How does language affect the history and culture of a society?

There are books devoted to this subject, which is deep and wide. We can only skim the surface here, and point out one or two of the more spectacular half-submerged logs of lore. There is the fact that English has the unique wealth of two word hordes and two grammatical structures, being something of a fusion of the Germanic Old English and the Romance Norman French. From the Norman Conquest of 1066 on, English literature changed direction and so today English speakers who have never heard of Beowulf, the great hero of Old English literature, know all about King Arthur, the Welsh hero of Mediaeval French literature.

Frenchified English is still considered higher and more refined, compared to the homelier and earthier Anglo-Saxon English, both in words and grammar. An English cow or sheep in the field becomes a French beef or mutton in the kitchen. And "God's House" doesn't have the necessary gravitas that "the House of God" has.

An interesting and important quirk in the history of English speaking culture is that its Anglic dialect, which obviously gave its name to the language, has an uninterrupted literary history that does indeed go all the way back to Beowulf, whereas the Saxon dialect spoken now didn't even exist at the time that Beowulf was composed. But, and this is huge, that Saxon form is now called Standard English, and its speakers ( the English) have the temerity to claim that the far older Anglic dialect, now called Scots, is an inferior debasement and a sloppy source of shame. This was and is a political feature of immense effect on the history and culture of Britain.

In America, the English used by African slaves became the major influence on the dialects of the South. In families well-off enough to own slaves, children learned their speech from their mammies, not their mamas, and the African substrate informs Southern speech, which is becoming basic American speech (Pop music is invariably sung southern), which is again to say the speech of the world.

English right now is at the center of world culture and history. In the last Century, it was French, and before that Spanish and Portuguese, which took over from Latin and the earlier Greek as the great international idioms of western thought. Get into this deeply by reading Empires of the Word, by Nicholas Ostler

First answer by Lynda Jean. Last edit by Bennett hammond. Contributor trust: 136 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 13 [recommend question]