The English Language

Peculiarities of English

In the late 16th Century, the number of mother-tongue English speakers in the world was thought to be around 5-7 million, all of them in the British Isles. However, English is now a language spoken by around 250 million people, the majority living outside the British Isles. Most of these people are Americans. Other English speaking areas of the world are: Canada, The Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, Colonial Africa, South East Asia and South Pacific. It is not surprising therefore that English everywhere has peculiarities of dialect, accent, slang, foreign borrowings and lexical differences (British/American in particular).

Let us look first of all at the peculiarities of dialect. Dialect refers to features of grammar and vocabulary, which convey information about a person’s geographical origin, while accent features pronunciation only. You can tell a lot about someone’s origins from his dialect or from his accent, and these vary greatly in the UK and the US alone. The Texas drawl, the lilt of the Irish and the rolling ?r? of the Scots for example, can easily be detected.

Slang is said to be used to show that you are one of the gang. There are many different types of slang worldwide, although cockney rhyming slang is probably the best known. It probably originated as part of a criminal argot in London. Examples of the cockney rhyming slang are: apples and pears (stairs); Cain and Able (table); Hampstead Heath (teeth); north and south (mouth); trouble and strife (wife).

When looking at written English, one of the first judgments you can make is whether it is British or American English. There are many spelling differences between British and American English (aeroplane/airplane, anaemia/anemia, manoeuvre/maneuver, colour/color ?). In addition to the spelling differences, there are also many lexical differences: aerial/antenna; wallet/billfold; curtains/drapes; pavement/sidewalk to name but a few.

Speakers of some languages take pains to exclude foreign words from their lexicon, however British English seems to have welcomed them. The influence of Latin is strong. The Viking invasions added about 2000 words to English (for example: dirt, egg, kid, leg ?). After the Norman Conquest the influx of words from Europe (especially French) was huge. Since the 1950s, a fresh wave of borrowing has taken place from all over the world.

Looking more closely at the UK, there are some fairly specific regional linguistic features. Take, for example, the Scots lexicon which also derives from the influence of other languages, in particular Gaelic, Norwegian and French. Gaelic imports include ceilidh, glen and loch. These words are now part of British English. However some lexical terms remain restricted to Scots and in fact the Scots Thesaurus lists over 20,000 items. Examples are:- dominie (teacher), high-heid yin (boss) and pinkie (little finger). Wales, Ireland and England have similar regional linguistic features.

English is a language with insignificant origins, but which has grown to be a world language. It has a rich lexicon which differs from country to country, and even within countries. Different dialects, accents and slang abound. The rules of grammar are endless, while spelling and pronunciation represent a significant challenge for non native speakers. Will a World Standard English ever exist, or will English speakers wish to hang on to their own origins? Whilst it is inevitable that there is and will continue to be a merge of certain elements of the English language to form a World Standard English, I think the loss of regional variations would be a great shame, and it is perhaps unlikely ever to happen.

Peculiarities of the English language

Here I was, waiting to teach a ‘Let’s Learn English’ session with the Pacific and Asian newcomers to Australia. I was to continue the conversational English lessons with them. The attendees were looking forward to the class. I could tell this by the enthusiasm in their greeting as they arrived and by their hunger to learn in previous sessions. What’s more we were having fun as we journeyed into the English language together. 

What’s the biggest problem these students have I thought? The simple answer is: the peculiarities of the English language, or more specifically: words.

So what are words anyway? They’re just sounds or noises that we utter after all. Unlike lower animals we may not bark neigh, moo, roar, purr or growl, but we do react instinctively to what’s happening around us; just as they do. If we stub our toe, hit our thumb with a hammer, get a paper cut, sit on a pin or watch our favorite sporting team score a goal we also react often with sounds. These are symptoms of our feelings just as trembling is a symptom of fear. Words make us human.

We as humans learn to symbolise as soon as our cortex develops. We are able to see one set of impressions and let them ‘stand for’ something else if we call out ‘look out, there’s a snake in the woodpile’ the sounds make sense to our senses. It is simply a matter of interpretation of all of the symbols we use to communicate, the most powerful and the most critical being words.

