Language

The country has a reputation for being remote and reclusive, yet is home to a remarkably multilingual society, as well as one of language's greatest mysteries, writes PETER TRUDGILL

PETER TRUDGILL on the many chapters of Yiddish

Not all languages use the same terms to describe skin colour, writes PETER TRUDGILL.

PETER TRUDGILL on a recent decision to drop a common Austrian phrase due to racial sensitivities

The disappearance of this archaic term represents a genuine loss for the English language, says PETER TRUDGILL

The Sami people are divided by several different languages and thousands of kilometres of inhospitable terrain. What does it all tell us about this remotely dispersed population?

Why Lord Digby Jones's claims that Alex Scott's commentary ruined the Olympics are ill-founded

The roots of author J R R Tolkien’s name are almost as tangled as his fantasy fiction.

PETER TRUDGILL on how one place name came to have two very different word associations Bethlehem is associated with the nativity of Christ, peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Bedlam is associated with the complete opposite: mad confusion and noisy uproar. It is something of a surprise to discover that they were originally the same word. […]

‘Thank you’ might seem an easy phrase to learn in a foreign language. But that is not always the case says PETER TRUDGILL Sometimes, when people are going to visit a country they have never been to before, they say they plan to learn a little of the language which is spoken there, but “just […]

Some modern misunderstandings are a consequence of changes that have occurred in the English language over the last 300 years A regrettable and embarrassing incident has occurred in the West Midlands of England. An 11-year-old schoolboy was referred to the government’s so-called counter-radicalisation programme after the teacher asked his class what they would do if they […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the European language that lingered on Greenland, and another –  of sorts – that still thrives there Greenland is the largest island in the world. As is well known it also lies very far to the north. At its northernmost point, it is only about 500 miles from the North Pole. Iceland lies about 200 […]

PETER TRUDGILL takes on the linguistic purists once again for their attachment to words’ ‘true’ meanings There are some pedantic people around who reckon that it is wrong to use the word aggravate to mean ‘irritate, vex’ or ‘annoy’ – as in “please stop doing that, it’s very aggravating!” This is probably the most common usage of the word […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how bottlers became butlers There are about 45,000 people in Britain who bear the surname Butler. In comparison, there are a quarter of million Browns and half a million Smiths. But 45,000 still seems to be rather a high number if we assume that all of our contemporary Butlers are descended from men who […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the language of the Isle of Man, and its rearguard action against the linguistic homogenisation of the British Isles If you have ever been to Ellan Vannin – the Isle of Man – you will know that from the shores of that beautiful island it is possible to see Ireland, Scotland, England and, […]

Plans are being drawn up to replace English with French as the main “working language” of the EU during France’s presidency, with meetings and documents to become “French-first” next year.  The French are set to take over the Council of the European Union presidency in 2022, with France planning to use its first presidency since Brexit […]

How, even when speaking clearly, true meaning can get lost when different nationalities communicate “Hello Tanit, hope you don’t have a hangover”, I read, nodding. “Are you able to file soon?” I wasn’t. Not soon, anyway. But I felt extremely lucky to have a English editor. Even when I miss a deadline he writes friendly emails. A German […]

PETER TRUDGILL picks apart another popular subject for pedants Are you alright? Or are you all right? Is alright one word or two? A number of people seem to feel rather strongly about this issue, and some of them are adamant that to write alright is totally not all right. They think that all right is the only “correct” way to write […]

Global health leaders have announced new names for Covid-19 variants using letters of the Greek alphabet. Experts working with the World Health Organisation (WHO) developed the labels for variants which are often colloquially named after the places where they are first detected. Many variants of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – have been […]

The spread of English as a narrative language now includes the Asian island nation. Singapore, the large island off the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, is separated from the mainland by the Johor strait which is less than a nautical mile wide at its narrowest point. A number of fascinatingly different mother tongues have […]

Why communication may have been the least of the problems when the Vikings invaded The Great Heathen Army of the Danes invaded eastern England in 865. Large-scale Viking settlements followed throughout the 9th century and on into the 10th. Many eastern and northern areas of our island came to have a heavily Scandinavian or Scandinavianised […]

