There is a popular perception that the English don't like other languages. Stereotypes abound of Englishmen speaking slowly in their native tongue as an alternative to speaking foreign, criticising the locals for not learning English. Look at English literature, however, and a different picture emerges: how often do you see the use of italics marking a phrase as a borrowing, or even an unitalicised word whose spelling marks it out as less than Anglo-Saxon? From raison d'etre to schadenfreude, they're everywhere you look. And it's not as if these borrowings are for concepts unavailable in English itself. Je n'sais quoi translates directly to "I don't know what" and whilst the literal translation may seem a little inelegant, a good writer could readily find a myriad other ways to express the same idea. So why the apparent inconsistency? Why should a people seemingly so averse to speaking in tongues write in so many pens?

English has long been a somewhat unusual language. The rules of its grammar are so intricate and fluid that English people rarely realise they exist and yet it is immediately apparent when a foreign visitor slips up and misspeaks. The spelling and pronunciation likewise seem fraught with elephant traps for the unwary, and woe betide someone who tries to form a simple plural of a word like radius or ox without due care and attention. It is almost as if the language is designed to perplex the visitor, and yet it is impossible to survive in the country without learning at least a reasonable smattering. Unlike in Paris, where simply attempting the language earns you the right to mix tongues according to your abilities, in London any such attempt is likely to meet with blank incomprehension.

The reasons for this complexity are many, from the geographical separation between England's key centres of learning (the older universities being responsible for the accepted spelling) and of political influence (London being responsible for most of the accepted pronounciation) to the linguistic pot pourri engendered by waves of invasion and later imperialist outreach. The influences on the language have been many more than you'd expect for a nation which as Churchill observed was not forever criss-crossed by foreign armies. But it's that last which is counter-intuitive: why should an island nation with a proud independent streak have such a porous language, whilst continental nations like Germany, whose very existence as a nation is still relatively recent, be so rigid by contrast? English has, after all, roots in the ancestral German tongue, but now boasts a vocabulary more than ten times the size.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, I believe it is our being an island nation, safely outside the milieu of cross-European wars, which provides the answer. Tokens of identity such as language matter vastly more when that identity is frequently at risk. So Germany, which was broadly outside the Roman Empire, resisted language concepts from the evolving romance languages as solidly as it had resisted the legions in the Teutoberg Wald. Likewise, when Rome fell the former nations of its Empire clung to their own tongue as a defining part of their civilized heritage. England, or rather Britain, was different: although also part of Rome's dominions, the conquest here was never quite as total and a strong sense of former culture and identity remained. Not for nothing did Tacitus put the words of the first great independence speech in the mouth of Caratacus. Even after the conquest, the British aristocratic classes were not mere Roman implants (Britain being an unpopular place to go when you're used to the warm climes of the Mediterranean) but Brits who romanised, following the fashions of Rome - including the language - but retaining their links with their origins.

When the Romans withdrew and were replaced by the Saxons, the British language was more or less extinguished from England, surviving in Wales and Cornwall, but the tendency to adopt new language was already ingrained. Latin remained part of the mix, despite Anglo-Saxon becoming the dominant. In fact, the use of Saxon was confined to vernacular language, with official and religious documents remaining Latin until hundreds of years later. This distinction between what was spoken and what was written was true across Europe, but in Germany Latin would have been an import, held apart and probably only spoken by an isolated religious immigrant class, whilst in countries like France, the similarity of Latin to the developing vernacular would have been less pronounced - much as was the case in Rome itself. This psychological splitting of the difference of a country partially romanised but now invaded by a culture without a Latin tradition meant the upper classes of English society were probably better linguists and less purist than their continental contemporaries.

Meanwhile, the process of the evolving vernacular continued. First, half of Britain was invaded by Vikings, a conquest eventually made briefly total under King Canute. They, in turn, were followed by the Normans. In both cases, the size of the invading class was relatively small, meaning that the fledgling English language was not swept aside, but rather grew, with countless new concepts jostling for space alongside words which would have started as synonyms but drifted apart over time. Whilst the Norman court initially resisted speaking the local tongue, aspiring Englishmen would have adopted the language of the invaders whilst retaining the tongue of their lessers. Conceptual separation between the language of court and country would have led to melding so that by the time the Angevin empire collapsed and left the ruling classes as purely English, the vernacular tongue was much more sophisticated than it had been only two centuries before. Monarchs from King John onward began to consider themselves as patriotic Englishmen, using and promoting their language as part of their identity, although it would take until the sixteenth century, when a reluctant Henry VIII authorised an English language bible for this transition to become complete.

So the Britain that emerged onto the world stage at the end of the Middle Ages was already a country with a rich language and a tradition of absorbing words and concepts. Writers like Shakespeare and Milton were also expanding the tongue with new coinages, often looking to classical languages like Latin and Greek for etymological inspiration. It was entirely expected that when Britain set on its imperial expansion it would continue, magpie-like, to take on words from across the world, from shampoo and bungalow to veldt and typhoon. At the same time the imperialists spread their tongue to their possessions. Indians who wanted to get ahead in the British Empire learned English, much as the English had learned French under the Normans. But the richness of the English tongue meant that this time there was no separate language of court and country, English grew to dominate particular classes entirely, leaving it as the greatest legacy of the empire. The different approach of nations like France and Spain to empire meant that the same process failed to occur in their spheres of influence: the Spanish, like the Saxons, wiped out much of the culture of their territories; the French, like the early Normans, remained aloof from it. While the English writers of the Enlightenment were continuing to borrow from Greek and Latin to find new words for gases and processes, the French were relying on an official academy to regulate the language and protect it from foreign pollution.

And so, in our modern times, English has become the most popular language in the world. Endlessly inventive and continually adapting, it defies all attempts to replace it as the language of commerce and popular culture. It is true that America and Hollywood in particular is partially responsible, but that's not the whole picture. When Hong Kong was ceded to China in 1999, it retained much of its British identity and English remained the language of banking. Indeed, English is spreading throughout China as it opens up to the world, and that has little to do with the movies they consume.

The English can guarantee going almost anywhere and being understood at least partially by some of the people, something which can't be said of other European peoples. For the English, therefore, it is hard to know which other language would be as useful as their own. Certainly no others are as expressive or as flexible, meaning even if an Englishman were fluent in another language he would be robbed of endless idioms, expressions and words that he takes for granted. For the English, therefore, there is no contradiction between borrowing from other languages and yet preferring not to speak them exclusively. It's an expression of both our cosmopolitan outlook and our island identity.