Behemoth, bully, thief: the English language is taking over the planet
July 31, 2018 5:04 AM   Subscribe

Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland. [sl Guardian Longread]

English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.
posted by ellieBOA (89 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
It does seem likely that English, Spanish and Standardized Chinese could eventually converge into some sort of global composite second language, if we live that long.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:10 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Do mi supozas ke ni estas pli bonaj sen ĝi.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 5:11 AM on July 31, 2018 [12 favorites]


It does seem likely that English, Spanish and Standardized Chinese could eventually converge into some sort of global composite second language, if we live that long.

Shiny.
posted by arcticseal at 5:12 AM on July 31, 2018 [47 favorites]


Utter nonsense!

This reminds of articles written in the late 80’s about AIDS, according to which, if nothing was done, the entire population of Africa would be wiped out. Nobody knows and can predict how these things turn out in the end. Even today, Spanish is more spread out than English while Mandarin Chinese and Hindi are more widely spoken.

I wonder if the author speaks anything other than English, for him to decide than literature in other languages is mangled.
posted by Kwadeng at 5:23 AM on July 31, 2018 [15 favorites]


The author mentions that they are a native Polish speaker in the article:

My first language was Polish. I learned it from my parents at home. English followed shortly, at school in Pennsylvania. I learned to speak it fluently, but with an accent, which took years of teasing – and some speech therapy, kindly provided by the state – to wear away. That, combined with the experience of watching the widespread condescension towards those who take their time learning English, left me a lifelong English-sceptic.
posted by smcg at 5:26 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I understand the concern about languages dying out but I don’t see that it’s necessarily the result of so many people speaking English.
posted by unliteral at 5:30 AM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


English has established itself as the de facto language for international corporations and business. If you have ever lived in another place where it isn't the first language, you'd see amazingly quickly how English really does spread like a virus!
posted by Kitteh at 5:46 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Utter nonsense!

The claim about "literatures being mangled" is obviously subjective, but the idea isn't necessarily chauvinistic. It's based on some evidence that the literature of other languages isn't just borrowing some English loanwords, but that the syntaxes and grammars are changing under English influence, Anglicizing them, in a way, and making them lose their native character:
The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.
You can think of this as akin to the way cinema has transformed novels. So many novels now seem to be written so that they could be easily turned into screenplays, since having your book made into a movie is the peak of success. Likewise, having your novel translated into English so that it can be read by the "most important" readers, who do not read any other language, means you've made it as a writer.
posted by dis_integration at 5:46 AM on July 31, 2018 [17 favorites]


It does seem likely that English, Spanish and Standardized Chinese could eventually converge into some sort of global composite second language, if we live that long.

Not just global, coyo. Fodagut xalte ere gova us beltalowda. [not belta speaker]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:50 AM on July 31, 2018 [15 favorites]


Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland.

The large number of World Englishes would like to have a word with the author. When English starts being spoken somewhere by large numbers of non-native speakers, their languages(s) leave an imprint. So yes, we have homogeneity in that people are speaking some form of English, but we also have incredible diversity in what forms that "English" takes.

The spread of English has given us Singlish, Indian English, Nigerian English, not to mention a whole slew of other things which tend to get classified as Creoles-- Sranan Tongo, Tok Pisin, Jamaican Creole, etc., etc.

And you don't even have to look outside of the US and UK to find these. We've got Hawaiian Pidgin and Gullah and African American English in the US; Hiberno English in the UK.

I understand the concern about languages dying out but I don’t see that it’s necessarily the result of so many people speaking English.

Yup; in some cases, the threat is more from a local lingua franca (like Swahili or one of the creoles listed above), rather than English. And in some cases, we do see people maintaining their languages alongside whatever lingua franca they've picked up.

Contact linguists have spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out what the heck's going on here, and to sort out the forces that cause people to shift or not shift. A lot of the time, the story is a lot more complicated than "Well, English came along and that was that."
posted by damayanti at 6:00 AM on July 31, 2018 [39 favorites]


Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon.

Or it would, if yelling at the moon was something that newspaper columnists were regularly paid to do. I've certainly seen more protesting it than celebrating it, but then I almost exclusively read the stuff published in English.
posted by sfenders at 6:00 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


One of the better examples of how thoroughly English is seeping into other languages is to listen and catch how often "ok" drops into the dialog of non-English-language films and tv.

I imagine being the defacto (now official) language for international air traffic control helps spread English quite a bit, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:14 AM on July 31, 2018


During my recent extended stay in Germany I have been struck by how deeply the English language and American culture permeate: private-sector commercial television produces almost no scripted shows, instead dubbing American shows; movies are nearly all dubbed from Hollywood; a very high proportion of books are translated from English and bookstores also sell many English books; most to all music on the radio is in English; German is peppered with loan words and calques; English is required in all schools and bilingual ed (native German speaking teachers teaching German pupils in English) is available in public schools.

