The Language Revolution (4 page)

All these users have a share in the future of English. Language is an immensely democratizing institution. To have learned a language is immediately to have rights in it. You may add to it, modify it, play with it, create in it, ignore bits of it, as you will. And it is just as likely that the future course of English is going to be influenced by those who speak it as a second or foreign language as by those who speak it as a mother-tongue. Fashions count, in language, as anywhere else; and fashions are a function of numbers. It is perfectly possible for a linguistic fashion to be started by a group of second-language or foreign-language learners, or by those who speak a nonstandard variety, which then catches on among mother-tongue speakers. Rapping is a recent case in point. And as numbers grow, and second/foreign-language speakers gain in national and international prestige, usages which were previously criticized as ‘foreign' – such as
three person, he be running, many informations –
can become part of the standard educated speech of a locality, and eventually appear in writing. An example is
Welcome in Egypt,
which has come to be widely used in that country, and now appears in English textbooks there. The biggest thing that native speakers of English are going to have to get used to, in the twenty-first century, is that they are no longer in charge of language trends. The English language as spoken in Britain is now a minority dialect of World
English – amounting to some 4 per cent of the global English-speaking population. Even speakers of English in the USA only amount to some 15 per cent of the world total. In India, there are probably now more speakers of English than in the whole of Britain and the USA combined.

What happens when large numbers of people adopt English in a country? They develop an English of their own. There are now many new varieties of spoken English developing around the world, in such countries as India, Singapore and Ghana. They have been called ‘New Englishes'. Why have they arisen? Because of the need to express national identity. Imagine the situation in one of the newly independent nations of the 1950s and 1960s. With newfound independence comes an urge to manifest identity in the eyes of the world. And one of the most important ways of manifesting this identity is through the medium of the language. So, which language will you use? Many of the new countries, such as Ghana and Nigeria, found that they had no alternative but to continue using English – the alternative was to make an impossible choice between the many competing local ethnic languages – over 400, in the case of Nigeria. However, we can also appreciate the widely held feeling that to continue with English would be an unacceptable link with the colonial past. So how could this dilemma be resolved? The solution was for a country to continue with English, but to shape the language to meet its own ends – in particular, by adding local vocabulary, focusing on local cultural variations, and developing new forms of pronunciation. It is a largely unconscious process, of course, but promoted by local initiatives, such as regional dictionary surveys. It is not difficult to quickly accumulate several thousand local words, in countries which have a wide range of local fauna and flora, diverse ethnic customs and regular daily contacts with
different languages. The emerging literatures of the Commonwealth countries – the novels from West Africa, India or South-east Asia, the poetry from the countries of the Caribbean – illustrate how quickly new identities can emerge. The term ‘New Englishes' reflects these identities.

When a language spreads, it changes. The simple fact that parts of the world differ from each other so much physically and culturally means that speakers have innumerable opportunities to adapt the language to meet their communicative needs and to achieve fresh identities. The bulk of the adaptation will be in vocabulary – not just new words, but new meanings of words, and new idiomatic phrases – as this is the area which most closely reflects living conditions and ways of thinking. There is a country's biogeographical uniqueness, which will generate potentially large numbers of words for animals, fish, birds, plants, rocks, and so on – and all the issues to do with land management and interpretation. There will be words for foodstuffs, drinks, medicines, drugs and the practices associated with eating, health-care, disease and death. The country's mythology and religion, and practices in astronomy and astrology, will bring forth new names for personalities, beliefs and rituals. Oral and perhaps also written literature will give rise to distinctive names in sagas, poems, oratory and folktales. There will be a body of local laws and customs, with their own terminology. The culture will have its own technology which will have its technical terms – such as for vehicles, house-building, weapons, clothing, ornaments and musical instruments. The world of leisure and the arts will have a linguistic dimension – names of dances, musical styles, games, sports – as will distinctiveness in body appearance – such as hair styles, tattoos, decoration. Virtually any aspect of social structure can generate complex naming systems – local government, family relationships, clubs and societies, and so on.

So, when a community adopts a new language, and starts to use it in relation to all areas of life, there is inevitably going to be a great deal of lexical adaptation. It only takes a year or so for the process to begin. The first permanent English settlement in North America was in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; and loan words from Native American languages were introduced into contemporary writing virtually immediately. Captain John Smith, writing in 1608, describes a
racoon; totem
is found in 1609;
caribou
and
opossum
are mentioned in 1610. Here is a recent example from an edition of the South African
Sunday Times
in the 1990s: ‘Diplomatic indabas only rarely produce neatly wrapped solutions to problems.'
Indaba,
from Nguni, was originally a tribal conference, but has now been extended to mean any conference between political groups. These are examples of words being borrowed from local indigenous languages. In addition, some words will change their meaning, as they come to be applied to new settings and take on different senses. This has often happened in the language's history: for example, in the Anglo-Saxon period Christian missionaries took over pagan words (such as
heaven, hell, God
and
Easter)
and gave them new meanings. Today we see it in the way a biological species in the new country similar in appearance to one found in the old will often keep the old name, even though it is not the same entity –
pheasant
in South Africa is usually found for certain species of francolin. Every area of society is affected.
Robot
is the South African term for traffic-light.

How many words will grow in these ways? It does not take long before word-lists and dictionaries contain several thousand entries. There were over 3,000 items recorded in the first edition of
A Dictionary of South African English
(1978).
The Concise Australian National Dictionary
(1989) has 10,000 items in it. There are over 15,000 entries in the
Dictionary of Jamaican English
(1967).
⁶
English speakers have always adopted an inclusive attitude towards loan words. English is a vacuum-cleaner of a language, readily sucking in words from whichever other languages it meets – well over 350 of them in the history of British English. Because of this, although English is historically a Germanic language, the bulk of its vocabulary is not – it is largely Classical and Romance in origin, with Greek, Latin and French loans especially important. And its diversified lexical character is especially increasing in parts of the world where there are many contact languages. In Nigeria, where over 400 source languages are available, the eventual lexical distinctiveness of Nigerian English is bound to be considerable.

