Language

PETER TRUDGILL on how bottlers became butlers There are about 45,000 people in Britain who bear the surname Butler. In comparison, there are a quarter of million Browns and half a million Smiths. But 45,000 still seems to be rather a high number if we assume that all of our contemporary Butlers are descended from men who […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the language of the Isle of Man, and its rearguard action against the linguistic homogenisation of the British Isles If you have ever been to Ellan Vannin – the Isle of Man – you will know that from the shores of that beautiful island it is possible to see Ireland, Scotland, England and, […]

Plans are being drawn up to replace English with French as the main “working language” of the EU during France’s presidency, with meetings and documents to become “French-first” next year.  The French are set to take over the Council of the European Union presidency in 2022, with France planning to use its first presidency since Brexit […]

How, even when speaking clearly, true meaning can get lost when different nationalities communicate “Hello Tanit, hope you don’t have a hangover”, I read, nodding. “Are you able to file soon?” I wasn’t. Not soon, anyway. But I felt extremely lucky to have a English editor. Even when I miss a deadline he writes friendly emails. A German […]

PETER TRUDGILL picks apart another popular subject for pedants Are you alright? Or are you all right? Is alright one word or two? A number of people seem to feel rather strongly about this issue, and some of them are adamant that to write alright is totally not all right. They think that all right is the only “correct” way to write […]

Global health leaders have announced new names for Covid-19 variants using letters of the Greek alphabet. Experts working with the World Health Organisation (WHO) developed the labels for variants which are often colloquially named after the places where they are first detected. Many variants of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – have been […]

The spread of English as a narrative language now includes the Asian island nation. Singapore, the large island off the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, is separated from the mainland by the Johor strait which is less than a nautical mile wide at its narrowest point. A number of fascinatingly different mother tongues have […]

Why communication may have been the least of the problems when the Vikings invaded The Great Heathen Army of the Danes invaded eastern England in 865. Large-scale Viking settlements followed throughout the 9th century and on into the 10th. Many eastern and northern areas of our island came to have a heavily Scandinavian or Scandinavianised […]

How the archipelago’s dialect hung on for centuries, but is now disappearing The Channel Islands lie between 70 and 85 nautical miles off the south coast of England. They are very much closer to the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy in France, which is only about 12 nautical miles away. The islands are not part of the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how English, having spread one way around the world, suddenly reversed direction During the 1600s and 1700s, the English language spread westwards from Britain across the Atlantic to Canada, the USA, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Central America. Then, suddenly, at the very end of the 18th century, it started spreading back […]

When it comes to people who try to police our grammar, Winston Churchill (apparently) knew how to deal with them There is a grammar joke about Winston Churchill which is well known, even if it probably isn’t true. When a draft of an upcoming speech of his was circulated to aides, one of them, a […]

TANIT KOCH on how the quest for equality is having an impact on the German language. Some of us have put lockdown to great use and improved our language skills at home. Some, like editor-at-large Alastair Campbell, have even chosen German, despite the lasting damage done to its reputation by Mark Twain (The Awful German Language), Hollywood (“Achtung! Schnell, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why we shorten some syllables and not others, such as in privacy and private. It is an interesting fact about the English language that we pronounce the word nature with a long ‘a’ whereas we say natural with a short ‘a’. Similarly, while we say grateful with a long ‘a’, gratitude has a short […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on two new European novels which highlight the underappreciated artistry of translators The job of a literary translator can be a thankless one. It’s a multiskilled calling with two main demands: fluency in at least one other language that isn’t your own and an exceptional talent for writing. It’s a role requiring immense artistic […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious process by which neutral phrases for ‘smell’ tend to turn bad. It is rather well known to keen crossword solvers that the English words aroma, odour, scent, smell and stink all have five letters. Crossword clues indicating a five-letter olfactory answer can therefore not be readily resolved without further work and thought. A good question […]

