The Story of English: How an Obscure Dialect Became the World's Most-Spoken Language

Piercy (Slippery Tipples) offers a handy pocket guide to the way the English language conquered the world. Moving chronologically, he opens with a cursory look at how, despite four centuries of Roman rule, the native Celts resisted speaking Latin, before "Anglisc" emerges circa AD 450 with the arrival of the next invaders, the Angles and Saxons. "Olde" English took a big leap forward during the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899)%E2%80%94Oxford founder, literacy promoter, and defender against Viking attacks. When the Normans brought French across the Channel, the aristocracy adopted it despite the formalization of the English alphabet by an industrious monk in 1011. In the 1370s Chaucer, with his Canterbury Tales, memorialized Middle English, a hybrid of French, Anglo Saxon, and Old Norse. Between colonization and the Industrial Revolution, by Queen Victoria's reign a quarter of the planet became English speakers. Organized in bite-size chapters peppered with sidebars and quotations Piercy closes with today's robust, slang-infused English. While the topics of BBC English and colonial dialects may be lost on American readers, puzzle lovers will be pleased to discover one of the earliest extant books in English: an anthology of poems and riddles entitled the Exeter Book. (June)