It had already, by this stage in its history, the middle of the eighteenth century, gone from a splinter dialect of a subdivision of a branch of an Indo-European tongue to the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, the language that sailed in the mouths and minds of zealous and dedicated men and women to plant itself in a new world. Yet of all its many triumphs and cunningly rich compromises, there is little, I think, that so singularly characterises its resources as its encounter with the African languages through the slave trade. That English united and absorbed so many scores of African tongues and so quickly, that it was itself sufficiently pliable and yielding to receive back the raft of words, phrases and insights brought from cultures so very different, is awesome. For English was able to perform an act of symbiosis with tribal tongues from a wholly different language group, even to survive being taken on by an alien grammatical system. This began to gather strength in the eighteenth century and went on to create a new English, black English, which fed back into the mainstream, especially in the twentieth century.
What do You think about The Adventure Of English (2011)?
