English Language

Abstract

English is both the most studied of the world’s languages and the most widely used. It comes closer than any other language to functioning as a world communication medium and is very widely used for governmental purposes. This situation is the result of a number of historical accidents of different magnitudes. The linguistic properties of the language itself would not have motivated its choice (contra the talk of prescriptive usage writers who stress the clarity and logic that they believe English to have). Divided into multiple dialects, English has a phonological system involving remarkably complex consonant clusters and a large inventory of distinct vowel nuclei; a bad, confusing, and hard-to-learn alphabetic orthography riddled with exceptions, ambiguities, and failures of the spelling to correspond to the pronunciation; a morphology that is rather more complex than is generally appreciated, with seven or eight paradigm patterns and a couple of hundred irregular verbs; a large multilayered lexicon containing roots of several quite distinct historical sources; and a syntax that despite its very widespread SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) basic order in the clause is replete with tricky details. For example, there are crucial restrictions on government of prepositions, many verb-preposition idioms, subtle constraints on the intransitive prepositions known as “particles,” an important distinction between two (or under a better analysis, three) classes of verb that actually have different syntax, and a host of restrictions on the use of its crucial “wh-words.” It is only geopolitical and historical accidents that have given English its enormous importance and prestige in the world, not its inherent suitability for its role.