English
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English is the name used for the written and spoken language which evolved in England and became the lingua franca of all parts of the British Isles. It is essentially a Germanic language, mostly closely related to the Frisian languages, but was suffused with words from Norman French after the Norman conquest and the Black Death, which directly affected population numbers and class relationships. Several centuries after this fusion of the two word streams, English was spread from the British Isles into North America. British settlers arrived to set up colonies on the shore of what is now America and Canada. As this language was shared between all the colonies except the (few) French and Spanish ones, it gained dominance over these latter two, and over the Native American languages, each of which was purely local in distribution. Over the next few centuries, British colonists took the language to parts of Africa, to India, Australia and other places. For practical reasons, local traders (and others) found it useful to acquire the language.
After the Black Death, there was a shortage of literate people to record things in either Latin or French, so records, letters and similar everyday items began to be written down in English. Geoffrey Chaucer was the first person to write books in English, but over the centuries a very extensive literature has built up, with the importation and deliberate creation of new words as part of this. As a result, English has a greater number of words than most languages have.
Significance to Bahá'ís[edit]
Because of the dominance of English in the commercially important United States, 'Abdu'l-Baha perceived the usefulness of teaching the Faith in English-speaking environments. Although His first trip outside the Middle East was to France, He followed this up by visiting both England and Scotland. The plan was for Shoghi Effendi to accompany Him, but machinations by an individual member of the entourage prevented Shoghi Effendi completing the trip, and he was sent back to Palestine. The following year, the Master visited the United States and Canada, both predominantly English-speaking nations, and again visited England.
'Abdu'l-Bahá arranged for Shoghi Effendi to attend the American University in Beirut, and then Balliol College in Oxford, in order to perfect his English. When he became the Guardian, Shoghi Effendi personally translated large sections of the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh into English, and established these English versions as the texts to be used for further translation. In other words, Scripture revealed in Arabic or Persian must first be translated into English, by a team of persons known to be competent in this field. The English translations are then used to render the Writings into Czech, Icelandic, Pushto or whatever the goal language might be.
As 'Abdu'l-Bahá had ensured the early establishment of the Faith in America, and as America was significantly receptive to the Bahá'í message, the United States in particular was used as a trail-blazer for the maturation of the Administration. Many of the Bahá'ís called to Palestine to assist the Guardian were English-speaking, and so English became one of the languages in use at the World Centre. The Universal House of Justice conducts its meetings in English, and its communications to the Bahá'í World are composed in English. Naturally, there are staff at the World Centre who are employed to translate such documents into certain other widespread languages, but the English text is looked upon as the definitive version.
However, there is nothing in the Writings to suggest that English will be chosen as the world language. Indeed, the Master has indicated that the world language should have consistency in its construction and spelling. English has (in common with virtually every spoken language) many irregular verbs, but it has also retained a spelling system which reflects how words were pronounced many centuries ago, and uses an (inadequate) modified Latin alphabet of 26 letters to represent a spoken language of approximately 44 different sounds.
Kevin Beint, a Bahá'í from England has written a book on the development of the language and its significance to the Faith. It was self-published and was titled: "The Spiritual Destiny of the English Language".
