The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

After 1588, the naval effectiveness of the comparatively small island grew even stronger and opened up the world to trade. This brought a massive injection into the language. As England imported a huge cargo of goods, English imported a huge cargo of vocabulary. Another ten to twelve thousand new words entered English in this Elizabethan and Jacobean period and delivered a new map of the world and new ideas. At the time of the Spanish Armada, England was well behind other European powers in the reach of its colonial conquests and English inevitably lagged badly in the influence it exerted abroad. Portuguese had already made its mark in Brazil and was biting deeply into southern America; Spanish had been spoken in Cuba and Mexico for more than half a century and Spain was taking its trade, its religion and its culture and its language all around the New World. Over eight hundred years earlier, Arabic had raced through the Middle East and North Africa and could still be called an imperial language, while Hindi was comfortably establishing itself as a vernacular if not a literary language throughout the populous Indian region.