The Tongue Twisters

 

English is the international language. But monoglot native speakers find themselves at a disadvantage to those who have adopted English and adapted it to their own purposes, warns Michael Skapinker.

When David Crystal stepped off the aircraft in Cairo this year, people said to him: “Welcome in Egypt.” Wherever he went, he heard the same greeting. Even long-time British residents welcomed him “in” the country rather than to it.

The phrase is too widely used that Egyptian English language specialists now regard it as grammatically correct, says Mr. Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. “Welcome in Egypt” has even started to appear in international publishers’ textbooks for the Egyptian market.

The incident is a telling one, Mr. Crystal argues. No language in human history has been as widely spoken as English is today. A quarter of the world’s population now uses the language. The British Council estimates that more than 1 milliard people are learning it. Three-quarters of the world’s mail is written in English. About 80 percent of the world’s electronically stored information is in English.

It is the principal language of an increasing number of professions and activities. No-one can hope to become a successful scientist, diplomat, air traffic controller or pop star without it.

Yet, as the world’s 375 million native English speakers, from Canada to New Zealand, exult in their good fortune in speaking the language everyone wants to learn, experts such as Mr. Crystal warn that English is changing – and native English speakers might not find the results comfortable.

Variations to standard English grammar, of the sort Mr. Crystal observed in Egypt, are apparent in many countries. English teachers around the world are rejecting the idea that the language is the exclusive property of Britain or the US. Wherever Mr. Crystal travels, he finds local teachers asking: “Whose English is it anyway? ” And the answer, increasingly, is: “It’s ours too.”

That does not mean there is much danger of English being supplanted as the global tongue during the 21st century. The spread of English is the result of the political and commercial power of the English-speaking world, which shows no sign of diminishing.

The British empire planted groups of English speakers from Vancouver to Cape Town to Auckland. As the empire declined, English showed signs of fading with it. By the first world war, German had replaced English as the dominant language of science. But the rise of the US after the second world war, and the power of its corporations and technologies ever since, rescued English and propelled it to even greater dominance. Other colonial languages, such as French, Portuguese and Dutch, faltered.

David Graddol, a lecturer at the UK’s Open University and author of a widely -cited 1997 British Council publication called The Future of English, believes that if important technologies emerged from outside the US – from China, for example – English might start to lose its importance. But he and Mr. Crystal agree this will not happen for a long time. “The English language snowball has got so big now that it’s virtually unstoppa­ble.” Mr. Crystal says.

So where does the threat to native English speakers come from? It comes, ironically, from the huge number of people learning English, who are taking control of the language in ways the older English-speaking world has barely begun to understand.

Linguists divide English speakers into three groups. The first is made up of people for whom English is the first, and often only, language. They live, in their largest numbers, in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Jamaica. They also live in South Africa, where, however, they are a small part of the total population.

The second group consists of those who speak English as their second language and live in countries where English has a special status, either because they were once British colonies or are under strong US influence. They include India, Nigeria, Singapore and the Philippines. The third group consists of the growing number of people learning English as a foreign language in countries with no strong US or British connection.

Some of the first-language speakers have been challenging British and American linguistic authority for decades. Although Australian or South African English, for example, are generally understood throughout the English-speaking world, thousands of their words are not. Ask for direction in South Africa, for example, and you might be told: “Turn right at the next robot”. This is not an instruction to watch out for a mechanical dictionary contains 10.000 words that are not used anywhere else.

But the real challenge to American and British English comes from those who speak English as their second language. Not only do people who speak English as a second language out-number those for whom it is their native tongue, but the populations of the second-language countries are growing much faster than those of the old English-speaking world.

The second-language speakers often speak a distinctive form of English, or several forms of English. Many Singaporeans speak Singlish – a mixture of English and Chinese. In India, many speak Hinglish, a mixture of Hindi and English.

People in second-language countries use different variations of English depending on the circumstances: Singlish or Hinglish among friends and something closer to British English for formal situations. In the office, those who work for international companies, speak the English appropriate to their fields, complete with the requisite computer or scientific jargon.

There are people in the third group of countries who are starting to move into the second, using English as a second rather than as a foreign language. In the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, for example, English is so widely spoken that it has become an everyday language. Just as in India, Singapore or South Africa, no young Swede or Dane can succeed in business or science without a fluent command of English.

As a younger generation – in Europe, Latin America and Asia – grows up surrounded by English, they will enter this second-language group too. English will become part of their everyday lives, as it already is today in Norway, Holland or Zimbabwe.

What will that do to the employment prospects of English-speakers who know no other language? Mr. Graddol argues it will put them at a significant disadvantage. Speaking English will be nothing special: everyone in the company will do that. But the others will speak their family language too. When it comes to transfers around the company, those with more than one language will have the upper hand.

It is already far easier for an English-speaking Mexican or Italian to take up position in London or New York than for a monoglot English-speaker to do a stint in Mexico City or Rome. More and more people might speak English in Mexico and Italy, but everyday life is a strain if you do not speak the local language. While your customers might speak English, they will be, more impressed by those who speak their language too. And office gossip is difficult to follow if it takes place in Italian – or Singlish.

Mr. Graddol says some monoglot English speakers are already feeling the effects. “In many multi­national companies, they're finding there’s a glass ceiling, ” he says. English speakers are not only struggling to compete against colleagues from other countries but against their multilingual fellow citizens too. Cities in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia are full of immigrants and their children who speak other languages.

Piero Corsini the Italian head of International Business Machines’s public-sector business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says the argument that monoglot English speakers are already at a disadvantage is “going too far”. But he agrees that those who have learned a second language can move around more easily and are more receptive to other cultures.

Mr. Graddol adds that anyone who has mastered a second language will find it easier to learn a third. A UK report this year into language learning, backed by the Nuffleld Foundation, warned: “While we have English, others have English, their national language and a head start in learning new languages.”

Mr. Corsini says all is not lost for the monoglots; computerised voice recognition and translation software is developing rapidly. It should one day be possible to speak into a microphone in one language and produce a computer-generated voice in another.

Existing translation technology, however, suggests there is some way to go. The-paperboy.com is a website offering access to online newspapers from around the world, along with computerised translations of many of them. A recent profile of George W. Bush in Liberation, the French newspaper, said that Mr. Bush had worried about the effect the electoral campaignmight have on his daughters, " desjumelles alors agees de is ans" - twins then aged 18. Translating the article into English, thepaperboy.com’s computer chose an alterna­tive translation jumelles, reporting that Mr. Bush was concerned about the effect of the campaign on his 18-year old binoculars.

Mr. Corsini says IBM and other companies are working on solutions to these problems so that translation computers will have a better understanding of the context in which language is used. In the meantime, English-speakers should sign up for foreign language classes. In an increasingly English-speaking world, it might be the key to commercial survival.