How the archipelago’s dialect hung on for centuries, but is now disappearing The Channel Islands lie between 70 and 85 nautical miles off the south coast of England. They are very much closer to the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy in France, which is only about 12 nautical miles away. The islands are not part of the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how English, having spread one way around the world, suddenly reversed direction During the 1600s and 1700s, the English language spread westwards from Britain across the Atlantic to Canada, the USA, Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Central America. Then, suddenly, at the very end of the 18th century, it started spreading back […]

When it comes to people who try to police our grammar, Winston Churchill (apparently) knew how to deal with them There is a grammar joke about Winston Churchill which is well known, even if it probably isn’t true. When a draft of an upcoming speech of his was circulated to aides, one of them, a […]

TANIT KOCH on how the quest for equality is having an impact on the German language. Some of us have put lockdown to great use and improved our language skills at home. Some, like editor-at-large Alastair Campbell, have even chosen German, despite the lasting damage done to its reputation by Mark Twain (The Awful German Language), Hollywood (“Achtung! Schnell, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why we shorten some syllables and not others, such as in privacy and private. It is an interesting fact about the English language that we pronounce the word nature with a long ‘a’ whereas we say natural with a short ‘a’. Similarly, while we say grateful with a long ‘a’, gratitude has a short […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on two new European novels which highlight the underappreciated artistry of translators The job of a literary translator can be a thankless one. It’s a multiskilled calling with two main demands: fluency in at least one other language that isn’t your own and an exceptional talent for writing. It’s a role requiring immense artistic […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious process by which neutral phrases for ‘smell’ tend to turn bad. It is rather well known to keen crossword solvers that the English words aroma, odour, scent, smell and stink all have five letters. Crossword clues indicating a five-letter olfactory answer can therefore not be readily resolved without further work and thought. A good question […]

PETER TRUDGILL on death, and recent revival, of Cornish. After the first arrival of the Germanic Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons in the southwestern peninsula of England, British Celts began migrating across the Channel to Brittany to escape Germanic domination, thus reducing the Celtic population base of the area. By about 800 AD, the Saxons had taken […]

London mayoral hopeful Laurence Fox used the launch of his manifesto to defend his right to call people “paedophiles” on Twitter, citing free speech and claiming it is just a “meaningless and baseless” insult. The former actor, who founded the Reclaim Party, is being sued by Stonewall trustee Simon Blake, Coronation Street actress Nicola Thorp […]

Technology may be closing in on making instant, in-ear translation services a reality. But it's still a galaxy away from truly replicating human communication.

PETER TRUDGILL on whether Scots should be considered a language or not. My column of a few weeks ago, about how the Swiss are encouraged to learn their country’s various languages – and how something similar here might benefit the UK – annoyed reader Bill Cooper, who wrote to The New European to say so. His letter was published […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many chapters of the Georgian language. As we have observed before in this column, Napoleon was not French, and Hitler was not German. King William III of England was not English, and King George I of Great Britain was not British. But there is another well-known example of the same kind of […]

The notion of ‘Global Britain’ goes hand in hand with good, proficient multi-linguistic skills.

The scandal of modern language education in the UK is going to cost the country dear Universities have been in the headlines, quite rightly, as students and their parents worry about being charged full tuition fees for nearly a year of online learning, while paid-for rental accommodation sits empty after tenants were told by the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how easy it is to make false assumptions about connections between words  Etymology is the study of the origins of words and the development of their forms and meanings. It is a scholarly activity which needs considerable knowledge of large numbers of languages, plus language history, linguistic change, historical linguistics, semantics (the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why the term for spring has not sprung from where you thought. The English word spring has many different meanings. It can refer to a place where water comes up out of the ground – a source or wellspring. It can signify an energetic forward or upward movement – a leap or jump. It […]

Reverend Nicholas Baines has called on the government to launch a public education campaign on notions of sovereignty following Britain’s exit from the EU. Speaking in House of Lords, Reverend Baines asked why “pooled sovereignty” with the EU was considered unworkable for the UK but not when it is pooled with the United States. “Notions of sovereignty […]

Peter Trudgill on the dubious master of multilingualism. There are many things to be said about Ján Ludvik Hoch, many of them very bad, even though he was a war hero. But this column is interested in his linguistic prowess: he was a remarkable polyglot. Better known as Robert Maxwell, Hoch did not learn English […]

