L’ANGLAIS, UN MAUVAIS CHOIX

L’ANGLAIS, UN MAUVAIS CHOIX
… comme langue universelle. Un article en anglais du Observer.

Le succès de l’anglais peut conduire certaines fois à un triomphalisme
inapproprié. Si l’anglais aujourd’hui est devenu une langue globale, cela
résulte de forces non linguistiques, pas en raison de ses qualités
intrinsèques. Malgré les mythes, le choix de l’anglais comme langue
universelle constitue, à certains égards, un fort mauvais choix. La langue
anglaise n’est pas plus facile à apprendre que le français ou le russe. Elle
n’est pas plus belle, mélodieuse ou plus éloquente que l’italien ou
l’allemand, ou toute autre langue. De tels jugements n’ont pratiquement
aucun sens. Mélodieuse pour qui ?

The Observer – 18.3.2001

http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,458371,00.html

They’re talking our language

Britain may have lost an empire, but it
has gained a planet. Now all of us, from Filipino judges to Basque fishermen,
conduct our business in English – and that includes the French

by Robert McCrum

In Septmber 1977 the Nasa spacecraft
Voyager One blasted off on its historic unmanned mission to Jupiter and beyond.
On board, the scientists, who knew that intrepid capsule would one day spin
through distant star systems, had installed a recorded greeting from the people
of the planet Earth. Preceding brief messages in 55 languages for any
inhabitants of outer space, the gold-plated disc played (and still plays) a
longish statement from the then secretary-general of the United Nations, an
Austrian named Kurt Waldheim, speaking on behalf of 147 member states – in
English.

Twenty-five years ago, Nasa’s choice of
language was as controversial as the man who uttered its bland but historic
sentences. Today it looks more than slightly prophetic. At the dawn of a new
millennium, if ever a language had the right to represent the planet to
distant galaxies, it is the language one that more and more commentators
refer to as ‘global English’.

In the European Year of Languages, it’s
English that dominates not only the international scene – that’s old news – but
also, incredibly, the European linguistic map. If you put to any European the
simple proposition that everyone should speak English, you probably would not be
surprised to learn that 70 per cent of Britons and 82 per cent of Dutch people
concur. You might raise an eyebrow at the 76 per cent of Italians who share this
point of view. But you would be gobsmacked – dare I say bouleversé ? – to
discover that in France, home of that supremely civilising international force
la langue Française, an astounding 66 per cent of those questioned in a
Eurobarometer poll, said it would be a good idea if the people of Europe spoke
English.

OK, it’s only a poll, but after decades of
French government propaganda and even legislation in defence of the beleaguered
French tongue, supported at the highest level by presidents of left and
right from Giscard to Chirac (who always uses French to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ media)
it represents a jolt to French linguistic self-esteem. After the substitution by
the French Academy of unequivocally French words for ‘la langue du Coca-Cola"
(for example capitaux febriles for ‘hot money’, gros porteur for ‘jumbo jet’ and
pret à manger’ for ‘fast food’), the news that two-thirds of French people are
now acknowledging the superior usefulness of English will come as a blow to
those, like the late Georges Pompidou, who believed ‘we must not let the idea
take hold that English is the only possible instrument for industrial, economic
and scientific communication’.

‘We’ve won the battle,’ says Charles
Tannuck, a Conservative MEP sitting in his office high in the European
Parliament. He adds, as an afterthought: ‘Though we have to thank Uncle Sam for
this.’

It’s all happened so fast: 25 years ago
the nascent global supremacy of English was inextricably bound up with US power
and US technology. In hindsight, the high point of Anglo-American linguistic
hegemony was the launch of the Voyager space probe with its message of ‘peace
and goodwill’ for the people of outer space. From that moment, British and more
particularly American English acquired a supranational momentum which has, so
far, proved unstoppable.

The speed with which this astonishing
linguistic revolution has occurred mirrors the speed at which change in
communications technology has transformed the world’s media. Just 20 years ago,
when I was involved in the making of a BBC television series about the evolution
of English, The Story of English, there was no CNN, no online OED, no Wap phones
and absolutely no world wide web. So anxious were we to avoid a historically
suspect linguistic triumphalism that it was an unwritten production rule never
to refer to our subject as ‘the world’s first global language’, even though all
the signs were there to read. In those far-off days we were excited to find
European truck companies such as Iveco transacting business exclusively
in English, or SAS and Air Italia pilots transmitting only in English, or those
first, cumbersome personal computers storing data predominantly in English. Now,
in the year 2001, all that seems rather quaint.

