How to order beer in Prague (if you are not Czech)

What is the role of the English language in world affairs?

A language once stamped out of official use by French-speaking conquerors has become the closest thing humanity has ever had to a universal tongue — not through any inherent superiority, but through an extraordinary chain of historical accidents, military conquests, economic dominance, and cultural export.

Give an example of how English has become the universal language

The Vltava river runs through Prague and alongside the river there is a promenade and quay where boats and boat hotels moor. The wall above the promenade has bars where you can enjoy the scene.

I was sitting outside one of these bars with my son, and next to us there was a large party of young German men. What struck me when the Czech waitress came to take their orders was that they had to speak to her in English. Germany is the huge neighbor to the north of the Czech Republic and, under the Hapsburgs, Prague used to be a predominantly German-speaking city. I might expect that German would be the second language but a series of momentous historical accidents over hundreds of years dictated that it would not be.

What is the origin of English?

Contrast the dominance of English with its ancient obscure origins and how it was a junior partner to Latin in the Middle Ages. Caedmon was a 7th-century illiterate herdsman at Whitby Abbey in northern England who, according to the monk Bede, received the miraculous gift of poetry through a divine dream. This was Caedmon’s Hymn, a nine-line Old English poem praising God as Creator — the oldest known named poem in the English language.

One manuscript embeds the Old English poem directly into the main Latin text of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Even then, English poetry was valued enough to coexist with Latin, the major written language.

What happened to English after the Norman invasion in 1066?

Old English survived the invasions of the Vikings but then it was subjugated by Norman French when William the Conqueror imposed a new ruling class on the Anglo-Saxon population of England.

For roughly 300 years after the Norman Conquest, England became effectively trilingual. Latin was the preserve of the Church and formal scholarship, Norman French was the domain of the aristocracy, law, and royal court, and Old English was left to the common people, peasants, and serfs. Grammar simplified so that Old English lost its declensions and conjugations which German retains, while at the same time, it acquired several layers of vocabulary that make it so rich and expressive today.

Examples of multi-faceted vocabulary are the names of animals and their meat such as cow and beef or pig and pork. The Saxon farmer tended the cow or pig and his Norman lord sat down to eat beef or pork in his manor. Then there are synonyms such as begin and commence, ask and inquire, or holy and sacred. Begin, ask and holy are humble as befits the Saxon under class, while commence, inquire and sacred are more fitting for the powerful and educated Norman upper class.

Which part of England does modern English come from?

English gradually re-emerged over the centuries. Modern Standard English descends primarily from the East Midlands dialect of Middle English, specifically the variety spoken in and around London, Oxford, and Cambridge in the 14th and 15th centuries.

The East Midlands triangle — London, Oxford, Cambridge — was the economic and intellectual heart of medieval England. London was the largest city, the main port, and the center of trade. The dialect spoken there carried natural prestige simply by association with wealth and power. Merchants, lawyers, and administrators from across England gravitated to London and absorbed its speech patterns. Standards coalesced around talent, prestige, capital and power, not because the English spoken in that area was ‘better’ than any other dialect.

Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in the 1380s in English using the London dialect. This helped establish English as more than a peasants’ tongue. Caxton’s printing press (1476) helped standardize spelling and grammar across England. Shakespeare’s works and the King James Bible elevated its prestige and sophistication. The intellectual and physical investment in its early days set the standard for English for centuries to come.

How did English become a world language?

This extraordinary hybrid then became a world language through the expansion of the British Empire from the 1600s to the 1900s and the rise of America.

By the early 1600s, four European powers had colonies in North America: Spain in Florida and the Southwest, France by the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes and Louisiana, the Netherlands in Manhattan, and England with the Atlantic seaboard colonies.

English prevailed because its colonies attracted family immigration: farmers, artisans and religious dissidents. French emigration to Canada was mostly single men: fur traders, soldiers and missionaries who often intended to return to France. Also, the French crown did not want its Protestant population who were often literate, skilled and motivated to leave, to resettle in French colonies and build Protestant communities overseas. France’s Protestants, often known as Huguenots, were barely tolerated.

In 1664, the Dutch handed over New Amsterdam, to become New York, to the English without a real fight, so Dutch was no longer part of the linguistic picture.

Then the Seven Years’ War ended with Britain taking all of New France. However, Quebec survived as a French-speaking enclave, with Catholic religious rights and French civil law preserved by the Quebec Act of 1774, simply because the British did not want another restive colony on its hands. The battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts marked the beginning of the American Revolution only a few months later.

Finally, the French sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, so English became dominant there despite the presence of some francophone communities.

And the hundreds of languages spoken by the indigenous Native Americans died out as the populations died out through disease and deliberate policies to displace them.

In the centuries that followed, Britain and the legacy of its empire spread English through soft power. It has become the language of Hollywood, the BBC, rock and pop music, and television and advertising.

How did modern technology become the catalyst for increased adoption of English?

The final step has been the use of English in technology, science, business and aviation through the internet. When companies cooperate internationally, English is usually the medium of communication. Some argue that English is a good common language for this purpose because it has no grammatical gender, simple verb conjugation and tolerance for absorbing loan words. But it is picked because it is usually the only neutral option everyone already knows at least to some extent. It is picked for reasons of history and power, not linguistic design.

Take Airbus as an example. When the consortium was formed in 1970, it brought together French, German, British and Spanish engineers.

None of the four national groups shared a common language. French and German engineers couldn’t work together in either’s native tongue — it would have been politically unacceptable and practically unworkable. British involvement made English the natural neutral solution, but even in facilities where no native English speakers were present, English became the working language. French and German engineers would conduct meetings, write technical documents, and collaborate entirely in English as a neutral medium.

Today the entire global aviation industry — air traffic control, pilot communications, maintenance manuals, international certification — operates in English, regardless of where the planes are built or where they fly.

In semiconductor manufacturing, multinational engineering teams routinely include Japanese, Korean, Dutch, American, Taiwanese, and German specialists on the same project. When ASML (Dutch) supplies equipment to Samsung (Korean) and they need to jointly debug a lithography process, the engineers on both sides communicate in English — often haltingly, on both sides — because there is simply no alternative.

How is English used in different countries?

English today belongs to no one nation. There are more non-native English speakers than native ones (estimates suggest roughly 1.5 billion speakers, with natives being a minority). Indian English, Nigerian English, Singaporean English, and dozens of other varieties have developed their own rules, idioms, and literature.

English succeeded partly because it’s so absorbent — as we saw with the Normans, it happily swallows foreign vocabulary. It joyfully embraces new words as they arise so that, for example, we have bungalows for single-story houses in England and wear pyjamas in bed thanks to the British in India. It has no official governing body (unlike French, which has the Académie française) policing its purity, so it adapts freely to local needs. The open standards, open source, extensible language is more likely to be adopted than one that is tightly controlled.

The dominance of English was not established in one single event. It grew incrementally from Chaucer to the internet to the point that a multi-national team of engineers, or the nations of India or Africa can only practically communicate in this common language.

When building airliners or semiconductors or simply ordering a beer by the riverside in Prague, English is how the people of the world talk to each other. I wonder what Caedmon or Bede would have thought. They broke new ground in writing down English as a devotional language which could take its place alongside Latin. I think they would have been astounded at its transformation into the common language that a Czech waitress, young German tourists and an elderly Englishman with his son used to enjoy beer by the side of the Vltava river.