The promotion of languages is a key way of keeping the disparate Swiss nation together, says PETER TRUDGILL. There is much Britain could learn from its example. If our government truly believed in the United Kingdom as a “sacred union”, they would do well to study the example of another union, the united republic of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on why Australians haven’t developed regional accents… yet. Reader David Handley recent wrote to The New European in response to my column about the origins of Australian English (TNE #225), commenting on its regional uniformity. How, he asked, has Australian English failed to develop distinct regional accents? He is quite right to point to the […]

The influence on English of the Old Norse language of the Vikings is still up for debate, says PETER TRUDGILL. When people are learning English as a foreign language, it is generally very useful for them to learn three main forms of every verb: the present tense, the past tense, and the past participle. Past participles occur […]

It wasn’t only the English language that spread around the globe during Britain’s age of imperial expansion, says PETER TRUDGILL.   The three major surviving indigenous languages of the island of Britain are English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. We are very familiar with the fact that, since the beginning of the 17th century, English has spread far […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how similarly-sounding words can come to have such different meanings. A word with two or more different meanings is technically a polyseme. An English example is wood, which can refer to wood as a material as well as to a tree-covered area of land. Neck is also polysemous: it refers to the part of the […]

Boris Johnson has demanded politicians be more “civil and kind” to each after debates surround the provision of free school meals sparked public reprisals against MPs. The prime minister’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, said the debate around free school meals had made life “very unpleasant” for Conservative MPs. This comes as the prime minister accused Labour supporters of using a […]

Like most British people of my age, I first encountered spaghetti in a tin, in tomato sauce. In our house it was kept in the pantry alongside the tins of baked beans, and we ate it in the same way as the beans: on toast, for breakfast. When I was a child, spaghetti on toast […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the famous names inspired by water courses. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was one of the greatest composers who ever lived, and his sublime music is much loved and still very frequently played today, 270 years after his death. His sons Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian, Wilhelm Friedemann and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach […]

The UK’s departure from the EU not only introduced new phrases, but showed how language can be used to shape political debate. ANDREAS BUERKI reports. A number of expressions have entered everyday use since Brexit started. Terms like ‘Article 50’, ‘no deal’, ‘hard border’ may now seem just part of life but they were seldom, if ever, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how long it took for the accent to appear after English arrived in Australia. In 1788, during the reign of King George III, the English language made a very long journey indeed, penetrating deep into the southern hemisphere. This was on the occasion of the foundation of the British Australian penal colony of […]

English could be ditched as an official language of the European Union as the United Kingdom leaves the bloc following the Brexit trade agreement. European and Scottish affairs correspondent Udo Seiwert-Fauti claims that the language is set to become downgraded to a “working language” after member states opted against using it for translations of documents. […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some seldom used festive terms. When I was at school, some children thought it was very funny, around Christmastime. to ask the trick question: “How many letters are there in the alphabet?” The correct answer, they said, was not twenty-six but “twenty-five, because the angel said Noël!”. Noël barely qualifies as an English word. For […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a cheering Christmas tradition. One of the best-loved spoof Christmas carols recorded by the Norfolk-based parody folk-duo the Kipper Family is called Arrest These Merry Gentlemen! Another song in the same vein (from their album The Ever Decreasing Circle) is the Trunch Wassail Song, a folk tune purportedly native to the North Norfolk […]

Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: “Do you have anyone there who can […]

Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: “Do you have anyone there who can speak […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the lost links that gave us surnames like Nelson, Hobson, Hodgson and Dodgson. There are not too many men about nowadays who are called Peter, but those of us who do still bear this name are quite liable to get called Pete, especially by family and friends.  In the same way, women […]

Collins Dictionary has named “lockdown” as its Word of the Year 2020 after a sharp increase in its usage amid the coronavirus pandemic. The dictionary said it added the term because it “encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus”. Collins’ […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the likeliest roots of perhaps the world’s most used word. OK is one of the most successful English words of all time. It is a relatively new word – the first recorded usage dates from the mid-1800s – but it has now spread to all varieties of English around the world, and […]

John Kampfner, author of the much discussed Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country and a regular contributor to The New European, has written in the New Statesman that “monolingualism is one of the enduring motifs of British mediocrity”.  It is hard to query the basic accuracy of his observation, but we should probably […]

