English conquers all

In “Globish,’’ British author and editor Robert McCrum sets out, first, to summarize the history of (as the subtitle states) “how the English language became the world’s language.” He describes his story as “the suspenseful narrative of a people and their successive empires coming out of nowhere to create a culture that — against the odds — has achieved lasting global consequence.”

So far, so good. But McCrum has a second, more dubious goal: to rebrand English as “Globish.” Globish, to McCrum, is gloriously “contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive,” free of its colonial and imperial past, and able to unite us all without harm to existing cultures. If you believe that last bit, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you — in, as the Lanape people once termed it, Mannahatta.

McCrum, best known as coauthor of the book and PBS series “The Story of English,’’ begins at the beginning: with the successive Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Norman invasions of the future England. These invaders gradually built a language that, by the 16th century, developed a kind of hybrid vigor. To a sturdy Germanic grammar and domestic vocabulary, it added Latin and French terms to fill out the scientific, professional, and cultural registers. (McCrum provides neat examples of how, as a result, English contains synonyms such as go, depart and exit, respectively derived from Old English, French, and Latin.) McCrum nicely summarizes this complex history from its earliest roots to the introduction of the printing press and later to the dawn of the American empire. Flexible and expansive, backed by one and then two aggressive nations, English conquered and thrived.