The expansion of English has been a remarkable phenomenon, but there have been many losers. And, indeed, there is an important sense in which we are all the losers: the loss of linguistic diversity from the world as a result of the expansion of English has been what can only be described as a language-ecological disaster.1

Today, English is still spoken as a native language in the same areas of eastern England where it first came into being, and where I am writing this 1,600 years later. But, in the meantime, it has spread right across the world.

St John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver is about 3,000 miles; Plymouth, Massachusetts, to San Francisco is about 2,700 miles, the distances which English covered on its westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific between 1700 and the late 1800s. Revolution, purchase, negotiation, violent conquest, slavery and genocide brought the continental USA finally to its modern geographical limits. English-speaking powers controlled the east coast of North America from Labrador to Florida, and the west coast from the Arctic Ocean to the USA–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. The 250 years of spread of native English speakers occurred at the expense of indigenous North American languages, and to a lesser extent Spanish, French and the other languages of other European colonists.

For centuries, the homeland of the Germanic people was in southern Scandinavia, butaround 1500 BC some of them set off on the journey that was to lead them to England – and then far beyond. The journey went down along the Jutland peninsula until by about 1200 BC Germanic-speaking people were occupying the whole of Jutland, as well as a small area of northern Germany from the mouth of the River Elbe to the mouth of the Oder. Here, they came in to contact with Celtic-speaking peoples.

In 1169, Anglo-Norman forces from South Wales landed on the south coast of Ireland. With the backing of King Henry II of England, they went on to take military control of the bilingual Norse-Irish city-kingdoms of Dublin, Waterford and Wexford. In 1170, the High King of All Ireland led an Irish counteroffensive against the Normans, but in 1171 King Henry landed an army in Ireland to establish English control. Settlers from England began to move into the Norman-occupied areas, and as more and more of them arrived, much of the eastern and southeastern coastal areas of Ireland gradually became English-speaking, under an Anglo-Norman-speaking aristocracy.

I am sitting at my laptop, in the county of Norfolk in the east of England, about 16 miles (25 kilometres) from the North Sea coast, writing the beginnings of a book about English in English. That is a rather new thing to be able to do. And I do not mean because laptops are an extremely recent invention, although of course they are. And I do not mean because people of relatively humble origins like me have only quite recently known how to write, although that is true too.

What I mean is that the English language itself is rather recent. Human language is a phenomenon which is at least 200,000 years old, and maybe much more, but the English language has not been around for even as little as 1 per cent of that time. Five thousand years ago, there was no such language as ‘English’ – not even here in Norfolk which, as I shall argue later, is one of the places where English may have been born.

The tale of English spreading around the world, killing off other languages as it goes, is a spectacular and sad story, but it is not the whole story. There have been a few cases, such as the Labrador Inuit-Métis, where English first of all established a presence on the territory of a particular indigenous language only to be replaced in the long term by that indigenous language as native anglophones abandoned their mother tongue.

Where did English originally come from? We can say with some degree of certainty that the ancestor of modern English, Proto-Germanic, was originally a dialect of the Indo-European language which travelled from the borderlands of Asia and Europe to southern Scandinavia. It also seems rather likely that Proto-Germanic was significantly linguistically influenced at some stage by contact with another language or languages. And it is by no means impossible that much or some of that influence was exerted by Finno-Samic.

Britain was amonolingual Celtic-speaking island for at least a millennium before Roman colonisers brought Latin to England in AD 43, during the reign of the Emperor Claudius. A description of the geographical spread across Britain of early forms of English is therefore equivalent to a description of the geographical retreat of the Brittonic Celtic language which had preceded Germanic to the island by hundreds of years. This retreat led to Cornish, Welsh and Cumbric eventually becoming separated from one another geographically and eventually linguistically.

For its first 5,000 years, the language which eventually became English remained firmly geographically anchored in the Northern Hemisphere. The first expansion of English as a native language into the Southern Hemisphere was not until 1659, when it arrived on the remote island of St Helena, about 15° south of the equator in the South Atlantic. There was no further movement of English until the 1780s, when it arrived in Australia and then, during the 1800s, into the Pacific.

The most recent chapter in the story of the geographical spread of mother-tongue English around the world is a tale of transcultural diffusion, of places in the world which native English has spread to, not through the arrival from elsewhere of native speakers, as in the settlement of Australia, but through the transformation of communities of non-native English speakers into native-speaking communities, through language shift, as in the ongoing case of Singapore.

During the 1600s, the southwards and westwards expansion of Germanic, which had begun 2,000 years earlier in northern Europe, regained a new impetus. There was an explosive expansion of the English language into and across the Atlantic Ocean, which was to lead to the eventual death of a very large number of the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere. During the 1600s, 350,000 people left the British Isles for the Americas. Some of this expansion of English was the outcome of large-scale, planned, quasi-official attempts at colonisation. Others were haphazard settlements by refugees, pirates, runaway slaves, sailors, shipwrecked mariners and passengers and military deserters such those from the English army of Oliver Cromwell which had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1650s.

During the late AD 300s and early AD 400s, 1,000 years after the arrival of Germanic-speaking tribes on the eastern shores of the North Sea and 300 years after the arrival of the Romans in Britain, boatloads of West Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. Some arrivals had almost certainly come well before that, because the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in their garrisons in Britain since the second century AD. These Germanic people were mostly members of the tribal groupings that we now refer to as the Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians.

By AD 850, Old English was spoken everywhere in England, though not necessarily exclusively, with three geographically peripheral exceptions: the far south-west, where Cornish remained for another thousand years; the far north-west from the Lake District northwards into south-western Scotland; and small areas of the English border counties of Shropshire and Herefordshire which remained Welsh-speaking until the eighteenth century. Scotland had originally been no less Brittonic-speaking than England; but by AD 650–700 English had become dominant in the south-east of Scotland from the region around Edinburgh in the Lothians down to what is now the border with England. Cumbric remained dominant in the south-west of the country, in the Brittonic kingdom of Strathclyde.