Will English end up affecting German as much as Latin stamped the linguistic course of Western Europe (not only the Romance languages, but also the Germanic and Celtic ones)? As much as Norman French changed English? As much as the imposition of standard High German and Parisian French altered the dialect landscape of those languages in the last few hundred years? It's not impossible, but then again America seems to be committing imperial seppuku at the moment and who knows what the next half-century will bring.

Certainly the author's fear that English is going to be the Trojan horse for making Anglo-American middle class values, as embodied by the tentative expression "I believe", ubiquitous worldwide is absurd. English itself is changing far too quickly for that.
posted by sy at 6:14 AM on July 31, 2018 [9 favorites]


In some ways, the worst threat may come not from the global onrush of modernity, but from an idea: that a single language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is therefore somehow “normal”. This is something that’s often assumed reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English, but historically speaking, monolingualism is something of an aberration.

Those who are unsure if this is a good trend, should read the article. The author does not seem to think so.

English is used as a second-language by the rest of the world. It is a way for native speakers of other languages to communicate with each other. But it should be remembered that those people still speak their own language and possibly others.

In many ways, I blame monolingualism in places like America and Britain for much of its cultural isolation and even the exceptionalism. Europeans understand English, they can read English newspapers. But English folks, even educated ones, cannot generally read French or German or Spanish. So, English-only speakers are left in a bubble, one tinier than the second-English speakers around the world.

And English as it is adopted by the world, is changing and finding new homes. The variants and dialects are on their way to becoming languages of their own and will need their own dictionaries. Instead of one language academy, you will have many, as has already happened with Spanish.

I'm reading short stories by brilliant young authors from Mexico. I'm watching culture shows from Catalonia. I'm reading Italian detective novels. I speak and understand English natively, but surprisingly, it is not where I am spending a lot of my time these days.
posted by vacapinta at 6:20 AM on July 31, 2018 [19 favorites]


Why does one existing language have to "win" -- why not make a wholly new thing, so no one feels left out or disenfranchised, or silenced?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:22 AM on July 31, 2018


Duobla.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 6:36 AM on July 31, 2018


I can see that other languages are better at expressing certain emotional landscapes than English, but I don't see how English being so widely spoken means that those other languages are under threat. There's always been a lingua franca, and for the first time in human history it's possible to have people from every other country in the world be your trading partner simultaneously. There's a need for a babel language, and the language of the people who invented the need happens to have some of the properties useful for a babel language, with its village bicycle vocabulary and word transformation. (An accidentally invented word like 'google' can, in English, transition from a noun, to a verb and adjective, without ever breaking grammar rules. That's insane.)
posted by Merus at 6:38 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Frankly, I think it would behoove native English speakers to really properly learn another language (Spanish, f'rex) instead of the one-off high school elective. One of the things I am most grateful in relocating to Canada was that I received free French lessons (especially as I was living in a part of QC that wasn't bilingual) as an immigrant. I still use that French and am very very glad I was pushed out of my linguistic comfort zone.
posted by Kitteh at 6:47 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I find it interesting that English letters are also the primary language used in computer programming. You don't see dominant programming languages written in Japanese or Hindi. They might be really neat.

I don't know if I'm missing some, or if it is a result of most computer processors (RISC/CISC, ARM /x86) were wired by English speakers and their instructions and manuals all reflect that.
posted by nickggully at 6:49 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I have no talent for languages. What ever was spoken where I was born would be my single tongue for the rest of my life. It just happened to be English. That it has become a lingua franca has made things much easier for me. And I salute all who have taken it on as a second or third language. A kleptomaniac borrowing language with Latinate, Germanic and Brittonic roots that seems to mutate almost daily and in every locale. What a mess to willingly lower yourself into...
posted by jim in austin at 6:50 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


There's always been a lingua franca

Is this really true, globally? Seems very unlikely to me. A number of regional, erm, linguas franca, I'd get but globalisation is pretty recent.
posted by pompomtom at 6:51 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's an even-handed article, and the proposed solution (for native English speakers to learn another language as a cognitive enrichment exercise and to expand their worldview) is not that radical.

Would you guys rather have a future where customs and immigration are called on the café staff because they dared to speak Spanish in public?
posted by subdee at 6:53 AM on July 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


It's weird, it bugs me a little bit that the language I've spent so much time learning, Italian, has absorbed so much English in the last fifty or so years. If you look at the front page of an Italian paper you see tons and tons of English: "la privacy," "il marketing," and other words for which there is a perfectly cromulent Italian alternative. An annoying part of me is like "Why did I bother when it's turning into English before my very eyes?"

