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| comments (Fall 2009) CommentsThe Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of EnglishI n depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense . . . Full text articleWhat an amazingly ethnocentric view! I hope you realize that English, too, is 'choke full of strange sounds you have to be born into to learn', as can be reliably demonstrated by listening to any of us who had to learn it later on our lives. And it's also full of strange gramatical quirks. Sure, you have simple conjugation rules. But, for example, you also have verbs that change meaning depending on the preposition you follow them with (there's no way 'give up' can be understood as a composition of the meanings of 'give' and 'up', to mention only one). And not even native speakers are sure when they're supposed to say 'whom'. By claiming that 'exotic' languages are any 'harder' than the well known European ones you're doing nothing but show a lack of good sense. Second: No serious linguist I've read actually considers that loosing a language necessarily means we're loosing the associated culture. The value of 'exotic' languages, from the point of view of a scholar of them, is the window they open into the basic mechanisms of language itself. If every language congugates verbs, is that because human thought processes require it, or because we never got to hear the one language that didn't, because it became extinct? Given such clear misunderstandings on two of your main stated reasons why English could or should become a global language, I utterly fail to see how the rest of the article's argument could be taken seriously. Oh, and just to put a final point on this: How is it strange that the language in Egypt is as different from that in Iraq as the one in Italy is from the one in Portugal? If you had bothered to look at a map, you could have noticed you're actually spaning similar distances. In any case, French is way more diferent from German, and yet Paris is much closer to Berlin, so the whole 'in a country as close as ...' argument is pure baloney anyway. John McWhorter has written a fantasy. The world is poly-lingual and even if all languages were to disappear their history cannot be erased. Moreover, one single language has always been a fantasy never to be brought about. If one language survives it will inevitably split into many tongues. The condition of humanity is multiplicity and not singularity. Why is that anytime this issue comes up the guy raising the question has a name like John McWhorter??? If we believe in second law of Thermodynamics than death of out of date language is natural. In past also thousand languages were dead, just remember Hadappa and Mohonjdaro language scrip is there but we could read it. Thank you for a thought-provoking article. I must disagree with some of your points. It is my belief that when a language dies, an important worldview dies...one that occupies an "ecological" niche just like an animal or plant. To be sure, something will evolve to replace it but it won't be the same and everything around it will be changed as well. By way of example, consider the number of words that English has for rain and raining; now consider the number of words the Inuit have for ice and snow. Knowing that you cannot walk on 'sish' ice or that 'pelting' rain can damage seedlings may have a profound effect on your well-being. "There is ice on the sea," and "It rained just after the garden sprouted," convey nothing but very limited facts. English is a wonderful language and in its local form, it conveys much that is important; when it has no native word for something, it appropriates it from a language that does. Also, where there is a word that describes something similar like publican vs bartender, bartender tends to win even though publican carries so much more meaning. In my Am Lit years (1952-82), I tried to create the rubric of International English beginningn with AfrAm, then African, and finally Commonwealth Lit. I promoted that idea at a Commonwealth Educational conference in Lagos in 1968 with a Wole Soyinka film. I was detained by the CID as a shadow CIA man!(He was in jail for trying to end the Biafran war by himself. A later article in CanadianCommonwealth Lit brought the ludicrous charge of Am imperialism!If I had to do it again, I'd recommend that every Ph.D. present a minor in a threatened language so that we'd read more A more realistic possibility is that machine translation will permit people to communicate across languages. i am aware of the problem that current machine translations have. But it is easy to imagine a slow migration to use of those strutures which can be machine translated. This mechanism once in place will slowly permit all but the artistic minded to manage communication via a machine like via a cellphone An excellent and thought-provoking article. However, it is worth noting the fate of the many ancient languages of North Africa and the Middle East after the Arabian conquest. For a century after, they continued to be in use until a dictat one day from Arabia stated that all government transactions had to be in Arabic. Without violence or coercion, all these old languages became extinct within just two generations - about fifty years. And that was in the days before the internet or pop culture. My guess is that far from there being 600 languages in 2109, it will be nearer twenty, with nineteen of these struggling to survive. About Hebrew - Its revival was made possible because the people who revived it came from different countries and did