The Adventure of English: the Biography of a Language.(Book Review)

by Melvyn Bragg Hodder & Stoughton, hb, pp325, 20 [pounds sterling]

The story of the language is the story of the people. Just as the English assimilated their invaders, so their language swallowed its influences whole, usually with the new social order attached. Thus, on top of a 'bedrock vocabulary' of Old English, new social orders made their claims: the Vikings left Danish place names bedded into local dialects; the French imposed the language of the conqueror: crown, govern, servant. "We know who is in charge," writes Bragg, "those who have the language" But as he goes on to show, the language, in the end, belongs to all: coloniser and colonised each leave their mark upon it. This, then, is the story of us, and it ranges from the vernacular Bible and the sonnet to the internet and textmessaging; from local dialect to global lingua franca. Bragg, a well-known polymath, enjoys his own adventures with the language, happy to write of shades of meaning "as impenetrable as those between Darwin's first gradations of finches", or to remark, discussing US English, that "scalp ... a harmless English noun, [has] become a verb fit to make your hair stand on end". He's good, too--if a little chippy--on the Cumbrian dialect of his youth; these passages read like a prose version of Tony Harrison's early verse. A valuable addition to our national biography.