Language has become as emblematic as flying the flag among the newly risen hard right.
There is sure to be much disapproval vented about those in Australia and the United Kingdom who don’t speak English when the likes of Pauline Hanson and her soul brothers and sisters meet for their big gabfest in London next week, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC Britain).
You might imagine a display of particularly pursed lips about those who speak different languages at home.
In truth, we all seem to be speaking different languages these days.
The academically trained communicate in a register so high and convoluted it as if their conversation is designed to baffle the rest of us.
Bureaucrats and technocrats exclude outsiders by scattering acronyms and impenetrable jargon throughout almost every sentence.
Everywhere those who accept, say, the science of climate change, can’t begin to understand those who condemn it as a hoax, and vice versa. The former may as well be speaking Norwegian, the latter Swahili.
Still, the Pauline Hansons and the Nigel Farages simplify the matter by exaggerating the impact and the number of those immigrants they condemn for failing to win a grasp on English.
They might be advised to avoid discussing events immediately after the year 1066, when the language we know as English was transformed to this day by a French-speaking monarch and his nobles.
My family (vegetarians should avert their eyes) had roast pork for dinner the other night. Crunching down on the crackling, it was oddly diverting to turn the mind to 1066.
That was the year William the Conqueror and his Norman troops from northern France defeated and killed the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings.
William was crowned King at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day that year.
The Normans, descended from Vikings, ruled for the next 90 years, but English language and culture were transformed permanently.
Which brings us to the matter of pork.
William’s Norman nobility continued speaking French in England, and William himself never learnt to speak English, despite being King of England.
The Anglo-Saxon peasantry found themselves raising the animals that were cooked for the Norman nobles’ tables. The peasants continued using the old Germanic Anglo-Saxon terms for the animals they farmed, but which they were too poor to eat.
Their word for pig was picq, cow was cu, sheep were sceap, a calf a cealf. They were not permitted to hunt, much less eat, the deer (deor) of the forest.
The new Norman elite scorned those Anglo-Saxon terms, brought by Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons and Jutes – who migrated from mainland Europe to Britain following the collapse of Roman rule in the fifth century.
The Normans feasted luxuriously on pig’s meat, but they called it pork (from the Old French porc). Cow on the plate was beef (boeuf), sheep became mutton (moton), calf transformed to veal (veal in Old French) and deer to venison (venesoun).
And so, a lasting class divide was born of language, formalised through the separation of the Anglo-Saxons, who laboured in the slush of the animal pens, and the Normans from across the Channel, who enjoyed wealth, social standing and fine food, and used language derived from Old French.
In time, numerous words from the nobility’s language came to be adopted by those who sought upward social mobility, which is to say, just about everyone, right up to those of us who speak English today.
Winston Churchill made a brave case for old English when he gave his famous “we will fight on the beaches” rallying speech during World War II.
He was determined to mobilise his people with evocative, home-grown language. Almost every word of the speech’s celebrated concluding section carries the punch of plain Anglo-Saxon.
The last word, “surrender”, perhaps naughtily, is of the French root (“we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”)
Nine hundred and sixty years on from William the Conqueror invading England and bringing his language with him, hard-right populists in Britain and across the world are making political capital out of scorning those who come from places across the sea, bringing their languages with them.
Hanson made it central to her speech at the National Press Club a couple of weeks ago.
“The 2021 census showed that one in four people, 23 per cent, speak a language other than English at home, the most common being Mandarin and Arabic,” she declared, as if speaking another language at home in Australia was not a good thing.
She neglected to mention that the vast majority of these people speak English when they’re not at home.
“How can you generate social cohesion if people can’t speak the language?” she demanded.
“In that same census, 872,000 people self-reported as speaking English ‘not well’ or ‘not at all’.”
Sounds confronting, until a quick figuring reveals it is just 3.3 per cent of the 2021 population of 26 million, a proportion that hasn’t changed much since the postwar immigration surge by non-anglophones in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hanson’s determination to demonise people who dare to speak their native languages at home finds an echo in Britain’s anti-immigration populist-on-the-rise Nigel Farage, who is much given to portraying multilingualism as a threat to British culture.
He has employed his claim that large numbers of people living in the UK do not speak “passable” English as an argument for stricter language requirements for immigrants.
Late last year, Farage took his outrage to Scotland, railing that one in three pupils in Glasgow schools used English as a second language. It was, he said, a “cultural smashing of Glasgow”.
Hanson and Farage were to meet up when Hanson flew to London this week.
Given that Farage quit his seat in the British parliament this week in a huff over scrutiny of donations from billionaires, they’d have quite a few notes to compare.
In plain Anglo-Saxon, you’d assume.
Tony Wright is an associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
