This is a book for anyone who wants to know about the origins and spread of the English language regardless of training. No need for technical knowledge of any kind—most linguistics books cannot be read in one sitting like a detective novel, whereas this one can. And the detective analogy is apt in terms of tracking when and whence English spread (quick spoiler: it has been spreading slowly over 1,600 years in numerous tiny fits and starts from the edges of land-masses to the regions within.) I read this book with Google Maps open, visiting the shores and islands settled by English speakers in date order (almost—St. Kitts is an exception) as you can now virtually roam around parts of the Frisian Islands, the Angeln peninsula, the Channel Islands, Newfoundland, Labrador, Virginia, the Caribbean, the Bay Islands, San Andrés and Providencia, Chichijima, Hahajima, from Unst to Utila, and see the beaches on which they landed.
However, the truly arresting thing here is that Trudgill also describes the flip side of the spread, the languages that the arrival of English dispossessed: ‘the story of the expansion of English is mostly also a story of language death, with indigenous languages dying out after contact’ (154). It's hard-hitting. You do not usually read in linguistics books about ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘cultural genocide’, the ‘deplorable ways in which the spread of the English language was effected in North America’ (113); the horrendous story of settlers and colonialists forcibly preventing peoples already in situ from speaking their languages. Trudgill does not pull punches, so when you have read about English spreading into North America you then read of the 100+ languages it dispossessed; of the Arawakan language dispossessed in Barbados, the Taino dispossessed in Jamaica, Bahamas and all the other Arawakan languages dispossessed in the Caribbean; the 200+ aboriginal languages dispossessed in Australia. Specific genocides committed by English-speakers are given their own sections, such as the Kalinago Genocide in St. Kitts and Nevis of 1626, the ‘Trail of Tears’ ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee in North America of 1830–1850, the Bloody Island Massacre in California of 1850, the Skull Pocket Massacre in Queensland, Australia of 1884. Outcomes of enslavement are reported: the Brittonic Celtic speakers enslaved by English speakers within the British Isles in the first millennium; enslaved Britons sold from the ninth century to the twelfth in Norse-Gaelic Dublin's slaving-centre; the African slaves brought to the Caribbean and North America, with concomitant reversal as their English was taken back across the Atlantic to Sierra Leone from 1787 and Liberia from 1820; the slaughter and enslavement of the Polynesian Moriori of the Chatham Islands in 1835. Thus The Long Journey of English differs from predecessors such as David Crystal's English as a Global Language (Reference Crystal1997) not only due to its wealth of extra detail but also its explanation of the linguistic consequences for languages displaced, and its emotional charge. It is an appalling record of how peoples—in this case, English-speakers—have destroyed the culture of those they have dominated, first by demic shift and force, and then by transcultural diffusion.
It is also a tour de force of writing, because the story of the spread of English is long, bitty, and not easy to condense. Detail has been selected and expressed without use of linguistics shorthand; footnotes are minimal, making for accessibility. Experts will not find a nuanced exposition of their field—for example, Theo Vennemann's theories on Vasconic and Afro-Asiatic influences are presented without the numerous objections and counterpoints made by his critics—as the objective here is a consistent followable narrative, whetting the appetite for the further reading suggested at the end of each chapter, which is itself kept brief. Like Trudgill's regular column in the Eastern Daily Press there are shaded boxes with related facts, and plenty of subheadings. This jettisoning of academic style was an understandable decision but one not always easy to implement, making for some potential misunderstandings: Trudgill swaps the usual name (date: page) referencing system for ‘the Dutch Celticist and Indo-Europeanist Professor Peter Schrijver’ (32; allowing an inference that Peter Schrijver works on Dutch Celtic), and usually but not always gives linguists their academic titles ‘Professor Ilse Wischer points out … According to Anders Ahlqvist …’, although Anders Ahlqvist was Sir Warwick Fairfax Professor of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney. A few small corrections to be made in the next edition: fart > eart (p. 28); Victoria did not come to the throne in 1820 (p. 123); the map on p. 154 needs some dark hatching in Saterland to match up with reportage of present-day spoken East Frisian; the map on p. 20 is labelled ‘Germanen’ without explanation of the -en suffix; p. 37 ‘the Old English word wealh or walh’—this is the same word in West Saxon and Anglian form; conventionally, West Saxon spellings are used for lexemes so ‘or walh’ is redundant here.
In sum, the research and literature-search that has gone into this book is considerable and the result is enthralling—with pun on thrall intended. It is a shocking book.
