English Begins at Jamestown by Tim William Machan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• English Begins at Jamestown by Tim William Machan
• Kevin J. Harty

tim william machan, English Begins at Jamestown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xi, 259. isbn: 978–0–19–884636–9. $35.

The course in the History of the English Language—often assigned to medievalists like myself to teach—has long been a requirement for majors in English and English Education, and one of the foundational textbooks for the course, Albert C. Baugh's 1935 A History of the English Language, is still in print in a sixth edition, revised by Thomas Cable in 2012. Baugh and other standard textbooks seek to answer a basic question: what is English? Tim Machan thinks that this question is indeed an important question, but that it needs to be linked to a second equally important question: who speaks English?

English Begins at Jamestown is a fascinating, but challenging, reflection on the various ways that we have traditionally thought about and taught the history of the English Language. Machan acknowledges that there is no one way to teach the course, and that saying that one approach is wrong and that another is right leads us nowhere. As he notes, the standard pedagogical approach to the course, regardless of textbook used, invariably follows a common chronology of cause and effect—external history influences the internal history of English. Thus, the Saxons conquer the Celtic peoples of England, and Celtic languages are suppressed in favor of what we call Old English. Invading Vikings have an impact on Old English, which eventually loses pride of place in 1066. By Chaucer's time, what we call Middle English is more or less firmly in place, though language as always changes. So, there is the Great Vowel Shift, and [End Page 72] the development of early Modern English, coincidental with the introduction of the printing press, and so on.

Instead of this multi-stage generative approach to the history of the English language, Machan offers a user-based narrative, the key event in which occurs in May of 1607 when 104 boys and men in three ships arrived in what is now Virginia and established a settlement called Jamestown on what they would name the James River. Prior to 1607, no permanent settlement of Anglophone speakers existed outside of the British Isles. Significantly for the subsequent development of English, the Jamestown speech community was regionally and socially diverse. The community also had linguistic contact with speakers of European, African, and Indigenous languages, all of whom in turn had contact with both L1 and L2 English speakers. The descendants of these speakers of contact languages would over time themselves switch to using English. 'In the process, these L2 speakers inevitably impacted the grammatical structure of the English then used in Virginia, which would become a regional variety of American English, itself a regional variety of English in general' (p. 205). More importantly, what went on linguistically in Jamestown in terms of 'speakers, domains, and usages, as well as grammatical structure' (p. 206) established the blueprint for the way that English functions and changes in the world today.

One of the effects of what happened to English after Jamestown has been heated and repeated discussion of who has proprietary rights to claim English as their language. Nationality, ethnicity, race, and class all factor in here. English may remain the L1 language of speakers in Britain and America, but it has also, since the mid-nineteenth century, been the L2 language of people across the globe who at times passed only English on to their children, leaving multiple heritage languages on the verge of extinction. And in America, as settlers moved west and as waves of immigrants arrived from different parts of the world, suspicion and exclusion became a reality faced by even larger groups of L2 speakers. 'The differences between preand post-Jamestown English certainly are structural, then, but even more so they are pragmatic: who uses which forms of the language under what circumstances for what purpose' (p. 221). If we are used to a generative narrative of English's history starting with the arrival of the Saxons and their fellow invaders, then a pragmatic narrative...