If, as I have argued before in The
Observer, we are living through a second Gutenberg Revolution, we are also the
helpless, and possibly fortunate, witnesses to the apparent realisation of one
of mankind’s oldest and deepest dreams – the end of Babel. Or, to put it
another way, the traditional language kaleidoscope – an entrancing,
many coloured, fractured thing derived from the Greek kalos (beautiful)
and eidos (form) – has become closer to something I’d want to christen
a kal-anglo-scope.

Look through the kalangloscope of global
English and you will find Greek and Finnish translators at the European
Commission in Brussels translating EU business from minority languages like
Czech or Turkish via English. Down the road in the Parliament building you will
find Dutch, Swedish, Spanish and Irish delegates arguing at the bar in English.
At the Commission’s headquarters, the Italian deputy head of President Prodi’s
private office likes to pepper his conversation with lines from Yes Minister.
‘That was a courageous argument,’ he will say, with a knowing wink to his
mystified fellow Europeans.

Charles Tannuck, a thoughtful Eurosceptic
who actually speaks at least four European languages, says the MEPs who can’t
speak English in Brussels have a ‘miserable time’. None of this, of course,
means Europeans are abandoning their mother tongues – far from it – but it does
strongly suggest that if there’s an internationally acknowledged lingua franca
it is English.

Elsewhere in the world we find Israeli
businessmen doing deals in English with European partners in Johannesburg, who
will in turn pass on the terms and conditions of the contracts to their
local Zulu-speaking South African subsidiaries. Turn the kalangloscope again,
and we find European Commission civil servants defending fishing quotas with
Basque tuna fishermen, then parrying inquiries from the Spanish media – all in
English. And across the globe in the Philippines, the Estrada corruption trial
was almost exclusively an English language affair.

Focus the kalangloscope on Europe and you
find that last year the Swiss-German cantons of Switzerland caused a local
sensation when they voted to adopt English in place of French as their official
second language, after German.

In the world of the kalangloscope,
presidential contenders, trades union leaders, terrorists, Nobel laureates,
tennis players and independent film-makers all use English as the essential
medium for putting their message across internationally. During the
Nato intervention in Kosovo, the public face of the operation was conducted on
all sides, even by the Serbs, in English. The Kosovo conflict is a reminder
that, while there are many possible explanations for the recent emergence of the
kalangloscope, the only one that matters is the sudden eclipse of Soviet power
in the early 1990s. Overnight, the world moved from a situation of
sustained superpower conflict to a condition of US superpower predominance.

Just as in the early Middle Ages it was
Latin, the language both of the defunct Roman Empire and of the resurgent and
all-powerful Roman Catholic church, that held sway throughout Europe, so in the
aftermath of the revolutions of 1989, it was American English, underpinned by
US culture and fashion and US media, that carried the English language into the
furthest corners of the globe. Blue jeans and Hollywood movies played their part
in this, but it was Cruise missiles and Stealth bombers that became crucial to
the process. Language has always been about power first, culture and learning
second. A language, as the saying goes, is ‘a dialect with an army and a navy’.

In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse
there was a global flight from the Russian language. Quickly, in countries as
diverse as China, Russia and Brazil, the language most commonly taught as a
foreign language became English. Parts of Europe formerly under
Soviet domination – the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Romania – switched
enthusiastically to English as a lingua franca.

In strictly European terms this is not
entirely logical. There are, for instance, far more German-speakers in the EU.
But not only has German been shunned, in Germany itself there are now fears that
English threatens the native tongue in the way it was once perceived to threaten
French. In recent months a proposed ‘language purification law’ (against the
invasion of English nouns, verbs and adjectives) has received widespread support
from academics, linguists and politicians. This movement wants to impose hefty
fines on any German caught using the bastardised tongue known as ‘Denglisch’.
Similar movements to defend the mother tongue from English are found in Spain
and Brazil.

‘Flirt’, ‘baby’, ‘power’, ‘administration’
and ‘underwear’ have become an everyday part of German vocabulary, joining other
English imports such as ‘kidnap’, ‘relax’ and ‘pick-up’.

