Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

– George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

While English is a Germanic language, only 26% of English words come from the proto-Germanic tongue. About 60% are from Romance languages, half being French and half being Latin. Many of these words are used in scientific, legal, aristocratic, or militaristic contexts.

The most widely-spoken language in the world is English, as seen in almost all fields of human behaviour, such as technology, politics, education, law, and mass media. How widely a language is spoken is a sign of the power of its native speakers. After the British Empire set English as the common language among the colonies, it became the world’s leading language of law, education, and commerce. In later years, American dominance in economics, trade, science and technology, transportation, and popular culture have meant that people around the world must learn English if they want success in these fields.

The benefit of a lingua franca is to more easily communicate across different countries and cultures. Many non-native English speakers have chosen to speak and write in English as a means of getting ahed in the world. Having a common international language, however, can come at the cost of discouraging or even losing one’s mother tongue.

Ironically, the English language is itself affected by cultural hegemony. Following the Norman conquest of England, a new Norman-speaking government took over, and they introduced Norman French as the language of the ruling class. The lower classes were not forced to learn the language, but they adopted French words as a sign of status and prestige. The Anglo-Normans later invaded Wales and Ireland, beginning a long history of racism and imperial rule over the Celtic peoples, and eventually over most of the world. Before then, Roman rule over foreign lands established Greek and Latin as the common languages spoken by educated peoples.

Even tho the Norman rule over England and the Roman rule over Europe are long past, their legacy runs deep. While English holds prestige in a global context, the word-hoard of French along with Latin and Greek still hold prestige within English itself. If we are to end imperialist, classist, oppressive ways of thinking, we have to free our language from its colonial history. This does not mean to simply stop speaking it, or to speak it differently and expect changes, but to end prestigious status among languages. In the same way that decolonisation in the post-second world war period has shaped the paths for political freedom in many parts of the world, there is also a need for the decolonisation of language for greater individual freedom and harmony with nature.

I.

Norman rule over England meant that their French words were associated with the activities of the rich and powerful. A mansion, from mansion for house, is not just a home but a large, upper-class residence. Some animals have a different name when used as food. Compare ‘swine’, from Old English swin, and ‘pork’ from Old French porc, both words once having had the same meaning. The living animal in the field was the business of peasants; the dead piece of animal, disconnected from its source and commodified, was the business of the nobility. To this day, we consume our meat, and other products, without having seen the living being. As urbanization spreds and dominates the way societies organize themselves, many of us will likely see animals eaten on the table more than we actually see them outside. The majority of society does not see the source of production of what we intake.

In later years, other native words became seen as outright vulgar compared to other ones. In fact, the word “vulgar” comes from the Latin vulgaris, “of the common people”. Vulgarities are used in everyday speech, but not in “polite” company or the professional world, registers we are taught to romanticise. The way the common people speak and act has for a long time been seen as inferior for no reason other than a reflection and perpetuation of oppressive social control.

By the 16th century, French was no longer the language of education in England. Some scholars wrote Greek and Latin words as prestigious alternatives to perfectly good native words. They are adopted constructs; their meanings must be spelled out to those unfamiliar with Greek root words. Likewise, modern science is heavily based around the constructs of symbolic culture: writing, time, mathematics. Science does not involve a direct, sensual connection to the world, but merely observes in a one-sided manner. It only values what it can quantify. We seem to almost worship science and technology, even when it comes at the cost of the living planet. The scientific way of thinking overtakes more spiritual and mystical ways of thinking, deeming them as inferior.

Not only did the inbringing of French, Latin, and Greek give us arbitrary hierarchies between formal and informal and cause spelling, the colonial history of the English language is also directly connected to structures of oppression. Many words of pointless state institutions come from the Norman invaders: prison, government, lieutenant, police.

Ever since Latinate words became more common in the English language, many writers have felt that English should be written with more native words, and took care to keep other words few to see that their writings could be understood by those who could not get a classical education. William Barnes, who wanted scholarly writings in English to be more easily understood, put forth new words such as birdlore for ornithology and suggested reviving old ones such as gleeman for musician, and yeartide for anniversary. Countless other words have been coined, calqued, or revived.

II.

English speakers are often confused by spelling. English-speaking children take three years to learn what children growing up with other languages do in one. The struggle is even greater for people with dyslexia. Literacy, however, is a needed skill for modern industrial society. Those with literacy problems are treated poorly by employers, and those without jobs often turn to crime. It is not surprising that many prisoners are illiterate.

Language is a way to represent reality and experiences, but it cannot explain everything perfectly. Writing is a way of further representing these abstractions. These representations are always changing, given the diversity and complexity of life experiences, yet there seems to be a fixed idea of “proper” speaking and writing. In fact, “proper” spelling is a form of dogma. If the goal of spelling is to represent the way we speak, why not allow for a freer way of spelling words, especially words that are confusing in their modern-day readings? The dogmatic answer is that a word should be spelled one way, because “that’s how it’s spelled”. That only states a fact, and does not mean that it needs to be spelled a certain way. The way in which something is done does not always tell us how it needs to be done.

