This long journey in the historical evolution of the English language has been nothing less than both tortuous and perilous. Twice in the early stage of its life, English was threatened with extinction.

More than a thousand years ago, the Anglo-Saxons had already invaded and settled down in England. The language that they had brought with them had done well in competition with the native Celtic and Gaelic tongues.

But they had to face their first crisis when the Vikings started to raid their island homes. These northern Nordic people spoke the Old Norse, and among the invaders, the Danes were the fiercest, driving the English monarch King Alfred into hiding in the marshes.

The Danes were ‘heathens’ who had no respect for books and learning. If they had succeeded in decimating the English people and the English tongue that they spoke, the English language would perhaps have perished forever.

Fortunately, King Alfred was able to marshal a loyal army of 4,000 men in the spring of 878 AD, and challenged the invading army of 5,000 Danes at the Western edge of the Salisbury Plain. What happened next was a rout, a massacre of the Danes against all odds. King Alfred had saved England and the English language. He is the only English monarch to have earned the title King Alfred ‘the Great’!

The second crisis came in 1066 when the Norman King William the Conqueror and his army crossed the English Channel from their Normandy homes and landed at Hastings on the English shore. There, they defeated the army of the English monarch King Harold and claimed sovereignty over England.

The Norman conquerors were French, and so French and Latin were used in the court and the church as the official languages of England. Fortunately for the English language, the Normans were a minority, and so the English tongue continued to be spoken and used by the masses, limiting French and Latin to the small circle of the ruling elite.

In subsequent centuries, the Norman kings had to fight against the French in France. Sometimes, power struggle also drove them to fight among themselves in a contest for the throne. In order to mobilise the local English masses for their cause, they had to resort to the use of the English language.

In 1399, Henry, the Duke of Lancaster, overthrew King Richard II, and ascended to the throne as King Henry IV. In a great symbolic moment, he made his inaugural royal speech in neither the Latin language of state business, nor in the French language of the royal household, but in what the official history calls ‘His Mother Tongue’: English. English was once again a royal language in England.

Another element of the élan vital of the English language to survive and grow to immense size and complexity is its seemingly limitless capacity to absorb other languages, to convert others, certainly to take on board others without yielding the ground on its own basic meaning and vocabulary.

For instance, the ‘sk’ sound is a characteristic of the Old Norse, and to-day, we have English words borrowed from the Vikings like ‘skin’, ‘sky’, and ‘score’. Other Old Norse loan words include ‘birth’, ‘cake’, ‘call’, ‘dreg’, ‘eggs’, ‘guess’, ‘happy’, ‘law’, ‘leg’, ‘ransack’, ‘scare’, ‘sister’, ‘skill’, and ‘smile’.

During those three centuries of Norman rule, under the linguistic hegemony of the occupying forces, it is estimated that some 15,000 Old English words were lost. But French flooded the English vocabulary with numerous new words. About 10,000 French words were thus integrated into the English language during this period.

In the language of war, the French words absorbed are ‘army’ (from armee), ‘archer’ ( from archer), ‘soldier’ (from soudier), and ‘guard’ (from garde). French also spelled out the new language of the social order, as in ‘crown’ (from corune), ‘throne’ (from trone), ‘court’ (from curt), ‘duke’ (from duc), ‘nobility’ (from nobilite), ‘peasant’ from ‘paisant’, and ‘traitor’ (from traitre.)

After the start of the Industrial Revolution in England a couple of centuries ago, the need for raw materials and new market drove the English overseas in search of colonies. The British Empire emerged as the most successful imperialist superpower of the world, with the Union Jack flying high wherever there was sea water.

Wherever they went, the British colonial government imposed their own brand of linguistic hegemony on the local population, much as the Normans have done to the English people during the early part of the second millennium. That has had much to do with the almost universal usage of English nowadays throughout the world.

All over their colonies, the English language was enriched by the words and expressions it absorbed and made its own. In his book Much Ado About English, author Richard Watson Todd quoted Booker T. Washington as saying:

“We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

The notorious and much feared word tsunami is Japanese in origin. The word tornado comes from Spanish, curry from Tamil, mosque from Arabic, bog from Gaelic, and wombats from the Australian Aborigines. Our Malay words like kampong and amok have certainly been long accepted as legitimate entries in any English dictionary. Even Gweilo, the Hong Kong Chinese’ term for all Caucasians, meaning ‘foreign devil’, is now used by more and more English writers.

What make English such a difficult language to master are precisely the varied sources from which it derives its vocabulary as well as its hoard of borrowed expressions and idioms. By knowing from where the word or expression has originated, you can get a rough idea of how to spell and pronounce them.

When I choose a dictionary, I always pick one that gives you the etymological background of the word. In this, the Oxford English Dictionary is peerless: it gives you the entire long history in the evolution of the meaning and usage of the word or expression back to the occasion when it was first encountered!

For instance, the word condom was likely derived from the Italian for glove, guanto. And the word jazz originated from the Creole word jass, meaning strenuous sexual activity.

Richard Watson Todd tells us that many idioms have very ancient root indeed. Both hair of the dog and living in cloud cuckoo land date back to 400 BC and the Greek poet Aristophanes. Let sleeping dogs lie is derived from Chaucer in 1374, and a needle in a haystack comes from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605.

The growth of American English has since increased the prowess and influence of the English language in no small measure. As Sir Winston Churchill was reputed to have observed, American and England are two countries divided by a common tongue. The emergence of the United States as the new superpower of the 20th century has also contributed to the prestige and the power of English in international relations and foreign affairs.

Last but certainly not least is the new language of Internet English in cyberspace. Any old-timers and linguistic purists who like their ‘i’ dotted and their‘t’ crossed will certainly cringe at the corruption of the English language in chat rooms and interactive websites. Some of the conversations going on there are really incomprehensible!

Finally, we have the many patois that have been born through a strange marriage of English with the local native tongues. One of these is our very own Manglish, the mangled English spoken mostly by Malaysians in West Malaysians. Fortunately, Manglish has not invaded Sarawak in a big way, and we should keep it that way.

For many decades now, the question of language has been the most contentious political issue in Malaysia. Nationalists have for too long regarded English as the remnant of our shameful colonial past. Official policies on education has led to a decline of the standard of English, much to the detriment of the country.

To me, English is just another language, a common heritage of the world. If we can speak and write in English, we might as well do it as best we can.