A number of high-profile Republicans and Trump supporters have been fooled into thanking Satan for supporting the president’s re-election bid. Fox News commentator Corey Lewandowski, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, Conservative political pundit Tomi Lahren, and outspoken Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio were among people duped into thanking someone called “Iblis” for campaigning on behalf of […]

Peter Trudgill on Antarctica, and its most famous story. Antarctica has been called “the continent without language”. True languages are spoken only by human beings, and although there are many visiting scientists and support workers in Antarctica these days, this is a modern situation: the continent has never had indigenous languages because it has never had […]

The nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are located in Caucasia, the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, no more than 350 miles across at its narrowest point, which is mostly taken up topographically by the Caucasus mountain range. These three countries are widely, but by no means universally, considered to be […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some obvious, and less obvious, origins of place names. On the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, there is a place called Buffalo Beach. This is something of a surprise, because New Zealand has no indigenous terrestrial mammals, and absolutely zero buffalo. In fact, in order to understand the […]

I must confess that I do not normally read the angling section of my local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, but from time to time I do catch sight in its columns of the name wrasse. As many readers will know better than me, this word refers to a particular species of marine fish, some […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the fascinating origins of Fahrenheit and Celsius – and how different things might have been. Many Americans endure a reputation for an apparent lack of regard for the rest of the world. Regardless of whether it is deserved or not, it remains the fact that the USA is the only nation on […]

PETER TRUDGILL on knowing your Baker from your Butcher. The origins of many occupational surnames are really rather obvious. If your family name is Shepherd, this is because one of your male ancestors herded sheep. If his given name was John, this term describing his occupation would have been used as a byname – a subsidiary […]

When I left school in 1963 at the age of 19 after 15 years of full-time education, nothing happened. Nothing at all. We just walked out of the school gates, knowing that we would not be coming back anymore, except as visitors. There were no ceremonies, no dressing up, no handing over of pieces of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on three languages that can give the country’s cricketers an edge over their opponents. During the recent Test Match between England and Pakistan at the Ageas Bowl in Southampton, cricket fans may have seen or heard Aatif Nawaz – actor, writer, comedian, and cricket commentator – presenting a very interesting discussion on the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the story of Sacajawea. The Louisiana Purchase is the name given to the 1803 deal under which the USA ‘bought’ very large tracts of North American land from France, extending American control over the continent an enormous distance westwards. The area in question covered the whole of modern Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the remarkable way that children learn their native language. The speed, accuracy and apparent ease with which small children learn their native language is a remarkable phenomenon, especially if we consider that they do this without mostly being taught the language by anybody. It is quite true, of course, that there are […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the language rules that guide how we banter and who we should do it with. We have heard quite a lot about banter in recent times on the sports pages of newspapers. A footballer may complain that an opponent has said something insulting to them. The opponent’s defence is that what was […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the many words which break the rules, If you have ever studied German, you may recall that one of the difficulties for a foreign learner of the language lies in struggling to come up with the correct plural forms of nouns. The word for ‘boy’ is Junge (you will also remember that […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the first meeting of two languages, one of which has since died out – but not without leaving some traces. The first location in which any sizeable group of native speakers of English became successfully established outside the British Isles was the Jamestown settlement, in what was to become the United States […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes rather rude origins of surnames. Some family names, in spite of having been passed down across the generations for the last 500 years or more, still retain a form which makes it easy to see what they originally meant. In an earlier column, we already noted colour-based names like Browne […]

PETER TRUDGILL tackles a burning issue that has been prompting debate among readers. The word portmanteau refers to a largish travelling bag which opens up into two equal parts. The word was originally borrowed into English from French; and for that reason it was sometimes pluralised as portmanteaux rather than portmanteaus. But it first arrived […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the curious confusions that can arise from the double meaning of quite. Several decades ago, when I first took my American girlfriend home to meet my parents, she was shown some of my father’s paintings – he was a rather well-known local artist. She said that she thought the pictures were ‘quite […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some expansionist chapters in the island’s history It is not usual to think of the Irish as being colonialists. On the contrary, we know a great deal about how the island of Ireland has suffered from the effects of colonialism on the part of the Vikings, the English, the Scots, and the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the ultimate origins of ‘English’. During the late 300s and early 400s AD, boat-loads of Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. Some arrivals had probably come well before that: since the second century AD, the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in their garrisons in […]

