The Language Revolution (6 page)

• The base level, the place where we all start, is the home, our family dialect. In my case, this was Wales, and my home dialect was a Welsh English so strong in accent that when my family moved to Liverpool, when I was 10, I was immediately dubbed Taffy, and remained so even after my accent had moved in the
  direction of Liverpudlian. I am fluent today in both Welsh English and Scouse. I have two home dialects. Everybody has at least one.
  
• The second level is the national variety of Standard English which most people learn when they go to school. (With a minority of people, in the UK especially in South-east England, the home dialect is already Standard English.) In my case, this was British Standard English. I learned to write it, and gradually to speak it, avoiding such features as
  ain't
  and double negatives, and learning a different range of grammatical constructions and vocabulary than was found in my home dialect.
  
• The third level is an International Standard English – an English, in other words, which in its grammar and vocabulary is not recognizably British, American or anything else. When working abroad, many people become skilled in using a variety which lacks some of its original Britishness, because they know they are talking to people from outside the UK. International Standard Spoken English is not a global reality yet, but it is getting nearer.
  

Similar distinctions are to be found in other language settings too. Many foreign learners of English will have an ethnic or ancestral language for level one, and a national language for level two – such as (in Northern Spain) Basque for the first and Spanish for the second. The first two levels may also be very different forms of the same language, such as (in Southern Italy) Neapolitan and Standard Italian, respectively.

The new revolution

The twenty-first century is likely to see most educated first-language speakers of English becoming tri-dialectal –
triglossic
is a term often used – whether in the UK, USA, Ghana, Singapore or anywhere that English has a significant national presence. Thanks to media exposure, these speakers are already tri-dialectal (at least) in their ability to comprehend regional varieties of English; and they will become increasingly tri-dialectal in their production too. Foreign-language learners will also find themselves needing to cope with these variations – developing a sense of international norms alongside the national norms which are currently the focus of teaching. Teachers already routinely draw attention to local lexical and grammatical differences, such as UK
pavement,
US
sidewalk
and Australian
footpath,
but the perspective is invariably from one of these varieties towards the others. Someone teaching British English draws attention to American alternatives, or vice versa. It may not be many years before an international standard will be the starting-point, with British, American and other varieties all seen as optional localizations.

I do not know how long it will take for such a scenario to become fully established. But I do know that it will not be an easy transition, as it will involve significant changes in our methods of teaching and examining. The situation is unprecedented, with more people using English in more places than at any time in the language's history, and unpredictable, with the forces promoting linguistic identity and intelligibility competing with each other in unexpected ways. For those who have to work professionally with English, accordingly, it is a very difficult time. After all, there has never been such a period of rapid and fundamental change since the explosions of development that hit the language in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For the first time in 400 years, we are experiencing what happens when English goes through a period of particularly dramatic change. It amounts to another revolution in
the way the language is used – an exciting time to be a linguist, of course, to be in at the beginning of it, but a problematic time to be a teacher, having to guide others through it. Doubtless traditional practices in teaching language production will continue with little change for the time being, but there are already signs of a broadening of practice with respect to the teaching of listening comprehension. We are already living in a world where most of the varieties we encounter as we travel around the world are something other than traditional British or American English. Teachers do students a disservice if they let them leave their period of training unprepared for the brave new linguistic world which awaits them.

This chapter has focused on what is likely to happen to English as it copes with the pressures of becoming a global language in such a relatively short period of time. But there is another side to the coin. When a language becomes dominant within a country, there are always implications for other local languages: how do they maintain their identity? When a language becomes global, such implications affect all languages. A different set of questions arise as a consequence. Will the influence of English be so strong that it will permanently change the character of all other languages? And could English kill off other languages altogether? A world in which there was only one language left – an ecological intellectual disaster of unprecedented scale – is a scenario which could in theory obtain within 500 years. During the 1990s, people began to think seriously about such a possibility as a result of becoming aware of the second dimension to the language revolution.

2

The Future of Languages

No language exists in isolation. All languages in contact influence each other. Languages whose spread is widest – the leading international languages, such as French, Spanish, Chinese and Swahili – exercise most influence on their contact languages. And a global language, by its nature, exercises most influence of all.

