I've always been very interested in linguistics, perhaps
because I was brought up in a multilingual environment- speaking several
languages. My father's family are Bristol Welsh and I was born and brought up
in a region of
Wales
where the Welsh language is dominant. My father's own family has a
Welsh-speaking branch too. My mother was a Dutchwoman and I spent a lot of time
in the
Netherlands
with her family, all of whom also spoke German because we were close to the
border where they lived in
Limburg. Some of the older
ones also spoke
Groesbeeks, a rare
dialect that has since died out. I've been thinking lately about how languages
are classified and what defines a language as opposed to a dialect, and why it
matters. Linguists define a dialect as a variety of language, in terms of its
structure deviating from the standard; that refers to a certain group of the
language's speakers. The same goes for an accent except this is when only the
pronunciation system changes leaving the grammar and vocabulary intact. For
example American English is a dialect because an American would say: "I'm
pissed because I've gotten a busted leg from walking on the sidewalk by the
drug store." while a Briton would say the same thing as: "I'm annoyed
because I've got a broken leg from walking on the pavement by the chemists
shop." If you spoke the latter sentence like an American would then you'd
be speaking in an American accent, but
not
in American English. So a speaker's dialect and/or accent will vary depending
on what town, region or country they live in; and their ethnicity or social
class. Some people speak in their own unique way because of upbringing, personal
choice, the influence of foreign languages and dialects or disorders of the brain,
mouth or other vocal organs; these are called
idiolects. (In the case of personal choice I suppose you would have
to call it a "constructed idiolect".) However when dialects of a
language deviate to a certain point from each other, should we reclassify them
as separate languages? How do we know when it's right to do so? In academic
linguistics, there is no universally accepted criterion. Languages come in
families in a similar way to living organisms. Like living organisms they
evolve, mutate, interbreed, speciate and sometimes become extinct
. A while ago I wrote a detailed article on
this subject which is essential background to this one, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/beyond-babel.html.
Different languages are often closely related within the families and
super-families I talk about in the article above. French, Spanish and Italian
are all from the Romance family while Russian, Czech and Polish are all from
the Slavic family. However these languages are not mutually intelligible,
meaning that the speakers of each language can't understand the other when
using their mother tongue. A language that is mutually intelligible means
speakers can converse with each other in their own separate languages and
understand each other. Mutual intelligibility is a sliding scale from total to
partial to slight; there's also asymmetrical intelligibility, where one
language can be understood by another's speaker, but not vice-versa. Sometimes
the written language is mutually intelligible, but not the spoken. Icelanders
can read Faroese, but not talk to a Faroese speaker. A Hindi and Urdu speaker
can easily converse with each other, but not read each other's writing because
the two languages use a completely different script; the same goes for German
and Yiddish. Mutual intelligibility is the most popular yardstick separating
languages from dialects, but because there is a continuum of separation, this
has caused some controversy. There seems to be one exception in this
categorization process that linguists tiptoe around with their arms pressed to
their sides... English.
English is technically a West-Germanic language, the same
family from which derive German and Dutch, yet it is unique in several ways.
Firstly, it's very widespread. Because of the political global influence of
Britain
in the previous couple of centuries, and the
United
States of America during the last century,
it is spoken in every corner of the planet and is a global lingua-franca. It
emerged in
England
in the early Middle Ages and evolved quickly into a wide variety of dialects,
some of which exist to this day. English comes from a sub-family of
West-Germanic called
Ingvaeonic. This
evolved on the continental
North Sea coast at the time
when people in
Britain
were speaking Latin and Celtic- the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic etc
(Boudica moment alert!). Today there is only one other living survivor of the
Ingvaeonic group, Frisian. Unlike English this only exists in a small corner of
the northern
Netherlands,
Denmark and
Germany
and is spoken by only half a million people. Despite being the closest living
language to English it is not mutually intelligible. This is song by Frisian
singer Piter Wilkens, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyFYylF3_g.
The only parts of the lyrics I can understand are the Dutch loanwords because I
can speak Dutch. In terms of upwards reclassification, English can never be
regarded as a dialect of any other language. However, the reclassification I'm
more interested in is downwards. I think English should be split up. Why has no
academic linguist considered this? English seems to be ring-fenced in some way;
for some reason it's become a sacred cow that has been put on a pedestal above
the shuffling and analysis that all other tongues are subjected to. This makes it
very lonely to be a monoglot Anglophone. The reason I say what I do is because
many of the dialects of English are very low on the scale of mutually
intelligibility. I'm thinking specifically in terms of the languages of the
Caribbean
and of some regions of the
British Isles. There has only
been a single official downward split in English that I'm aware of, Scots.
Scots is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language spoken in
the north and west of
Scotland.
Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and some of the rural areas of
Northern
Ireland. Scots was formerly regarded as a
dialect of English, but today it is classified as a language in its own right.
This is fair enough I think. It is only semi-intelligible with British Standard
English and also it has a proud and ancient literary tradition, especially due
to the poet Robert Burns who is as influential in
Scotland
as William Shakespeare is in
England.
Scots recently became a third member of the Ingvaeonic sub-family. However I
can understand fairly well Burns' poem
The
Mouse, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy8lehO7nqg,
wheras somebody speaking Geordie at full strength is very low on the mutual intelligibility
scale for me personally, and therefore probably will be for many other British English
speakers. Geordie is a dialect spoken in northeast
England.
Some people in the region speak Standard English but have a strong Geordie
accent; a good example is the conspiracy researcher Richard D Hall, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbS6hR9citU.
However there are others who speak full strength Geordie with all the different
words and grammatical elements that are absent from Standard English; a good
example is the character Michael in the Alan Partridge comedy series, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ5CdJwKNI8.
In some scenes Michael speaks so strongly that a fellow character describes his
speech as "just a noise!" So why has Geordie not been classified as a
language in the same way Scots has? Dutch and Afrikaans are officially separate
languages, although they are mutually intelligible. Even I, whose Dutch is
rusty, can understand much of spoken Afrikaans. There are other similar
situations. English is the official language of nineteen of the twenty-eight
nations that make up the
Caribbean islands, but the
people who live in those islands don't speak anything I'd recognize as English,
let alone understand. These languages are known as
patois or
creoles and are
familiar around the world because of the international popularity of
Caribbean
music. The lyrics of this ska song are typical of strong patois, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrNDnU6PPk.
You might argue that Althea and Donna are obviously speaking a form of English
because of its Germanic features: word order, idea order, tense formation etc.
But Dutch and German have an identical syntax; that does not make
them English does it? Upgrading a
dialect to a language is merely bureaucratic and rubber-stamping on one level; a
bit like the fuss over whether
Swindon is a town or a
city, or whether Pluto is a planet or Kuiper Belt object. However it can be
significant for political reasons which I'll come on to shortly. Having a
recognized script is important in linguistic status. Scots has this thanks to
writers like Robert Burns. Jamaican Patois has a linguistic academy, see:
http://www.mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/documents/spelling-jamaican-the-jamaican-way-Handout.pdf,
and there are some road signs now written in it. Geordie does have a written
form, but hardly anybody uses it in daily life. In popular culture, written
Geordie is most commonly seen in the adult comic
Viz which is set in an imaginary town in Northumberland called
"Fulchester". Some of the characters are made to speak in strong
Geordie, particularly
Sid the Sexist
whose catchphrase is: "Tits oot feh the lads!"
As far as I can see the English speaking world is falsely
unified and some parts should be expelled. The Anglosphere should consist of
southern
England,
parts of
Ireland
and
Scotland,
North
America,
Australia
and several other places; everywhere else should be declared independent
linguistic zones. When I was at school I used to read a magazine called
English Today and watch a TV documentary
called
The Story of English, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0.
These media speculated that English was developing into separate languages.
This was in the 1980's, so why hasn't it? There are clearly political
influences on language classification. I suspect that Scots has been made a
language because of recurring historical waves of Scottish nationalism, one of
which we're experiencing right now, see:
http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/programme-104-podcast-scottish.html.
Afrikaans was probably upgraded from a Dutch dialect because of the constant
warfare in southern
Africa through the 19th century;
indeed it used to be known as "
Cape
Dutch". So if English is being
held together in the face of all linguistic reason, there must be a political ideology
behind it; yet there is none I can find in the overt world. Does the English
language occupy an important clandestine position in the global world order? Is
it being groomed to play a specific role in the New one, the "Great Works
of Ages"? Language is a very important part of political dynamics, as George
Orwell ingeniously explained, see background links below. I think the answer to
this conundrum might lie in the insights of Orwell. As of yet, I have no firm
solutions myself. Another intriguing revelation about the history of English
has just struck. Thanks to modern DNA testing techniques we now know that,
contrary to previous beliefs, the supposed Anglo-Saxon migration never took
place. We used to think that after the fall of the
Roman Empire,
Britain
collapsed into chaos and immigrants from Ingvaeonic-speaking regions of the
Netherlands,
Germany and
Denmark
took advantage of the power vacuum and moved in to displace the remaining
vestiges of the native civilization. This is not true. There was no significant
immigration into
Britain
at all in the centuries following the departure of
Rome
and DNA analysis of the bodies in graves in the Anglo-Saxon heartland of
East
Anglia during the birth of the Anglo-Saxon
world shows that almost all the people had a pure native pedigree. It seems
that the Anglo-Saxons were not invading foreigners, but instead were local
British people joining in with a cultural revolution. What's more the signs are
there in the English language. English has grammatical features that it does
not share with other Germanic tongues; features that are found in the Celtic
family. The implications of this are astounding. English, the language I am
speaking right now, first emerged as a second language spoken by people whose
first language was Celtic, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLpgVEfy4mQ.
This is a question for which I have no current answers, but could English even
be a
constructed language, at least
partly-constructed? If the answer is "yes", then was it constructed
for a long-term strategic purpose? Perhaps a parting gift from the
Illuminati-occupied
Roman Empire that was considering
the future.
