Dave Farber
2018-07-28 08:09:36 UTC
Date: July 28, 2018 at 4:12:29 PM GMT+9
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
[Note: This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis. DLH]
Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting?
By Jacob Mikanowski
Jul 27 2018
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance>
On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: âYour staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English ⊠This is America.â A video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a âfiestaâ protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.
As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. Itâs a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Rooseveltâs 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that âwe have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouseâ.
As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.
Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: 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 parentâs dream and a studentâs 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.
One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English â he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes â published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include âlast-minuteâ, âfitnessâ, âgroup sexâ, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.
In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own â to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: âDoes anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academyâs diktat, are going to trade out âsextingâ for texto pornographique?â) Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.
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 â whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German â 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.
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
[Note: This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis. DLH]
Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting?
By Jacob Mikanowski
Jul 27 2018
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance>
On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: âYour staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English ⊠This is America.â A video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a âfiestaâ protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.
As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. Itâs a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Rooseveltâs 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that âwe have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouseâ.
As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.
Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: 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 parentâs dream and a studentâs 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.
One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English â he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes â published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include âlast-minuteâ, âfitnessâ, âgroup sexâ, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.
In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own â to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: âDoes anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academyâs diktat, are going to trade out âsextingâ for texto pornographique?â) Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.
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 â whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German â 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.
[snip]
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