BRAGG.. saluton,
kaj bonvenon al la lasta programo en ci to serio.
And for those of you who don't speak Esperanto,
I've just said, "Hello, and welcome to the Iast programme
in the adventure of English."
It's often argued
that the modern world needs a common Ianguage
with which to communicate.
That's why Esperanto was invented
in the Iate 1 9th century,
with a dream of providing an artificial second Ianguage
for all the people of the world.
There have been numerous attempts at similar schemes
but none of them anywhere near as popular
as the Ianguage which spread by natural selection
through the 20th century -- English.
English can now claim to be a global Ianguage,
more so than any other Ianguage in history.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media
I'm in Chicago, the Windy City.
The 20th century could be said to begin here.
In 1 87 1, a fire had destroyed old Chicago,
but within two years,
an entire new city was built for a new century.
With a huge charge of economic and technical development,
America was about to burst onto the global stage.
The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck
said, near the end of the 1 9th century,
"The decisive element of modern history
is the fact that the North Americans speak English."
But there were now two Englishes,
or one Ianguage that we might call English-American
or American-English,
and the story of the Iast century
is how these two Englishes have grown together,
sometimes in harmony, sometimes in competition.
America was flexing its economic muscles at that time,
and the words and phrases reflect that.
"Big business", "executive",
"well-heeled", "fat cat",
"go-getter", and "yes-man",
as well as "assembly Iine" and "closed shop" --
they're all American English.
Europe had its towers,
but it took America to build and to name
that quintessential image of the country, the skyscraper.
The first skyscraper ever was built here in Chicago in 1 885.
It's been knocked down,
but this one was built soon afterwards.
It's now the oldest one still standing in Chicago.
Now it's a hotel.
"Hotel", in the modern sense, is an American word.
In French, it just meant a Iarge, private house.
And it was in America
that they first called this reception area a Iobby,
with its desk "clark" -- I mean clerk --
dressed in black, of course, at the front desk,
its bellhop and its concierge,
another European word given its modern meaning in America.
To get to your penthouse, if you should be so Iucky,
you would, of course, need an elevator.
English already had the rather Iess technical word "Iift".
But as Oscar Wilde inevitably said,
"We have really everything in common with America nowadays,
except, of course, Ianguage."
You can see it everywhere,
and a hotel gives us quite a few examples.
In England, we would have a wardrobe.
This is a closet.
In England, we would have a bathroom.
Well, that's the same.
But it could also be called a washroom.
The tub with a faucet, not a bath with a tap.
And when we go into the bedroom --
well, at Ieast that's the same word --
we find that the window has drapes, not curtains.
The bed has covers, not bedclothes.
Instead of a dressing gown, here's a bathrobe.
Beside the bed, there's a nightstand, not a bedside table,
and somewhere there's a trash can, not a wastepaper basket.
The British had Iong Iooked down
on the way the Americans used the Ianguage.
Coleridge thought the word "talented"
was a vile and barbarous American word,
but it was, in fact, English.
Dickens noted how they corrupted the Ianguage
with words Iike "reliable" and "Iengthy".
There's always been some perhaps misinformed resistance
to American words.
But the Americans have never cared much for English opinion
about their use of the English Ianguage.
The poet Walt Whitman observed in 1 888
that American English was the apotheosis of slang.
A glorious new Ianguage, he said,
reinvented away from the traditions and authority
of British English.
Hey, Mike, we got a problem.
I don't have the chicken wings. I ordered them two days ago.
Let's go for the Wishbone omelette.
And with the omelette,
you also get a corn muffin, a biscuit, or toast.
-You guys get growth. -Yeah.
You get apple-maple or chicken-andouille.
We should point out that the increase
will not be any more than the savings.
Right.
They're writing over 2,600 in a quarter.
AIrighty.
In Britain, correct English was Iinked with manners,
morals, and, of course, class.
Just as one had to keep a straight bat
and hold one's knife and fork correctly,
so one had to use the right words.
Use the wrong one and you could be caught out.
Edwardian English abhorred flamboyance.
When somebody wrote of Rupert Brooke,
the young poet who died during the First World War,
that he'd Ieft Cambridge University
in "a blaze of glory",
the poet's mother crossed out that melodramatic phrase
and replaced it with a single word.
It read, "He Ieft Cambridge University in July."
In part, it was a case of British formality
versus American informality.
American was thought to be a classless version of English.
And there were those in Edwardian society
who found that idea difficult to tolerate.
But the First World War would test and change most of that.
Edwardian English, Iike its Victorian parent,
Ioved pageantry, pomp,
and a society where every word knew its place.
The trenches of the First World War
detonated much of that.
The First World War gave us new figures of speech,
as well as a vision of equality here in the trenches.
Before the war, if you were in trouble or under pressure,
you might have said you'd been "thrown Iike a horse rider"
into a wasteland or a swamp,
perhaps under "a shower of criticism" --
words drawn from peaceful country Iife.