That reaction is of course kind of silly–languages are constantly evolving and changing, no matter what an individual might think or do. It's not really for me to complain about. I *can* complain about the sorry state of language learning in the US and note that the author is right to say that learning a new language is a worthwhile exercise in and of itself, whether or not the natives of whatever country you're visiting speak English. For the most part people are still pleased when I make the effort to speak their language in their country (and conversely, I wonder at how difficult we make it even here in NYC for visitors who don't fluently speak *our* language).
posted by lackutrol at 6:57 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Ah, I remember when everyone was complaining that you couldn't get ahead without Latin, all our lovely local celtic languages were getting pushed aside and changed by it, what with the Romans being everywhere and dominating everything.
posted by conifer at 6:58 AM on July 31, 2018 [20 favorites]


I don't know if I'm missing some, or if it is a result of most computer processors (RISC/CISC, ARM /x86) were wired by English speakers and their instructions and manuals all reflect that.

Definitely a factor, but the big one is that English characters have got a privileged position when it comes to how letters and numbers are encoded. The first widely adopted standard for how to encode characters was a standard called ASCII, which covers most of the letters on the American keyboard and that's it. Even pound sterling signs and umlauts aren't available in early ASCII. So you got broad compatibility if you used ASCII characters, and if you didn't then things would break when you moved countries.

These days, we use Unicode, which is supposed to encode every written language (it doesn't), but even Unicode starts with the ASCII characters. So code that uses ASCII still saves more space.

(There are languages that primarily use non-English marks, but they're generally considered novelty languages.)

Is this really true, globally? Seems very unlikely to me. A number of regional, erm, linguas franca, I'd get but globalisation is pretty recent.

No, I did mean "regional" lingua franca, for the trading language of the region.
posted by Merus at 6:59 AM on July 31, 2018


Wait, “Behemoth”? Really? A word that comes from Latin from the Hebrew Bible (Job 40:15), is an example of the hegemony of English?
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:17 AM on July 31, 2018 [12 favorites]


Yes, because English steals all the good words, and that's why it has the most words.
posted by pompomtom at 7:20 AM on July 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


's/steals/shares/g'
posted by pompomtom at 7:22 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Excellent piece. The Guardian is really killing it these days.
posted by The Toad at 7:27 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


In the 1970s, Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish academia, stood the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on its head. Instead of trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter-gatherers, she turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones. For Wierzbicka, English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other language. It’s just that in an anglophone world, that invisible baggage is harder to discern. In a series of books culminating in 2013’s evocatively named Imprisoned in English, she has attempted to analyse various assumptions – social, spatial, emotional and otherwise – latent in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK.

Reading Wierzbicka’s work is like peeking through a magic mirror that inverts the old “how natives think” school of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves. Her English-speakers are a pragmatic people, cautious in their pronouncements and prone to downplaying their emotions. They endlessly qualify their remarks according to their stance towards what is being said. Hence their endless use of expressions such as “I think”, “I believe”, “I suppose”, “I understand”, “I suspect”. They prefer fact over theories, savour “control” and “space”, and cherish autonomy over intimacy. Their moral lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture-specific concepts called “right” and “wrong”, which they mysteriously believe to be universal.
[...] Anglo-American middle class values, as embodied by the tentative expression "I believe" [...]


Perhaps it's a symptom of being a middle-class American, but I don't understand what's being discussed here (but it sounds fascinating). Could somebody please enlighten me?
posted by ragtag at 7:30 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. - James Nicoll, rec.arts.sf-lovers, 1990.
posted by bonehead at 7:40 AM on July 31, 2018 [25 favorites]


I was just digging up the citation for that quotation, but bonehead beat me to it.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 7:43 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


English is the de facto lingua franca.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:55 AM on July 31, 2018 [16 favorites]



a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken.


...which is exactly what my Mum used to tell me about why I should learn other languages. If you learn another language, you'll also learn another way of thinking.

Of course, I'm an idiot and have learned parts of other languages that English has already stolen from, or was derived from. I should've been learning Asian languages rather than French and German. I had a hellish time learning tourist-Turkish, but people tell me that Turkish is a bit similar to Japanese in structure. I gather that difference in structure is what makes for a difference in internal thought.

I'm well chuffed with my Japanophile nieces learning non-Euro languages, but they have the privilege to do that because they were raised with English as a default.
posted by pompomtom at 7:56 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


languages are constantly evolving and changing

A dead tongue is not one that has no native speakers. A dead tongue is one that no longer acquires new words.
posted by aramaic at 7:57 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Definitely a factor, but the big one is that English characters have got a privileged position when it comes to how letters and numbers are encoded.

Oh yes. Linguistic and technological hegemony grows from the barrel of a gun like any other form of power. At first English spread because Britain was better than anybody else at building an empire, and then it spread in the digital realm because America's military industrial complex and federally funded universities had the foresight to do a lot of research into communications networks. We're fortunate to live in an era where English is spreading as a result of its superior convenience in technologically mediated communication rather than because an English-speaking army smashed up a few civilizations that just happened to use other languages. But I do wonder how much of that convenience (whether it's using ASCII vs Unicode as you pointed out or other such factors) is just another side effect of a few centuries' worth of successful smash-ups.

