The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  But it can happen. In multilingual parts of the world, the pidgin is found to be so useful that the peoples in contact find they cannot do without it. The pidgin becomes a common language, or lingua franca. This happened to Sabir, a pidginized form of French used along the Mediterranean coast from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century. It has happened in Nigeria. And above all, it has happened in Papua New Guinea, where Tok Pisin is known or used by over a million people – more than any other language in the country.

  Of course, when a pidgin becomes widely used, its form changes dramatically. To begin with, pidgins are very limited forms of communication with few words, a few simple constructions (mainly commands), helped along by gestures and miming. Tarzan’s style is not very far from reality, in such cases. But when a pidgin expands, its vocabulary increases greatly, it develops its own rules of grammatical construction, and it becomes used for all the functions of everyday life.

  A very significant development can then take place. People begin to use the pidgin at home. As children are born into these families, the pidgin language becomes their mother tongue. When this happens, the status of the language fundamentally alters, and it comes to be used in a more flexible and creative way. Instead of being seen as subordinate to other languages in an area, it starts to compete with them. In such cases linguists no longer talk about pidgin languages, but about creoles. Creolized varieties of English are very important throughout the Caribbean, and in the countries to which Caribbean people have emigrated – notably Britain. Black English in the United States is also creole in origin (see p. 252).

  There is often conflict between the creole and standard English in these places. The creole gives its speakers their linguistic identity, as an ethnic group. Standard English, on the other hand, gives them access to the rest of the English-speaking world. It is not easy for governments to develop an acceptable language policy when such fundamental issues are involved. Should road signs be in standard English or in creole? Should creole-speaking school children be educated in standard English or in creole? And which variety should writers use when contributing to the emerging literature of their country? Social and political circumstances vary so much that no simple generalization is possible – except to emphasize the need for standard English users to replace their traditional dismissive attitude towards creole speech with an informed awareness of its linguistic complexity as a major variety of modern English. We have to forget Tarzan.

  Pronouns in Tok Pisin

  Sometimes a pidgin language can develop forms that are more complex than those available in the standard language. An example is the range of personal pronouns used in Tok Pisin. There are two forms of ‘we’: the inclusive form means ‘you and me’; the exclusive form means ‘me and someone else’.

  Tok Pisin English origin Modern meaning

  mi me I, me

  yu you you

  em him, ’em (them) he, she, it, him, her

  yumi you + me we, us (inclusive)

  mipela me + fellow we, us (exclusive)

  yupela you (plural) you

  ol all they, them

  It is also possible to expand the pronouns to include the number of people being talked about:

  mitupela the two of us (excluding you)

  mitripela the three of us (excluding you)

  yumitripela the three of us (including you)

  yutupela the two of you

  etc.

  PART I

  The Structure of English

  Chapters 2 to 5 investigate the main dimensions of the anatomy, or structure, of the English language. We begin with the skeleton, grammar – a field that has aroused a great deal of controversy in recent years. What are the important characteristics of English grammar? Why do people complain about grammar so much? What is involved in studying usage – whether your own or other people’s?

  Much of the ‘flesh’ of the language comes from its enormous vocabulary. But how large is this vocabulary, and how can it be classified? What should you bear in mind when purchasing or consulting a dictionary? Chapter 3 looks at these questions, and also suggests a way of keeping track of the size of your own vocabulary.

  Once we have words and grammar at our disposal, we can communicate, but we have a choice of medium – speaking or writing. Chapter 4 looks at speaking, outlining the pronunciation system of English. How many vowels and consonants are there, and what happens to them when we speak normal, fast conversation? The chapter introduces the thorny question of pronunciation errors, and ends by explaining the background to Received Pronunciation – the accent which many people think of as the best kind of English speech.

  Chapter 5 raises the equally thorny issue of English spelling, generally condemned as chaotic. How regular is the writing system, in fact, and where does all the irregularity come from? There have been many proposals for spelling reform. Part I concludes by reviewing some of these, and reflecting on their chances of success.

  2

  Grammar

  BASIC ENGLISH COURSE

  20 lessons

  We teach you how to speak

  so there’s not much grammar.

  I’m glad I was brought up to speak English – a much easier language than Latin, German, and all those others with dozens of word endings.

  English… has a grammar of great simplicity and flexibility.

  The above advertisement appeared in a foreign Sunday paper not so long ago. The second comment was made in a letter to a BBC programme on English. And the third appeared in a best-selling book on the English language, published in 1986. Together, they illustrate one of the most widespread fallacies about the language, especially in its spoken form, that there’s no grammar worth bothering about.

