MI6? A secret society headed by Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, his trusty lieutenant? The point about the book market is that it’s a market. Readers buy whatever they want to read. Publishers publish anything that looks like selling. It’s true that English acts as a convenient international clearing house. Japanese publishers wanting to translate a Danish text will most likely translate from the English ver
sion, not the Danish. In that sense, though, the universality of English makes works in minor tongues more available than they were before, not less. When great books come along in those minor tongues, they sell. The Danish language Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow was a big hit. So was the Norwegian book Sophie’s World. Contrary to what UNESCO might think, these books sold not because of a slip-up in the CIA’s operating procedure, but because they were good to read. That, funnily enough, is what readers care about.

  In the end, why should it seem so odd to argue that British writers do so well because they’re good at what they do? Nobody has a problem accepting that the German musical tradition is (vastly) richer than the British one, that the Italians have done (infinitely) more for opera, that the French have done very much more for painting, and so on. We Brits aren’t awful at these other art forms, but we don’t excel. In literature, however, whether popular or highbrow, we do excel. It is our art form, the one that, for whatever reason, speaks more deeply to our national consciousness than any other.* It has done so since the time of Alfred the Great, when English vernacular literature was the most developed in Europe. It does so now.

  * Also its most famous secretary, Miss Moneypenny.

  * I’m using the word ‘national’ in a very broad sense here, since Ireland has made a quite disproportionate contribution to ‘English’ literature. Since the death of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatists of the British Isles have arguably been Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Synge, Shaw and Beckett—every one of them Irish.

  OF COWS AND BEEF

  The word Welsh derives from an Anglo-Saxon root, Wealas, which means slave or foreigner. There, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the politics of sixth-century Britain. The incoming Angles, Jutes and Saxons had turned the native British Celts into foreigners in their own land; not quite slaves perhaps, but humiliatingly subject all the same.