The Adventure of English (37 page)

Given the mass of America and the inrush from elsewhere, it is perhaps surprising to find that plain, more or less monosyllabic Old English could still resonate so powerfully and movingly. But it could, as we saw in Winston Churchill's speech: “We shall go on to the end . . . we shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air . . . we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

That war brought the first mass invasions of Americans into Britain. The GIs arrived and a little handbook was given them to ease their conversation with the natives. They were informed that a kipper was a smoked herring. There were skittle alleys with ninepins rather than bowling alleys with tenpins. They were told that a five and ten store should be called a bazaar and instead of OK, which was already on its way to becoming the most famous word in the world, they should say “righto.” They were also told: “the British are tough . . . The English language didn't spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were pantywaists.” “Panty-waist” was American for “sissy.”

By 1944, more than one and a half million Americans were billeted around Britain. And this war, like all wars, brought the recording of new words — from “jitterbug” to “doodle-bug,” “smooch” to “stakeout,” “passion-wagon,” “teenager,” “ballsy,” “gung-ho” (from Chinese “work together”), “genocide,” “anti-gravity,” “jet plane,” “chicken” for “coward,” “laundromat” and “squillions.”

From the mid twentieth century the English language flooded all over the world until by the year 2000 no one was in any way surprised that a Polish-speaking Pope, the head of a Latin-speaking Vatican, on his arrival in a Hebrew-speaking state, should say in English: “May this be God's gift to the land that He chose as His own — Shalom.” Nor, as I write this, does it surprise anyone that so many of the diplomats and leaders of states at the United Nations are speaking to the world's press in English.

Countries such as Japan made learning the English language compulsory. The Japanese turned it into a form of Japanese-English: “biiru” for “beer,” “isukrimu” for “ice-cream.” And American soldiers took Japanese words back to the U.S.: “honcho” from “hancho” — leader; “kamikaze,” “hari-kiri” and “tsunami.”

In 1945, George Orwell gave the language a new term, “cold war,” and this was yet another war which delivered new words. “Big Brother,” “Gulag,” “Newthink,” “double speak,” “fallout,” “overkill,” “megadeath.” And from the world of spies, there came “moles,” “sleepers,” “brainwashing,” “bug” and “safe house.”

What happened in the second half of the twentieth century has been described rather dismissively as the coca-colonisation of the world. American brand names, American popular music, its movies and television, stormed the world and for a time the jukebox became the shrine of youth. To buy and sell, to enjoy and participate, to sing and be heard, increasingly and everywhere, you needed American English.

Yet English does not have the biggest core-speaking population. There are over a billion speakers who have Mandarin Chinese as their first language. By comparison English's three hundred eighty million core speakers look quite puny. All the more remarkable then that it has taken such a worldwide hold. For outside the core speakers, it is estimated that upwards of three hundred million have English as a second or third language essential, as in India and Singapore, to enter into many of the central processes of society. There is yet another batch who use English as the preferred adoptive means of communication. Many from different languages now speak to each other in English rather than in either one of their own languages — say Malay or Russian. This figure has been estimated to be over a billion and rising rapidly.

A lateral-thinking way to look at this is to measure the economic strength of different languages. Measured in billions of pounds, Chinese is “worth” four hundred forty-eight billion, Russian eight hundred one, German one thousand and ninety, Japanese one thousand, two hundred seventy-seven billion, English four thousand, two hundred seventy-one. English is the buyers' and sellers' language, the stock language of the market.

And English is the first language among equals at the United Nations, at NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. It is the
only
official language of OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the
only
working language of the European Free Trade Association, the Association of Baltic Marine Biologists, the Asian Amateur Athletics Association, the African Hockey Federation . . . while it is the second language of bodies as diverse as the Andean Commission of Jurists and the Arab Air Carriers Association.

And that is not the end of it.

F
or centuries English was outstandingly successful at feeding off other languages and turning them into English, often endowing them with a quality which made them seem agelessly English. Now it is feeding other languages.