not have any language in common, so they had to learn a new language anyway. Add to that the zeal of the moment and you get Hebrew. But look at it Today. It is a language poor in words, words are added every day, but they are just English words converted. Names of people, restaurants and shops are selected to sound good in English. Also, in your list of pros and cons you should add money. How much does it cost to translate books and movies to your local language. How much to teach children English, in addition to the local language. In Hebrew, of course, the cost is multiplied many times by the fact that it is written right to left. Do you have any idea how many man hours go to correct software so it will work with bi-direction. And so far failing miserably. They should at least have copied the Turks, who write Turkish in Latin letters.As a linguist, John McWhorter should know better than this. The issue is not one of pronunciations or basic vocabulary. The important issue is at the other end of the scale, where a complete and subtle mastery of a language by a native speaker allows perception of ideas and analysis that are unique to the language, and that are not accessible or conceivable in other languages. It's not that one could only say XXXXX in a language, it's that one can only THINK of or about XXXXX, or think in certain ways, in that language. There's an old definition of a cynic, who knows the price of everything, but not the value. McW's argument is cynical. Languages spoken by 10,000 people or fewer are threatened with extinction. This process is accelerated by the increasing assimilation of supranational political entities (the State, nation-state, and Empire). These supranational political entities impose their hegemony by means of unilingual educational systems and ethnocentrism. When a language dies a 'culture' does not necessarily die. Witness the emergence of Chicana/o culture in California. However, local knowledge is lost and the oral tradition is not transmitted. These losses affect our cognitive processes in the development of a language and its culture while enhancing the political and cultural power of Empire. One solution is to foster synergies between modern science and local knowledge, develop internationa research programs, and involve communities in promoting cultural diversity. Biological, cultural and linguistic diversity are human rights. With the development of a globalized economy, we should be promoting multilingual language/educational systems even though these systems are expensive to maintain. Cost is trivial when you consider the value of knowledge of biodiversity, natural resources, cognitive evolution, and our cultural heritage. Which prompts the question what ever happened to Esperanto and the idea of a single second language for all people? Very soon more than 50% of English speakers will be non-Caucasian. I find that the foreign students at my university speak more grammatical English than the natives who can never seem to get the objects of prepositions right. Though not a speaker of Eyak, I mourn its passing as do the disappearance of many other languages. I also deplore the ethnocentricity of this article. When the day comes that the whole world speaks English we shall have lost as much diversity of thought processes as we are currently losing in bio-diversity. We shall all be diminished not only by the laziness that comes with an incapacity to speak different tongues, but by our collective ignorance of the intuitions and nuances of thought that are the specific heritage of each. We shall be as weakened as species modified by genetic engineering. Evil is not too strong a word, Professor McWharter, and to postulate the corollary of your argument, imagine Shakespeare only read or acted in Eyak! Let's assume that English becomes a truly dominant language, as Latin once was. Do you suppose that English will begin again the process of splitting into mutually unintelligible dialects, as Indo-Euoprean, and later Latin did? Technology might change the mechanisms involved, but is the process inevitable? "About Hebrew - Its revival was made possible because the people who revived it came from different countries and did not have any language in common, so they had to learn a new language anyway. Add to that the zeal of the moment and you get Hebrew. But look at it Today. It is a language poor in words, words are added every day, but they are just English words converted." This is nonsense, you obviously don't know Hebrew. “Yes, there is the success story of Hebrew, but that unlikely revival came about because of a happenstantial confluence of religion, the birth of a nation, and the obsession of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who settled in Palestine and insisted on speaking only Hebrew to all Jews. This extended to reducing his wife to tears when he caught her singing a lullaby to their child in her native Russian.” This denigrating pop explanation of the birth of modern Hebrew doesn’t even begin to describe its origin. I suggest McWhorter do some research and not rely on a film version of the life of Be-Yehuda. There is much more far reaching material out there. There is the book by Robert Alter “Hebrew and Modernity” for starters (click here). No individual by himself could have brought about the rebirth of a modern language. There hundreds of scholars and writers who participated in its rebirth and some like David Vogel lived and worked in Europe most of their lives. Modern Hebrew is the medium of speech, of commerce, of scientific research as well as of one of the finest