The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

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. On a very much smaller scale during the sixteenth century, English had begun to spread more widely to parts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Yet even in its more limited scope, English showed its voracity for new words and its power to enfold them almost instantly into the mother language.