PETER TRUDGILL on death, and recent revival, of Cornish. After the first arrival of the Germanic Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons in the southwestern peninsula of England, British Celts began migrating across the Channel to Brittany to escape Germanic domination, thus reducing the Celtic population base of the area. By about 800 AD, the Saxons had taken […]

London mayoral hopeful Laurence Fox used the launch of his manifesto to defend his right to call people “paedophiles” on Twitter, citing free speech and claiming it is just a “meaningless and baseless” insult. The former actor, who founded the Reclaim Party, is being sued by Stonewall trustee Simon Blake, Coronation Street actress Nicola Thorp […]

Technology may be closing in on making instant, in-ear translation services a reality. But it's still a galaxy away from truly replicating human communication.

PETER TRUDGILL on whether Scots should be considered a language or not. My column of a few weeks ago, about how the Swiss are encouraged to learn their country’s various languages – and how something similar here might benefit the UK – annoyed reader Bill Cooper, who wrote to The New European to say so. His letter was published […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many chapters of the Georgian language. As we have observed before in this column, Napoleon was not French, and Hitler was not German. King William III of England was not English, and King George I of Great Britain was not British. But there is another well-known example of the same kind of […]

The notion of ‘Global Britain’ goes hand in hand with good, proficient multi-linguistic skills.

The scandal of modern language education in the UK is going to cost the country dear Universities have been in the headlines, quite rightly, as students and their parents worry about being charged full tuition fees for nearly a year of online learning, while paid-for rental accommodation sits empty after tenants were told by the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how easy it is to make false assumptions about connections between words  Etymology is the study of the origins of words and the development of their forms and meanings. It is a scholarly activity which needs considerable knowledge of large numbers of languages, plus language history, linguistic change, historical linguistics, semantics (the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why the term for spring has not sprung from where you thought. The English word spring has many different meanings. It can refer to a place where water comes up out of the ground – a source or wellspring. It can signify an energetic forward or upward movement – a leap or jump. It […]

Reverend Nicholas Baines has called on the government to launch a public education campaign on notions of sovereignty following Britain’s exit from the EU. Speaking in House of Lords, Reverend Baines asked why “pooled sovereignty” with the EU was considered unworkable for the UK but not when it is pooled with the United States. “Notions of sovereignty […]

Peter Trudgill on the dubious master of multilingualism. There are many things to be said about Ján Ludvik Hoch, many of them very bad, even though he was a war hero. But this column is interested in his linguistic prowess: he was a remarkable polyglot. Better known as Robert Maxwell, Hoch did not learn English […]

The promotion of languages is a key way of keeping the disparate Swiss nation together, says PETER TRUDGILL. There is much Britain could learn from its example. If our government truly believed in the United Kingdom as a “sacred union”, they would do well to study the example of another union, the united republic of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why Australians haven’t developed regional accents… yet. Reader David Handley recent wrote to The New European in response to my column about the origins of Australian English (TNE #225), commenting on its regional uniformity. How, he asked, has Australian English failed to develop distinct regional accents? He is quite right to point to the […]

The influence on English of the Old Norse language of the Vikings is still up for debate, says PETER TRUDGILL. When people are learning English as a foreign language, it is generally very useful for them to learn three main forms of every verb: the present tense, the past tense, and the past participle. Past participles occur […]

It wasn’t only the English language that spread around the globe during Britain’s age of imperial expansion, says PETER TRUDGILL.   The three major surviving indigenous languages of the island of Britain are English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. We are very familiar with the fact that, since the beginning of the 17th century, English has spread far […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how similarly-sounding words can come to have such different meanings. A word with two or more different meanings is technically a polyseme. An English example is wood, which can refer to wood as a material as well as to a tree-covered area of land. Neck is also polysemous: it refers to the part of the […]

Boris Johnson has demanded politicians be more “civil and kind” to each after debates surround the provision of free school meals sparked public reprisals against MPs. The prime minister’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, said the debate around free school meals had made life “very unpleasant” for Conservative MPs. This comes as the prime minister accused Labour supporters of using a […]