“Maybe English is what they meant by the lingua pura? It’s considered the international language of science.”

— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

I chuckled when I read that. I am reading the book now, and I find the story fascinating and entertaining. The fictional argument is that English was a language the seventeenth-century Vatican had not embraced, something foreign to its institutions and associated instead with free thinkers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare. From there comes the suggestion that English could have been the lingua pura, the “pure language,” precisely because it sat outside the linguistic world the Vatican controlled.

It is a Dan Brown novel, so I am not treating that as reliable Vatican history. What amused me was the idea of English being called “pure” when the language itself is anything but pure.

It’s a mess. English is three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one.

Part of teaching English is having to address why the language matters. I usually begin by asking whether it is, in fact, important. I don’t usually get an answer. My students have no idea why they’re learning anything, let alone a language barely spoken where they live.

English is everywhere, which makes it easy to forget how strange the language actually is.

It is used internationally in education, business, science, entertainment, tourism, technology, and communication between people who may not share any other language. Estimates of the number of English speakers vary enormously, somewhere between roughly 1.38 and 2 billion depending on what we mean by “speaking English.” Knowing a handful of words is not the same as being able to hold a conversation, study, work, or function independently in the language.

Only a minority of those English users are usually described as native speakers. Roughly 400 million fall into that category, which means most people using English around the world are not native speakers at all.

So who exactly owns English?

A language built from other languages

English has never been particularly pure. Remember the trench coat.

Its early foundations were Germanic. Contact with Vikings brought Old Norse into the mixture. The Norman invasion introduced enormous French influence, while Latin contributed heavily as well. Migration, conquest, trade, religion, administration, literature, and ordinary contact between people kept adding to the language.

The result is a language capable of having several words for similar ideas because those words entered through different historical routes.

Its spread beyond Britain followed another history. Settlement carried English into North America. British trade and imperial expansion carried it much further. Later, the economic and cultural influence of the United States strengthened its international position. Literature, film, television, music, education, commerce, and eventually the internet pushed it into places where Britain itself had little direct relevance.

Some communities adopted English because it was useful. Others encountered it because political or economic power imposed it. Often, both are part of the story.

English is enormously influential, but it is not the first large language to displace or weaken smaller ones. It is simply one of the most successful examples.

There is no single English

“British English” and “American English” are useful labels, but they cover a lot of variation. Scottish English does not sound like Geordie English. New York does not sound like Texas. Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Irish, Jamaican, and other varieties developed in their own contexts as well.

There is an entire field around this, usually discussed under World Englishes. The Handbook of World Englishes collects research on how English changes, adapts, and functions across different cultural and regional settings. I mention it because it takes much further something Harmer introduces more practically: English exists in many varieties, and the people using it keep shaping it.

For teaching, learners still need a model. Beginners benefit from a reasonably consistent variety, usually influenced by the curriculum, materials, examinations, or where they are learning. As they become more proficient, they can encounter a broader range of accents and usage.

This difference between the English we teach and the English people actually encounter can get funny very quickly. There is a scene in The Wire where Omar says, “I thinks not.”

A student can hear that perfectly understandable sentence in one of the most acclaimed American television shows ever made, then walk into an English class and be told that think takes an s with he, she, and it, but absolutely not with I.

So we teach I think and he thinks. Then the world outside the classroom hands them I thinks not.

That does not make the classroom rule useless. Students need a model, especially when they are starting out and when examinations expect standard forms. It does mean that the model is a model. English outside the classroom has never agreed to behave for us.

The recording in Unit 4 is one version of English. It is not the only one they are going to hear.

Most English conversations do not belong to native speakers

English also works as a lingua franca.

Two people may use English because neither speaks the other’s first language. A Moroccan might use English with someone from Japan, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, or South Korea. Neither person needs to sound British or American for the conversation to work.

Research into English as a Lingua Franca looks at these interactions. Speakers adjust to one another, repeat themselves, simplify something, rephrase it, or tolerate forms that a traditional exam might mark as incorrect.

