Those like, LJ Smith and Phil Ings who think that the English have their own language, have only to look at the facts.

The first person to use the term "cuppa" for a cup of tea was not an Englishman, but an Australian. the first person to use the word "twig" (Irish – tuigim) ,meaning to understand, was an Irishman.

The first people to report feeling "unwell", or to have "fun" (Irish – foinn) were Irish.The word "quiz" was invented in Dublin by an Irishman for a bet.

The ubiquitous word "okay/okeh" is from a West African language, probably Wolof, and was popularised in the USA as "OK".

The word "Pidgin" to mean a reduced form of English was first used by a Chinese. The use of the word "global" to mean "world-wide" comes from America.

The process will go on until such times as the English make a collective decision to speak English and not the cosmopolitan Anglo-US language.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a genius, but he bears a huge responsibility for undermining the Englishness of the tongue and opening the floodgates wide to words from other languages.

Only someone with his feel for language could have done that, but his was a poisoned chalice as far as English as a national language is concerned. This is something which we can see in hind-sight, or "retrospect" to use the non-English word.

It says something when Professor David Crystal tells us that English, which was born in Northern Germany, is now more like Italian than it is like any other language.

How can a language which is spoken by one third of the world's popullation as LJ Smith points out, be English in any meaningful sense, particularly as the purely English element is being squeezed out by borrowings from Latin, Greek, French and numerous other languages? (Although Chinese has more speakers than Anglo-US has, it has been used by the Han for thousands of years in an unadulterated form.)

There are, of course, "English language dictionaries" and "English lessons" in school classes, but these combinations of words are an abuse of the word "English".

Robert Craig By email