After 1 91 8, you'd probably say were being "bombarded",
"under a barrage", "shell-shocked",
or "in no-man's Iand".
The First World War gave British English
"firepower" and "front Iine",
"gas mask", and "camouflage",
"bonk" for "to shell with artillery"
and "dud" for "defective round".
"The balloon goes up" was the signal
for the artillery to open fire at zero hour.
"Over the top" comes from the terrifying moment
of climbing out of the trench.
The biblical phrase "at the eleventh hour"
gained a new meaning
from the time the final cease-fire was declared
on Armistice Day --
all terms from the very end of World War I.
When the armistice finally came,
more than the First World War was over.
It underlined what was already a trend,
the shift of power in many areas,
including Ianguage, to America.
While Europe had been burning,
the USA had experienced massive industrial expansion.
The factories of the northern states needed new workers
and the poor of the South,
many the descendants of former slaves,
saw the opportunity they offered and moved in.
The migrants, overwhelmingly black,
came along tracks Iike these and railroads Iike these.
They came to the cities of the north, cities Iike Chicago,
pounding with growth then and pounding with growth now.
And they changed America.
They also changed the English Ianguage.
In the 1 9th century,
almost all Afro-Americans had Iived in the South.
By the end of the century, 95%% were up in the North.
And they injected a new energy into the Ianguage.
They brought African speech, African rhythm, new vocabulary.
# We're gonna boogie #
# We're gonna get in the groove #
# We're gonna do these boogie blues #
BRAGG.. What brought black and white together
and put black speech into mainstream American
was music.
First jazz, then blues.
New words and expressions
started to accompany the soundtrack
of what America is perhaps best known for --
popular culture.
Today, the Ianguage would be unimaginable
without its colonisation by words and expressions
of black and African origin.
The very words "jazz" and "blues"
arrived from Afro-American speech
at the beginning of the century.
The African word hipikat,
meaning "attuned to the environment"
or "with his eyes open",
gave us "hepcat", and, Iater, "hip" and "cat".
Later still, of course,
its meaning grew to include the idea of hippy.
White American embraced black American speech
when people started to dance the hootchy-kootchy
and then the cake-walk, the shimmy, jive, and boogie-woogie.
# We're gonna boogie woogie, woogie, woogie, woogie #
# All night long #
# We're gonna boogie woogie, woogie, woogie, woogie #
# All night long #
And perhaps it was the sex in black music
that seduced white America.
"Jazz" itself may originally have been a word
meaning "to have sex".
Later on, "rock 'n' roll" certainly was.
"Jelly roll", "cherry pie", and "custard pie"
were all words for the female organ.
"Shack up", in the sense of Iiving together,
comes from black speech at this time, too.
BIack American expressions are now so mainstream
that it's forgotten almost all Americans
and very many British, including almost all youth,
now speak some sort of "black".
Young people want to be cool or bad,
which was first recorded as meaning "good"
in America in 1 928.
Others might want to be groovy or mellow,
which came from "melody" in jazz circles in the early '40s.
Square is out, but it may come back.
# We're gonna get in the groove #
# We're gonna do these boogie blues #
# Boogie #
Thank you! Thank you!
BRAGG.. But it wasn't just black words
flooding into American English in the early 20th century.
Around that time,
the country's population nearly doubled in just 30 years,
mainly due to incomers from Central and Eastern Europe.
As more Europeans migrated here and began to speak English,
words from their own Ianguages came with them
and American English, Iike English English before it,
was ready and able to soak them all up,
and what was once foreign,
now sounds apple-pie American English.
If this coffee had been really hot,
someone might have said "ouch",
from the German word autsch -- A-U-T-S-C-H.
As well as "hamburger" and "frankfurter",
the Germans gave us words Iike "wanderlust", "seminar",
"dumb" for stupid,
and even the game of poker, from the German pochen.
"Bum", meaning "tramp",
comes from bummler, a good-for-nothing;
"Hold on!" from Halt an!.
And "so Iong" from the German so lange.
so lange itself may have originally come
from the Yiddish shalom.
"Bagels", "Iox", "pastrami", and "borscht"
became part of our "nosh", another Yiddish word.
Soon, German and Yiddish speech patterns flooded the Ianguage,
and by the end of the century,
we would all, quite naturally, be using turns of phrase
such as "Am I hungry", "I'm telling you",
"Now he tells me", "Could I use a drink",
"I should worry."
And there was plenty to worry about in the 1 920s.
The prohibition of alcohol encouraged gangsters,
and in a garage on this unremarkable site,
seven men were mown down by AI Capone's mob
in the notorious St Valentine's Day Massacre.
It was a time of racketeers and hatchet men,
of goons and finks.
If you took the rap for a heist,
you might find yourself in the can
or even in the hot seat,
especially for a hijack with a sub-machine gun.
A woman was a chick, a bimbo, a broad, or a babe,
and a telephone was a blower.
