The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

“More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.”

Bill Bryson begins The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by explaining that English has become entrenched as a commonly used language across the globe. He points out that advertisements and even road signs around the world frequently use English, but often do so with mangled syntax.

“For better or worse, English has become the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics, and pop music.”

Lingua franca is a term that refers to a common language being adopted by groups of diverse people who speak different languages. Bryson explains that English has become a lingua franca internationally because it has been adopted by many facets of business, education, and politics. For example, English is the agreed international language of discourse among almost all airlines across the globe.

“One of the greatest mysteries of prehistory is how people in widely separated places suddenly and spontaneously developed the capacity for language at roughly the same time.”

In Chapter 2, Bryson examines the dawn of language and how prehistoric humans developed the ability to communicate through language. Bryson’s theory is that after the evolutionary change which pushed humans’ larynx deeper into the throat, verbal sounds became commonplace and the formation of languages sprung from “spontaneous utterances of alarm, joy, pain, and so on” (17).