The English is Coming!

How One Language is Sweeping the World

Leslie Dunton-Downer

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439176726
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

English has fast become the number one language for everything from business and science, diplomacy and education, entertainment and environmentalism to socializing and beyond—virtually any human activity unfolding on a global scale. Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English now outnumber natives three to one; and in China alone, more people use English than in the United States—a remarkable feat for a language that got its start as a mongrel tongue on an island fifteen hundred years ago.Through the fascinating stories of thirty English words used and understood in nearly all corners of the globe, The English Is Coming! takes readers on an eye-opening journey across culture and commerce, war and peace, and time and space. These mini-histories shed new light on everyday words: the strange turns of fate by which their meanings evolved and their new roles as the building blocks of the first language ever to forge a global community. Exploring such familiar terms as shampoo (from a Hindi word for scalp and body hygiene long practiced in India); robot (coined by Czech painter Josef Capek for his brother Karel's 1921 play about man-made creatures); credit (rooted in a prehistoric phrase of sacred significance: "to put heart into"); and dozens of others, Dunton-Downer reveals with clarity and humor how these linguistic artifacts embody the resilience, appeal, adoptability, and wild inclusiveness that English, through a series of historical accidents, gained on its road to worldwide reach. These words explain not only how English has managed to link our distant and often disparate pasts but also how it is propelling humankind to a future that we can, for the first time, talk about and shape in a language that now belongs to all of us: Global English. Perfect for culture buffs, armchair travelers, and language lovers alike, The English Is Coming! is sure to inspire truly global conversations for decades to come.

1

GLOBAL ENGLISH

Hello, spoken worldwide into telephones, encapsulates extraordinary shifts that English has undergone on its path from a quasi-tribal, island language to our first and so far only planetary one. Attached as it first was to made-in-America technology, hello also shows the major role the USA has played in the globalization of English. Looking at core words of Global English, we notice that many point to innovations and concepts that arose in America, and to that country’s impact on global culture. But can we really say that English was made into a global language by any one culture or nation?

If we step back into the pretelephone era, we see that English was already long on the move over significant swaths of the globe. Courtesy of exploration, migration, trade, war, missionary work, and the rapid expansion of the British Empire, English was, well before Alexander Bell’s birth in 1847, at home on all six inhabited continents and in the British Isles. The United States, following independence from Britain, likewise did a great deal to disseminate English. In bringing the language to extensive territories, these two military, cultural, and commercial powers installed it as well in small but strategic places, such as islands in major bodies of water and in the two canal zones, Suez and Panama, where English became an idiom of truncated and time-saving passage between oceans. Even where other powerful languages dominated, English has, since around 1600, usually managed to install a forward base in the vicinity.

Britain’s maritime reach having established English as the lingua franca of the high seas, the advent of aviation, pioneered in America, lifted the language into the sky. Today English is at least one official language of more than fifty nations; of international air traffic; of major bodies like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization; not to mention of private companies, institutions of higher learning, research laboratories, nonprofit outfits, nongovernmental organizations, media empires, and other entities based around the world and populated by speakers for whom English is not a native tongue.

While this staggering internationalization of English emerged from British developments, true globalization of the language has been overwhelmingly America’s work. The process weaves through the central domains of global life that have been introduced or changed by British and American cultures. The first major English-speaking spheres were trade and militarized colonial expansion, but the impetus has been increasingly commercial, and increasingly sparked by made-in-the-USA technology. We can see evidence of these realms of activity at work in clusters of words, largely exported to the world from America, that form today’s most-used Global English vocabulary.

One such sphere is entertainment. In the late nineteenth century, while telephones were propagating hello, film began to mean a technology that was, almost overnight, able to advance a secluded district of California into the position of global capital of mass leisure. No place would do more than Hollywood to diffuse the glossy pop-culture prestige of spoken and sung English, along with its terms and commodities, including the media-fueling star and, eventually, the compact disc, cassette, and a plethora of video games.

