The Englishness of English

Roy Harris

  • Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk edited by Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik
    Longman, 304 pp, £18.00, September 1980, ISBN 0 582 55079 3

England has never had an official body equivalent to the Académic Française or the Italian Accademia della Crusca. And that is no accident. For the Englishman has scant respect for experts, of whatever kind. Telling Englishmen what they ought to do for their own good has been a hazardous enterprise throughout history. But a permanent committee to tell them how they ought to use their own native language would be an institutionalised insult. Setting up an English Academy to watchdog it over the language would have guaranteed defeat or exile for any government or monarch foolish enough to try it on.

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