Senator Eckhart Werthebach, a conservative
politician, is the moving spirit behind the Language Purification Law. He wants,
he says, to protect German from extinction. ‘Our language is being
abandoned thanks to a growth in Americanisms. Older, less educated people,
and foreigners living in Germany who don’t speak English, are excluded,’ he
says.

The Language Purification Law sounds
bizarre, but it has popular backing. A recent magazine poll showed that 53 per
cent of Germans are against the use of English words. Another survey showed that
English words like ‘shopping’, ‘happy’, ‘event’ and ‘statement’ have
largely cancelled out their German equivalents. English terms
like ‘slow-motion’, ‘last-minute’ and ‘highlights’ have usurped homegrown words.
Some of these expressions are based on comical German misunderstandings of
English slang. In Denglisch a ‘handy’ is a ‘mobile phone’.

The German Language Union’s chairman,
Professor Walter Kramer, said: ‘We protest at the totally one-sided takeover by
English expressions.’

In the European Union, German is one of
the so-called ‘working languages’. But virtually no one, apart from the poor old
Germans, uses it. Even French, the traditional language of foreign affairs,
is under pressure from English. A European parliamentarian like Charles Tannuck
says he is keen ‘not to destroy national culture’ but a moment later will agree
that for EU email ‘the default language is always English’.

Tannuck, who has thought deeply about the
language question, is a far cry from the kind of Eurosceptic who displays
photographs of RAF Spitfires on his office wall. He sees himself as a
pragmatist. He says: ‘If we want a really successful single market, all
documents, all road signs, every piece of official information should be
in English as well as in the national language.’

He stresses the feasibility of this by
pointing out that 75 per cent of European children are now learning English in
school. This Eurosceptic says that, paradoxical as it may seem: ‘If you believe
in a strong European identity, English is vital.’ He thinks it’s time to put the
language question on the political agenda – which would certainly make a change
from the interminable debates about the euro.

History is on his side. After the Nice
summit, the planned enlargement of the EU to incorporate former Soviet-bloc
countries such as Hungary, Estonia, Bulgaria and Slovakia is going to deal a
body blow to the use of the French language in community affairs. Steve Morris,
a Commission spokesman, notes that English is now ‘everybody’s second language’.
For the first time in the history of the EU, the Commission’s spokesman,
Jonathan Faull, is English. To illustrate the dominance of English, Morris says
that he gave up going to his Italian language classes because he found his
fellow students always answered him in English. He acknowledges that the
language question is ‘an emotive issue’, but points out that, de facto, ‘it’s
difficult to find somewhere in Europe where they don’t speak English’.

Away from the European heartland, the end
of the Soviet imperium meant something else, too – the proliferation of small,
independent states (Croatia and Bosnia, for example) which, while fiercely
nationalistic about their mother tongues, have been only too eager to
establish English as a foreign language on their campuses and in their
business schools. Where, in the days of the USSR, there were fewer than 150
UN member states, now in the globalised world of the new century there are more
than 180 UN member states for whom American English is the second language of
choice after the mother tongue.

The figures tell their own story.
According to the best estimates available, English is now the first language of
about 380 million mother tongue speakers, based in traditionally
English-speaking countries such as Britain, Australia and the United States. Add
to this approximately 350 million second language English speakers in countries
like India, Nigeria and Singapore, and a staggering further 500-1,000 million
people in countries like China, Japan and Russia that acknowledge the importance
of global English as an agent of global capitalism, and you arrive at a total of
nearly 2,000 million – at least a third of the world’s population. It’s further
estimated that by 2050 no less than half the world’s population will
be competent in English.

For these participants in the global
kalangloscope the dominant tone is the American of American English. American
English is a vast and complex subject that traces back to the landing of a few
English- speaking settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, and then at Plimouth Rock in
New England. The resulting marriage of unbridled, pioneering adventurism and
straitlaced puritan simplicity was a variety of English that is both
marvellously innovative and yet capable of a positively Calvinist precision and
understatement.

