Latin and English

In a recent European survey on the use of English, foreigners thought that the people most difficult to understand speaking English were the English themselves, mainly because the English spoke a sophisticated language, depending on many original sources and with a very large vocabulary. At the same time, it was reported that in spite of Mandarin Chinese being spoken by the largest group in the world, English continued to gain ground as the business 'lingua franca'. Yet England and the English are slowly disappearing as immigration into the UK increases and the English disappear overseas.

Rather as Latin disappeared over the 1500 years since the collapse of Rome in 410 AD - although the Venerable Bede through to Sir Isaac Newton kept Latin alive in England until quite recently - only to reappear as Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese, the same is now happening to English. The English nation will disappear within the next 50 years, but English itself will reinvent itself as a universal language, spoken all over the world by new nations. It won't be English we speak today but it will still be English.

A visitor to England in fifty years time will find a people who have nothing to do with an Anglo-Saxon history. The dialect will be recognisably English but the Anglo-saxons will have gone forever from the land once called England.

A Roman from the Roman empire vanished long ago, and yet bring him back today he would recognise at once the patois the Roman soldiers left behind in Italy, Spain or Latin-America. So it is about to happen again. Just as the citizens of Rome dusappeared long ago, so it is that we live in a time when the English as a nation will also disappear, bequeathing to the world their language but disappearing themselves.