SWORDPLAY: These days, national pride is a complex issue. By way of example, there are those who, casting their gaze to Europe for the European Championships, will sigh with quiet relief precisely because of the absence of the England football team and certain of its supporters. But when it comes to language, rather than the beautiful game, we can afford to be proud, sans guilt or complication. The English language is rich, nuanced, complex, creative; a delight for all of us. Here’s Times columnist Edward Fennell with a piece celebrating our mother tongue and explaining a landmark initiative by The English Project – ‘Kitchen Table Lingo’.
Who does the English language belong to? Inevitably that is a question that must be answered if you are embarked on a venture called ‘the English Project’, which aims to set up a permanent exhibition and associated activities dedicated to the story of the English language.
While some languages are hedged about by official constriction, English is spontaneous, subject to the laws of natural selection rather than regulation. So a central tenet of our philosophy for the English Project is that English owes its vigour and vitality to the inventiveness and creativity of ordinary English speakers and users. Important though the lexicographers and dictionaries may be, they trail behind the living exponents of the language – the man, woman and child in the street (or home, or workplace or nursery).
So our central conviction about the character and heritage of English is that it is the most inclusive phenomenon in the culture. Whatever social, ethnic or generational divides may exist we all share the same core language and are playful and innovative in our use of it. That is why, left to their own devices, people love talking about language (even though they may clam up about it in an academic environment).
That was our belief. But did it hold water?
In devising ‘Kitchen Table Lingo’ we put our convictions to the test. By setting out the proposal that ordinary families and social groups had their own – often private – language through which they expressed their creativity and delight in language, we were risking a lot. By inviting the general public to ‘go public’ on their private vocabularies we were exposing ourselves to the acid test of truth.
We need not have worried. Within less than a couple of hours on the morning of 6 June 2008 when we launched Kitchen Table Lingo hundreds of contributions were pouring in. Within a couple of weeks we had thousands of entries. What was even more exciting was that we had set off an informal national festival of language. Not only wasKitchen Table Lingo featured in virtually every newspaper but it was on the BBC, ITV and CNN. Most significantly, though, it was picked up by local radio stations across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Listeners by their thousands phoned in with their words and, against a background of gloomy news, people began to laugh about language. BBC Radio Solent, for example, said that it had never before had such a response to a topic. It ran the story for a whole week with a barrage of people phoning in with their family or local words. Our only regret was that we could not pick up and record all these words which were pouring in to the media.
So just two weeks after Kitchen Table Lingo had gone live we thought we had proved a point. Not only was there cherished ‘private language’ out there (as if in an unexplored continent) but people were fired up, fascinated and frank in talking about it in an unprecedented way. We had unleashed the underlying democracy of the English language in which speakers devise new words constantly to meet new needs – or just because they enjoy it. And all we had to do was stimulate them and then collect this harvest of words for relaying on to the wider community for their delectation, amusement and use.
On that basis we feel more confident than ever that the English Project is right to celebrate the language and the creativity of the people in a process going back 1500 years. This is, after all, the heritage of every one of us.
For more about the English Project (of which Edward Fennell is a trustee) and Kitchen Table Lingo go to www.englishproject.org
