A History of the English language

Click this for a video explaining the ten main historical stages of the English language in ten minutes. Below is a summary of these points:

410 AD – Romans leave Britain and Germanic tribes start coming in, tribes such as the Angles and the Saxons. The Latin language used by Romans was deserted as the Anglo-saxon vocabulary was much more useful as it contained words for simple everyday things like ‘house’ and ‘woman’. In fact, three days of the week were named after Anglo-Saxon Gods.

597 AD – Christians came in and brought back some Latin words with them.

800 – Vikings came in and brought their lexicon which included words like “thrust”, “drag”, “ransack” and “die”. 1066 – William the conqueror invades England bringing new concepts from across the channel – like the French language (where words like ‘judge’, ‘jury’, ‘evidence’ and ‘justice’ originate from).

Latin was still used in the Church, but the common man spoke English. Words like ‘cow’, ‘sheep’ and ‘swine’ come from the English-speaking farmers whilst the words ‘beef’, ‘mutton’ and ‘pork’ come from the French. Overall the English absorbed over 10,000 new words from the Normans.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) – About 2000 new words and phrases were invented by William Shakespeare, including ‘eyeball’, ‘puppy’ and ‘anchovy’. Shakespeare’s poetry showed the world that English was a rich, vibrant language with limitless expressive and emotional power.

1611 AD – A team of scribes created a new translation of the Bible (King James bible) which has had a visible impact on the English language today.

1660 – The Royal society was formed by new-age scientists like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. New words had to be created to label the many things that were being discovered, including words like ‘acid’, ‘gravity’, ‘electricity’ and ‘pendulum’. They began working in Latin until realising they all spoke English.

With English quickly becoming the language of science, religion and Shakespeare, Britain decided to take it on tour, searching for land, wealth, and natural resources. New words were collected from all around the world in places such as the Caribbean, Africa, India, and Australia and brought back to use in the English language.

1746 – Lexicographers began to come along, aiming to find a way to stop the English language from becoming too diverse. Doctor Johnson took nine years to write the first dictionary. Words continued to be invented and in 1857 the Oxford English dictionary was started – though it took 70 years to complete due to troubles with the editor.

As soon as the Brits entered American soil they needed to borrow words to define new animals and plants, like ‘racoon’ and ‘squash’. Waves of immigrants brought new delicacies to America (like ‘pizza’ and ‘pretzels’), broadening the English language even further. America spread a new language of Capitalism, bringing in words like ‘merger’ and ‘downsizing’.

1972 – The first email was sent. The internet later arrived in 1991, and has since had a huge impact on the English language we use today. The net brought typing back into fashion and conversations became shorter than the average attention span, due to the vast amount of abbreviations being created in ‘text talk’.

1500 years after the Romans left England, the English language has demonstrated its unique ability to absorb, evolve and steal from over 350 languages. It was started by foreigners and has grown into a fully-fledged language on its own, and has travelled all over the world – first via the high seas and then via the high-speed broadband connection, eventually establishing itself as a global institution.

The stages of CLA

Year 1 – Babies work on speech sounds (often known as vegetative noises) to express pain, pleasure of hunger. The first sound they make is crying. At six to nine months old this becomes babbling which is not learnt or copied but pre-programmed. The work out of the vocal-chords means babies repeat syllables over and over.

Year 2 – An increase in the ability to manipulate speech sounds. The second year can be roughly divided up into three sub-stages: ‘one-word’, ‘two-word’ and ‘telegraphic’. During the one-word stage children concentrate on building phonemes into words, beginning largely with nouns that reflect their needs/interests. Single words can convey more than one meaning, and when they do it is called a holophrase. Holophrases are used as a substitute for complex grammar – i.e “Milk!” may mean “I want some milk!” or “I’ve spilt some milk!”

This then develops overtime into two word phrases, and then a few months after the two-word stage (age varying from child to child) comes what is known as the telegraphic stage. This is where children begin using increasingly complex multi-word sentences. Grammatical words and endings are also present, and this stage includes all the important function words whilst leaving out things like conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and prepositions.

Year 3 – A child’s pragmatic ability is greater, and they are effective language users.

Year 4 – Children are sophisticated language users by year four. Their use of language is purposeful.

Robin Lakoff's features of women's language

Sociolinguist Robin Lakoff theorised that the language of women could be distinguished from the language of men by the use of several gender-specific traits. One of these include hedges, which are phrases that fill gaps in speech such as ‘sort of’, ‘kind of’, etc. Another Lakoff spoke about is the use of empty adjectives, which are adjectives used to soften and apply an element of friendliness to a conversation, e.g ‘wonderful’ or ‘gorgeous’, despite the fact that they may be meaningless and insincere. This can be seen as holding parallels with linguist Deborah Tannen’s ‘difference theory’, which states that the language of males reflect their conditioned belief that the world is a competitive place whereas women view the world as a network of connections, using their language primarily to make social links.

Another trait proposed by Lakoff is the use of super-polite forms, which are usually independent clauses applied to a request in order to soften the imperative impact of it. For example, rather than saying ‘pass the salt’, one might say ‘would you mind passing the salt’.
According to Lakoff, women also apologize more and tend to speak less often: usually the addition of the adjective ‘sorry’ is not even contextually appropriate, for example ‘I’m sorry, but I think that…’, etc.

Female language according to Lakoff also frequently features indirect requests, which are declarative or exclamative statements which very subtly express a wish or desire. An example of this would be if one were to say ‘gosh, I’m so thirsty’. Although this is dressed as a declarative, pragmatically it means the speaker is asking for a drink. Women’s language also regularly features tag questions, which are statements converted into questions by applying the interrogative formula to the end. For example, ‘it’s a lovely day out, isn’t it?’. This further suggests that women are less direct and use more influential power to control a conversation.

One more trait of women’s language include what is known as hyper-correct grammar and pronunciation. This is the use of clear articulation and prestige grammar during conversation, which allows a certain representation of one’s self.