We Iearned not to spill the beans
or we'd be taken for a ride,
and to avoid gimmicks and pranksters,
junkies, pushers, and the fuzz.
And when we drank hooch, we had to watch out for a Mickey Finn.
Gangsters are forever Iinked with the movies,
never more so than here.
John Dillinger, the FBI's Public Enemy Number One,
was gunned down as he Ieft the Biograph Movie Theater in 1934.
He was fingered, or betrayed, by his companion,
the notorious Lady in Red.
She's still here.
[ Gunshots ]
MAN: Now, beat it, you two mugs, before I Iose my temper.
Everybody get out of here. Come on.
By the 1 930s, motion pictures and sound had been united,
and the talkies were in full swing,
bringing a new vocabulary.
Going to the movies at a movie theatre or nickelodeon
was a national pastime.
You could see the stars in close up,
in a weepie or a tearjerker,
Iaugh at some slapstick,
or be gripped by a spinechiller or a cliff-hanger.
While the usherette was selling ices,
you could watch a trailer for next week's show.
You might even dream of going for a screen test yourself.
More than anything else,
the talking picture would be the engine
to spread American ideas and American English
from Hollywood around the country
and then around the globe over the next century.
MAN: Hey, where's the guy that hit me?.
Come on. Get over here.
Hey.
But back in Britain, their Ianguage caused an outrage.
But with the popularity of Hollywood,
those complaints were simply swept aside
by most people in Britain.
Films were starting to bring the two Ianguages closer together.
But despite the incursions of its vigorous cousin,
English in the U.K. was alive and well
with its own style
and also with an awareness of American influence.
P.G. Wodehouse defined himself, in some measure,
by stressing Englishness,
yet he was informal and up-to-date with phrase-making,
as you can see from a couple of phrases.
"She had a penetrating sort of Iaugh.
Rather Iike a train going into a tunnel."
You could say first half Edwardian English,
second half American English.
Or "There's such a thing as going too far,
and you have gone it."
Again, could be Edwardian and American.
Wodehouse came to school here, at Dulwich College in London,
and he Ieft the school his books
and the desk on which he wrote many of them.
And a writer regarded as the epitome of American style
also came here to Dulwich College.
Raymond Chandler was seven years younger than Wodehouse.
He was born in Chicago, but came to England as a young boy
and became naturalised British at the age of 1 9.
From the Edwardian playing fields of Dulwich College
came BIandings and Jeeves in a timeless England
and the mean streets of L.A. and Philip Marlowe
in a timeless America.
Marlowe is the name of a house at this school.
Just as Wodehouse played with British English,
Chandler played with American English,
making it elegant but tough.
MAN: "It was a blonde.
A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."
"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."
BRAGG: In the year Chandler published
the entertaining American prose of "Farewell My Lovely",
Hitler was preparing to invade England
and make German the common Ianguage of Europe.
Different situations make different demands on a Ianguage.
CHURCHILL: We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
We shall fight in the air.
We shall fight on the beaches.
We shall fight on the Ianding grounds.
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills.
We shall never surrender.
This is part of Churchill's war rooms,
under ground behind Downing Street,
and from this desk,
he made his broadcasts to the nation.
In 1940, Britain stood alone against Hitler.
Winston Churchill made a speech
which drew on the deep historical roots
of the English Ianguage.
It's a masterpiece of rhythm and rhetoric.
Churchill had studied the speeches of EIizabeth I,
and this has the same resolve as her words at Tilbury
which inspired the English to repulse the Spanish Armada.
And he digs deeper into the history of English.
AII but a handful of words here
can be traced back to OId English.
The key vocabulary, "We shall go on to the end,"
"fight", "strength", "island", "Ianding",
"ground", "field", "street", "hills", and "never"
had all been part of English for more than a thousand years.
Churchill was rallying some of the country's oldest words
to the fight, not to the battle --
that was a French word.
And "surrender", too, is a French word.
The hostile Nazi invasion never came,
but in 1 942, a friendly American one did.
#...that the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming #
Nothing could reverse the effects
of such sustained exposure to American English.
The G.I.s introduced words Iike "beefburger", "crewcut",
and "disc jockey",
"gizmo", "gobbledygook", "pin-up", and "G.I. bride".
# And we won't come back till it's over over there #
But the traffic was not all one way.
The Americans published this book,
"A Short Guide to Great Britain",
the War and Navy Department, Washington, D.C.,
for all their troops in this country.
It's very friendly,
and, I think, acute about the British.
"The British are reserved," it says, "but not unfriendly."
Then it describes it.
"Don't show off," it says,
"The British dislike showing off.
Don't say you've got too much money.
You've got much more than the British,
and don't show off about this."
They Iearned how to eat.
They Iearned that french fries were chips
and a smoked herring was a kipper.
They Iearned that bowling alleys and ten pins
were skittle alleys with nine pins,
that a five-and-ten store should be called a bazaar
and that instead of "okay", they should say "righto".
And they were told, "The British are tough.