So in Russian, for example, they now use “futbol,” “chempion,” “kemping” (camping), “khobb” (hobby), “klub,” “striptiz,” “ralli,” “boykot,” “lider” (leader), “pamflet,” “bifshteks,” “grog,” “keks,” “puding,” “myuzikl,” “kompyuter,” “mobilny telefon,” “faks,” “konsultant,” “broker,” “sponsor,” “kornfleks,” “parlament,” “prezident,” “spiker” (speaker), “elektorat,” “konsensus,” “ofis,” “supermarket,” “loozer” (failure). In Japan we have mentioned one or two; others include: “raiba intenshibu” (labour intensive), “rajio” (radio), “konpyu-ta” (computer), “kare raisu” (curry rice), “supootsu” (sports), “autodoasupo-tsu” (outdoor sports), “sutoresu” (stress), “insentibu” (incentive), “akauntabiriti” (accountability), “ranchi” (lunch), “kissu” (kiss). Brazil is to ban the increasing number of English words and expressions, such as: “sale,” “50 percent off,” “spring,” “summer,” “shopsoiled,” “exuberant,” “overtime” (watch shop), “New Garden.” In São Paolo's Shopping Centre, ninety-three out of two hundred fifty-two stores featured English words in their names. When President Cardoso recently used “fast track” in a speech, he was criticised for it. There is no doubt that certain governments think, as Gandhi did to an extreme degree, that the use of the English language is enslaving and a danger to the native tongue.

No one objects more than the French, who have contributed many thousands of words to English. The traffic was almost all one way until halfway through the twentieth century, when the flow was reversed. The French dislike this intensely. Yet, inexorably it seems, they say “le weekend,” “le twin set,” “le look,” “un holiday,” “le midwife,” “le parking,” “le gros rush” (rush hour), “le garden party,” “les drinks,” “le score,” “le front desk,” “le building,” “le mixed grill,” “un pullover,” “aftershave,” “le babysitter,” “le barmaid,” “le camping,” “le cowboy,” “le cocktail,” “le hold up,” “le jogging,” “le jukebox,” “le jumpjet,” “le know-how,” “le manager,” “le name-dropping,” “le rip off,” “le sandwich,” “le selfmade-man,” “le showbiz,” “le stress,” “le supermodel,” “le zapping.” And many more.

In 1994, the French government passed a law prohibiting the use of English words where good French equivalents existed. This can be enforced by a hefty fine. The most recent edition of the Académie Française dictionary admitted about six thousand new words to the French language, including “le cover girl,” “le bestseller” and “le blue jeans,” but none of those I listed above, from “le weekend” to “le zapping.” We'll see who wins: the street talk or the state censors. France's concern for its own language is exacerbated by the drift towards English in the European Union. People who can speak English in Europe outnumber those who can speak French by three to one and the margin grows.

One of many predictions about the future of English is that as time goes on, the mother tongue as we know it, tested and embellished in England, then in Britain, then America, Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, will be spoken only by a minority of English speakers. Other Englishes are being formed all the time.

Singlish in Singapore is a good example. English was used in Singapore for a hundred fifty years and when it went independent in 1958, Singapore made it the official language of business and government, partly because English united the diverse population of Chinese, Malays and Indians and partly because of its commercial and financial importance. But alongside official English you also hear Singlish, which grows and develops despite the efforts of the government to root it out. Some scholars believe that Singlish indicates the way in which future Englishes will develop. In so many ways it fits the tongues and the traditions and the vocal rhythms of the people of Singapore much better than official English and could threaten to replace it. And is it not yet another dialect of English?

Some words come recognisably from English: “go stun” — to reverse (maritime “go to stern”), and “blur” (confused). But others come from Malay and Hokkun. Words such as “habis” (finished), “makan” (to eat, meal), “cheem” (difficult), “ang mo” (redhead in Hokkun and hence white person), “kiasu” (very keen, especially of a student). Some of these words are now being used as part of Singapore Standard English and they will change it greatly. Marking plurals and past tenses is a matter of choice and so you get phrases such as “What happen yesterday?,” “You go where?,” “Got so many car!,” “The house sell already.” The verb “to be” can be optional. “She so pretty,” “That one like us,” “Why you so stupid?” These phrases are easily comprehensible to more traditional English users, often full of bite and wit and energy.

A similar thing is happening in South Africa, where local words now sit alongside Standard English, indicating total acceptance and signalling the birth of another new English. As in this from a South African newspaper: “First they told us they would lend us the maphepha to buy the old four-roomed matchbox which masipala put us in . . . So by the time you are eighty years old — if you have survived the marakalas we live under — they can tell you to voetsek out of the house because somebody with the cash in hand wants it now.”

