A Short Course In Speaking English(es)

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 116
John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, and Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

Sixteen centuries ago, the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, bringing their Germanic language with them. Sometime after that, Vikings invaded, then Normans, each changing English in different ways. Then the Empirehappened, and voilá! English as we know it happened!

If your grade-school English linguistics history resembled mine, you probably received a version of this just-so story. English underwent massive changes in the distant past, until it eventually resembled today’s vernacular, and the peasants rejoiced. Even then, I found this narrative unsatisfying. Apparently John McWhorter, Cornell linguist and sometime pundit, felt equally dissatisfied. He’s spent his career documenting how English has evolved, and continues to evolve.

English language evolution is substantially hidden because nobody left written records of change. McWhorter finds clues hidden in what historians and scholars wrote, but also in what they omitted. Languages which rubbed elbows with early English, including Welsh, Cornish, and the now-lost Danish Viking dialect, provide valuable clues. English, McWhorter believes, evolved in hybrid, among bilingual populations.

For instance, English lacks case endings, the word mutations that make Latin and German difficult to learn. But it has the present progressive tense, missing from most Indo-European languages. McWhorter finds other languages that possess, or lack, these functions, and wouldn’t you know? They’re all language that interacted heavily with English, often at swordpoint. From this, McWhorter surmises a history of lively linguistic give-and-take.

McWhorter works from the documentary record, but also from hypothesis. He considers it logical that Celtic languages seeded spoken English with new verb constructions, even as written English (Anglo-Saxon) resisted change. Indeed, in some cases, McWhorter considers the lack of written evidence as proof of deep-seated cultural prejudices and systems of power, which manifest themselves in what literate Anglo-Saxons consider to commonplace to record.

In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, McWhorter reconstructs linguistic change in distant history and written record. But English never achieved some perfect form, and stopped. In Talking Back, Talking Black, McWhorter applies the same narrative reasoning to the most vibrant form of linguistic evolution happening today: Black American English. Far from merely “broken” English, as critics accuse, McWhorter finds lively, vibrant growth taking place.

The arguments surrounding Black English have mostly fallen along two lines. Linguists and sociologists, often writing in specialist journals, insist that Black English has its own sophisticated rules, complex textual history, and social status. Meanwhile mass-media critics, Black and White alike, decry how Black English differs from Standard or “Correct” English, and bemoans the dialect’s backward social status. Both consider their positions apparent.

John McWhorter, Ph.D

Obviously, McWhorter rejects the mass-media narrative. However, he doesn’t do so offhandedly; he makes a persuasive case for Black English and its rich linguistic heritage. For McWhorter, language doesn’t merely convey information; it also builds social bonds and creates communities. In diverse ways, he emphasizes how Black English doesn’t merely let Black Americans communicate knowledge, it also reinforces their communities and binds them together. It also reflects power dynamics in a historically divided America.

Unlike his morphology of Anglo-Saxon, McWhorter has ample material evidence to demonstrate how Black English evolved within living memory. Black Americans left ample books, audio recordings, video performances, and other serious documentary evidence. Therefore he’s able to track, with remarkable precision, exactly when and where Black English underwent significant changes. He makes a persuasive case that Black English remains lively and evolving, adapting to meet society’s changing needs.

He also makes the case that Black Americans, speaking their historic dialect, are “diglossic,” equally fluent in two linguistic forms simultaneously. Unlike me speaking French, having to desperately translate every phrase and sentence internally, Black Americans simply know both dialects, and apply them correctly. Both forms come equally readily, and Black Americans can deploy Standard English when the context demands it.

McWhorter wrote these books separately, but they serve as a pair. One establishes and demonstrates his philological principles in an historical setting, while the other applies the same tools to contemporary settings. Both books run short, under 200 pages plus back matter, and both are comprised of mainly freestanding short thematic essays. This allows sampler-style reading without needing to commit to treatises founded on dense technical terminology.

Throughout, McWhorter maintains his casual tone, conversational digressions, and friendly vibe. Even when he goes beyond ironclad proof, you always believe he’s led you to think about things more deeply. Especially for general audiences, whose familiarity with applied linguistics is probably scanty, McWhorter’s approach will probably guide them through his difficult thought process. That makes these books good introduction to linguistics, an often overlooked field.