You say potato, I say ghoughbteighpteau

Harry Bingham on why English rules the world of languages

About three years ago I started researching a book, This Little Britain, about the various ways in which we Brits have a history of being exceptional. In areas such as law, government, economics, agriculture, and science, we've often been a uniquely British exception to a general European rule: in such things as men's fashion, Victorian sewers, and, most especially, in our language and literature.

Start with spelling. George Bernard Shaw once commented that English spelling would allow you to write FISH as GHOTI (f as in rough, i as in women, sh as in nation.) But he couldn't have been trying all that hard, if that was the best he came up with. The fact is that with just 26 letters and 48 different sounds to cope with, there were always going to be problems. Besides the Great Vowel Shift, other pronunciation changes, and an appetite for foreign borrowings, and it's no surprise that English now has some of the most dangerously unpredictable spellings in the world.

With about one and a half billion non-native speakers, English has become the world's own language. Given that there will shortly be as many English language speakers in China as there are in the entire English-speaking world put together, that anglophone dominance is only set to grow.

If you wanted to learn all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, you'd have to deal with about 500,000 of them (the last of which is zyxt, a splendid last word by any standards and an archaic Kentish term for thou seest( you see)). Having done that, you'd probably be a bit taken aback to learn that the equivalent American dictionary, Webster's, offers a further 450,000 words or so.

In the cultural realm, however, mere size is hardly likely to impress. In terms of Nobel Prizes for literature, the United Kingdom takes the bronze medal (beaten by gold-medallist France, and the silver-gong-holder, the US). We do, however, have the best thing: an index of authors whose books have been translated of all time. British authors take four of the top five places: Agatha Christie in first place, then Enid Blyton, Shakespeare and Barbara Cartland in third to fifth respectively. (The one interloper: Frenchman Jules Verne in second place).

In the end, it's hard to survey all these facts and not draw the obvious conclusion: that we Brits have some natural affinity to words and literature, the way that the Germans "do" music, or the French "do" visual art. Such things run both deep and ancient. The vernacular literature of Alfred the Great's England was the most developed in Europe. It's perhaps not surprising that the same is - arguably - still true today.