An Anglo-Saxon chronicle

LANGUAGE: CARLO GÉBLERreviews Globish: How the English Language Became the World's LanguageBy Robert McCrum, Penguin Viking, 310pp, £20

THIS FASCINATING BOOK is largely a history of those nations – first England, then Britain and, finally, the United States – that took English around the world and how they did that. This is combined with a running audit of the foreign words effortlessly appropriated by English, while at the end the author offers some reflections on the varieties of English now spoken all over our planet – the global English, or Globish, of the title.

McCrum’s narrative comes in four acts. In the first he tells the story of the island of Britain, starting with the Roman invasion and ending with James I and the emergence of the unified British state.

This is a bravura section that combines a description of the emergence of the English language and the simultaneous evolution of the idea of Englishness that's indistinguishable from the language, with a lucid account of the main historical events, a deft survey of the literature from Bede's History of the English Church and Peoplethrough Chaucer's Canterbury Talesto the King James Bible, and an illuminating description of the achievement of William Caxton (a true English genius: something I'd never realised).

For act two McCrum crosses the Atlantic and tells us what happens in the first great British colony, from its settlement by English speakers to the election in 2008 of Barack Obama (who does things with English inconceivable to his predecessor), with, threaded deftly into the account, a fast but illuminating description of the development of American-English and its literature with particular reference to Mark Twain.

For act three McCrum returns to the British Isles. Starting with Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, he then goes back to the Glorious Revolution (which is strangely antichronological and momentarily interrupts his otherwise lovely narrative rhythm) and from there works his way forwards, telling the story of the development of English alongside that of the antislavery movement – Britain's revenge on the US for divorcing her – the conquest of India, the settlement of Australia and Southern Africa, Queen Victoria's 1897 jubilee and, finally, the Great War, which he sees as the start of Britain's decline and the United States' rise.

In act four, another bravura section, McCrum describes the status swap between Britain and the US but with his focus always on the English language. As McCrum sees it, though the loss of prestige stings the British state and people, thanks to the postwar establishment of three anglophone institutions – the International Monetary Fund, Nato and the United Nations (where two of the five permanent members have English as their mother tongue) – the new world order has done wonders for the English language.

However, what seals the global reach of English isn’t the post-war settlement (that merely prepares the ground) but 1989, when, unpredicted yet inevitable, the Berlin Wall is breached. In short order the Soviet Union ceases to exist and new governments appear in the newly independent nations of eastern Europe, while in China the Communist Party, having watched events in Europe and faced popular convulsions of its own, decides to sanction capitalism on condition that it remains the supreme power – a stipulation the Chinese largely accept.

These enormous changes, besides flattering western anticommunists, from the point of view of the story of the spread of English around the globe have an extraordinary effect. With the fall of the Wall, McCrum writes, “where once there were competing ideologies, loosely capitalism versus communism – now a formerly divided world became united, economically speaking, in the common enterprise of global capitalism. For better or worse, every country under the sun was now in the same world market, trading on unequal terms, but trading nevertheless”.

In the 18 years from 1990 to 2008 the global economy expands from $23 trillion to $54 trillion, and global trade increases by 133 per cent, with about half of this growth coming from the markets that appear after 1989. The new consumers need to talk – estimates vary, but after the death of the Soviet Union it is thought something like two billion of them join the world market – and their preferred language is English, “contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive”.

Coinciding with the collapse of the USSR and the Chinese Communist Party’s invention of sino-capitalism, a new communication system has conveniently appeared. All the new consumers need is a way of navigating the web – and they get it finally, and serendipitously, in 1995, with the launch of Netscape, the first commercial browser. A fortnight later Microsoft launches Windows 95, and at a stroke “the whole world was wired together”. It is no coincidence that it is also in 1995 that Jean-Paul Nerrière identifies and names the language this wired community uses to talk when he coins the term Globish.

The global English story is fiendishly complicated, and to tell it McCrum has to follow many threads running in many directions at the same time. Happily, apart from having an uncharacteristic kink at the start of the 18th-century part of his story, he manages to make the complex accessible and interesting. His pace is also admirable: brisk but never breathless.

I don't doubt, linguistics, language and the history of empire being slippery and contentious, some experts will see things differently from McCrum. I don't think that matters. He isn't writing an academic work. He's writing a book for readers who like stories, and his storytelling, which requires him to synthesise a formidable body of material, is so good that comparison with another great synthesiser and writer of narrative history, the now sadly neglected Alan Moorehead (author of The Blue Nileand The White Nile), is in order, I think.

McCrum’s other virtue (and this is another similarity he has with Moorehead) is his refusal to be categorical. As McCrum has it at the end, the English language is evolving, its triumph is not assured and, like Latin, it could yet fragment into different dialects that would be so different from each other that, even though they shared a common root, the speakers of one dialect would be unable to understand the speakers of any other dialect. On the other hand, English may triumph, but McCrum has no more of an idea than anyone else has what way things will go, so he makes no predictions.

Instead he offers a snapshot of where we are and how we got here, and I would certainly urge anyone wanting to know why the world’s second-most-spoken language (Mandarin is the first) is that of a now failed imperial power from an obscure island in the northern hemisphere that they read this book.

Carlo Gébler is the Royal Literary Fund fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is writing a play for the BBC about Charles and Mary Lamb