  If only it were true. But you have only to ask foreigners who have been struggling with the language for years, and they’ll tell you the opposite. ‘I don’t think I shall ever master all the rules of English grammar,’ said one. ‘So many exceptions, so many tiny changes in word order which make all the difference to what you’re trying to say,’ said another, gloomily. If you add up all the points to do with sentence construction identified in the index to the major reference work by Randolph Quirk and his associates, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), you

  ‘Me mum sent a note in, Miss…’

  Punch, 6 February 1985

  will find you have a total of some 3,500. The book weighs nearly three kilograms. That’s how much grammar there is in English!

  There are two reasons why people are contemptuous of English grammar. First, there’s the influence of Latin. For centuries, the Latin language ruled the grammar-teaching world. People had to know Latin to be accepted in educated society, and their knowledge of grammar was based on how that language works. Here’s the famous verb that started millions of schoolchildren on their Latin-learning road.

  amo I love amamus we love

  amas you love amatis you love

  amat he/she loves amant they love

  When people started to analyse English grammar in the eighteenth century, it seemed logical to look at the language using the terms and distinctions which had proved so useful in studying Latin. English had no word-endings, it seemed. Therefore, it had no ‘grammar’.

  But of course there is far more to grammar than word-endings. Some languages (such as Chinese) have none at all. English has less than a dozen types of regular ending (and a few irregular ones):

  the plural -s the girl → the girls

  the genitive -’s or -s’, marking such meanings as possession

  the boy’s bike the boys’ bikes

  the past tense -ed I walk → I have walked

  the past participle -ed I walk → I have walked

  the third person singular of the present tense, -s

  I run → he runs

  the verb ending which marks such meanings as duration, -ing

  she laughs → she is laughing

  the negative -n’t he is → he isn
’t

  the comparative -er big → bigger

  the superlative -est big → biggest

  the shortened form of some verbs, ’ll, ’re, etc.

  I’ll leave

  Among the exceptions are certain nouns and adjectives, such as mice, men, better and worst, and about 300 irregular verbs, such as gone, taken, saw, and ran.

  But these endings, whether regular or irregular, make up only a fraction of the grammar of modern English. The language makes very little use of word structure, or morphology, to express the meanings that Latin conveys in its word-endings. Most of English grammar is taken up with the rules governing the order in which words can appear: the field of syntax. Word order is crucial for English, as we can see from the following examples, where the meaning of the sentence alters dramatically once the order varies:

  Dog bites postman v. Postman bites dog

  They are here v. Are they here?

  Only I kissed Joan v. I kissed only Joan

  Naturally, I got up v. I got up naturally (not awkwardly)

  Show me the last three pages (of one book) v. Show me the three last pages (of three books)

  The man with a dog saw me v. The man saw me with a dog.

  There are also many complex constructions, such as the use of respectively, which enables us to say several things at once in an economical way:

  John, Mary, and Peter play tennis, baseball, and croquet respectively.

  And there are thousands of rules forbidding us to put words in a certain order. Mother-tongue speakers never think twice about them, because they learned these rules as children. But the rules are there, none the less, making us use the first of the following alternatives, not the second (the asterisk shows that the sentence is unacceptable):

  I walked to town *I to town walked

  Hardly had I left… *Hardly I had left…

  That’s a fine old house *That’s an old fine house

  John and I saw her *I and John saw her

  She switched it on *She switched on it

  Mother-tongue speakers instinctively know that the first is correct and the second is not. But explaining why this is so to anyone who asks (such as a foreign learner) is a specialist skill indeed.

  Grammar in speech and writing

  There is a second reason for the way people readily dismiss grammar: the widespread feeling that only the written language is worth bothering about, and that spoken English has ‘less’ grammar because it does not ‘follow the rules’ that are found in writing. A surprisingly large number of people who have spoken English since they were children are willing to admit that they ‘don’t speak English correctly’, or claim that ‘foreigners speak better English than we do, because they’ve learned the rules’. There is something seriously amiss here, if mother-tongue speakers can be made to feel they are wrong, and foreign learners are right. Certainly, foreigners are often mystified by this reaction when they hear it.

  There are indeed many differences between the way grammar is used in writing English and the way it is used in speaking it. This is only natural. When we are writing, we usually have time to make notes, plan ahead, pause, reflect, change our mind, start again, revise, proof-read, and generally polish the language until we have reached a level which satisfies us. The reader sees only the finished product. I can assure you that the first draft of this paragraph looked very different from the final one!

  But in everyday conversation (which is the kind of spoken language we engage in most of the time) there is no time for such things to happen. As we begin a conversation, or start to tell a story, we are faced with listeners who react to what we are saying while we are saying it. We do not have the time or opportunity to plan what we want to say, and we have to allow for false starts, interruptions, second thoughts, words on the tip of the tongue, and a host of other disturbances which take place while we are in full flow.