Don't be misled by the British tendency
to be soft-spoken and polite.
The English Ianguage didn't spread across oceans, mountains,
jungles, and swamps of the world
because these people were 'pantywaists'."
Pantywaist.
That's American English
for what the British would have called a sissy.
By 1 944, on the eve of D-Day,
1.5 million United States soldiers
were billeted around Britain.
The Americans eventually returned home.
But the Ianguage they brought with them has stayed ever since,
and English was massively enriched.
In March 2000, the pope made his historic first-ever visit
to Israel.
On this important occasion,
he addressed his hosts not in their own Ianguage, Hebrew,
nor in the Vatican's official Ianguage, Latin,
nor in his native Polish, but in English.
May peace be God's gift
to the Iand he chose as his own.
BRAGG: English has become the primary Ianguage
of global communication,
the most understood Ianguage in the world.
So why has English become so important on the world stage?.
1 9th-century Iinguists felt
that there was something special and unique
about the Ianguage itself.
In 1 851, Jakob Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm,
told the Royal Academy of Berlin
that English was the strongest Ianguage
because it had dropped all its complicated word endings.
He wrote, "Of all modern Ianguages,
not one has acquired such great strength and vigour
as the English.
For none of the Iiving Ianguages can be compared with it
as to richness, rationality, and close construction."
You'd be hard-pressed to find any Iinguists today
who would follow that Iine
or even a Iess triumphalist argument put forward
by another foreign scholar, the Dane Otto Jespersen,
in 1 905.
He wrote,
"The French Ianguage
is Iike the stiff French garden of Louis XIV,
while the English Ianguage is Iike an English park
in which you're allowed to walk everywhere
without having to fear rigorous regulations."
But most Iinguists today
would agree not with the genius of Jakob Grimm
but with the Iinguistic scholar David Crystal,
that the spread of a Ianguage has Iittle to do
with its intrinsic qualities.
Social, political, and economic factors
are now seen as the forces behind the spread of Ianguages.
There's a saying among Iinguists
that a Ianguage is a dialect with an army and a navy.
So, a Ianguage that spreads just has more clout behind it.
At the end of the Second World War,
British and American troops were stationed as administrators
in Europe and the Far East.
In Japan, Iearning English became compulsory.
In Germany, knowing English gave people an edge
in dealing with officials and regulations after the Reich.
And a world impoverished by the war
turned its eyes enviously to the American dream.
WOMAN: And now the dream cars of tomorrow!
MAN:...expressing not only the American Iove of beauty,
but also the basic freedom of the American people.
BRAGG: And the Ianguage of that dream was English,
a Ianguage that came to represent
the delights of consumption and consumerism,
of material advance and its promise of happiness.
But perhaps the most desirable consumer product
at the end of the 20th century was first developed in England,
in Manchester.
It made the English Ianguage adapt and expand
to a whole new vocabulary.
In 1 948, this was the state of the art
of what the boffins were calling the electronic brain,
the computing machine,
or the electronic numerical integrator and computer.
The Baby,
as this rather Iarge piece of hardware was christened,
was the first to store a digital programme
in its 2048-bit memory.
In the years since Baby received its first input of data,
the computer and its vocabulary have embraced the microcircuit,
the database, the chip and the mouse,
the floppy disk and the hard disk.
We've progressed from the mainframe to the desktop,
the Iaptop to the handheld,
and now even a cellphone Iike this
can download information from the Internet.
And with an estimated 85% of the world's webpages
being written in English,
this newest technology has become one of the great conduits
taking the English Ianguage around the world.
With the dollar Ieading the world economy
in the Iatter part of the 20th century,
English became the most significant trading Ianguage.
GIobal trade in English is reckoned to be worth
over $4,000 billion.
That's three or four times as much
as the next richest Ianguages,
Japanese and German.
Though Chinese has more native speakers than English,
trade conducted in Chinese
is just one-tenth of the value of trade in English.
Hello.
Many design. Good price now.
You can choose what colour do you Iike.
I have tie-dye and with pattern or plain colour.
Hello. You buy.
BRAGG: There's an international rule
that the seller speaks the buyer's Ianguage.
If I want your money,
it pays me to Iearn to talk to you in your Ianguage.
It's the same on a Iarger scale.
Whether selling postcards to sightseers
or raw materials to industrialists,
English opens the purse strings.
Here in India, some 40 million people speak English fluently
as if it were a first Ianguage,
though, mostly, it's a second or third Ianguage.
But it's reckoned that a third of the population here
have some sort of familiarity with the Ianguage,
and that's over 300 million people.
And that pattern is repeated around the globe.
Wherever there's a population of English speakers,
you'II find a much Iarger number of people
who come into contact with it and have some knowledge of it
or who are at Ieast Iearning it.
Now is the time to relax and enjoy the programme.
BRAGG: In the second half of the 20th century,
the number of people speaking English as their first Ianguage
has doubled to nearly 400 million.
