What Is English? And Why Should We Care? by Tim William Machan (review)

Given that one and a half billion of the world’s nearly 7 billion people speak English, it seems odd to ask “why should we care?” Machan’s answer would probably occur to most of his readers before he says it: because “it plays a gate-keeping role in some of the most powerful domains in any Anglophone society.” His book fleshes out this answer in many interesting directions and locales, some expected, others less so: the Oxford English Dictionary, Polynesian encounters with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settlers, Native American boarding schools in the American West, Henry Ford’s factory schools, and Churchill’s appeals to the English-speaking peoples. Machan thinks it probable that Old English and Old Norse speakers understood one another’s language, and he maintains, repeatedly, that English is defined by its speakers. He seems surprised at his own conclusions that English- speaking peoples are far more divergent, inconsistent, and ideologically driven in their own views of English than they sometimes like to appear.

While it may be self-evident that people do want to learn English in very large numbers, the question of why English is not so transparent. Why English rather than Chinese or Malay? Are there any linguistic, as opposed to historical and colonial, reasons that English is so global? Are not all languages with a long history “rivers” (to use his favorite metaphor)? Pedagogy—in all kinds of exotic locations—has played just as important a role in the promulgation of French since the medieval period. Other languages also have a colonial history. In short, what makes English exceptional? A book on English, written for Anglophones, risks assuming that its focus is an obvious choice. If this book ever stepped outside its own topic, it would encounter questions that Anglophones tend not to ask.