  Naturally, in such circumstances, we make use of all kinds of grammatical features that wouldn’t be necessary in writing – in particular, parenthetic phrases such as you know, you see, I mean, and mind you. We make great use of and and but to join sentences together – a feature of style which is often criticized when it appears in writing, but which is extremely widespread in speech, as this extract from a conversation shows (/ marks a break in the rhythm of the speech, – marks a pause):

  it’s not a select shopping centre by any means/ and there’re lots of – council houses/ and flats/ and – erm – I mean I think it’s fantastic/ because you can go up there/ and they’re very nice-looking flats and everything/ it’s – it’s been fairly well designed/ – and you can go up there/ and and shop reasonably/ – but – at the same time/ just where we’re living/ there’s a sort of sprinkling/ of of little delicatessens/ and extravagant and extraordinarily expensive shops/ you see/ and very expensive cleaners etcetera/ – and I’ve been doing little surveys/ of the area/ and and looking/ you know…

  This kind of speech looks weird in print, because it is not possible to show all the melody, stress, and tone of voice which made the speaker (a woman in her early twenties) sound perfectly natural in context. But it does show how spoken grammar differs from written. It would be possible to reduce the extract to a more compact, economical style, such as the following (it uses 40 per cent fewer words), but the language immediately becomes more controlled, formal, and abrupt, and it simply would not sound right in everyday speech.

  It’s not a select shopping centre, by any means, but I think it’s fantastic, because you can go up there and shop reasonably. There’re lots of fairly well-designed council houses and very nice-looking flats. Just where we’re living, there’s a sprinkling of delicatessens and extravagant, extraordinarily expensive shops, cleaners, etcetera. I’ve been doing little surveys of the area, and looking…

  It’s important not to overestimate the differences between speech and writing, though. Probably over 95 per cent of the grammatical constructions in English appear in both spoken and written expression. All the examples on pp. 23–4 could be used quite acceptably in either. And of course there are many styles of language use where the boundary between speech and writing almost disappears – as when people write material to be read aloud (as in radio plays and news broadcasts) or speak spontaneously so that what they say can be written down (as in dictation or teaching). The conclusion is clear: spoken English may be different, but it certainly does not lack grammatical structure.

  Knowing grammar and ‘knowing about’ grammar

  The advertisement at the beginning of this chapter carries a further implication: when you learn a language, you don’t need to know any grammatical terminology. That language school’s teaching method, it

  She shall, will she?

  The way grammatical usage is changing over shall and will is neatly captured in these 1985 newspaper headlines, both supposedly reporting the words of a member of the royal family, and appearing on the same day.

  would seem, is an ‘oral’ approach; their students will not be spending time learning English rules by heart and then trying to turn these rules into spontaneous speech (the ‘Oh dear, how can I say anything if I can’t remember my irregular verbs’ problem). The hope is that, by giving the students lots of time to practise speaking, they will ‘pick up’ the right forms of expression, and gradually develop a sense of what the rules are – without anyone formally having to tell them.

  This method of language learning can work. Little children, after all, do it all the time. They follow a gradual process of trial and error, and never get bogged down in wondering what an irregular verb is. However, whether the same approach works for adults is currently controversial. Adults can often be helped by having a rule of grammar explained to them, rather than having to work it out for themselves. It’s often a lot quicker than the trial and error technique, which can easily take a great deal of time. On the other hand, too much grammar work can kill any enthusiasm for language learning, as many people well remember from their sch
ool days.

  The English language has suffered badly at the hands of the grammarians over the centuries. Many people have left school with the impression that English grammar is a dull, boring, pointless subject – simply because it was presented to them in a dull, boring and pointless way. They may even say that they don’t know any grammar, or (as already noted) that they don’t know the correct grammar. They feel insecure and defensive. Something is wrong when this happens.

  The origins of the problem lie in the eighteenth century, when the first influential grammars of English were written. The grammarians shared the spirit of that age to establish order in the language, after what they saw as a chaotic period of expansion and experiment. Shakespeare and his contemporaries had added thousands of new words and usages to the language. The new dictionary-writers and grammarians felt it was their responsibility to sort out what had happened (see p. 222).

  From the 1760s, grammarians such as Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray laid down rules which they thought should govern correct grammatical usage. This is the period when the rules were first formulated about such matters as saying I shall rather than I will, preferring It is I to It is me, avoiding a ‘double negative’ (I don’t have no interest in the matter), never ending sentences with a preposition (That’s the man I was talking to), and – in the nineteenth century – never splitting an infinitive (I want to really try). The early grammars were followed by others, and a tradition of correct usage came to be built up, which was then taught in public schools during the nineteenth century, and later in all schools. Many generations of schoolchildren learned how to analyse (or ‘parse’) a sentence into ‘subject’, ‘predicate’, and so on. They learned to label the different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.). And they learned about correct usage, as viewed by educated society, and tried to follow it in their own speech and writing. They were left in no doubt that failure to speak or write correctly would lead in the long term to social criticism and reduced career prospects – and in the short term to a more immediate form of suffering. As one correspondent to the BBC series English Now wrote: