Conversation

Very interesting. British history is uniquely interesting since it’s also a history of the English language before it was the global language. Puts it in the uncanny valley of familiarity.
Quote Tweet
Today is St Cuthbert’s Day, & - since I am unable to head for Durham or Lindisfarne – how better to celebrate it than by going on an insanely long walk in search of the scattered trace elements of #AngloSaxonLondon?
Show this thread
Image
1
127
British history is at least the third most salient history for everybody: 1: local history, which is British for ~67M people 2: colonizer history, which is British for ~2B people 3. everywhere else, which got ESLized by either Britain directly or via the US
2
43
English is genuinely unlike other languages since it forms a secondary language layer at a meta level. It does not merely co-exist with other languages or inject loan words into them. It’s an inter-lingual protocol language.
2
59
It’s also unlike any previous language that could claim partial-global status, like French/Latin in Europe, or Sanskrit/Persian in South Asia. They were scholarly/elite global languages because globalization itself was an elite thing. Mostly only elites could travel far.
1
20
Spanish comes close, but it lost the colonial race too early (pre-industrialization) to be a language of global *modernity*. And the Dutch never established a big enough zone. English is it. Occupying Level 2 of our linguistic brains all by itself.
2
22
I think what installed English as the global Level 2 is that it became the language of global institutions that co-evolved with modernity and became the native Level 2 language of the global middle class.
2
28
English is the only language where the slightly anemic middle-class “TV newscaster” version, rather than the robust and colorful working class version, is the most powerful “distribution” so to speak. It’s a middle-heavy language, class-anatomically speaking.
1
38
Most other languages are bottom heavy, including Spanish. There are no living top-heavy languages. The elites of any language are generally not numerous enough to drive the overall evolution of a language, only their uppity dialects.
2
29