One of the most notable trends of the last fifty years has been the way English, as it became increasingly global, began to affect the character of other languages through the arrival within them of unprecedented numbers of English loan words. Here are a dozen from the beginning of the alphabet, collected in Manfred Görlach's
Dictionary of European Anglicisms
(2001):

Cultures vary greatly in their response to this influx, and within each culture there are mixed attitudes. Some people welcome them, seeing them as a source of lexical enrichment; more puristically minded people condemn them, seeing them as an attack on traditional language values.
Organizations have been set up to fight them. In some famous cases, attempts have been made to ban them – the 1994
loi Toubon
in France being perhaps the best-known instance. The energy and emotion generated has to be respected, but at the same time history tells us very firmly that it is misplaced. All languages have always been in contact with other languages. All languages have always borrowed words from other languages. And no language community has ever succeeded in stopping this process taking place. The only way to do so would be to take one's language away from contact with other languages. But no-one would want the social and economic isolationism that such a policy would imply.

There is a fallacy underlying the anti-borrowing position. Purists believe that borrowing words from other languages will lead to their own language changing its character and that this is a disaster. Change of character there certainly will be. Disaster there certainly won't be. The evidence, of course, comes from the history of languages, and especially from the history of English itself. A search through the
Oxford English Dictionary
shows that English over the centuries has borrowed words from over 350 other languages. As already pointed out in chapter 1, this has changed the character of English dramatically. Originally a Germanic language, English today is not like the English of Anglo-Saxon times: four-fifths of its vocabulary is not Germanic at all, in fact, but Romance, Latin or Greek. (I always find it ironic that when the French, for example, complain about the English words currently entering their language, they often end up objecting to words – a recent example is
le computer –
which have a French or Latin origin.)

English has undoubtedly changed, but has this been a bad thing? Much of the expressive impact of Chaucer and Shakespeare – to take just two of many authors – is due to
their ability to work with all that multilingual vocabulary. And everyone benefits in a lexically enriched language. In English we have many ‘doublets' and ‘triplets', such as
kingly, royal
and
regal,
which stem from the borrowing history of the language – one Germanic, one French, one Latin. Three words for the same basic concept allows a whole range of stylistic nuances to be expressed which would not otherwise have been possible. Loan words always add semantic value to a language, giving people the opportunity to express their thoughts in a more nuanced way. And this is exactly what is happening in other languages at the moment: young people, for example, find many English loan words ‘cool', in a way that the older generation does not, and their expressiveness is empowered as a consequence. The language as a whole thus acquires an extra lexical dimension which it did not have before. Many social domains now actively and creatively make use of English words – in advertising, for example, where the use of an English lexicon can actually help to sell goods. It is, of course, the same in English, but the other way round. French words in English help to sell perfume. And one of the most widely used expressions borrowed into British English via TV ads in the past decade or so has been
Vorsprung durch Technik.

When a language adopts words – and also sounds and grammatical constructions – it adapts them. This is the repeated history of English, as it has spread around the world, evolving the New Englishes discussed in chapter 1, and a similar process will affect the loan words currently entering other languages too. When the French word
restaurant
entered English, it slowly changed its character, losing the French nasal vowel in the final syllable to end up first with ‘rest-uh-rong' and eventually the modern pronunciation ‘rest-ront'. Analogously, English words change their pronunciation, and eventually their English
character, when they are re-pronounced in other languages. The syllabification which has affected English words entering Japanese is a well-studied case: several are now unintelligible to a native-English listener – which is one reason for the emergence of labels like ‘Japlish', with the implication that these varieties are becoming new languages. Such labels are not jocular, as we have seen, though they are often used in that way: they are intuitive attempts to characterize what is happening linguistically around the world as languages become increasingly in contact with each other. They are a prime example of the point that human language cannot be controlled. The more a language becomes a national, then an international, then a global language, the more it ceases to be in the ownership of its originators. English itself has long since ceased to be owned by anyone, as we have seen, and is now open to the influence of all who choose to use it. That is why it is changing so much as it moves around the globe, and why the scenario of an English ‘family of languages' is a major possibility for the twenty-first century.

The reason why vocabulary attracts all the attention is because the lexicon is the area where change is most rapid and noticeable. People are aware of new words, and new meanings of words. But not all borrowings attract the same amount of attention. Loan words tend to be of two types: words for concepts which the language never expressed before (as in much Internet vocabulary); and words for concepts which were already expressed by a perfectly satisfactory local word. It is this second category which receives criticism, because there is a fear that the new word will replace the old one. It is a misplaced fear, as I have suggested, for two reasons. First, as the many examples like
kingly
illustrate, the new word does not have to replace the old one, but can supplement it. As Spanish, for example,
adopts English words, and adapts them, they cease to be English, and become Spanish – though conveying a different nuance alongside the traditional Spanish word. The process of integration is facilitated by many people, such as poets, novelists, dramatists, satirists, comedians, advertisers and journalists, who make use of these nuances creatively. It usually takes a generation for loan words to become integrated, though the Internet seems to be speeding up this time-frame. Looking back on previous generations' loan words, we value them, because we see the way that authors and others have made good use of them. It is only the current generation of borrowings that attracts criticism.