But Hollywood hardly had a monopoly on the molding of English over the first half of the twentieth century. America’s military and diplomatic sway gained surprising linguistic ground at the signing, in 1919, of the Treaty of Versailles. Until the First World War, French had been the language of diplomacy, and it was irksome to French observers that America’s belated arrival in the conflict gave English carte blanche for those historic negotiations, even as they unfolded on French soil.¹ English then became the new French, and diplomats were quick to set English on a course that now has speakers of the global language likely to bypass détente and rapprochement for phrases like common ground or words like partnership and cooperation. Or even some of the businesslike terms that pepper American diplomatic language, such as accountability and transparency.

Just when the French were coming to terms with diplomatic English, more Global English was being engineered in America thanks to the modernizing avenue of mass production. Following World War I, American car manufacturers were making Detroit a pivotal city on the emerging map of Global English. The era of mass-produced cars launched parking and STOP, among other devices of vehicular English that would eventually be embraced by automobilists virtually everywhere.

Around the same time, on a New York stage, audiences adjusting to advancing mechanization first encountered the word robot. And while America’s factories churned out an ever-growing array of goods, the rising craze for productivity and efficiency also enveloped American educators in the form of standardized tests, including the SAT. By the end of the twentieth century, those three letters would annually terrify not only new crops of U.S. high school students, but scores of thousands of nonnative users of English taking the examination in hundreds of countries and territories, all hoping to pursue higher education in the heartland of Global English.

With World War II, the American stamp on Global English was even more pronounced. U.S. troops—deployed more widely than had been those of the British Empire—introduced such all-American delicacies as chewing gum and Coca-Cola, and Yankee notions of fun and glamour. Postwar manufacturing subsequently produced abundant supplies of Global English items like the refrigerator and television and, in the credit card, a convenient, sometimes too-convenient, means of acquiring them. On a yet darker note, war technology globalized such made-in-America phrases as atom bomb, even as the country’s military activities inspired words and things seemingly far removed from particle physics and weapons of mass destruction, like the miniskirt and the bikini.

In the post–Baby Boom decade, and on America’s domestic front, the civil rights movement and Vietnam era shaped fresh batches of words for which there were no true conceptual equivalents in other languages. From the United States, black gradually gained global status as a term of race identity. Gay was likewise made a signifier of identity. Jazz had journeyed across the globe during World War I. But the second half of the century gave planet-wide traction to rock, disco, rap, and hip-hop in the hugely influential realm of American pop music, which diffused catchy melodies, irresistible rhythms, and an endless supply of singable lyrics in English. More generally, America’s urban street culture, notably black and Latino, offered the world readily recognized ways to be cool, a major Global English culture term. Cool became the world’s new chic, but with broader socioeconomic range than the loanword from fashionable France.

Far and wide, up-to-date individuals of the late twentieth century tapped into an unmistakable energy, at once edgy and perpetually youthful, that came packaged with an American look—another big Global English word. It was often fused with sportswear, from baseball caps to basketball shoes (called les baskets in chic French). But no clothed part of the body was to be deprived of making its American statement. Among the most popular items were jeans, jerseys, and T-shirts, preferably bearing plenty of words and phrases in, or at least appearing to be in—lots of them would be “linguistically incorrect”—the world’s lingua franca of hipness: English. For those who had no taste for casual clothing, global elixirs of the American lifestyle were to be found in jogging, fitness, and the putatively rejuvenating face-lift.

Cold War America generated many terms the world could hardly ignore, such as those taken from the space race pitting the U.S. against the USSR. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, an astronaut from Russia or Japan would be as likely as one from the United States to board the International Space Station—where extraplanetary work still goes on, in English. And the attention-grabbing word news, from a prehistoric root meaning simply “now,” found its Global English stride in more terrestrial circumstances. Against awesome desert backdrops, viewers beheld the first multilateral conflict to be televised globally and in real time: the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91. The American entity CNN (Cable News Network) sped the diffusion of news as shorthand for “developments of worldwide impact.” In some languages, news would come to refer to timely reports of the local variety as well, even as the very idea of “local” grew increasingly thorny in the global era.