It might seem like a modern complaint, but, says PETER TRUDGILL, this practice has been going on since the Ancient Greeks The sound represented by our Latin-alphabet letter H has had a sorry history in the languages of Europe over the last 2,000 years or so. Perhaps the decline started in Greek. The Ancient Greek […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how a chapter from its past has left the South American country swimming against a global tide One of the most appallingly bloody wars ever fought was the War of the Triple Alliance (in Spanish La Guerra de la Triple Alianza, Portuguese A Guerra da Tríplice Aliança). Also called the Paraguayan War, […]

PETER TRUDGILL boldly goes on about one of the most controversial grammatical issues of all. English forms like to sleep, to run, and to read are technically called infinitives. In the sentence ‘I want to go’, to go is an infinitive. When we want to talk about a particular English verb, we normally cite the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the gradual spread of a language, the echoes of which are still heard in English today. Four and a half thousand years ago there was no such language as English. There would be no such language for another 3,000 years. But a language did exist which eventually became English, though you would […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a remarkable language made up equally from two others From time to time we hear about ‘mixed languages’. Maltese, for example, is sometimes said to be a mixture of the European language, Italian, and the North African variety of Arabic. But it isn’t really. Its grammatical structures show that it is basically […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a fading linguistic practice for describing numbers For the first twenty or so years of my life, when I was telling the time I always said five-and-twenty past two rather than twenty-five past two, and I continued to use that type of formulation on at least some occasions for many years after […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes surprising languages spoken by some our greatest composers. Music is sometimes said to be the universal language; and it is certainly true that the music of the great classical composers is as well known these days in China, South Korea and Japan as it is in its original European homeland. […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some of the ways Welsh and English have stayed apart. The name of the village of Betws-y-Coed in North Wales means ‘prayer-house (in) the trees’. Coed, ‘trees’, is the plural of coeden, ‘tree’. This is an intriguing grammatical fact. In the languages of the world generally, plural forms of nouns are normally […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the names of English counties and US states. It makes perfectly good sense that the names of many of the counties of England should have their origins in the dominant language of the country, English. Rather obviously, Norfolk was originally two English words, north folk, and similarly Suffolk derives from south folk. […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how some ‘antiquated’ words drop out of use In George Borrow’s 1843 book The Bible in Spain, he reports one of his interlocutors, a servant, as saying to him: ‘Though I have been turned out of so many families, I was never turned out of that one; and though I left it […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the sometimes confusing way in which surnames seem to indicate nationality People with the surname Inglis are usually Scottish. That might seem rather strange, because the name is the Scots-language word for ‘English’ – and why would Scottish people have been called Inglis? But actually of course there would be no point […]

PETER TRUDGILL assesses just how (il)logical certain languages are. Over the years there have been plenty of people who have not hesitated to assert that French is a “very logical language”, the implication being that other languages are less so. But it is actually rather easy to point to aspects of French which do not […]

The complex history of the eastern Mediterranean means there are individuals who have defied their ‘national identities’. PETER TRUDGILL reports. Many people in southeastern Europe would agree that it is correct to say that Turks are a Muslim people who speak Turkish and that Greeks are a Christian people who speak Greek. That is certainly […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the surprisingly wide array of surnames derived from colours. Football fans will know that Kevin De Bruyne is the brilliant midfielder who plays for Manchester City as well as for the Belgian national team. They may not all be quite so familiar with other foreign soccer stars such as the Spanish international […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the correct use of ‘best’ – a grammar ‘rule’ it is safe to ignore. After a football match it is often said by those talking about the event that “the best team won” – or in the case of a losing team managed by Jose Mourinho, that the best team did not […]

The meaning of the word have has changed over the centuries to denote more dynamic activities, says PETER TRUDGILL At Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, passengers are often urged – in announcements made by Dutch people speaking English – to keep their boarding-passes ready. At British airports, passengers are generally asked to have their boarding-passes ready. American […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a rural region of Ireland where a dialect took root and remained for centuries The English language came into being in Britain, and spent its first 700 years on this island. When it did then start spreading beyond these shores, this was to the neighbouring island of Ireland. This first expansion of […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the archipelago which helped develop the language now spoken in Greece. Great Britain started decolonising its imperial possessions in a significant way in 1947, when British India became the two independent states of India and Pakistan. But there is a very interesting example of British decolonisation which comes from well before that […]