The totals are small compared with the size of English vocabulary as a whole, which is well over a million words; but the effect of even fairly small numbers of localized words can be great. The new words are likely to be frequently used within the local community, precisely because they relate to distinctive notions there. Also, these words tend not to occur in isolation: if a conversation is about, say, local politics, then several political terms are likely to come together, making it impenetrable to outsiders. ‘Blairite MP in New Labour Sleaze Trap, say Tories' might be a British newspaper example. Six words with British political meanings or overtones are found in quick succession, and the sentence will not be immediately interpretable to anyone unfamiliar with the world of British political discourse. Exactly the same kind of piling up of alien expressions can be found in areas where New Englishes are emerging. In this example from the South African
Sunday Times,
all the local words are Afrikaans in origin: ‘It is interesting to recall that some verkrampte Nationalists, who pose now as super Afrikaners, were once bittereinder bloedsappe' [
verkramp,
bigoted;
bittereinder,
die-hard;
bloedsappe,
staunch member of
the United Party, formerly the South African Party, or SAP].

It is easy to see how things might develop further. It wasn't just an Afrikaans noun which was distinctive in this last example; it was a noun phrase – a combination of adjective and noun. So, if a phrase, why not something bigger than a phrase? Add a verb on, perhaps, or make it a whole clause – in much the same way as in English we might borrow a whole sentence from French and say
Je ne sais quoi
or
c'est la vie.
Parts of an originally English sentence can easily come to contain large chunks of borrowed language. And in many parts of the world, where English is a second or foreign language, it is precisely this process which has been used with unprecedented frequency. People using English, even at a fairly advanced level, become stuck for a word, phrase or sentence; or, although using English as a lingua franca, find that a particular utterance in their mother-tongue suits better what they want to say. If they are talking to someone from their own language background, there is no problem in switching into the other language to solve the communication problem. A dialogue may move out of English, then back in again, several times in quick succession. The same situation obtains the other way round, too: people begin in their mother-tongue, then switch into English when they find their first language does not allow them to say what they want. This often happens when they get onto a subject-matter which they have learned only in English, such as computing – or even having a baby. I know a French-speaking mother who had a baby while living in Britain for a year. Back in France, she found herself switching into English every time she wanted to talk about the experience – much to the confusion of her French friends, whose baby-bearing experience had been resolutely francophone.

When people rely simultaneously on two or more languages to communicate with each other, the phenomenon is called
code-switching.
We can hear it happening now all over the world, between all sorts of languages, and it is on the increase. Because English is so widespread, it is especially noticeable there, in writing as well as in speech. In
The English Languages,
Tom McArthur gives an example of a bilingual leaflet issued by the HongkongBank in 1994 for Filipino workers. The Tagalog section contains a great deal of English mixed in. For example:

This kind of language is often described using a compound name – in this case, Taglish (for Tagalog-English). We also have Franglais, Tex-Mex (for the Mexican Spanish used in Texas), Japlish, Spanglish, Chinglish, Denglish (Deutsch English), Wenglish (Welsh English), and many more. Traditionally, these names were used as scornful appellations. People would sneer at Tex-Mex, and say it was neither one language nor the other. It was ‘gutter-speak', by people who had not learned to talk properly, or ‘lazyspeak', by people who were letting themselves be too much influenced by English. But in the new century, we are going to have to rethink. We can hardly call a language like Taglish gutter-speak when it is being used in writing by a major banking corporation! Linguists have spent a lot of time analysing these ‘mixed' languages, and found that they are full of complexity and subtlety of expression – as we would expect if people have the resources of two languages to draw upon.

Mixed languages are on the increase as we travel the English-speaking world; and it is important to realize the extent to which this is happening. They will probably be the main linguistic trend of the twenty-first century. Code-switching is already a normal feature of communication in the speech of millions who have learned English as a second or foreign language. I live in a Welsh-speaking part of Wales, and I hear code-switching between Welsh and English around me all the time. Indeed, globally, there are probably now more people who use English with some degree of code-switching than people who do not. And if these speakers are in the majority, or at least represented by significant numbers – as in the case of India – our traditional view of the language has to change. It is quite wrong to think of the ‘future of World English' as if it is simply going to be a more widely used version of British English, or of American English. These varieties will stay, of course, but they will be supplemented by other varieties which, although perhaps originating in Britain or the USA, will display increasing differences from them.

The evidence of linguistic diversification – new Englishes, with increased code-mixing – has been around a long time, but the extent of its presence has only recently come to be appreciated. It is not something we usually see in print – except insofar as a novelist captures it in a conversation, or it turns up in informal writing in a newspaper. But we readily encounter it when we travel to the countries concerned – usually in the form of a breakdown of comprehension. We speak to somebody in English, and they reply – but we cannot understand what they are saying, because their English is so different. And we ain't seen nothin' yet. All over the world, children are being born to parents with different first-language backgrounds who speak English as a lingua franca. Their English often contains a great deal of code-mixing or nonstandard usage.
If these parents choose to speak to their children in this English, as often happens, we now have the prospect of code-mixed and nonstandard English being learned as a mother-tongue – and by millions of the world's future citizens. The distinction between English as a first language and English as a foreign language ceases to be significant in such cases.