Authors: Bill Bryson
The simple fact is that English is not always spoken as widely or as enthusiastically as we might like to think. According to
U.S.
News & World Report
[February i8, 1985], even in Switzerland, one of the most polyglot of nations, no more than io percent of the people are capable of writing a simple letter in English.
What is certain is that English is the most studied and emulated language in the world, its influence so enormous that it has even affected the syntax of other languages. According to a study by Magnus Ljung of Stockholm University, more than half of all Swedes now make plurals by adding
-s,
after the English model, rather than by adding
-ar, -or,
or
-er,
in the normal Swedish way.
The hunger for English is gargantuan. When the BBC English-teaching series
Follow Me
was first broadcast in China, it drew audiences of up to one hundred million people. (This may also tell us a little something about the quality of alternative viewing in China.) The presenter of the program, Kathy Flower, an unknown in England, is said to be the most familiar British face in China after the queen. At all events, there are more people learning
ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
English in China than there are people in the United States. The teaching of English, according to
The Economist,
is worth £6 bil-lion a year globally. It is estimated to be Britain's sixth largest source of invisible earnings, worth some £5043 million a year.
English words are everywhere. Germans speak of
die Teenagers
and
das Walkout
and German politicians snarl "No comment" at German journalists. Italian women coat their faces with
col-cream,
Romanians ride the
trolleybus,
and Spaniards, when they feel chilly, don a
sueter.
Almost everyone in the world speaks on the telephone or the telefoon or even, in China, the to le fung. And almost everywhere you can find hamburgers, nightclubs, and tele-vision. In 1986,
The Economist
assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: airport,
pass-
port, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis,
stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal,
and
no prob-
lem.
As
The Economist
put it: "The presence of so many words to do with travel, consumables and sport attests to the real source of these exports—America."
Usually English words are taken just as they are, but sometimes they are adapted to local needs, often in quite striking ways. The Serbo-Croatians, for instance, picked up the English word
nylon
but took it to mean a kind of shabby and disreputable variation, so that a nylon hotel is a brothel while a nylon beach is the place where nudists frolic. Other nations have left the words largely intact but given the spelling a novel twist. Thus the Ukrainian
herkot
might seem wholly foreign to you until you realized that a
herkot
is what a Ukrainian goes to his barber for. Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize
ajskrym,
muving pikceris, and
peda as
the Polish for ice cream, the Lithua-nian for moving pictures, and the Serbo-Croatian for payday. The champion of this naturalization process must be the Italian
schiacch-
enze,
which is simply a literal rendering of the English
shake
hands.
The Japanese are particular masters at the art of seizing a foreign word and alternately beating it and aerating it until it sounds some-thing like a native product. Thus the
sumato
(smart) and nyuu
ritchi
(newly rich) Japanese person seasons his or her conversation
THE MOTHER TONGUE
with
upatodatu
expressions like
gurama foto
(glamour photo),
hai-
kurasu
(high class),
kyapitaru gein (capital gain),
and
rushawa
(rush hour).
Sebiro,
for a suit of clothes, looks convincingly native until you realize that it is a corruption of Savile Row, the London street where the finest suits are made. Occasionally the borrowed words grow.
Productivity
was stretched and mauled until it emerged as
purodakuchibichi,
which, despite its greater length, sits more comfortably on the Japanese tongue. But for the most part the Japanese use the same sort of ingenuity miniaturizing English words as they do in miniaturizing televisions and video cameras. So
modern
girl comes out
as moga, word processor
be-comes
wa-pro, mass communications
becomes
masu-komi,
and
commercial
is brusquely truncated into a short, sharp
cm. No-pan,
short for
no-panties, is a
description for bottomless waitresses, while the English words
touch
and
game
have been fused to make
tatchi
geimu, a euphemism for sexual petting.
This inclination to hack away at English words until they become something like native products is not restricted to the Japanese. In Singapore transvestites are known as
shims,
a contraction of
she-
hims.
Italians don't go to a nightclub, but just to
a night
(often spelled
nihgt),
while in France a self-service restaurant is simply
le
self.
European languages also show a curious tendency to take English participles and give them entirely new meanings, so that the French don't go running or jogging, they go footing. They don't engage in a spot of sunbathing, but rather go in for
le bronzing.
A
tuxedo or dinner jacket in French becomes
un smoking,
while in Italy cosmetic surgery becomes
il lifting.
The Germans are partic-ularly inventive at taking things a step further than it ever occurred to anyone in English. A young person in Germany goes from being in his teens to being in his
twens, a
book that doesn't quite become a best-seller is instead
ein steadyseller,
and a person who is more relaxed than another is
relaxter.
Sometimes new words are made up, as with the Japanese
salry-
man
for an employee of a corporation. In Germany a snappy dresser is a
dressman.
In France a
recordman
is not a disc jockey, but an athlete who sets a record, while an
alloman
is a switchboard op-erator (because he says, "alto? alto?"). And, just to confuse things,
ENGLISH' AS A
WORLD
LANGUAGE
sometimes English words are given largely contrary meanings, so that in France an
egghead
is an idiot while a jerk is an accomplished dancer.
The most relentless borrowers of English words have been the Japanese. The number of English words current in Japanese has been estimated to be as high
as
zo,000. It has been said, not altogether wryly, that if the Japanese were required to pay a li-cense fee for every word they used, the American trade deficit would vanish. A count of Western words, mostly English, used in Japanese newspapers in 1964 put the proportion at just under lo percent. It would almost certainly be much higher now. Among the Japanese borrowings:
erebata—elevator
nekutai—necktie
bata—butter
beikon—bacon
sarada—salad
remon—lemon
chiizu—cheese
bifuteki—beefsteak
hamu—ham
shyanpu setto—shampoo and set
Not all languages have welcomed the invasion of English words.
