Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am a nerd, of course, but not even I expect to find linguistics riveting and funny. That’s what happens, though, when you find yourself reading something by a brilliant thinker who’s not afraid to challenge many of his field’s presuppositions and who can spin a good story out of otherwise dry stuff.

McWhorter has a couple of ideas that he both presents with stunning clarity and that he juxtaposes to the dominant thinking of other linguists. Above all, he has a sense that language carries the residue of the people who spoke it rather than the conquerors of those people. It’s a great and liberating sense as far as I’m concerned; these conquered people often vanished from history, but they have left their mark in the way we speak.

The first theory he explores is the notion that our English grammar owes far more to the Celts than we have otherwise imagined. When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived as conquerors, they did not, as some historians have insisted, wipe out the existing Celtic population. Instead, they became an upper-class; as recent DNA evidence suggests, the Celtic Britons seem responsible for more than 90 percent of the genetic make-up of modern-day English.

The official language the island came to speak was indeed “Old English,” a descendent of Old German, but it had a number of grammatical quirks, mostly an absence of case endings and verb conjugations as well as an odd “meaningless do” that featured in sentences like “Do you want…” Where conventional linguistic history has it that these features either just fell away from disuse (something that did not happen to most other descendants of Old German) or emerged as quirks in the case of the “meaningless do,” McWhorter marshals all sorts of evidence to show that what we see is the evidence of a conquered people attempting to speak a new language but mangling it in the process. The Celtic British language indeed featured some of those grammatical elements, and it seems fairly convincing to think that those “second language speakers” of that time – who constituted a substantial majority – mis-learned the invaders’ way of speaking.

McWhorter applies similar thinking in a later era. Convention has it that the Norman Invasion, with its French speakers, infused Middle English with the novelties that eventually turned it into Modern English. And it is clear that we receive many Romance-language words through that transfusion. But vocabulary is a more superficial change in language than its core grammar. McWhorter argues that there were simply never enough Normans around to influence the everyday language; there were perhaps only ten thousand on an island with millions in population, and many of them rarely interacted with the common people.

Instead, says McWhorter, there’s a much more substantial infusion of population from a series of Viking raids. Those small-time conquerors – who tended to land near the coasts and establish colonies that eventually intermarried with the existing population – were ultimately both more numerous and more engaged in the commerce of everyday life. They are the ones, McWorter says, who brought about the further erosion of conjugation and case endings that is distinct to English. What’s more, he points out triumphantly, while the written record will always be far behind the conventional ways most people talk, the written records show that such changes began in the regions where the Vikings settled rather than in places closer to Norman strongholds.

He offers one more intriguing hypothesis from the same pattern of analysis. He notes that Old German is itself already a somewhat trimmed down version of its precursor Old Indo-European. Among other strange changes, it’s a rare language that goes from hard consonants tike ‘P’ to softer ones like “F,” as in Pater becoming Father. Using a kind of CSI—History of Language, he speculates that it’s possible the alternation we see is the result of a transfusion from the way Semitic speakers would have learned and bastardized the language.

Then, in perhaps the most speculative part of the book, he considers the possibility that the Phoenicians of Carthage – they of the Punic Wars, and speakers of Semitic Akkadian – may have had a larger geographic presence in the Scandinavian areas where Old German first emerged. That is, he proposes that our language has never been “pure,” that it has always been altered by contact with peoples who, though they have not gone onto political power, have mis-learned and passed along a new kind of speech.

If all that weren’t enough – a coherent story that gives a glimpse of academic controversy and still manages to stitch together different historical developments – this also offers the best grammatical defense I have ever heard for why I should let go the, to-me, ear-scraping sound of using the plural “them” to refer to individuals as a gender-neutral pronoun. First, he says, there’s evidence for such a use going back to Shakespeare and before; it’s always been a part of the language.

Second, he reminds me, no language is without its logical inconsistency. He offers a lot of great examples I can’t reconstruct, but most persuasively he points at the example of “aren’t I?” I’d never thought of it before, but – if numerical agreement is so important – then why does the singular I take the plural aren’t in such a situation? Logically it should be “amn’t I,” but we hear that as wrong. It’s just a reminder that this is how language works. It’s always got some illogical elements from its strange inheritance, and it’s never going to be entirely consistent.

What we have with which to write and speak is, it turns out, the record of many long-defeated peoples. We’ve lost their ideas and many of their words, but something of their experience has crept into what we know through the bastardization process of linguistic change. I knew a lot of this going in, but McWhorter makes me feel smarter, and he certainly entertained me along the way.


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