But words only make sense when they represent or indicate experiences. What we call communication takes place when we know what the message is. We know to keep alert around the woodpile because there?s a snake in it. But the meanings of the words are in the minds of the people who send them more often than those who hear them. 

The whore of languages, English has opened itself to French, Norse, Greek, Latin, Celtic dialects, different African, Polynesian and Asian languages and merged all of this into a polyglot of sounds making words which in turn make meanings. But pity the newcomer. How to explain that we see the sculptor, the artist, the cartoonist, the actor, the playwright, the novelist, the singer, the musician all clumped into a mass we call ?art?. Try explaining ?art? to a new English speaker. It’s a peculiar language alright.

So, the question for a TESOL teacher to answer is--- is the meaning of a word in the word itself or is it in the minds and collective experience of the hearer?

Back to the class. The students were all punctual, keen and open- eared, wanting to learn this peculiar thing called English. Armed with notebooks and their trusty dictionaries we set off on some word discovery meanings. 

The mighty dictionary is a best friend for any language student. Three cheers for the lexicographers. But English is peculiar. I recall hearing once that the 500 most commonly used English words have something like 14000 meanings. Have a look for yourself try ‘cut’, ‘lie’,’ table’, ’fast’, ‘run’ and ‘tick’, You may be surprised at the options. The dictionary isn’t so much a set of regulations for correct usage as a book of etiquette giving us the different sorts of choices in which we might expect to find the words used.

So, while the dictionary can assist us explore different meanings and can reassure us that we are using them not too differently from other people, it doesn’t always help improve understanding between people. We must use language to demonstrate that we know how to use words that both the sender and the receiver understand. Without this, we will not understand each other. Words will just be sounds. 

Meaning is in the mind of the receiver. It’s the sender’s responsibility to get the meaning of the message across. The challenge is finding the words that achieve this.

It sure is a peculiar language.

Peculiarities of the English language

All of my life I’ve been told that English is one of the most difficult languages on Earth to learn, and I should thank my lucky stars that it was my first language and I would never have to go through the agony of learning it later in life. Of course, I thought this was B.S. when I first heard it; after all, I learned English when I was like three years old. How hard could it be?

It wasn’t until I began to learn another language, Spanish, that it began to dawn on me just how convoluted and peculiar some parts of our language are. In Spanish, if you can say a word, you can spell it. That’s it. Sound it out and you’ve got it. But English is chock full of all these funky, weird rules for spelling like I before E except after C. Okay, you got that? Now you can spell anything, right? But what about the word weird, that’s an exception to this rule that already has an exception in it! So what’s the rule there, that weird is spelled weird? I could go on like this for hours. English is full of words that sound nothing like they are spelled, or words that are pronounced differently but spelled the same. In Spanish, if you want to make a noun plural, you add an S to the end of it. But in English you have to deal with plurals like geese, fish, feet, mice, and moose. There are no rules here, these are things that we as native speakers memorized long ago when our minds were young and absorbed everything. But these very things will drive an adult trying to learn English absolutely crazy because there seems to be no rhyme or reason anywhere.

Of course, English is not all nonsense rules and oddly spelled words. We have a simple tense system that is fairly easy to grasp, and our nouns have no masculine or feminine forms, which cuts down on confusion. Its similarities to German and the romance languages make it easier for native speakers of those tongues to learn. I do believe, however, that it is the mixture of German and the romance languages that resulted in many of English’s peculiarities.

It’s up to us as teachers to find ways to help our students navigate though this minefield that is the English language, to keep them from getting frustrated when they can’t read a word like thorough (which I needed to use spellchecker to spell correctly), and to correct and encourage them when they say a person has two foots. The fact that English is spreading around the globe and becoming more and more important on the international scene provides we the teachers with our most valuable asset against English’s quirks. The people we are teaching want to learn, or need to learn. The desire is there, and we can use it to help people assimilate our wonderful yet odd language. I’m just glad I’m not the one who has to do the learning.