When we talk about the success of a language, there seems to be a tendency to treat it as just a natural phenomenon, as if it's just a thing that happens, or a product of its superior expressiveness or ease of use or what have you, and not an extension of geopolitical power and violence. Such an attitude lends itself to a laissez-faire approach, but I think nationalists might have it right in that the increasing dominance of English is neither natural nor necessarily preferable, depending on who you are.
posted by hyperbolic at 8:00 AM on July 31, 2018 [9 favorites]


antirez (of Redis fame) had a post about his experiences in the tech industry learning English as a non-native speaker, and the difficulty understanding different accents.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:02 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


If y'all are up for another looong read about language, the complications of English as a colonial language, and the act of translation, don't miss the Arundhati Roy essay posted just a few days ago, it's fascinating and great.
posted by gwint at 8:02 AM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


look, i'll settle for monolingual anglophones being able to understand not just other englishes, but other english accents, and not be so constantly amazed that there are other kinds of english: Native English Speakers are the World's Worst Communicators

“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong. “But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”

a lot of english-speakers who don't come from the west (and often speak english as one of their actual native languages) can modulate their accent and syntax to be understandable. monolingual westerners really have a tough time learning that skill. Then again, most marvel when minorities codeswitch, period.
posted by cendawanita at 8:04 AM on July 31, 2018 [8 favorites]


Also:

A dead tongue is not one that has no native speakers

...

posted by aramaic at 2:57 AM



You're having an eponymousterical lend, no?
posted by pompomtom at 8:27 AM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Visual Basic in th 90s had a deal where the keywords got translated into different languages and it was largely a mess.

Most hip, modern languages support Unicode in identifiers, so you can use Chinese characters or emoji or whatever to name things (although it might be dangerous to mix in a right to left script). But words like "public", "class", "function" and so on will be English still. And libraries will use English words for everything.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:38 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Oh, also per the whole Sapir-Whorf thing: I heard a story re the 80s "NO MEANS NO" campaign, which had some trouble being rendered to Gaelic, and ended up with T-shirts which could be translated to "The negative form of the verb means the negative form of the verb!"
posted by pompomtom at 8:39 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm not a linguist, but isn't Sapir-Whorf pretty well out of favor these days? Pop science gets very excited about the whole "if there isn't a name for a color, you can't see it!" thing, but it's an absurd reduction (whether something fits in that color category doesn't mean you literally can't see how it's different from another color). It's not that language can't be influential in how you express things, but it seems like English is standing in here for a whole number of cultural factors that aren't simply a matter of language (like the ease with which you express emotions, for example).
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 8:42 AM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Even before unicode variable names in programming languages was a thing, the first time I worked on code written by French-speakers it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that 'car' was short for 'character'. People mostly stick to ASCII for code that's going to be internationally shared, but use of other types of language is very likely still growing since it only recently became convenient to the extent that it is.

The variable names and other identifiers of things that can be named however you like make far more difference than the handful of keywords in almost any computer language. If I was going to learn a new langauge, it might even be easier to remember some unfamiliar foreign word than to get it straight whether it's "else if", "elseif", "elsif", or "elif" this time.
posted by sfenders at 8:50 AM on July 31, 2018


I'm not a linguist, but isn't Sapir-Whorf pretty well out of favor these days?

Are you a polyglot?

I'd love to be refuted, if I can learn something, but even as a kid learning German I found that I'd think differently when I needed to express myself in German. Just sentence-structure-wise. Try speaking in Turkish where you're changing endings of words based on context...
posted by pompomtom at 8:56 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


English is a mixture of other languages in the first place. That’s why the spelling is so fucked up. English is the delicious gumbo that will take over the world.
posted by w0mbat at 9:25 AM on July 31, 2018


I'd love to be refuted, if I can learn something, but even as a kid learning German I found that I'd think differently when I needed to express myself in German. Just sentence-structure-wise. Try speaking in Turkish where you're changing endings of words based on context...

It's not really something that can be refuted. It doesn't make a testable prediction. So why not believe it.
posted by dilaudid at 9:25 AM on July 31, 2018


I for one dislike using non-latin characters for variables and such; I think using two character sets at once makes the code less readable, not to mention the huge bother of switching keyboard layouts multiple times per line. At one time I briefly took over an orphan project where all the model classes had complete word business-domain names in Greek, and then you had monstrosities like ΔιεύθυνσηΠελάτηRepository - much swearing was heard until I found an unlucky soul to pass it on to.
posted by each day we work at 9:31 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm not a linguist, but isn't Sapir-Whorf pretty well out of favor these days?

The "strong" intepretation of Sapir-Whorf has fallen out of favor. According to this interpretation, lacking the words for something means you also lack the concepts, and the ability to perceive the thing which the word is about. Examples are often drawn from ancient and indigineous peoples, for example hunter-gatherer societies which only have two words for colors, or the Inuit and their many words for winter precipitation.