Though it's still not as many as the 900 million
who speak Mandarin Chinese.
English is national Ianguage, international Ianguage,
so I start English.
I can use English Ianguage to speak with other people.
I want to earn much money.
[ Laughter ]
What I want to do today...
BRAGG: However, there are another 500 million people
around the world
who are bilingual in English or at Ieast speak it fluently.
It's here that the big expansion has taken place.
The number has quadrupled in 50 years.
[ Woman speaking native Ianguage ]
But because of its usefulness as a second Ianguage,
some 1,000 million other people
are Iearning English in schools and colleges.
Added together, that's about 2,000 million people,
or a third of the world's population,
who have some knowledge of English.
It's an unprecedented expansion.
English is now used
as an official or semi-official Ianguage
in over 60 countries around the world
and plays a significant role in 20 more.
English is now well established on all six continents.
And it doesn't stop there.
Because, in all sorts of ways,
when nation needs to speak unto nation,
they do it in English.
[ Women speaking native Ianguages ]
...the implementation of Lisbon, and that gives you all...
BRAGG: At the European Parliament in Strasbourg,
business in the chamber is translated
into all the Ianguages of the member states.
Ten years ago, French was the Ianguage most commonly used
by delegates outside the chamber.
Today it's English.
The president of the Parliament
to the president of the Commission.
BRAGG: Final European Parliament documents
are translated into all Ianguages,
but it's the Ianguage they are drafted in that's changed.
In 1 970, 60% of E.U. documents were drafted in French
and 40%% in German.
By 1 997, 45%% were drafted in English,
40%% in French, and 15%% in other E.U. Ianguages.
English plays the Ieading role,
not just here at the E.U.
but in international bodies all around the world --
the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank,
and hundreds of other associations.
English is important even when
it's not the natural Ianguage of the major players.
It's the only official Ianguage of OPEC,
the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
It's the working Ianguage
of the European Free Trade Association,
of the Association of Baltic Marine Biologists,
the Asian Amateur Athletic Association,
the European Association of Fish Pathology,
and the African Hockey Federation.
Whatever country they come from,
most medical journals are published in English,
Iike this one -- the Japanese "Journal of Bio-Chemistry".
It's not translated into English.
It's published only in English,
and its writers include Tatsuo Irimura,
Hiruki Takachuko, Kentaro Kato.
AImost anywhere
that a body wants to communicate with the world
or where they want access to the Iiterature
of international politics, ideas, culture, and sport,
you'II find English.
In Germany,
international corporations such as Daimler and Mercedes
conduct important meetings in English
and thousands of English words
have made their way into German speech and print,
from "accountant", "acid trip", and "advertising agency"
to "yellow pages", "yuppie", and "zapper".
A movement has been started to hold back words
for which there's already a German equivalent,
though, when it's a choice
between "pesticide" and unkrautvernichtungsmittel,
the smart money is on the import.
But this opposition is nothing compared to France,
where the tide of Franglais was seen as a national threat.
Just as we took in thousands of French words in the Middle Ages,
French speakers and writers today
are taking on thousands
of English and American expressions.
-Un meeting. -Un Ioser.
Le surfer.
-Une garden party. -Le basketball.
Mobile.
-Le downloader. -Le football.
-Le soft-drink. -Cheeseburger.
-Cocktail. -Un jumbo jet.
-Le scotch. -Un sandwich.
-Milkshake. -Le parking.
Pony club.
BRAGG: So many English words made their way to France
that it became clear that something had to be done,
and in 1994, the French government passed a Iaw
prohibiting the use of English words
where good French equivalents existed,
on pain of a hefty fine.
The British Parliament threatened retaliatory action
if La Loi Toubon, as it was called,
was not watered down.
But the most recent edition
of the Academie francaise dictionary
did admit about 6,000 new words to the French Ianguage,
including, for the first time,
a number of Franglais words and expressions.
But most of them are from the 1950s,
such as le cover girl, le bestseller, and le blue jeans.
Most of those in everyday use, from le weekend to le zoom,
were excluded.
It's not just the old English-French rivalry.
Norway and Brazil have recently adopted similar measures
to keep English out.
It's the colourful words
that people want to borrow from English.
But the Ianguage used as a tool for international documents
is a different matter.
This is a sample.
It's an English that bears only a passing resemblance
to the Ianguage you and I speak.
"According to article 7 of directive 96/92/EC,
member states must designate a system operator
to be responsible for operating, ensuring the maintenance of,
and, if necessary,
developing the transmission system in a given area,
and its interconnection with other systems, et cetera."
Mind you, there are places in England
where they write Iike this.
We've all been globalised.
It's very important, and it's very dull.
It's this official sort of Ianguage
that's being promoted around the world
by government bodies, multinational corporations,
and international associations.
It's stripped out turns of speech and colourful idioms,
deliberately so, because this is Ianguage
designed to be easily understood internationally
and Iocal terms could be confusing.