Many of the inconsistencies of English spelling came from outdated ways of writing. In the era of Middle English, letters were written in a series of minims, or short strokes, making the letter u hard to read among m and n. Because of this, it was often replaced with o, such as in honey, money, come and done. The Norman system did not place the letters U and V together as they were written in the same way, which also led to the letter V becoming rare at the ends of English words. This is why the bird called the dove is not written as duv. The pronunciation of said words was also different; the final e was pronounced in those days, but later disappeared. Despite this, the spellings remained as artefacts, since dictionaries were unable to adapt the relativly fast linguistic evolution.

After the invention of the printing press, typists added more letters to lengthen words, as they were paid by the number of lines they wrote. Hence frend → friend. Some Belgian and Dutch scribes who did not know English produced yet more misspellings. Later typists undid some of these mistakes in order to fit more text onto a page.

Other mistakes came from loanwords. While some were in time anglicized (episcopal → bishop, bicycle → bike), others had their spellings reverted to Latin ways (dette –> debt from Latin debitum). These reversals were carried out by scholars from the literate classes who wanted to remind us of the classical roots of said words. Even some native words were rewritten: iland was rewritten as island in the belief that it was from the Latin insula (as is the word isle). It was really from Old English iegland. A similar thing happened with the word ptarmigan: not Greek, but Gaelic!

There hav been many calls for reforming English spelling, as a result of its effects on literacy. However, there is a tendency among those who advocate it to believe that reform proposals should be standardized and adopted by others. In order to solve the problem, the solution is to care less about spelling, not more – then it’s fine whether or not someone writes in a reformed manner. There is no need for education systems and regulatory bodies to do it for us, because language is not the property of academics. The power must come from the people. Do it however you like!

III.

I have argued that that is a need to decolonize the English language on social, historical and practical grounds, but there is a more fundamental purpose to rethinking our use of language, and it is the need for a more biocentric outlook towards life. Biocentrism is knowledge and wisdom based around seeing nature as having its own value.

Robert MacFarlane writes of his fascination with “the relations of language and landscape – by the power of strong style and single words to shape our senses of place”. As civilization overtakes our knowledge and relationship to nature, we use fewer words to speak of its vastness, and instead simplify these things as large generic units. MacFarlane described native regional words from across the British Isles such as zawn (Cornish, “wave-smashed chasm in a cliff”), pell (Sussex, “hole of water, generally very deep, beneath a waterfall”), roarie bummlers (Scots, “fast-moving storm clouds”). Shivelight, for the sunshine that shines between the treetops, was coined by a writer of Roots English: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

MacFarlane also said, “Language is always late for its subject.” To name and represent does not always make us know more, and there are experiences no words can describe. But in a world where we forget our knowledge of the wilderness, studying our use of language may help us see the beauty of the planet on which we live. Many indigenous languages embody their speakers’ earth-based way of living, and their cultural knowledge shapes their words.

I look at these concerns from a critique of civilisation. Unlike smaller-scale lifestyles where everyone shares in the means of production of what they intake, the dispersal of civilization makes its inhabitants disconnected. This begins the rise of divisions of labour, which soon lead to oppressive structures such as ruling classes, organized religion, and militaries. In order to sustain these economic structures amidst dispersed, alienated populations, civilizations rely on symbolic proxies, such as currency and writing.

Implicit in the idea of civilization is also the concept of development, which carries suggestions of an advanced culture that rules over those outside it. (Think of the negative connotations of the words “uncivilized” or “savage”). This disregard for those outside of civilisation is manifested in the way civilisations interact with the world, rejecting and dominating the “wild nature” of uncivilized inhabitants. A dense population must take resources from outlying lands, displacing other communities. The cedars of Lebanon once covered the Balkans and the Middle East, a thick forest home to lions. What is now the UK, which was once the world’s largest empire and a leading cause of much suffering and devastation on this planet, was once a rainforest where lived animals such as wolves, bears, and lynx.

Therefore, civilized worldviews have a tendency to discourage the “base nature” of humans, likely to promote religious or technological salvation. Many languages and cultures show signs of this mentality: much of what we are taught to hide, either in our words or in our actions, refers to our body parts and functions, behaviour that reminds us of our animal natures, or disrespect of the religious institutions that promote this way of thinking.

As civilisation destroys the foundation upon which it was built, we can see its ongoing effects on the planet today. Carbon emissions increase the acidity of the ocean, unpredictable weather, and the loss of bodies of water. Most of the world’s forests are gone, and the rest are being actively destroyed. Countless beings go extinct – each day, and production is based largely on nonrenewable materials such as fossil fuels.

In summary, some problems that we seek to end are:

1. Colonial rule over indigenous cultures

2. The separation of labour and education from free time and everyday life

3. The dominance of symbolic culture over direct, sensual experience

4. The glorification of technology and civilisation over natural ecosystems, and the unequal relationships therein

5. Dogma – determining the way things are done, based not on logic or function, but on tradition

This is a decolonial look at the English language that takes these factors into account. The prestige of some words and dialects over others and the role of language in globalisation. The education systems and the professional workplace giving us words and spellings that would otherwise be unnecessary. The notion that we must use correct spelling and grammar. We choose to use language how we want.

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