The French have been more resistant than most. President Fran-cois Mitterrand declared in 1986, perhaps a trifle excessively:
"France is engaged in a war with Anglo-Saxon." The French have had a law against the encroachment of foreign words since as early as 1911, but this was considerably bolstered by the setting up in 1970 of a Commission on Terminology, which was followed in 1975
by another law, called the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language, which introduced fines for using illegal anglicisimes, which in turn was followed in 1984 by the establishment of
another
panel, the grandly named Commissariat General de la Langue Francaise. You may safely conclude from all this that the French take their language very seriously indeed. As a result of these
THE MOTHER TONGUE
various efforts, the French are forbidden from saying
pipeline
(even though they pronounce it "peepleun"), but must instead say
oleo-
duc.
They cannot take a
jet airplane,
but instead must board an
avion a reaction.
A
hamburger
is a
steak hache. Chewing gum
has become
pate a ma cher.
The newspaper
Le Monde
sarcastically suggested that sandwich should be rendered as "deux morceaux de pain avec quelque chose au milieu"—"two pieces of bread with something in the middle."
Estimates of the number of anglicisimes in French have been put as high as 5 percent, though
Le Monde
thinks the true total is nearer a percent or less. (Someone else once calculated that an anglicisime appeared in
Le Monde
once every 166 words—or well under i percent of the time.) So it is altogether possible that the French are making a great deal out of very little. Certainly the incursion of English words is not a new phenomenon.
Le snob, le
biftek,
and even
le self-made man
go back a hundred years or more, while
ouest
( west) has been in French for loo years and
rosbif
(roast beef) for 350. More than one observer has suggested that what really rankles the French is not they are borrowing so many words from the rest of the world but that the rest of the world is no longer borrowing so many from them. As the magazine
Le Point
put it: "Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauf-feur."
The French, it must be said, have not been so rabidly anglo-phobic as has sometimes been made out. From the outset the government conceded defeat on a number of words that were too well established to drive out:
gadget, holdup, weekend, blue jeans,
self-service, manager, marketing,
and many others. Between 1977
and 1987, there were just forty prosecutions for violations of the language laws, almost always involving fairly flagrant abuses. TWA, for instance, was fined for issuing its boarding passes in English only. You can hardly blame the French for taking exception to that.
The French also recognize the global importance of English. In 1988, the elite Ecole Centrale de Paris, one of the country's top engineering academies, made it a requirement of graduation that students be able to speak and write fluent English, even if they have no intention of ever leaving France.
ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
It would be a mistake to presume that English is widely spoken in the world because it has some overwhelming intrinsic appeal to foreigners. Most people speak it not because it gives them pleasure to help out American and British monoglots who cannot be trou-bled to learn a few words of their language, believe it or not, but because they need it to function in the world at large. They may like a few English words splashed across their T-shirts and shop-ping bags, but that isn't to say that that is what they want to relax with in the evening.
Go to Amsterdam or Antwerp or Oslo and you will find that almost everyone speaks superb English, and yet if you venture into almost any bookstore in those cities you will usually find only a small selection of books in English. For the most part, people want to read works in their own language. Equally they want to watch television in their own language. In the coastal areas of Holland and Belgium, where most people can both speak English and re-ceive British television broadcasts, most still prefer to watch local programs even when they are palpably inferior to the British prod-uct (i.e., almost invariably). Similarly, two English-language sat-ellite networks in Europe, Sky TV and Super Channel, had some initial success in West Germany, but as soon as two competing satellite networks were set up transmitting more or less the same programs but dubbed into German, the English-language net-works' joint share slumped to less than i percent—about as much as could be accounted for by English-speaking natives living in West Germany. The simple fact is that German viewers, even when they speak English well, would rather watch Dallas dubbed badly into German than in the original English. And who can blame them?
In many places English is widely resented as a symbol of colo-nialism. In India, where it is spoken by no more than 5 percent of the population at the very most, the constitution was written in English and English was adopted as a foreign language not out of admiration for its linguistic virtues but as a necessary expedient. In a country in which there are 1,652 languages and dialects, includ-ing 15 official ones, and in which no one language is spoken by more than 16 percent of the population, a neutral outside language
THE MOTHER TONGUE
has certain obvious practicalities. Much the same situation prevails in Malaysia, where the native languages include Tamil, Portu-guese, Thai, Punjabi, twelve versions of Chinese, and about
as
many
of Malay. Traditionally, Malay is spoken in the civil service, Chinese in business, and English in the professions and in educa-tion. Yet these countries are almost always determined to phase English out. India had hoped to eliminate it as an official language by 198o and both Malaysia and Nigeria have been trying to do likewise since the 1970s.
There is certainly a good case for adopting an international lan-guage, whether it be English or Malaysian or Thraco-Phrygian.
Translating is an enormously costly and time-consuming business.
An internal survey by the European Community in 1987 found that it was costing it $15 a word, $500 a page, to translate its documents.
One in every three employees of the European Community is engaged in translating papers and speeches. A third of all admin-istration costs—$7oo million in 1987—was taken up with paying for translators and interpreters. Every time a member is added to the EC, as most recently with Greece, Spain, and Portugal, the trans-lation problems multiply exponentially. Under the Treaty of Rome each member country's language must be treated equally, and it is not easy even in multilingual Brussels to find linguists who can translate from Dutch into Portuguese or from Danish into Greek.