How the English Language Betrays Class and Power

Boris Johnson is known as a man with some skill in French, Latin and English. When he first spoke on TV about his wish to shut down parliament, he used all three. The language of power was, as ever, French: prorogation, parliament, government. The language of the abstract concepts he said the government needed to deal with was Latin: exciting agenda, violent crime, education, infrastructure, economy. He spoke only one sentence from Anglo-Saxon, the language of England before the conquest. It was the sentence where he spoke about a worker being employed to do a job, a hired drudge bound to do something tedious, concrete and essential that nobody would thank her for and was necessary to make the whole thing work. It so happened that this drudge was the monarch. “That’s why,” he said, “we are going to have a Queen’s speech.”