The winter precipitation example is one that is often used to prove the strong Sapir-Whorf, but one that has come under scrutiny. The idea is: native speakers of this language have a better perception of winter weather because their language has more facility for expressing it. But it turns out you can talk about winter precipitation in numerous ways in every other language (it's not like we just have "snow", nor french "neige", we have flurries and sleet and snowdrifts and blizzards and so on), and it tends to be people who have to deal with winter a lot that have a better facility for perceiving the nuances in different kinds of winter weather. Also it's probably a kind of noble-savage fallacy to say that the Inuit have 100 words for snow or whatever. They have words for winter weather and then lots of ways to modify those words (like we say: heavy snow, light snow, hardpack, slush and light powder) etc.

I don't think anybody doubts that different languages encourage different ways of thinking and framing, but what's fallen out of favor is the idea that your perspective on the world is limited by the vocabulary your language gives you access to. It turns out we're good at combining existing terms in order to form new concepts in order to get along in the world.
posted by dis_integration at 9:35 AM on July 31, 2018 [13 favorites]


I understand the concern about languages dying out but I don’t see that it’s necessarily the result of so many people speaking English.

It would be interesting to know which language is responsible for more violently enforced indigenous language death during colonization of the americas, english or spanish; I'm pretty sure it's spanish but I don't have the energy to grumpily research it today.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:39 AM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Cool, thanks! I had just written a whole comment about how much the whole "Inuit have 100 words for snow!" thing grates on me, ha. You said it much better.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:43 AM on July 31, 2018


I guess I just find it troubling that it seems as if native English speakers are okay with other languages as long as they don't have to speak or learn them. It feels like it reinforces that yes, you are welcome in native English speaking countries and you are most definitely welcome to speak your own language, but don't expect anyone to engage with you unless you are willing to learn some English.
posted by Kitteh at 9:49 AM on July 31, 2018


It does seem likely that English, Spanish and Standardized Chinese could eventually converge into some sort of global composite second language, if we live that long.

Cityspeak?
posted by the sobsister at 10:08 AM on July 31, 2018


> even as a kid learning German I found that I'd think differently when I needed to express myself in German.

It's not really something that can be refuted. It doesn't make a testable prediction.

Are you sure about that? From earlier this year—After On Episode 21: Mary Lou Jepsen | Neural Imaging and ... TELEPATHY!

She gave a TED talk in 2013 (direct .mp4 link) in which she presented clips of fuzzy video depicting what people were seeing out of their eyes, reconstructed from simultaneous MRI scans of their brains (research produced by someone else, a group at Berkeley.) Similar Google Solve For X talk from 2012.
posted by XMLicious at 10:14 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


It would be interesting to know which language is responsible for more violently enforced indigenous language death during colonization of the americas, english or spanish; I'm pretty sure it's spanish but I don't have the energy to grumpily research it today.

The Story of Spanish is a nice short read, and no we didn't particularly impose Spanish on the native population of Latin America but thanks anyway.
posted by sukeban at 10:30 AM on July 31, 2018


Counterpoint, also from the Guardian: The English language reigns now, but look at the fate of Latin. With bonus correctly attributed (for once) James Nicoll "We don’t just borrow words" quote! l
posted by happyroach at 10:38 AM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's not the fate of Latin (Latin evolved into a bunch of languages from Portuguese to Romanian and the Romance languages are doing fine). 150 years ago the language of diplomacy and the arts was French and the language of science German. Fashions change with the waxing and waning of empires, political or cultural.
posted by sukeban at 10:41 AM on July 31, 2018 [8 favorites]


It's not really something that can be refuted. It doesn't make a testable prediction.

Then it's probably very handy that no-one cares what I think.
posted by pompomtom at 10:44 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


150 years ago the language of diplomacy and the arts was French and the language of science German. Fashions change with the waxing and waning of empires, political or cultural.

something similar to this was playing in my mind when I was visiting an old church in Budapest, and trying to read the signs/info boards meant for tourists. It was only in the newer signs, that had English, that I could follow the church's history. Before that it was Russian, then German, sometimes French...
posted by cendawanita at 10:58 AM on July 31, 2018


I think we should kick it old skool and just go back to the original lingua franca.
posted by the sobsister at 10:59 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


When I was in Budapest in 2004 I had to buy train tickets to Romania from Keleti station and the ticket lady knew only Hungarian and German... also when I went to Ljubljana I think the older generation were more likely to have learned German, too.

Here in Spain the older generations would typically have learned French, people under 40-50 are the ones who would have learned some English in high school, at least up to Cambridge First Certificate level.
posted by sukeban at 11:10 AM on July 31, 2018


Before that it was Russian, then German, sometimes French

yeah, my dad was from budapest and after hungarian & english, his other main language was russian, but for my grandparent's generation, the common third language was german.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:27 AM on July 31, 2018


Even if you’ve forgotten the language you spoke as a child, it still stays with you

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
Sujatha Bhatt
posted by infini at 11:44 AM on July 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


I think we should kick it old skool and just go back to the original lingua franca.

