Native speakers of English have the linguistic equivalent of
the financial advantage held by citizens of a nation with an international
reserve currency (dollar, euro, pound, yen, Swiss franc and precious few others).
Exchanges, verbal and commercial, are just easier for them when away from home.
By the accidents of history, English has become the de facto global language. Chinese has more native speakers, but only
modest global reach; Mandarin won’t get you far in Amsterdam
or Dar es Salaam .
Spanish also has more native speakers, but it is of limited use in Zurich , Lagos , or Singapore .
People who speak English as a first language number between 375
million and 400 million, but the people who speak it as second language are the
folks who give English its international punch. When you combine native and
non-native speakers, they total well over a billion, if you are generous with
proficiency standards, and they are spread around the world.
That’s not to say native speakers of English won’t be
baffled sometimes by versions of English they encounter elsewhere. As an
example, Bill Bryson in his book The
Mother Tongue quotes his travel brochure from Urbino, Italy: “The integrity
and thus the vitality of Urbino is no chance, but a conservation due the
factors constituted in all probability by the approximate framework of the
unity of the country, the difficulty od communications, the very concentric
pattern of hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly developed areas, the
force of the original design proposed in its construction, with the means at the
disposal of the new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city even.” We can sort-of see what the author of that
sentence was getting at, but that is surely more to our credit than to his. In
fairness, though, it is more competent than any stab of mine at Italian likely would
be.
English infiltrates other languages, often to the annoyance
of language purists. So (to cherry pick just a few) Germans have Teenagers,
Romanians board a trolleybus, and French wear jeans. The Japanese prefer to
alter English borrowings so they roll off the tongue more like native words,
e.g. erebata (elevator), chiizu (cheese), nekutai (necktie), and sarada
(salad). If it’s any comfort to those purists, English at least returns the
favor by absorbing foreign vocabulary easily, such as tycoon and honcho from
Japanese,bamboo from Dutch (actually from a Dutch mispronunciation of
a Malay word), and yogurt from Turkish, to take a few random examples.
The size of the English vocabulary (excluding most chemical
names and scientific designations, which would drive up the figure into
millions) is often guesstimated at about 600,000, a number that grows by about
25,000 per decade. In truth, nobody really knows because there is no official
body that decides what is and isn’t English. There is no equivalent to L'Académie française which holds the
reins on French. The closest to a standard dictionary is the OED (Oxford
English Dictionary), and the editors merely try to keep up with current
vocabulary and usage rather than dictate what it should be.
The OED updates
four times per year. This year’s December update added 500 words and modified
1000 definitions of existing entries. The list of new entries is remarkably
tame this time, and is mercifully light (or should I say “lite,” which is in
the OED) on the texting abbreviations
of the sort added last year. A few samples:
Bureaucratese – The dense language of officialdom. (I’m
surprised this wasn’t included years ago.)
Vacay – vacation. (Does this phonic curtailment irk you as
much as me?)
Virtuecrat – Someone,
especially in authority, who preaches his or her own morals as a cultural
imperative. (The person described is irksome, but I like the word.)
Badassery – The behavior, attitude, or actions of a badass (What
else?)
Bosonic – Of or regarding bosons. (Though a particle physics
term, this might catch on outside the lab if we use it slangily. Since forces
are carried by bosons, I see some real possibilities for this, as in, “What you're saying is like totally bosonic, Dude!”)
Emoji – icons used in texting. (Borrowed from Japanese, the
word is not etymologically related to “emoticon” but probably was picked up by
English-speakers because it looks as though it is.)
Cramdown – a court ordered settlement, bankruptcy resolution,
or reorganization, as in “cram down their throats.” (The OED doesn’t mention divorce settlements, but I suppose they would
qualify.)
Sillytonian – a silly person (n.) or in the manner of a silly
person (adj.). Though new to the OED,
sillytonian is not a new word: it was popular in the 18th century. (Even
a cursory glance around indicates that this word is ripe for revival.)
Are native English speakers so famously monoglot because
they need to keep up with their own language? I doubt it, because most of us don’t keep up with
it. Laziness is a better explanation. We can get away with being functionally
monolingual, so most of us are – if indeed we are even that. According to the
Harvard School of Public Health, “The average
reading level is at the 8th- to 9th-grade level” in the US and
“one out of five read at the 5th-grade level and below.” These
numbers haven’t budged in nearly two decades, and, despite large real increases
in school budgets since the ‘70s, actually are worse than four decades ago. Maybe
we need to outsource English.
Help may be on the way, though, thanks to teens’ passion for
texting. According to a study conducted by City University in London, texting
improves “phonological awareness and reading skill in children.” But then a
University of Winnipeg study shows that teens who text 100 times or more per
day (a pretty average number, strange as that sounds to older generations) are
more likely to be shallow and unethical. Referencing Nicolas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to
Our Brains) who hypothesized that heavy social media use is associated with
cognitive and ethical superficiality, Dr Paul Trapnell of the University of
Winnipeg said “The values and traits most closely associated with texting
frequency are surprisingly consistent with Carr’s conjecture that new
information and social media technologies may be displacing and discouraging
reflective thought.” Damn, it’s always something.
Marianne Faithfull Broken English
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