This sort of globalisation, I think,
could become a cemetery for English.
Is anyone ever going to write a poem in this sort of Ianguage
or use it when they fall in Iove or when they have a real row
or express any of the personal feelings they have?.
But, thankfully, as English spreads around the globe,
alongside its official use,
it has developed rich vernacular varieties.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
BRAGG: English has been spoken in Singapore
since the early 19th century,
but after independence from Britain in 1 958,
Singapore went a step further
and English was made the official Ianguage
of business and government.
Besides its ability to unite an ethnically diverse population
of Chinese, Malays, and Indians,
the economic potential of English was paramount.
At school, children Iearn their own first Ianguage,
but they must all Iearn English.
An elite minority Ianguage
has become the property of the whole population.
But the day-to-day English
that the people of Singapore actually speak
is a far cry from the official English
that the government wants them to Iearn.
It's a vibrant, expressive dialect nicknamed Singlish,
full of vocabulary, grammar, and inflections borrowed
from the Singaporeans' native Ianguages.
And this may be the irony of the global spread of English.
The more widely it's spoken,
the more it may fracture into Iocal dialects,
which will become increasingly mutually unintelligible.
People will make English their own
and, in doing so, will make it something else.
This has happened before -- to Latin,
which broke into French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Romanian.
But English has always embraced variety and change,
and it still does.
And in the final part of our final programme,
I'II be Iooking at how English is behaving now in this country.
In this series, we've Iooked at how English began
as an obscure tribal dialect 1,500 years ago
and became a Ianguage for the world,
spoken more widely and with more variety
than any other Ianguage in history.
For this, the final part of the final programme,
I want to go down these islands
to take soundings of the state of English
in its homeland today.
When English came here in the 5th century,
it began to push the Celtic Ianguages to the fringes,
to the margins,
to Wales, of course, to Cornwall,
and here to the Outer Hebrides.
And in all those places, it's hung on.
I'm on Ness at the northern tip of the Outer Hebrides,
and the Ianguage around here spoken by almost everyone
is Scots Gaelic.
It's one of UNESCO's endangered Ianguages,
but, so far, it's hung on almost miraculously.
But now, after 1,500 years,
it's facing its biggest battle ever
against the still relentless advance of English.
[ Woman singing in Scots Gaelic ]
Did you have English and Gaelic
when you went to school in Barvas Primary School?.
I can't remember, but I don't think I had one word of English.
BRAGG: This traditional Hebridean village
was abandoned 30 years ago.
The Iocal population are now bilingual,
but these adults grew up speaking only Gaelic
and had to Iearn English at school.
I think we could count to 1 0, I would think,
and part of the alphabet,
but it wasn't a totally strange Ianguage to me, as I remember.
-Will we have a seat?. -Yeah. Why not?.
I think I was totally bilingual
by the time I Ieft secondary school.
My grandfather's generation would speak English
in a way different from what we would.
We were very conscious that they were...
Like a Iiteral translation?.
Yeah, we would put it at that time,
that they were Iess advanced in their use of English.
Yes, that's true. That's true.
They were thinking in Gaelic.
There's still some of that today in the town,
that "after being" or "after talking to somebody"
or "after being somewhere".
And there's the "yourself" and "myself".
The use of "yourself".
When two people would meet and say, "It's yourself".
-Yes. -You feel Iike saying no.
AIthough youngsters nowadays,
they've got whatever transfers across from the media.
GIRL: If you're talking about something Iike pop music
or something in the media that you've seen,
you're not going to talk about it in Gaelic
when it's been in English that you've actually seen it.
Words in Gaelic which describe situations so much better.
For example, cianalas. It's more than homesickness.
It's used to describe homesickness,
but it takes in sort of nostalgia
and sort of a Iot of feeling more so than "homesickness".
And the same applies to old man.
We would use the word bodach, the old bodach down the road
or the old bodach next door.
I would speak Gaelic to my grandmother and my mother,
but, to my friends, I speak English.
Gaelic seems to have an image problem
amongst the young people.
I mean, we used to speak Gaelic all the time
when we were in primary school,
but if you have one person who comes into your class
who speaks English,
everybody has to change or that person's isolated.
So, ever since then, I mean,
we've been speaking English to everybody.
We're just so used to it now it's a habit.
The English spoken here still has the tang of the Gaelic.
But its edge is getting duller.
It's sounding more and more gradually
Iike the Ianguage of the mainland.
But how stable is that?.
English continues to devil away up here,
and if even Lewis weakens, can GIasgow be far behind?.
GIasgow has some of the most distinctive voices in Britain.
Companies Iocate call centres here
because they think that the softer version
of the GIaswegian accent
is one of the most trustworthy and friendly in the country.
MAN: I'II send an e-mail out to resort
and request that both reference numbers
have rooms which are next to each other.
Yeah, I'II do that. That's absolutely fine.
So that would be half past 4:00.
Yeah, half past 4:00 in the morning.
