An American friend observed at dinner last week that it is common for non-native English speakers, like maybe me and my wife, to speak with each other in English. Why does that happen?
The trivial argument is that my wife and I are native English speakers, as Indian-Indians. We've been educated in English in India since the age of three, like tens of millions of proud and privileged Indians. There is a case for India appropriating English and making it another Indian language, much like India has appropriated cricket and made it a very Indian game. But there is something more interesting happening here than identity politics.
English is famously weak among non-native speakers as being a poor medium for expressing emotion. But, despite that, English may lend itself to expressing precise, complex or subtle thoughts more readily than any other language.
That is an unprovable and potentially incendiary claim...but it still is worth holding that thought for a moment to see where it goes.
The strength of English is most obvious in the size of its vocabulary. English has about twice as many words as Spanish, the #2 language on the wordlists. This happens mainly because English is the default language of business, science and technology. Things that enrich people's lives, new experiences people want to talk about, happen because of business or technology and are therefore conceived in English. Translating gear, amplifier, covariance, browser or credit card out of English rarely feels natural. Hence, when Brazilians and Japanese want to talk, they talk in English. Hence Hinglish, Spanglish and Franglais.
Also, English is wonderfully assimilative. There is no language police to prevent beautiful words like gestalt, schadenfreude or zeitgeist from being imported into English words. Yin, yang, chi, karma, avatar and kismet are, or are well on their way to being, mainstream English words.
So, technically educated polyglots whose first language is Tamil, Arabic or Malay may well drift into English as they start expressing more complex ideas.
It looks like when history and custom provide a simple but robust (grammatical) framework, when nationalistic pride and the language police are kept away, when business and technology are allowed to just get on with it and do their thing, what develops is something amazingly powerful that connects a big slice of humanity. Is there is political philosophy lurking somewhere in here? Or is it just the Linux business model?
3 comments:
It's an interesting topic.
The emergence of English as a global lingua franca gets plenty of coverage (from relatively tame theories attributing it's growth to cultural and technological exports from the U.s. to more politically charged theories like Robert Phillipson's "Linguistic Imperialism"), but it seemed genuinely curious to me that two people with a common, native, non-English language would elect to speak English in entirely social circumstances.
I too find it interesting.
The world does need a lingua franca, and just one lingue franca. Logically, it is hard to rule out pure randomness, as opposed to something intrinsically interesting about English or English speaking cultures. The mind is really good at spotting patterns, even when no patterns exist.
But still, I do like the theory that English is powerful precisely because it is an open-source language.
This is interesting enough for another post. Coming soon...
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