The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

In Chapter 6, Bryson focuses on English pronunciation and examines how it has changed over time. He points out that “every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever reason, happily accept conventions and limitations that aren’t necessarily called for” (89). For example, while many languages feature a “one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling,” he argues that “not one of our letters can be relied on for constancy” (88-89). At times, English letters can have multiple pronunciations or be completely silent. Changes in English pronunciation have occurred as fractional adjustments over time that we are often unaware of (91). This is especially true when contracting words that are most familiar to us, such as the names of places.

One of the aspects which led to changes in English pronunciation was the Great Vowel Shift. This was a series of changes that took place over several generations between the 15-18th centuries. Not only did these changes largely go unnoticed, but no one knows why they took place (97). The most prominent explanation for the Great Vowel Shift is that the long vowel sounds in English “changed their value in a fundamental and seemingly systematic way, each of them moving forward and upward in the mouth” (97). This theory is evident in the writings of famous writers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, which featured inconsistent spellings. This inconsistency also provides an explanation for why some modern words still have more than one spelling.

In Chapter 7, Bryson explains that idiolect is the term for “the linguistic quirks and conventions that distinguish one group of language users from another” (105). This relates not only to geographic vocabulary—in which people use different words for the same thing depending on where they live—but accents and dialects. In America, four primary speech groups have been geographically established as Northern, Midland, Southern, and New England—but Bryson acknowledges the blurring of speech patterns, as these groups further divide into many variations. He explains that “there is no place where one speech region begins and another ends” (107). In fact, a field study from 1963 “found more than 100,000 variations in terminology and pronunciation throughout the country” (110). In terms of why terminology and pronunciation vary so much, Bryson suggests that geography and history play a role, with the Eastern seaboard being more closely tied to England historically; class and social bonding also play a role.

Bryson argues that “no place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain” (117). Prominent research shows that 9 separate dialects exist in Scotland, 3 in Ireland, and as many as 30 in England and Wales—but depending on how dialect is defined, there are likely many more (117-118). According to Bryson, dialects in England “are very much more a matter of class and social standing than in other countries” (118). He explains that Fraffly is the dialect of the upper class, while Cockney is the dialect of the working class in London. Because so many dialects in both America and Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) feature grammatical differences, American and British English can sometimes seem like separate languages (even within their respective countries). Examples of this are the Cajun accent spoken by many people of French heritage in Louisiana—and Gullah—spoken by descendants of enslaved African peoples by many people living on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia (122-23).

Bryson begins Chapter 8 by comparing the English system of writing—which evolved from pictographs to an alphabet—to the complex systems used in the Chinese and Japanese languages—which use a pictographic-ideographic system. In his opinion, the drawbacks to the latter system are enormous, not only because things such as word puzzles and text codes cannot exist (in a western sense) but because “there is no logical system for organizing documents” (127). However, the pictographic-ideographic system has an advantage because it can be read anywhere, without having to speak the language. Furthermore, spelling in English is extremely difficult because there are so many different ways to spell a single sound. Many of the curious spellings in English can be attributed to slight changes in pronunciation and the adoption process from other languages. Because there was no central authority over English for centuries, dialects varied and different spelling patterns emerged (134).

The printing press—invented by Johann Gutenberg and introduced to England by English writer and businessman William Caxton in the 15th century—“fixed” this lack of standardization, establishing uniformity in spelling and “one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems in the world” (136). The reason for this continued inconsistency was that the printing press standardized English spelling at the same time that the language was undergoing great changes in phonetics—resulting in words being spelled as they were pronounced 400 years ago (138). Over the ensuing centuries, writers and philosophers like Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, and Mark Twain called for spelling reform.