literatures in the modern world. McWhorter’s cartoonish view of Hebrew doesn’t begin to describe the birth and evolution of the language. Those who hold the opinion that English is, will be, or needs to be the "universal language" are normally English speakers, and often don't bother to learn another language fluently. In fact, I COULDN'T learn another fluently inspite of all efforts. That is, until I encountered Esperanto, a rich and more complete language which merits more of our attention that it often gets. The tough coughed as he ploughed through the dough. English may not be the worst lingua franca, but it's far from ideal. Please do not overestimate the position of English. I live in London and if anyone says to me “everyone speaks English” my answer is “Listen and look around you”. If people in London do not speak English then the whole question of a global language is completely open. The promulgation of English as the world’s “lingua franca” is impractical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker! Impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is how English is used internationally at the moment. Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential. As a native English speaker, my vote is for Esperanto :) Your readers may be interested in seeing this. Professor Piron was a former translator with the United Nations A glimpse of the global language,Esperanto, can be seen here. I love Anglophones promoting English as a universal language. And English may be cosmopolitan because many people worldwide speak it, but there is certainly nothing inherently cosmopolitan about it, and its global dispersal in fact is making many native English speakers less cosmopolitan, as they expect all elements of world culture to be delivered to them in English. i wonder how that great lover of language, J.R. Tolkien would think of the argument that loss of languages is not that big a deal. He created whole worlds with his created languages. Losing a language is like losing species in a environment. It makes the world, that must less interesting, and special. I have the feeling that scholars 100 years from now, are going to look back on the 20th century as the last time the earth had real variety. After globalism, and modernity get done, every where will sound and look like every where else. I would have liked to see John McWhorter address the bilingual sign shown at the beginning of the article. Does "Up the Great Wall" show us the way to climb the Wall, or only show us the way to the Wall. English may be becoming universal, but it's also becoming universally incomprehensible. I am not sure that English is as widespread as people claim. I would like to argue the case for wider use of Esperanto as the international auxiliary language. It is a planned language which belongs to no one country or group of states. Esperanto hasn't yet gained the recognition it deserves. However, all things considered, it has actually done amazingly well. In just over 120 years, it has managed to grow from a drawing-board project with just one speaker in one country to a complete and living natural language with around 2,000,000 speakers in over 120 countries and a rich literature and cosmopolitan culture, with little or no official backing and even bouts of persecution. John McWhorter's argument is alluring in that it offers an easily understandable proposition up against a complex one. Wouldn't it be great, he says, if everyone could understand one another? English is trending fairly inevitably towards becoming an international lingua franca, often at the expense of other languages and while this is often bemoaned, what’s really so wrong with it? However, McWhorter takes as his accepted premises that the function of language is purely communicative. I agree, language's primary aim is the conveyance of information. That’s why languages die out - when they become inefficient in obtaining and sharing relevant information. But if you pare the matter down to such a pragmatic, biologically reductionist approach, surely you miss some things. Like the fact that you could reduce and simplify almost any Shakespearean soliloquy to extract its key information. He’s missing the fact that language has a social and aesthetic function as well. It’s misleading to frame the alternative to his position as linguistic determinism. It’s pretty spurious to claim that language dictates the way we think. It’s slightly less spurious to claim that it reflects the way we think, but still shaky. The fact is that no matter where your language evolved from, or how, its history will resonate with you, without necessarily pointing to some inner cognitive process (do people argue that music from different cultures determines or reflects how they think?). For English-speakers a blunt, earthy Anglo-Saxon word feels different from an intricate, abstracted romance one. Oscar Wilde or Ernest Hemmingway may run through your syntax like metallic veins or square punches. Your own relationship to your history and culture permeates your lexicon and the way you employ it. I don’t think this is unique to English. We don’t use our languages as purely functional tools, we also decorate, embellish and personalise them for profound reasons. If everyone everywhere were equipped with a standard-issue Starbucks (or made-in-China) brand of Standard Language, surely something would be lost in that translation? My mother and her mother spoke Yiddish and it would be a shame for this language to dissapear only because it is sooooooo colorful. It is truly unique and would be sad to lose