In English, the word can be frustratingly imprecise. As PETER TRUDGILL reports, other languages have gone to greater lengths to ensure exactitude. A few years ago, the Greek translator of a book I had written got in touch to ask if a “cousin” I had referred to in the text was a man or a […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the languages of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and how they interact. The Baltic States are, from north to south along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We often refer to them by this collective name as if they formed some kind of unity – and in […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the origins of many of our most common surnames… and much more besides There are quite a lot of people in Great Britain, and in other English-speaking parts of the world, who have surnames ending in -kins or -kinson: Atkins, Dickinson, Jenkins, Parkinson, Simkins, Tomkinson, Watkins, Wilkinson – and plenty more. If […]

We have borrowed plenty of words from Greek – but they haven’t always kept quite the same meaning, says PETER TRUDGILL If you are on holiday in Greece or Cyprus, you may be unlucky enough to come across a sign hanging on the door of your hotel lift saying Ektós liturgías. Ektós is not necessarily […]

PETER TRUDGILL revisits a traumatic day in English football history to track down some etymological roots On June 22, 1986, in a World Cup quarter-final football match played between England and Argentina in Mexico City, the Argentinian player Diego Maradona knocked the ball into the England net with his hand and claimed a goal – […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how languages come up with the words their culture requires and uses snow as an example. My German-English dictionary says that the German word keltern is to be translated into English as ‘to press (of grapes)’ (for the purpose of making wine). The word comes originally from Latin calcatura, ‘stamping’, which is […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the journey along which we arrived at our use of the negative If you have learnt even a little bit of French, you will probably know that the word pas in that language means ‘not’. Pas mal! is ‘not bad’. Pas encore means ‘not yet’. Pas moi! is the equivalent of ‘not […]

One hundred years on, PETER TRUDGILL tells the story of another referendum, one which hinged on language On May 11, 1919, a Volksabstimmung took place in the mountainous region that is now the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. Vorarlberg means ‘before Arlberg’, the Arlberg being the mountain massif which contains the steep pass which separates the […]

Broad and wide mean pretty much the same thing – they are very close to being synonyms. The Oxford English Dictionary defines broad as “extended in the direction measured from side to side; wide”; and wide is also defined as “having great extent from side to side”. Both broad and wide are also said by […]

The singer Sam Smith’s desire to be referred to as ‘they/them’ throws up language challenges, says linguistics expert PETER TRUDGILL. Sam Smith has expressed the wish to be referred to as they rather than he or she. Many people already operate this pronoun system when requested to do so, and are happy to use it. […]

For our most commonly-used words, brevity is an obvious advantage, says PETER TRUDGILL. But that doesn’t mean it always applies. On the train the other day, I was wondering why the people across the aisle from me kept saying “again”, until I realised that they were Hungarian and were in fact saying igen, the Hungarian […]

Germany’s complex history has left it with some fascinating features, not least its pockets of Slavic speakers. PETER TRUDGILL reports. The boundary in northern Europe between the areas where Germanic languages are spoken and those which are occupied by Slavic-language speakers has been shifting backwards and forwards on an east­-west axis for at least a […]

Peter Trudgill recounts the story of what happened to one of Britain’s ancient languages, Old Norse During the first millennium AD, Britain was home to four major languages, each of which had arrived from a different point of the compass. The first was Britonnic Celtic, the ancestor of Breton and Cornish, which had come to […]

PETER TRUDGILL follows a thread through the centuries, via various connected words related to the telling of time. In English, when we speak about the approximately twice-a-day rising and falling of the seas along our shores, we talk of high tides and low tides. Norwegian uses similar terminology: høgvatn, ‘high water’, and lågvatn, ‘low water’, […]

The very spot where accents change can often be pinpointed and it’s often a case of geography, as PETER TRUDGILL explains My late mother-in-law came from the American Midwest, a predominantly flat land of enormously fertile and productive soils. She was not very impressed by the Rocky Mountains, observing that you couldn’t grow much there. […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains why some old childhood favourites no longer seem to rhyme. Many of us remember from our childhood the well-known nursery rhyme which goes: “Jack and Jill/Went up the hill/To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down/And broke his crown/ And Jill came tumbling after.” Jill rhymes with hill, and down rhymes […]