Increasingly even in Europe there is an acceptance of different Englishes. Everything does not have to be put in “correct” English. The English linguist David Graddol points out that English-looking words in Europe often carry meanings which come from the French — “federal,” “subsidiarity” and “community” are three examples he gives. The Germans use “handy” for a mobile phone and on a Lufthansa flight you will be told to “turn your handies off.”

The more English spreads, the more it diversifies, the more it could tend towards fragmentation. Just as Latin, which once held sway over a great linguistic empire, split into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian (all with common roots but — apart from Spanish and Portuguese — not immediately mutually intelligible), so may the future of English be not as a single language but as the parent of a family of languages.

Noah Webster predicted this two hundred years ago. Although he thought it would happen within his native America, the reasons he gave apply precisely to the condition of English around the world today. In his
Dissertations in the English Language
(1789), he wrote:

For Webster's North America two hundred years ago, read “the world” today. Just as the Old Germanic dialect which fathered English also split into the tribes of Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German, so may English itself diversify. Webster's prediction that the language of North America would become as different from the language of Britain as Swedish is from German has not yet been fulfilled. I suspect it will take a longer time a-coming than Webster anticipated. If ever. But the theory has supporters and it is certainly true that diversity seems to be accelerating.

There are scholars who believe that the future of English will no longer even be shaped by its founding family but by L2 speakers — those who vastly outnumber the “core” speakers — for whom English is a second language, Language Two. Dr. Jennifer Jenkins sees the green shoots of plausibility in this theory. She has pointed out that whereas the traditional English “talk about” something or “discuss” something, almost all L2 speakers “discuss about” something. She believes that phrase is here to stay and will spread into Standard English as, she believes, will the tag “How can I say?” and many others. Perhaps even words we consider wholly mispronounced will take their place in the
Oxford Dictionary.
In Korea and Taiwan and elsewhere, for instance, a “product” is a “produk.” What odds “produk” displacing “product” as Asian wealth grows? And the complicated English tag system — “have you?,” “haven't you?,” “could you?,” “couldn't you?,” “won't you?,” “didn't you?” — will most certainly be simplified, Professor David Crystal thinks. His bet is that “nesspa?” could replace the lot of them. Innit?

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English. And a new form of English has just appeared back at base — Text English.

This appeared in an issue of the
Guardian
early in 2003, under “English as a Foreign Language”:

This is yet another English and totally comprehensible to its users, who are mostly young and therefore influential on the future of the language.

“I love you” is now more commonly the text “i luv u.” A texting dictionary is already on the streets. On Valentine's Day in 2003, in the U.K., about seventy million text messages were sent, five times the number of Valentine cards. “i luv u” rules.

At first glance this text looks not wholly unlike one of the Old Germanic dialects, and that is no wonder: for the latest specialist, most technologically driven of written languages is still founded on the word-hoard brought across to England from Friesland more than fifteen hundred years ago.

There are now hundreds of dictionaries of English words — slang dictionaries, science, art, business dictionaries, creole, dialect, sporting, dictionaries blasphemous, humorous, ponderous, omnivorous.

These are some of the latest words recently accepted by the
Oxford English Dictionary:
“ass-backwards,” “bigorexia,” “blog,” “clientelism,” “clocker,” “dischuffed,” “dragon lady,” “emotional intelligence,” “lookism,” “rent-a-quote,” “rumpy-pumpy,” “sizeist,” “sussed,” “unplugged,” “weblogger.” Still it flows on. English it seems has to name and so claim everything in the world that comes on its radar.

These words are queuing up and knocking on the door to be admitted next to the
OED:

Chambers Dictionary
has its own rather racy list of words in waiting:

Again, as with so many of the hundreds of thousands of words which have come into the language since the fifth century, it is all but impossible to discover a single prime creator for these words, words which extend the description and possibilities of our lives. They seem to be conjured out of the air we breathe; just as they are spoken back into that air and carried like pollen on the wind.

An adventure should have an ending but there is no conclusion to the astounding and moving journey of the English language, from its small spring to rivers of thought and poetry and science, into oceans of religions and politics, industry, finance and technology, those oceans swept by storms that poured English on to the willing and the unwilling alike. It is a language that other languages take on, bend, adapt and grow from, just as English itself from its slow fierce forging in these islands has taken on and been tested by and absorbed many other languages. Still it grows. New words line up in their thousands every year to be inspected and selected by compilers of dictionaries: if the guardians of these books of life give them the nod, in they go, into a hoard and a history of words whose ingenuity, democratic sourcing, variety, richness, even genius, is all but beyond imagination.