Tim William Machan: What Is English? And Why Should We Care?

• Nicole Meier

The book under review asks a seemingly (and deceptively) simple question: What is English? Machan’s 400-page book, however, reveals that an answer is not easy to arrive at. In lieu of an introduction, Part One picks up the words from the book’s title (what? why? we?) and struggles with a definition of what English is – many answers can be given and criteria such as intelligibility or geography do not really apply. Machan doubts the possibility of clear distinctions between grammatical and pragmatic definitions and uses the metaphor of a river to describe a language as something that is constantly in flow; it comes as a surprise that a single label for English can be used across time and space and that there seems to be some sort of continuity behind the flux.
The next two parts of Machan’s book are centred around the grammatical (Part Two) and pragmatical (Part Three) definitions mentioned in the previous chapter. Machan is well aware that he is being selective here, but since there cannot be one definition of English, he presents his readers with examples, or, as he calls them, case studies. Part Two is concerned with words, due to the foundational role of lexicon in any definition of English, and underscores the fuzziness of lexicon as a concept (size, loanwords, ghost and nonce words etc.). Machan also deals with lexicography, doing justice to the prevailing notion that dictionaries define what qualifies as English, and gives a short overview of the history of dictionaries ranging from Cawdrey to the OED and Webster’s Third, with their different pictures of English.