PETER TRUDGILL on an island language which vanished after the Europeans arrived The Canary Islands are a long way from mainland Europe, but the Romans knew they were there. Pliny the Elder (23-79AD) referred to them as the Canaria, supposedly because of the large numbers of big dogs (Latin canes) which were reported to live […]

PETER TRUDGILL examines the etymological roots of this beautiful plant. It is not a totally straightforward matter to explain how the flower we call the foxglove got its name. We can, though, at least figure out where the glove part comes from: the flowers look like the fingers of gloves; and small fingers, as children […]

When it comes to this aspect of language, it’s not as straightforward as a, e, i, o, u, says PETER TRUDGILL If you ask English-speaking people how many vowels there are in their language, many of them will tell you that there are five: a, e, i, o and u. If you ask Greek speakers […]

Why we have the Ancient Greeks to thank for almost all our misfortunes. In English we don’t really have a true equivalent of the French expression bon appétit, wishing people who are about to start a meal a ‘good appetite’. But most other European languages seem to have some kind of bon appétit-type formula: German […]

PETER TRUDGILL tells the story of Norn, now vanished from the British Isles, though some of its sounds still linger. Philologists generally divide the Scandinavian languages into two historical branches: eastern and western. Swedish and Danish fall into the Eastern Scandinavian division, while Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic form the Western Scandinavian languages, the Faroe Islands […]

These days we hear the word like, meaning ‘similar to’, quite a lot. In fact, in the speech of many younger people today it seems to occur, like, all the time. But it is a word with an extraordinarily interesting and complex history, and one which is not completely understood. One fascinating aspect of its […]

As the Premier League draws to a close, PETER TRUDGILL explores the meanings behind some of its biggest names. As is well known to most English football fans – and to the entire population of Norway over the age of three – the manager of Manchester United is called Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Like very many […]

The story of how a little corner of Wales retains a very English flavour. If you look at a map of Wales, you will see that the majority of the places in the country bear unmistakably Welsh-language names: Aberystwyth, Caernarfon, Ffestiniog, Llanelli, Machynlleth, Pwllheli, Ystradgynlais. Certainly no one would ever suppose that Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant was somewhere […]

PETER TRUDGILL explains the processes by which phrases can contract to just a shadow of their former selves. It is often the fate of words and phrases, over the millennia, to get shorter and shorter. The Latin phrase hoc die, ‘this day’, famously became so shortened in French – as hui, ‘today’ – that French […]

It has its diehard fans, but do we really need this punctuation mark, asks PETER TRUDGILL The English word apostrophe comes from a Greek term meaning ‘turning away’: in Modern Greek apó means ‘from’ and strophí is ‘turn’. As used in English, apostrophe refers to the usage of the punctuation mark ‘ to indicate the […]

PETER TRUDGILL on what lies behind our irregular everyday phrases. The most usual way to make past-tense verb forms in English is to add -ed to the basic form of the verb: want–wanted, love–loved; play–played. So why is the past tense of go not goed but went? Even with verbs which are irregular and do […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how some unlikely connections between European languages emerged after 2,000 years The Albanian word for king is mbret. You might think that this has got nothing to do with any word in any language that you have ever come across before. But it would be slightly surprising if you were right. Albanian […]

PETER TRUDGILL suggests a time and a place for when and where the English language came into being English is a language which certainly came into existence rather gradually. If we want to know how old it is, the only sensible way of answering that question is to determine when English started breaking away from […]

It provided the inspiration – and name – for the race, but Greece’s Marathón also has a fascinating linguistic history. PETER TRUDGILL reports. The men’s race at the Athens marathon (marathónios in Greek) was won this year by the Kenyan athlete Misoi Brimin Kipkorir of Kenya, in two hours 10 minutes and 56 seconds; the […]

Back to the farmstead, PETER TRUDGILL reveals the etymology of Paris Hilton’s name but he’s not going to France for the answer. Travellers crossing from England to France via the Channel Tunnel emerge into French daylight in the vicinity of a place called Fréthun, southwest of Calais. In the Pas-de-Calais and the neighbouring le Nord […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some familiar celebratory Balkan phrases, and how they reflect the region’s complex linguistic history Macedonia is a geographical term which refers to an area of the southern Balkans. For some centuries, the region was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the Turks from Constantinople. It contained a mixed and varied population […]