Haunting, barely heard Bob Dylan songs?
posted by Etrigan at 11:56 AM on July 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


The Story of Spanish is a nice short read, and no we didn't particularly impose Spanish on the native population of Latin America but thanks anyway.

Hmmm. Would this be in the same way that the Roman Empire “didn't particularly impose” Latin on the Iberian peninsula? I can't help but notice that it's a person who I believe has identified herself in the past as being of latinx origin you (a Spaniard in Spain, per the “we”?) are rhetorically thanking for posing the question about colonialism-caused language death.
posted by XMLicious at 12:44 PM on July 31, 2018


The world was infinitely lucky that in 1492 Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar of a non-classical language in the world. The Catholic Church found easier to teach Nahuatl, Mayan or Quechua to evangelizing priests with this new-fangled concept of ~having the mechanics of a language described in a book~ than to first teach everyone Spanish and then the Cathechism, so at first the official languages in New Spain were indigenous. Mind you, not all languages, the principal ones. And it wasn't an ideal situation, but it could have been so much worse.

It was only between 1700 and 1800 that they reversed custom and made Spanish the only official language, but since there was no push for obligatory schooling, native populations weren't forced to learn Spanish unless, say, they needed to petition the government (that could only be done in Spanish). It was only way after Latin American nations achieved independence that the concept of mass alphabetization in Spanish took hold.

Anyway, if you know something about the history of languages, this is also the period where central states begin suppressing local languages, not just in America. This is the period when France imposes the language of Paris on Bretons and Occitans, and the Bourbons equally promoted Spanish on the Catalan-speaking regions of Spain over the local languages, so this is not exactly as tied to race as with the Enlightenment ideal of a strong central state and an unified national culture.
posted by sukeban at 1:16 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Fun fact, not only did they teach the liturgy in Nahuatl, but they also taught methods of polyphonic composition to the indigenous people. I read a great paper years ago about polyphonic choral music composed and performed by Aztecs, in Nahuatl, in the 16th and 17th centuries. The musicologist Robert Stevenson proposed studying those works to see if there were any melodic themes not found in other canons, based on the possibility that indigenous composers might have incorporated Aztec melodies that predated the arrival of the Spanish. There's a large collection of these works in Mexico City, but to my (limited) knowledge no one has yet undertaken a systematic study of them.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:31 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


* Amendment because I should have known better: Nebrija's was the first grammar of a non-classical language in Europe. Because it's not the first in the world by a long shot.
posted by sukeban at 1:39 PM on July 31, 2018


Sanskrit is considered a classical language and taught in the same vein as Latin or Greek in India's leading public schools.
posted by infini at 1:54 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


isn't Sapir-Whorf pretty well out of favor these days?

Linguists always liked it far less than columnists and sf writers. But it's made a resurgence in more limited forms. This Guy Deutscher NYT article has some great examples; don't miss the geographical orientation of certain languages.

Whorf was particularly concerned with Native American languages, and a lot of supposed refuters are, well, not very conversant in those languages. (This can be seen in the controversies over Pirahã, where critics of Dan Everett put themselves in the faintly ridiculous position of arguing about the worldview of people they don't know and a language they don't speak.)

E.g. Whorf made a lot out of the verb-orientation of e.g. Hopi, as opposed to the noun-orientation of English. There's something to be said for this; e.g. a language acquisition book I was just reading pointed out that children learning English learn far more nouns in their early years, while those learning Korean (where nouns are often left out) learn far more verbs. That doesn't "determine the way you think", but it might well contribute to it.

On the other hand, Whorf was arguably led astray by, of all things, glossing conventions. He liked making translations like "whiteness moves downward", from Apache. This is poor glossing; a better method is to provide morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, not twist the English. After all, it says very little to claim that instead of "You're welcome" the French say "It not there has step of what."
posted by zompist at 2:08 PM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


It was also between 1700 and 1800 that the Qing Dynasty's extermination of Dzungaria occurred, but I don't think we should for example count the Chinese writing system being non-phonetic and thus technically not requiring facility in a spoken Sinitic language during the eras before (or after) that period as much of an exculpatory factor regarding the death of indigenous languages.

Not to personally criticize the missionaries and scholars and other academic individuals who have worked to document and use indigenous languages over the centuries, but I would decidedly ascribe non-infinite amounts of luck to the world for the course of events.
posted by XMLicious at 2:10 PM on July 31, 2018


Universal language should be a goal of humanity. God's curse at Babel, one of his most abjectly evil acts in the bible, has started to be undone. The means by which the language has spread are not pleasant, but they cannot be undone now. I hope one day everyone is able to speak a common language, it's a sad reality of humans that it is easier for them to give a shit about those with whom they can communicate.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:53 PM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Universal language should be a goal of humanity.

