The first thing that made me want to write about Anglo-Saxon was my experience of French exchange students using the term to mean 'anglophone, English-speaking'. I'd warn them against the term, stating (but perhaps not explaining) that it is inaccurate and has connotations they didn't intend in British/American English. (So here comes the explanation.) The second thing is that I've been writing about the history of English and have chosen to mostly refer to Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English and I'm thinking about that choice. The third thing is that Dave Wilton (who writes the fantastic Word Origins newsletter) published a paper in 2020 on the topic that's been on my TBR pile for a while—so writing this post provided me with an excuse to take the time for it.
Anglo-Saxon v Old English
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- ca. 450AD/CE to 1150ish: Old English/Anglo-Saxon.
from the Germanic invasions till the start of Middle English. This can be further divided into prehistoric (450–650), early (650–900) and late periods (900–1150). Beowulf is the most famous literary work from this time. - 1066 to 1500ish: Middle English
from the Norman (French) invasion through the Great English Vowel Shift. This also has early and late periods. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the most famous bit. - 1500ish to 1650ish: Early Modern English
Shakespeare times. King James Bible times. - 1650ish to now: Late Modern English
No more thou, no more hath, and lots more vocabulary thanks to industriali{s/z}ation and the spread of English worldwide.
Anglo-Saxons = English speakers?
At the height of the British Empire, English intellectuals were taken with the notion of an “Anglo-Saxon race”, tracing its roots to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain after the Romans left in the 5th century. With self-satisfaction they concluded that their “race” was something special, illustrated by the strength of their culture over that of the conquered Celts, their early codification of individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, and their break with the Roman church in the 16th century. Belief in their own good example made appropriating other peoples’ lands much easier to justify – and Americans of English stock were happy to share in this myth. But by the 20th century, talk of an Anglo-Saxon race had fallen out of fashion, and instead of genetic inheritance, it was language that seemed to unite us.
Thus we started to be called the English-speaking peoples, a term used with particular influence by two statesmen-historians, Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West and Winston Churchill in A History of the English-speaking Peoples. President and prime minister turned to this language-based description of “our peoples” because other possible descriptions had become impossible.
My French students were still using the Anglo-Saxon race to refer to 'the English-speaking peoples'. One problem in using the term that way is that "races" allegedly have a common genetic heritage, and English-speakers don't. Many Americans cannot trace their ancestry back to England. We are a transatlantic linguistic group and we share some aspects of our cultures. But it's weird to call us a race in contemporary English.
- une politique audacieuse pour défendre la langue et la culture française qui se trouvent aujourd'hui particulièrement menacées par l'invasion de la langue anglaise et de la culture anglo-saxonne .
a bold policy to defend the French language and culture, which are today particularly threatened by the invasion of the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture.
- L'hôpital a mis en place un concept qui vient des pays anglo-saxons nommé "Kids friendly".
The hospital has implemented a concept that comes from Anglo-Saxon countries called "Kids friendly".
- cette brutale franchise, qui caractérisent la race anglo-saxonne .
that brutal frankness, which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon race. - Cette ardeur chrétienne est-elle particulière à la race anglo-saxonne ?
Is this Christian ardo(u)r peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race?
The Anglo-Saxon race-ism
- "The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be – with the Anglo-Saxon race ," John Knox, the president of the [Alabama] constitutional convention, said in a speech encouraging voters to ratify the document [in 1901] [source]
- Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind." [source]
WASP
For the sake of brevity we will use the nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’.
Three uses of Anglo-Saxon in American and British corpora (Wilton 2020)
Wilton, David. 2020. What Do We Mean By Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119.425–454. doi:10.5406/jenglgermphil.119.4.0425.
Wilton tracks three uses of Anglo-Saxon:
- Pre-Conquest: referring to the Germanic peoples of Britain before 1066
- Politicocultural: "references to the politics, economics, and culture of present-day Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and especially the transnational characteristics that these nations share that are not explicitly ethnic or physiognomic." (p. 433) So: like the French usage above.
- Ethnoracial: "any use of Anglo-Saxon that is applied to an individual person; that refers to physiognomy, personal appearance, DNA or genetics or ancestry; or that contrasts Anglo-Saxon with another ethnic or racial group, as well as instances of the phrase white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and the acronym WASP." (p. 433)
Moving on to more recent times, here's what Wilton found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
In Britain, there's either even (BNC, 1980–93) distribution of ethnoracial and politicocultural or lots more politicocultural (NOW, 2010s). Wilton writes:
One might have expected an increase in the ethnoracial uses of “Anglo-Saxon” [in the UK] since the advent of the Brexit era, but the data shows this not to be the case. Any impression otherwise is probably due to increased awareness of ethnoracial uses of the term. In other words, people are only now noticing the uses that have always been there or are now reading ethnic connotations into the term that they had not before.
A wise American reporter based in London once told me that every British news story is, deep down, about class. Every American story, he said, is about race.