And second, even in cases where the new word does replace the old one (as often happened in English too, with hundreds of French words replacing Anglo-Saxon ones in the early Middle Ages), there is not very much that anyone can do about it. The point deserves repetition: human language cannot be controlled. A story is told by the twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon that King Canute of England rebuked his flatterers by showing that even he, as king, could not stop the incoming tide – nor, by implication, the might of God. The story has great relevance when we think of individuals, societies, academies or even parliaments trying to stop the flow of loan words – whatever the language they are coming from. They have never managed it in the past. They never will in the future. Language is just too powerful, because too many speakers are involved. Apart from a handful of cases where the numbers of speakers are so few that their usage can be planned by a central body (as in the case of some endangered and minority languages), usage is beyond control. This is plainly the case with strong languages like French, Spanish and German, spoken in countries which have incorporated many ethnic identities.

Instead of attacking loan words, accordingly, it makes much more sense to develop creative strategies to foster their integration, in literature, school and society at large. That would be time and energy better spent. Loan words are the invisible exports of a world where people from different language backgrounds spend time with each other. They add new dimensions of linguistic life to a community. As a citizen of that world, I value every loan word I have in my linguistic repertoire, and look forward to the day when others feel the same. If people do have time and energy available to worry about linguistic matters, there are far more important issues deserving of their attention. Such as language death.

Languages in danger

Although languages have come into existence and died away throughout human history, it was only in the 1990s, following the publication of a series of worldwide surveys, that people began to notice that the rate of disappearance was significantly increasing.
²
The thrust of these facts is easy to summarize, even though it is impossible to be exact: of the 6,000 or so languages in the world, it seems probable that about half of these will disappear in the course of the present century – an average of one language dying out every two weeks or so. It is a rate of loss unprecedented in recorded history. Popular awareness of the facts is still very limited, and certainly nowhere near the corresponding awareness of biological loss that we associate with the environmental movement. Most people have yet to develop a language conscience. But the extent and rate of the ongoing loss in the world's linguistic diversity is currently so cataclysmic that it makes the word
‘revolution' look like an understatement, when we consider it in this context.

Public interest in world language diversity is steadily growing, partly because the global story is being seen repeatedly in the histories of individual languages at risk, many of which are in Europe. Europe is fortunate in having several decades of experience in the management of minority languages, political and administrative structures to channel the expertise, and a history of decisionmaking which has resulted in important safeguards and recommendations. Indeed, several countries outside Europe look on the Continent's focus with great respect, and view with not a little envy situations like Welsh – where there are no fewer than two protective Language Acts already in place, and ongoing debate about a third. The local movements in support of Welsh, Gaelic, Catalan, Romansch and many other local languages have built up a dynamic which reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s, at least if judged by the number of public statements (such as the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the 1996 Barcelona Declaration of Linguistic Rights).
³
International and national organizations concerned with language death (such as the UK's Foundation for Endangered Languages, or the UNESCO clearing-house at Tokyo) date from 1995. It is the recency of the movement which explains why it has so far had relatively little public presence, by comparison with the ecological movement in general, which has been gathering steam for half a century. But there is no doubt about the seriousness of the situation, which is proportionately much greater than in the case of zoological and botanical endangerment. Nobody is suggesting that half the world's species are going to die out in the next century.

The connection between the arrival of a global language (chapter 1) and the increased rate of language loss needs to
be recognized, but not oversimplified. The impact of dominant languages on minority languages is a matter of universal concern, and the role of English is especially implicated. But it is important to stress that
all
majority languages are involved: the growth of English as a global language is not the sole factor in explaining language endangerment. Although it is English that has been the critical factor in the disappearance of languages in such parts of the world as Australia and North America, this language is of little relevance when we consider the corresponding losses that have taken place in South America or in many parts of Asia, where such languages as Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Chinese have replaced local languages. Nor, for that matter, is it always the chief factor in colonial Africa, where inter-ethnic and inter-religious rivalries at a local level are often the reason for the endangerment of a particular language. The thrust of the point is a general one: we are having to deal with the consequences of a globalization trend in which unprecedented market and cultural forces have been unleashed, steadily eroding the balance of linguistic power and involving all major languages.

A language dies when the last person who speaks it dies. Or, some people say, it dies when the second-last person who speaks it dies, for then the last person has nobody to talk to. A language lives on, after these deaths, only if it has been written down or recorded in some way. At the turn of the millennium, some 2,000 languages – about a third of the total – had still not been documented. When one of these languages disappears, the consequences are truly catastrophic. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds and artefacts – in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies which has never been documented, it is as if it has never been.