Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson

I love Bryson’s books. The ones I have read are entertaining, they wear their author’s erudition lightly, include lots of great anecdotes and deploy well Bryson’s intimate knowledge of the US and the UK.  

It has been years since I last read this one, subtitled: “The Story of the English Language”.  Published in 1990, it hasn’t aged particularly well.  That is perhaps an unfair comment, given that (p136) Bryson quotes someone taking issue with the NY Times’ decision not to switch from the 1934 edition of a dictionary to the then-newly published 1962 version: “Anyone who solemnly announces in the year 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense”.

The time between 1934 and 1962 spans 28 years.  Bryson’s book was published in 1990, which is 30 years ago.  So we would expect the linguistic world to have moved on a little.

It still makes uncomfortable reading to see how Irish words are derided for the lack of sound-writing link, native American words are considered to have far too many syllables and the Chinese and Japanese languages are regarded as incomprehensible.

Then there is the Western-centric nature of some of the writing.  Writing about Australia (p103) Bryson says: “When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 …”.  Presumably these “first inhabitants” were news to the pre-existing aboriginal population, who rate a mention two sentences later: “Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the aborigines, were billabong for a brackish body of water, didgeridoo for a kind of trumpet [...] and of course boomerang, koala, outback and kangaroo.”

So according to page 103, the Aboriginal population were not “the first inhabitants”, were not “Australians” and “lent words” to the European settlers who then “devised” their own “new words”. 

Seen through the prism of 2020, this looks incredibly dated.  And it’s odd for me, because I remember 1990 well!  I don’t recall when I last read this book, but it didn’t strike me as offensive then. 

It is also dated in the lack of usage of computers and the internet.  For example, graduate students were deployed to count occurrences of certain words, and no-one was absolutely sure how many different words were used by Shakespeare.  A computer program would do both of these very straightforwardly today.

The good parts?  Bryson writes very entertainingly: he is happy to go off on an excursus and takes any excuse to deploy an anecdote (which is good news for the reader – they are good value).

He also gives the reader some credit for their intelligence.  He exemplifies Esperanto and earlier versions of English using texts he is sure people will recognise (such as the start of Genesis, or the Gettysburg address).

Bryson seems to me (someone who doesn’t know about linguistics) to be very knowledgeable about related words, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, etc. He pulls some good misspelling-related gags.

His closing thesis that US English and British English will get closer together has, I think, been proved right, largely due to the continuing convergence of culture, prompted by the internet and by the ready availability of music and movies.  (I didn’t consciously choose the word ‘movie’ over ‘film’ here, but I now find myself talking about the “seasons” of a programme on Netflix, rather than its “series” as I would have done 5 years ago.)

Overall, it’s still entertaining, but it would be worth a rewrite to bring it up to date (both in terms of how it views the non-American/Brit and in terms of the language used).  But maybe Bryson has other, interesting things he wants to write about instead.