The brochure will probably take
between 7 to 10 days before it comes out.
Okay, so you can confirm today for £125.
Which is your nearest airport to go from?.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
BRAGG: But at its broadest,
GIaswegian dialect is furthest away from standard English.
It can be virtually incomprehensible to outsiders.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
STUART-SMITH: Many dialects have eroded to the extent
that they're just accents.
But other dialects have retained their distinctive nature.
GIaswegian is a dialect which is made up of a range --
actually two different forms of English --
Scottish English, which was taken over in the 1 8th century,
which is essentially
standard English spoken with a Scottish accent.
And then Scots,
which has its own distinctive historical development.
For example, OId English "E" is "head" in standard English,
so it's been retained.
But, in Scotland, is "EE", so it's "heed".
BRAGG: GIasgow University sends researchers into the streets
to monitor changes in speech.
Right, so, one at a time,
just tell me what it says on the card.
-Heed. -Head.
Heed.
Hoose.
-House. -Hoose.
-Mooth. -Mouth.
-Mooth. -Mooth.
Mooth.
STUART-SMITH: OId English "OO" is still in Scots today.
So they say "mooth".
What about the accent?. Does that also change over time?.
We have, for example, "FF" for "TH".
Now, in Cockney, it's very normal to say "I fink".
But up here, it isn't.
However, it is now.
-Fink. -Think.
-Think.
Fink.
-Bu'er. -Butter.
-Bu'er. -Bu'er.
Bu'er.
Inevitably, there has been speculation that it's the media,
that it's watching soaps, it's watching TV,
and particularly southern English forms of TV,
that are causing these changes.
But there's a problem here.
There's no real research
to actually establish this empirically.
Have you any examples of very recent new GIaswegian words?.
The one that we've been quite excited about is "nip".
It's a verb,
and an example of "nip" would be "I nipped her,"
"I saw her nipping him."
Can you think of any words that you use in GIasgow
that nobody else uses?.
Nip.
Yeah?. And what does nipping mean?.
Snogging.
We don't exactly know what "nip" means.
It seems to mean something Iike "kiss" or "snog",
probably "get off with".
There's a Iot of talk about this particular time,
the Iast 25, the Iast 50 years,
being the period
when regional accents retreated and began to die.
What evidence do we have for that here?.
An accent is actually a combination of features.
And so you can change certain features in the same way
in GIasgow and in Reading,
but because the original combination of features
that you started off with
in Reading and GIasgow were different,
although you have the same changes
for some of the features,
the rest of the features are quite different,
so the resulting mix will remain distinctive.
So my feeling from Iooking at GIaswegian at the moment
is that, actually, GIaswegian will retain its distinctiveness.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
BRAGG: As we've Iooked back at the adventure of English,
we've steamed through centuries
and so we've been able to see
sweeping changes in the vocabulary
and the way it was used.
But many changes in Ianguage have happened over a Iong period
and in small steps -- word by word and sound by sound.
So when we Iook at the way Ianguage is changing now,
all around us,
it's not so easy to see the bigger picture
or where the changes are Ieading,
which currents or influences will mark out the future.
One of the greatest causes of change in English
has been its encounter
with other cultures and other tongues.
And these encounters are still happening today.
My next stop is Bradford to see this in action.
This is Lilycroft School in Bradford.
Bradford has one of the Iargest concentrations
of South Asian populations in Britain.
There are about 1.7 million
who have come to this country from South Asia,
from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
making it the biggest ethnic minority.
Many of those who came in the first instance
didn't speak English,
but as their children were born here
and went through the British school system,
they did speak English,
they do speak English in school at Ieast.
Here they speak Yorkshire English.
"Welcome to the tale of a delicious adventure
in a wonderful Iand."
"Kate, not that the name matters much either way.
She barely comes into the story."
"But if wishes were fishes, I bet we'd all throw them back."
The first Ianguage
of these children's parents and grandparents
is usually Urdu or Punjabi,
and that's often the Ianguage that the children speak at home.
And these Ianguages have greatly complicated and enriched
the Yorkshire English they speak at school and on the streets.
MAN: I speak half English and half Punjabi
when I'm talking to my mates.
If I know I can't say this word in English,
I will say it in my own Ianguage.
WOMAN: Kass me means "I swear",
Iike, "I swear I won't do that again."
I find with my white friends,
you know, Iike, accidentally, I will say,
"Kass me, I really did this."
And they'II say, "What is kass me?"
And then I'II say, "It means 'I swear'.
I swear, you know. I'm being honest."
When they use the word kass me,
it's quite funny the way they say it.
They'II go, "Kass me, that happened."
They'II use the Ianguage as well, very differently as well.
They'II walk up to you, and you say, "Awr?" --
What's happening?.
And then they pick it up, "Awr, what's happening?. "
But they don't know they're saying the same thing.
Awr means "What's happening?. "
They don't say, "Awr, what's happening?. "
The only Punjabi word we use when we're texting is awr.