Yet the farthest-reaching, fastest-moving, and most revolutionary American contributions to Global English have been in communication technology. This field has been central to the creation of the global networks pressing English into wide use for new kinds of exchanges. Computer engineers in the United States have made the internet accessible to billions of users worldwide, and have lured Earth’s inhabitants into their first truly global conversations. Email, blog, site and website, cookies, spam, chat rooms, and network are not merely some of the many new words and phrases now familiar to a sizable portion of the Earth’s human population; like hello, they are also verbal extensions of game-changing tools of communication, tools transforming how English is used and how the world is experienced. Indeed, these tools are changing the way our planet, as a whole and rapidly integrating object, operates. The creation and adoption of Global English are part of the larger, inexorably world-shrinking process. Is that a good thing? Debate about globalization and language will no doubt go on for a long time. This book hardly aims to end discussions, but does hope to offer reasons to participate in them or reflect on them anew.

Global English. The very phrase is a curious twofer. For one, it refers to the latest moment in English’s evolution—the active phase that we see unfolding in our present world, one wherein a modern form of the language is turning into a global one. From its emergence nearly fifteen hundred years ago, English has, by chance roughly every five centuries, weathered a period of notable turbulence and change. At the same time, the phrase Global English captures the unprecedented and recent demonstration that a single language can indeed attain worldwide reach. English is the first language ever to grow and adapt into a global, planet-serving variant. Will there eventually be Global French, Global Chinese, and other global languages joining Global English? Or does the very nature of a global language suggest that one will serve its speakers, and without competition? These are questions whose answers depend greatly on how English-speakers—native and adoptive—put the language to use as it undergoes its present transformation.

Not long ago, matters spanning countries and regions, let alone continents and oceans, seemed few and far between, remote from or even irrelevant to most daily routines. But in the current age, myriad aspects of an individual’s life are tied to events and ideas that encompass our entire planet. Some of these spheres are in effect expanded, global versions of preexisting ones. The Olympics are an example. Since the games of antiquity were revived in Athens in the late nineteenth century, they have featured competitors from around the world. Globalization has facilitated worldwide coverage of these athletic contests, and allowed devotees to follow the events and competitors, even to the point of interacting in high global fashion with fellow fans. An official language of the Olympic Committee, English is also the preferred language of tweeting, blogging, and chatting enthusiasts of the games. In these and other ways, the Olympics have been “globalized.”

Yet many spheres of life haven’t merely been globalized; rather, they’re global by nature. Awareness itself is one such sphere. For a person with a global worldview, ideas and actions in one location can be integral to those in another, no matter how far away. Many of the concerns that interconnect us have to do with recent shared challenges we face, matters that are decidedly specific to the global era. Some we’re already aware of include global ecology and environment, climate, agriculture, health, immigration, energy, security, trade, communications, finance, and economic policy. News from the other side of the world, of a stock market’s surge, or a virus’s emergence, grips us personally and nationally in a way that would have been unimaginable just decades ago. A striking fact is that human beings aren’t in a position to make much of such news if they aren’t equipped with a language in which to discuss and act upon it. Today, participation in the global community calls for command of at least some English. Those who have no English risk being isolated from global life, at best only indirectly informed and heard, and hence uncounted as well.

How does Global English work in practice for someone who’s not a native speaker? Let’s picture—and lend an ear to—Siamak, who lives in one of the world’s remotest regions: the upper reaches of Bartang Valley, high in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. He talks to his family and neighbors in Rushani, an unwritten language descended from an ancient form of Iranian. On Fridays, joining other Shia Muslims for prayers in a neighbor’s home, he has occasion to hear and use expressions in Arabic, and to sing sacred songs in Classical Persian. He has no electricity in his own house, but when he or a neighbor can afford batteries, he listens to radio broadcasts in Tajik, his country’s national language. Like many others in his part of the world, Siamak was schooled ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Flap
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Hello
• 1: Global English
• 2: A Family Picture Of English
• 3: Made in Ænglisc
• 4: Made in Englysshe
• 5: Lingua Franca And English
• 6: Future Global English Spoken Here
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Back Flap
• Back Cover