I agree, especially for interpersonal communication. Sign language is often an artificial language, and should it become standardized, it would qualify as a universal language in personal settings, such as travel and work, and translation. We wouldn't need to worry about embarrassing mispronunciations, obscure dialects, accents, or any cultural hegemony. Background noise would be irrelevant, and it's discreet. You can meet someone across a crowded room without anyone's knowledge.
posted by Brian B. at 4:27 PM on July 31, 2018


Sign language is often an artificial language, and should it become standardized, it would qualify as a universal language in personal settings, such as travel and work, and translation. We wouldn't need to worry about embarrassing mispronunciations, obscure dialects, accents, or any cultural hegemony.

Sign languages work like all other languages; take a look into Bedouin Sign Language, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, and probably the most well-studied Nicaraguan Sign Language for how they develop in communities with large numbers of Deaf people.

There are many different types of sign languages, and sign languages have accents and dialects. British Sign Language is different from American Sign Language (which is actually more closely related to French Sign Language), and there is, for example, Black American Sign Language (which developed thanks to segregation in the US).
posted by damayanti at 4:39 PM on July 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


We wouldn't need to worry about embarrassing mispronunciations

If anything, I'd expect sign language mispronunciations to be potentially even more embarrassing.
posted by sfenders at 5:03 PM on July 31, 2018


I live in Holland where the English proficiency rate is somewhere around 90%. I'm learning Dutch.

The most common question I get is "why?"
posted by Seeba at 5:03 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I feel like it can be a challenge to learn a second language when your native one is the lingua franca. I've forgotten pretty much all the French I've learned because I've literally never had to use it. I took three years of Japanese in high school, and that is almost completely gone.

Here in California I would get some use out of Spanish, but even then it's been a while since I've been in a situation where someone couldn't communicate with me in English. I might do it anyway, because I think it's a beautiful language, but other the non-native Spanish speakers I know have had a hard time keeping their proficiency up due to lack of use.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 5:11 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


It depends some on what you're trying to do, as well.

In Japan, I could get around / buy things / etc with just English (mostly). But I couldn't have an actual conversation in English with the vast majority of people (maybe 5-10% have enough English ability to follow this thread, for example).

For traveling and such, English is certainly insanely useful. And in some countries the proficiency as a second language is huge (like Seeba's example --- I feel like everyone I met in the Netherlands spoke amazing English).

But a lot of countries where it is a second language few people are fluent in it. Japan is certainly in this latter group (partially due to poor choices in how they teach English --- students spend a lot of time on study, but don't generally attain conversational ability unless it is a hobby for them). There is also some overlap here with how different the language is --- it was much easier for me as a native English speaker to learn German than Japanese, and the reverse seems to be true as well.

Even inside the US there is some truth to this --- some immigrants become fluent in English, but others never do - they can usually speak enough to do basic things, but cannot hold a real conversation (not just in the US -- I know Americans who emigrated that have the same situation in their new countries).

My wife, who spoke some English when we met and speaks much better English now (although not quite fluent) has pretty mixed feelings on all this. On the one hand, now that her English is better she can see how much easier that makes travel, on the other hand she's still a little jealous that Americans/British/etc basically get this for free and that it means we are less likely to even try to learn other languages (especially Americans), since we don't "need" it in the same way.
posted by thefoxgod at 5:24 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Not just global, coyo. Fodagut xalte ere gova us beltalowda.
SUSHI MASTER:
He say you blade runner.

DECKARD:
Tell him I’m eating.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:40 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I hope one day everyone is able to speak a common language, it's a sad reality of humans that it is easier for them to give a shit about those with whom they can communicate.

You haven't been on Twitter, Reddit or X-Box Online, haven'[t you. Being able to speak the language makes very little difference in people's lack of empathy. In fact, a common language just gives them another alley to hurt people.

But, you will get your universal language, and it will be binary. All the careful and poetic arrangements of lexicon and grammar to convey shades of meaning will be swept away by strings of ones and zeroes carrying the message "R U MAD BRO?"
posted by happyroach at 8:18 PM on July 31, 2018


Universal language should be a goal of humanity.

That means we'd be forcing the Hopi or the Basque to speak English or Esperanto or something. It'd kind of sad when children don't understand what their grandparents are saying.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:39 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


That means we'd be forcing the Hopi or the Basque to speak English or Esperanto or something.

How about USians and everyone else being forced to learn Hopi?
posted by Kwadeng at 11:15 PM on July 31, 2018


under my totalitarian dictatorship every school district in the US regardless of public, private, charter, or religious affiliation, will be required by law to have every student take 12 years of an indigenous american language right alongside english.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:20 PM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Mostly, I'm not worried about English and anglicisms here, but the swearing gets to me. Specially Danes and Dutch people use a lot of English swearwords, and it's clear that they have no idea how offensive those words are. Apart from that, language evolves, that's how it works. At the end of the article, he writes a bit about how some people grow up using several languages, but he makes it exotic and unusual. I think he's wrong about that, in most of the world outside the actual English-speaking nations, people speak, or at least understand several languages from early childhood. And I'd include dialects in that. The dialect spoken here in the region I'm in now is more different from formal Danish than formal Swedish is, (and it has geographical orientation, yeah!). (Country-) kids here will speak dialect at home, formal Danish in school, and learn English, German and Scandinavian languages from TV and from encounters with tourists/visitors as well as at school where all kids have two foreign languages + Scandinavian literature as mandatory subjects.
Just a few days ago I saw a German father and son in a store, trying to buy a Danish TV box to bring back to Germany because the boy loved Danish childrens' TV so much he had taught himself Danish.
posted by mumimor at 3:06 AM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


