OK, Clive’s victory in 1757 … until 1957 is 200 years. Until 2005 is another 48 years. So, 250 years since English began to become the lingua franca of commerce.

Spanish could indeed have been much more powerful in an international sense than it is today (although it is immensely powerful, obviously, in Central and South America and in Mexico in N America), but although it would be a good trading language because it is a small and not too taxing to learn, it simply never had the powerful trading base that English had with Britain (richer than Spain), the United States, Canada, Australia and England – all players on the world scene – whereas Bolivia, Guatamala, Belize were not. And, 350 years later, are still not.

1755 (250 years ago) is a little early to put English as a world language. The French still had Canada and Louisiana, and the British had hardly started to penetrate India: one could say the process started with Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757. Fifty years before that the Mughal Empire was still a going concern. British India didn’t reach its limit until a hundred years later, just before the Mutiny.

For sheer territorial extent, someone at the time might have opted for Spanish – but only to reject it at once because the mother country and colonies operated a system that simply didn’t work.

American English spread because the settlers wanted to work the land and so filled it up. Nowadays settlers/immigrants go to the cities, where they never did reproduce so much.

RPW, Interesting about my hero, the Duke of Wellington’s French accent. No matter what he did, he did superbly. He was a good dancer, too.

Yes, I accept that French was the lingua franca of culture, diplomacy and court. But I have a feeling that English had begun, by around 250 years ago, to start making inroads as the lingua franca of commerce.

And remember, 250 years ago, America was being settled. And India – or most of it – was under British rule. So diplomacy and culture and all the poncy stuff, yes, French. But what makes the world go round, i.e., commerce, English!

Ta for that, I believe mitochondrial studies are more ambiguous than y-chromosome ones which may be what you were picking up (the difference between the two could be explained if we were to postulate invading barbarians killing or driving off the men and enslaving the women, but I’ve no idea if there is enough evidence to support such an interpretation).

Verity, EG is about right in assigning 150-200 years for the rise of English to global dominance. Up until the early 19th century French was clearly the dominant language of diplomacy, culture and what not – at the battle of Waterloo for example Blucher and Wellington had to communicate in French because they had no other language (and according to people who heard the both speak, Wellington’s French was better than Napoleon’s, but that’s an aside). Waterloo is a good marker for the point at which English seriously began to displace French, but it probably took another generation for the changeover to be decisive.

I would say English has been the dominant language of the world since 200 years before that. Indeed, the lingua franca of commerce for around 350 years …

Also Anglo-Saxon, in effect, has conquered the world because, as Doug Jones says, we are relaxed about taking in anything that suits our purpose.

(Little side issue here: the French who were a presence in pioneer America, gave French names to things – Nez Percé Indians, for one example among hundreds. The Brits happily adopted the names the local indigenes had given them – thus Tennessee, Mississippi, Seminole, Florida – whatever. If that was your name and your word, fine. You were now part of the English language.)

Thanks – I am willing to stand corrected and the article looks interesting. Perhaps I should make clear that it was not a point made by Bragg, but by myself from rather vague statements I must have picked up from somewhere.

Colin Renfrew’s migration thesis, “Archaeology and Language” (1987) is interesting and very plausible, but for an earlier period, when agriculture was moving slowly from its origin in Anatolia into areas occupied by hunter gatherers (density 0.1 to the square kilometre) which, with agricultural exploitation, could carry 5-10 to the square kilometre. He was, of course, writing before Y-chromosome/mitochondrial DNA analysis had been developed.

It is, of course, more politically correct to assign migratory movements (and especially language spread) to peaceful methods than the old fire and sword massacres formerly in vogue.

Donald Wildgoose

It’s hard to prove a negative and I haven’t searched very hard, so if you can find evidence that there was an attempt, post-conquest, to make the teaching of English illegal, I should be glad to know. The “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (kept by monks) was being updated in English for nearly 100 years afterwards in some places. Preaching in Cathedrals in English was common. So Poole: “Domesday Book to Magna Carta” in the Oxford History of England Series.

“The Anglo-Saxon speakers moved west, gradually conquering the resistance of the Celtic-speaking inhabitants and replacing their language with their own. One must be careful to distinguish this process from one of replacement of the inhabitants themselves, for studies of the DNA of today’s population indicate that this was far from being the case.”

I understood that the evidence was actually quite compelling for population replacement (see “Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration” for details), and if I were to be cynical for a moment (as perhaps befits a descendant of the Celtic speaking inhabitants who managed to survive) I’d theorise that such controversy as exists on this subject is more down to residual squeamishness on the part of English historians reluctant to admit that they are benificiaries of one of history’s more successful acts of ethnic cleansing than to any dispute about the evidence.

There are two factors which accoount for the predominance of English today

Perhaps the fact that the dominant global powers for the past 150 years have been English speaking nations might have had something to do with it as well.

EG