The rest is all short English
Iike you probably use when you're on the Internet,
sending a message.
English is borrowing, adopting, changing,
altering words all the time,
as we've seen throughout these programmes.
It's a massive job keeping track of them,
being, as it were, the keeper of words.
If any one body deserves to be called
the keeper of the English Ianguage,
it's the Oxford English Dictionary.
And that's my next stop.
We've been travelling down the country from the Hebrides south,
just taking soundings as to what the Ianguage is Iike these day,
and I wondered how these figured in your dictionary.
From the Outer Hebrides, there's bodach, an old man.
An old man, yeah.
I believe that word actually still
is in the Oxford English Dictionary
in the sense of an old -- in the sense of --
in a slightly earlier sense -- a spectre or spectral presence.
In GIasgow, there's the word "nip" being used
as "to get off with".
It's not in the dictionary yet in that Iast sense, no.
We haven't got enough evidence for it.
We're Iooking for fairly extensive evidence
from GIasgow or elsewhere.
In Bradford, with the Punjabi and Urdu influence,
there are several words.
Kass me, meaning "I swear".
There's awr -- "How's it going?. "
And "chuddies" -- underpants.
"Chuddies" is in the OED already,
possibly from a Hindi word.
And that's one of these words
that's achieved some sort of currency
through the media and through television.
And the other words that you mentioned,
no, they're not in the dictionary yet.
Again, this is a borderline area.
The interface between cultures.
It's always an interesting area for Iinguistic description.
And we'II tend to wait several years
before a word finds some sort of
more established place in the Ianguage
before we put it into the dictionary.
The operation going on behind us here
is a sort of scientific investigation of the Ianguage.
Evidence starts coming
into our card files and our computer files,
which we're monitoring
and we can see that it's maybe significant.
Of course, so much of the Ianguage is just sort of sparks
that disappear.
Let's talk about slang, about "bling bling".
"BIing bling", meaning ostentatious jewellery
or as an adjective relating to that,
ostentatious wealth, that sort of thing.
It crops up 5 or 6 years ago,
but it's stayed around, so it's on the way into the dictionary.
It's not there yet, but it's on the way in there.
It's being reviewed by our advisors at the moment.
What about the relation
between English English and American English
and now other Englishes?.
The whole concept of different varieties of English
is obviously more important now than it was --
or more recognised now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
So, whereas at the time, you might have thought
of British English and American English
as being the main features on the Iinguistic Iandscape,
people talk about the different Englishes
now that you can count these days.
So, you can have a plural -- Englishes --
with American English, Australian English,
Singapore English, Indian English, et cetera.
And they've all got their own characteristics.
So they're independent in many ways,
but they also feed
into a general sort of Internet English, if you Iike.
What's the size of the dictionary at the moment?.
About 750,000 words.
This is covering English from the Anglo-Saxon period
up to the present day.
You seem to have fairly tough requirements
of taking words in.
Do you ever dispense with words?.
Do you ever Iet words drop, kick them out?.
We have a very simple rule
for taking words out of the dictionary,
and that is we don't.
Once a word is in the full Oxford English Dictionary,
it stays there
because it's part of the history of the English Ianguage.
So, once it's in, it's there.
Have you got any favourite ones you want us to take out?.
[ Laughter ]
BRAGG: The adventure of English began 1 5 centuries ago,
when invading Germanic tribes brought their dialect here
from mainland Europe.
English survived against the odds,
facing near extinction
from other invaders and other Ianguages,
before becoming our national tongue.
Over the Iast five centuries, as we've seen,
settlement and subjugation, industry and imperialism,
armies and art have combined to make it a Ianguage
not for this country alone,
but for the world.
But the adventure has already gone even further.
A quarter of a century ago,
NASA Iaunched its two Voyager probes into deep space.
At the end of 2003, they are heading out of our solar system
in the hope of contact with unknown forms of Iife.
Each probe carries a gold-plated recorded disk,
designed to Iast for 1,000 million years in space,
and on each disk,
there are brief greetings in 55 of the planet's Ianguages.
[ People speaking native Ianguages ]
The only Iong message,
recorded by the then-Secretary of the United Nations,
Kurt Waldheim, is in English.
WALDHEIM: I send greetings
on behalf of the people of our planet.
We step out of our solar system into the universe
seeking only peace and friendship,
to teach if we are called upon...
English is on its way to the stars.
But the story of English
has also been one of constant changes in the Ianguage.
It's never stood still, as we've seen.
So, if, a thousand years or more in the future,
people meet Iife from other planets
who have Iearned their 20th-century English
from Voyager,
it'II sound as strange and archaic
to English speakers here in the future
as the earliest Anglo-Saxon does to us today.
MAN: "Hwat!
We gardena inyear dagum
feodcyninga, frym gefrunon,
hufa aefelingas ellen fremedon..."
BRAGG: "In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God and the Word was God
and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."
Subtitling made possible by Ahmad AL Zouabi