That creates a problem for language teaching. Examinations still expect conventional accuracy. Learners still need grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation standards, while ordinary communication can be considerably more forgiving.

The practical question is what learners need English for, who they are likely to use it with, and what kind of English will help them do that.

Grammar is only part of the language

A grammatical form does not always have one meaning. The present continuous can describe something happening now, a temporary situation, a future arrangement, or irritation with repeated behavior. The present simple can describe routine, but it can also make a past story feel immediate.

Even “yes” is not as simple as it looks.

Depending on intonation, facial expression, posture, and context, it can communicate agreement, surprise, uncertainty, celebration, a question, or simply “I am listening.”

Learners therefore need more than the form itself. They need to know what it means, how it is used, and what changes when the context changes.

The same thing happens beyond individual sentences. People speak and write differently depending on who they are talking to, where they are, what they are trying to accomplish, and what kind of text they are producing. An email, funeral speech, advertisement, classroom instruction, poem, and conversation with a friend all come with different expectations.

English is made of chunks

Vocabulary is equally messy.

Words carry multiple meanings. Synonyms are rarely completely interchangeable. Register changes what sounds appropriate. Words develop connotations that dictionaries cannot always capture neatly.

Fluent speakers also do not construct every sentence one word at a time.

We rely heavily on collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms, compounds, and phrases we have encountered so often that we retrieve them as units. Expressions such as “make a decision,” “by the way,” or “I don’t know” behave partly like stored chunks rather than completely new constructions every time we say them.

Metaphor makes things even more interesting, especially in phrasal verbs and idioms. A learner can understand every individual word in an expression and still have no idea what the expression means.

And then there is pronunciation

English spelling is not much help.

Twenty-six written letters represent at least 44 phonemes, and the relationship between spelling and sound is famously inconsistent. The same spelling can produce different sounds, while the same sound can appear under several spellings.

Pronunciation also involves more than producing individual consonants and vowels correctly. Stress, rhythm, pitch, intonation, elision, assimilation, and the reduced vowel we call the schwa all shape normal speech.

Then there is everything happening outside the words themselves.

Facial expression, posture, gestures, eye movement, speed, loudness, and silence contribute meaning. Those signals are not universal either. A gesture that seems obvious in one culture can mean something completely different somewhere else.

Where do I fit in?

I grew up in a linguistically rich environment, which is a fancy way of saying it was a mess.

A lot of the cartoons I watched were in English, first through Cartoon Network and later Boomerang. Movies and television brought more English, often accompanied by Arabic subtitles. There were channels such as Abu Dhabi TV, Dubai One, and later MBC2. English was simply around.

Then there was French at school, beginning in primary school. My experience with it was horrible. I remember being punished for trivial nonsense and for making mistakes while learning a language we somehow seemed expected to already know.

Spanish, or broken versions of it, existed around me too. Moroccan Arabic came in many flavors. And then there was Riffian, which as a child sounded almost like a completely foreign language, with structures I could not make sense of.

That was the linguistic world I grew up in. It was chaotic.

English became an escape language for me.

Books, movies, television, games, and eventually the internet opened a space that felt separate from everything around me. They still do. English gave me somewhere else to go, mentally at least, while growing up in a country where arguments about language, identity, education, and which language should be used where never seem very far away.

Somehow, I found a place in English.

It is chaotic too. Its spelling barely behaves. Its vocabulary comes from everywhere. Its accents multiply the moment you start listening carefully. Native speakers break the rules teachers spend years explaining. The same sentence can mean completely different things depending on who says it and how.

But there is a method to the madness.

Maybe that is part of why I stayed with it.

Sources

The main framework comes from Chapters 5 and 6 of Jeremy Harmer’s Being an English Teacher: Principles and Practice of ELT, covering the history and spread of English, varieties, English as a lingua franca, grammar, lexis, pronunciation, discourse, and paralinguistic communication.

I also refer briefly to The Handbook of World Englishes for the wider discussion of English across different cultural and regional settings, Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons for the opening lingua pura reference, and The Wire, Season 1, Episode 9, for the “I thinks not” example.