Things you Probably Won’t Hear in English Language Class

In English classes there are priorities.  Certain aspects of English language usually aren’t taught because either they’re not appropriate for a classroom setting, the teacher relies entirely on textbooks, the teacher doesn’t know anything about the topic, or perhaps they’re just not considered important enough to spend class time on.

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This type of information isn’t limited to grammar or vocabulary either; it could be historical or cultural information about the language.  The following paragraphs introduce some topics that aren’t normally discussed in English classes.

There is no original, pure form of English

Students frequently want to know which dialect or national variety of English language is the most “correct” or “pure.” Some people look to the history of the language for answers to this question and conclude that British English is the most pure.  Other people ask their teachers, whose answers will vary and be more opinion than anything else.  The fact is that no present-day speaker of English speaks “the original.” Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the original is the English spoken in Anglo-Saxon times; well, no native speaker today can even read it without training! If we move forward to the 16th–18th centuries (Early Modern English), nobody speaks that way either.  We ought to realize, therefore, that even if there were an “original” English at some point in the past, since nobody speaks it today, it’s best just to learn the dialect that you expect will be most useful in your everyday life.

For most practical purposes, “American” English includes both Canada and the USA

Naturally, this is a controversial issue.  Certainly, there are differences between the English of Canada and that of the United States.  However, a person living in the northern United States probably speaks more like the people on the other side of the Canadian border than like folks from South Carolina or Louisiana, yet the latter two groups are supposedly fellow speakers of “American English.” The point is that the political boundary does not always mean there’s a huge difference between the English spoken on either side.  It therefore doesn’t have much practical value for learners to focus much attention on the relatively minor differences between these two national varieties of English.

“People don’t speak English as well as they used to”

There is a tendency to think that people spoke better English at some point in the past.  It is common to think that the language has been corrupted somehow or that people aren’t as educated as they used to be.

This is similar to the tendency to think that today’s youth are more depraved and disrespectful than they were in the good old days.  However, languages change, and grammatical constructions and words that were once viewed as “bad English” eventually come to be accepted.  There are three stages of this: first, a word or construction is considered clearly to be slang or substandard; then there is a period of confusion when people aren’t sure which is correct; finally, what was originally “bad English” gains full acceptance.

Frisian is English’s closest relative

A number of languages have sister languages that are very similar, and in many cases they are mutually intelligible.  For instance, German language has Dutch, Russian has Ukrainian, Spanish has Portuguese, and Norwegian has Swedish.  One might then wonder if English has a similar language, and while we don’t have a sister language quite as close as those mentioned above, we do have Frisian.  You see, English wasn’t always isolated; long before the Anglo-Saxons (I am using the term Anglo-Saxon very loosely here) crossed the English Channel and became Englishmen, they were living on the North Sea coast in Jutland.  A bit further down the coast were their immediate neighbors, the Frisians.  English and Frisian were very similar 1,500 years ago, and they still have a lot of similarities today.  Let’s compare Frisian, English, and their somewhat more distant relative, German, all of which are West Germanic.  English and Frisian just happen to be much closer.

Only about 30% of words in English language are native

While it is very clear that English and Frisian have a lot in common, there are important reasons why they’re quite different too, and foremost among these is vocabulary.  An examination of the English lexicon reveals that it is made up of only about 30% Germanic vocabulary (including all of the examples above).  Latin and French loanwords make up about 30% of the lexicon each, and the next biggest contributor is Greek at about 5% (these are very rough estimates).  For various historical reasons, English language did not build its lexicon by modifying and combining its native words but instead by doing a lot of borrowing, especially from French and Latin.  It could be argued that English would probably have a lot more in common with the other Germanic languages were it not for the large number of loanwords.