One of the things I never see in discussions like this is the problem of English as a class marker. I think one of the huge problems with English becoming so wide-spread and, therefore, necessary for business, science, and higher education, is that it is very difficult to learn English with anything approaching an international business-level of fluency in just your basic public school language classes. If I meet a Spaniard with a very good level of English, it's almost always because they had private classes, attended academies, and/or studied abroad. Someone, either they or their parents, has been investing money in their English for years. Kids who start out with the advantage of private instruction reap the benefits later, because sooooo many jobs nowadays require English fluency. If you don't speak English you are effectively cut out of whole sectors of higher-paying jobs.

NB: I'm speaking from my experience in one European country. Perhaps the level of language instruction in other countries or continents is far better than what we have here. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised.)
posted by lollymccatburglar at 5:50 AM on August 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


I feel like...you Americans and Brits seem to think the English language belongs to you. Like, it is something we borrow from you or you impose on us.

And as a native German speaker of color, let me tell you, no way. English belongs to us in Germany, in Italy, in Malaysia, in Zimbabwe. It belongs to us all, it is our lingua franca. It is a joyous, vibrant extension of our own languages. We play with it every day, we let our choice of English rather than our local words add additional layers of meaning to the things we say. We add irony, context. When we use English words they carry with them all the other instances in which these words was previously used. We use English words to imply global memes, global injustices, global phenomena. We comment on our international world with an internationallanguage.

English never poisoned our regional dialects (it was German that did that! Yet, we require a German language. C‘est la vie.) English is our plaything, our delightfully promiscuous, endlessly adaptable, creative, evocative tool. We bastardize all the words. We call a suit a „Smoking“ and a cellphone a „Handy“. We can do that! Handys (we decided that plurals don‘t require ies!) are here to stay. Who’s going to call that wrong? The „well, actually“ crowd? who cares?


It‘s our open source language, it belongs to us as much as it belongs to you.

English gave us a lot. It gave us the concept that complex scientific issues can be written in a way that every person can understand. It gave us a delight for puns.

Sure, a lot of us complain about the overuse of English words when German ones would do. Do you know what we call this phenomenon when we do? We call it „Neudeutsch“. We sneer the word (sometimes). New German.

Don‘t get me wrong, I love the German language. And English is a part of it.
posted by Omnomnom at 6:13 AM on August 1, 2018 [20 favorites]


Yes, as I mentioned earlier, when I was a teen at the end of high school you should have achieved Cambridge First Certificate level of English proficiency. There are free or almost free options for furthering language knowledge like the Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas or courses sponsored by the British Council, but you do have to put an effort beyond the required curriculum.

There's been lately a push for bilingual teaching, so nowadays my nephews are learning Maths or Sciences in English, not just attending English class, and we should see more young people fluent in English in a few years' time.
posted by sukeban at 6:19 AM on August 1, 2018


We call a suit a „Smoking“ and a cellphone a „Handy“

a specific variant of Malaysian English (the Malay community one) also calls a mobile something similar. We call it a 'handset'.

i love talking and thinking about creole and variant Englishes, and it's probably the reason why I enjoy the worldbuilding of The Expanse so much. tbh, the standard English in the show is still too colloquially N. American, needs more International Standard English (whatever that means). ;)

One of the things I never see in discussions like this is the problem of English as a class marker.

This is also especially true for British commonwealth ex-colonies as well (for obvs #colonialism reasons), even though English is as much ours as the other local languages. But kinda like how local Singaporeans pushed back at government campaigns to 'speak English better', our English is just as valid within our context. I totally understand the sentiment in TFA, but at the same time, I'm gonna continue reclaiming the language. I mean, international English could probably stand borrowing grammar from the more modular Austronesian languages or Chinese languages. Certainly would make my relationship with tenses and plurals a lot more amicable.
posted by cendawanita at 8:07 AM on August 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


English certainly unlocks a lot of academic, cultural and professional possibilities. As a shared language it enables communication and it is the language of MeFi to boot. On the other hand, I was watching a French film yesterday and it was delightful also having a space away from English. Maybe it's a Greek poem or a Spanish novel or a Portuguese comedy or what have you. It's kinda like the internet: at first blush you're thrilled at all the opportunities and then you find a book that's not online (or has been crowded out) and you can also perceive the limitations.
posted by ersatz at 1:14 AM on August 5, 2018


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