PETER TRUDGILL on a grammar ‘rule’ ripe for debunking There seem to be quite lot of self-appointed experts on the English language around who like to invent grammatical rules. One of these ‘rules’, which Americans in particular seem to be very worried about, concerns among­ and between, and states that writers should only use between […]

The very term used to describe the prejudice is itself born of prejudice. One of the most anti-Jewish words in the English language is anti-Semitic. In terms of the history of our language it’s a rather new word – no one used it until about 140 years ago. The term, as is well known, is […]

​Insecurity over the ‘correct’ use of pronouns has led language in an unusual direction, says PETER TRUDGILL In normal native English, the personal pronouns I, he, she, we, they are only used when they appear as the subject of a verb: I am leaving now; he likes coffee; she would like some; we are coming; […]

PETER TRUDGILL on the unlikely origin of the name of a stretch of water off the Scottish coast The sea between the northern Outer Hebrides and the Scottish mainland is called the Minch, while the more southerly strait between the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Skye is known as the Little Minch. The word […]

Peter Trudgill on a perfectly good word which may find its days numbered The Dutch word for ‘to buy’ is kopen. The corresponding word in German is kaufen; and the West Frisian equivalent is keapje. All the Scandinavian languages also have a related form: Norwegian kjøpe, Danish købe, Swedish köpa, Icelandic kaupa, and Faroese keypa. […]

Logic- and despots – might favour other systems, but, as Peter Trudgill explains, traditional units of measurements still endure. Of the approximately 80 countries in the world which drive on the left-hand side of the road, only four are European: Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, and the UK (plus the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). […]

PETER TRUDGILL finds much in common between European languages and the English spoken by African Americans. One of the African American comedian Reginald D. Hunter’s best jokes comes from a television appearance here in Britain. It was a linguistic gag. Hunter related a story that went something like this: He was in a bar, somewhere […]

PETER TRUDGILL divides up the continent according to word different languages use to describe the smelly stuff The distribution of words meaning ‘cheese’ in different European languages has an interesting geographical pattern. These words fall into four rather clearly separate zones. In the northern zone, the North Germanic languages have a word for cheese which […]

PETER TRUDGILL traces the clockwork progress of the word ‘orange’ from southern India to northern Europe, and finds the odd detour. The Democratic Unionist Party are having difficulty coming to terms with the official use in Ulster of Irish Gaelic, the indigenous Celtic language of Ireland. They also have a predilection for the colour orange. […]

Peter Trudgill on a remarkable discovery which transformed the way we think about languages. About 230 years ago, Sir William Jones made an amazing intellectual breakthrough. Jones had been born in London of a Welsh father and an English mother, and some reports suggest that he grew up bilingual in Welsh and English, though this […]

We have a number of set phrases in English which we use in a rather automatic and semi-obligatory way at particular times and in specific social situations – such as ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’, ‘happy birthday’ and ‘happy new year’. There are rules about how to use these formulae. We can say ‘good afternoon’ […]

Many of the materials we use derive their names from the towns they were first made in. PETER TRUDGILL explores the stories behind some of the best-known The sad city of Mosul, or what is left of it, has been very much in the news. Thousands of its inhabitants have been killed, wounded, or displaced; […]

Parisians might like to claim a link for their city back to ancient Greece. In fact the stronger connection is a Yorkshire one The capital of France has many names. In the Gaelic of Ireland it is known as Páras; the Finnish name is Pariisi; it is called Parijs in Dutch; and in Lithuanian it […]

In Romanian Moldavia,the Csángós are oppressed by their Romanian neighbours and misunderstood by their Hungarian ‘relatives’. Photo: Contributed – Credit: Archant Hungarian is a language which is generally considered to have no close linguistic relatives, in any sense of the word ‘close’. Its nearest linguistic relations seem to be the Mansi and Khanty languages, which […]

Why do officials opt for formal phrases when other more instinctive, natural-sounding alternatives are available? On flights coming into London, airline passengers often hear messages from the cabin crew along the lines of ‘we are about to commence our descent into Heathrow airport’. Anybody who knows anything about English will recognise that this isn’t anything […]

The English might claim their language is clear and straightforward, and mock the complexities of others. But when it comes to opacity, it is English which leads the way A German word recently made it into our news. The word was Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung. It was deemed to be newsworthy because of its extreme length, fifty-one letters. […]