In its infancy, American English played
wayward child to its unbending British parent. Later, as the British Empire,
which had done so much to spread English across the globe, declined, the story
of the English language became a tale of American world domination. In the
spread of the American language – the forerunner of the global
English kalangloscope – three agents were decisive. First, and most
obvious, there is the contribution of US culture: Hollywood movies,
the advertising of Madison Avenue and the newspapers and television channels of
the great media corporations such as Time-Warner and CBS. A defining moment in
the cultural imperialism of the US media giants occurred in 1983 when a nomadic,
drought-plagued sub-Saharan tribe, the Tuareg, delayed its annual migration to
fresh pasture by 10 days in order to catch the last episode of Dallas.

Second, there’s the role played by the
scientific community in the dissemination of Anglo-American usage. Scientific
endeavour, of course, transcends national boundaries, and scientific
communication has fastened on English as the natural medium for the transmission
of new ideas. More than half the world’s scientific journals are in English.
Hand in hand with science, the massive impact of the internet has been
unimaginably important. Although there is now decisive evidence that English is
being challenged on the net by other languages, the first decade of activity has
been a familiar tale of English language domination (80 per cent of home pages
on the web are in English, compared to 4.5 per cent German and 3.1 per
cent Japanese.)

Finally, there’s trade and tourism. As
Naomi Klein has shown in No Logo, multinational trade, tearing up frontier
restrictions in a kind of capitalist hurricane, has spread English into the
export processing zones of Far East Asia, into the sweatshops of Bangkok and
Shanghai and into the hypermarkets of Japan and Korea.

The commercial logic described in No Logo
goes hand in hand with the package deal. Tourism and mass consumerism are
opposite sides of the same coin. The language of Thomas Cook, of Mastercard and
of Sheraton is English – in hundreds of thousands of kalangloscopic
transactions every day.

The success of English
sometimes induces a kind of triumphalism that is inappropriate. If English today
is a global phenomenon, this is due to non-linguistic forces, not because it has
unique or special qualities. Despite the myths, English is, from some points of
view, a spectacularly bad choice as the world’s leading language. It is
not easier to learn than French or Russian. It is not more
beautiful, mellifluous or eloquent than Italian or German, or any other
language. Such judgments are almost meaningless. Mellifluous for whom?

English is, moreover,
highly idiomatic. How do we begin to explain such phrases as ‘put up with’ or
‘get on with it’? English also has some impossible characteristics. ‘Th’ is
famously difficult for foreigners. There are some rare and difficult vowels: the
vowel-sound in ‘bird’ and ‘nurse’ occurs in virtually no other language. The
13 spellings for a sound like sh – shoe, sugar, issue, mansion, mission, nation,
suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuschia and pshaw – are a source
of weakness, not strength.

Weak or strong, global English now has a
supranational momentum that has set it free from the political fates of Britain
and the United States. The colossal global financial underpinning of the
language ensures its continued supremacy. The estimated gross language
product (GLP – the money generated by language-related commerce) of English
is $7,815 billion, compared to $2,455bn for German and $1,789bn for Spanish.

Even so, there are signs that a resurgent
multilingualism will keep the spread of global English in check. David Crystal,
a leading commentator on the English language, says you find ‘a
rampant multilingualism on the web. People are adopting English
for intelligibility and their local language for identity.’

This is an important development, possibly
even a turning-point. Crystal and others have argued that one of the negative
consequences of global English has been an acceleration of ‘language death’ –
the disappearance of minority languages in predominantly English-speaking parts
of the world. With the disappearance of some versions of, for instance, Maori
languages the loss is not just linguistic. Language death means the slow
obliteration of oral traditions – songs, folktales, rituals, proverbs – all of
which add up to an invaluable legacy to humanity. In almost every quarter of the
globe there are shocking examples of language death to be found.

There are, of course, numerous
contra-indications. In America some see Spanish as a real challenge to the
primacy of English. Closer to home, Jack Straw recently publicised his efforts
to acquire French, and, according to Labour MP Denis MacShane: ‘Ministers have
been told they must learn a foreign language if they are to do work for
the Government in Europe.’

What, then, is the future of the
kalangloscope? Where will it end? Only one thing is certain: every prediction
about the future of the English language has ultimately been proved to be wrong.
If, in the year 1601, you had asked for odds on the global future of
English you’d have been lucky to get 1,000-1.

All we can say with confidence in the year
2001 is that, as participants in global English, in all its myriad
manifestations, we are probably closer in spirit and self-expression to the
Shakespearean extravaganza than at any time since the seventeenth century.
Spoken and written, global English offers a medium of almost limitless potential
and surprise.