it. It is probably impossible to resurrect a dying language. In the best cases you've created a stale facsimile or a living language that is no longer the original. Even the one success story in modern history - Hebrew - becomes tainted when one looks more closely. Many linguists argue that Modern Spoken Hebrew is really just Yiddish with Hebrew vocabulary. The true soul of ancient Hebrew has been lost for millennia - we don't really know how a mother sang Hebrew to her child, what the children's slang was in David's Jerusalem, or how people joked, blasphemed and made love in ancient Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is a vibrant living tongue, true, but it is no more the language of the Torah than modern Italian is the language of Virgil. And by giving up Yiddish Jews have now made 2 centuries of one of the richest world literatures ever produced practically inaccessible to the rightful heirs of that culture. Was it really worth it? Being a linguist I don't want the endangered languages to die. Instead we have to try to revive them by proper documentation. Every language either small or big has its speaker. These languages can be done scientific study. Why should we lose the endagered languages? They are rather important for study by researchers in this field. Yours, C D Aimol Manipur University Imphal INDIA I find it ironic that most, if not all, of the readers of this journal are Anglophones, many of them native. This means they will have a natural affinity for/respect of/interest in English. Otherwise, why would they know how to speak it? I'm going to make my own potentially messy analogy and hope it doesn't outrage any industrial tycoons that spend their spare time thumbing through academic journals... To me, it's like asking a Board of Directors at MegaConglomorate Inc. how they feel about global warming. Either they want it to continue because their industries are profiting from processes that contribute to it, or they want it to continue because it presents new ways to make money. Obviously the Englishization of the world appeals to us because it presents us with more opportunities and easier travel. (I started typing this response before finishing the article, so I found it funny that the author mentioned the target of my analogy.) That said, I disagree entirely with the following excerpt: "The immigrants’ children may use their parents’ indigenous languages at home. But they never know those languages as part of their public life, and will therefore be more comfortable with the official language of the world they grow up in." First of all, he's a native English linguist and he ended a sentence with a hanging preposition? How shameful! Second, what facts does he use to support this claim? None. Yet it is followed with what is presumably his thesis statement ("This is language death"), as if the former buttresses the latter. While I understand personal experience counts as anecdotal evidence at best, several children of immigrant families in Europe that I've known are very resistant to the encroachment of their society's dominant language and eagerly trying to preserve cultural heritage from their motherlands. Perhaps he means to describe what occurs for many Latinos in America who cannot find jobs (or decent ones, in terms of conditions or pay) without fluency in English. However, it seems a ridiculous generalization to paint all immigrant children as resentful toward their native cultures and readily adopting the influence of an outside one. Finally, it seems impossible for me to put into words the ideological conflict I feel with the overall position taken in the article, but I will make a short effort through another example of personal experience. I am American, born and raised, but I was lucky enough to live in France for seven months; three and a half with a French host family in a small town, and three and a half with other Americans enrolled in an academic program in Paris. The rural environment of the small town was largely secluded from the influence of globalization. This meant I was immersed in French language and culture. It was a fabulous experience that helped me grow incredibly as a person and vastly improved my French skills. It also changed the direction of my life, professionally and geographically. When I got to Paris, I was amazed by the prominent position American and British media held in every facet of society -- cinema, music, fine arts, literature, etc. In fact, the French government enacted a series of laws to preserve 40% of airtime on radio stations in the hexagon for native artists, precisely because they anticipated the deleterious effects on French culture of the encroachment of English-speaking media. Despite the government's efforts, most French youth prefer visiting their neighborhood MacDo (as it's referred to over there) over a brasserie. While many would applaud the domination of Anglophone culture, it also means the death of French traditions and creation of a monotone world, in terms of language, ideology, and culture. Normative judgment wise, is this a bad thing? Perhaps not necessarily, but I would hardly call it a good thing. I think your criticism of the cultural uniqueness of languages focus too much on phonology. What makes a language reflective of the culture are its idioms, small sayings, turns of phrase, slanf and its social registers., and it is in them that we see a unique world view associated with a culture. The phonology point seems like something of a straw-man arguement. |  Submit Your Comment |
Posted by Stuart Munro | October 26, 2009 09:46:11 PM EDT