The first superpower crisis, the Korean War, which gave us words such as
”brainwashing” and ”chopper” (for ”helicopter”), ended in July, 1953. It was the last war to be reported extensively on newsreel by companies like Pathe, Movietone and Rank. A few weeks before the ceasefire the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey was the first event to capture a mass television audience around the world. The age of television communications had arrived. Throughout the 1950s American television and movies combined to bring American English and the American way of life–as interpreted by Hollywood–to a world audience. Many immigrants to the U.S. have said they first learned English by repeating much-loved lines in the cinemas of Europe. There had been many American films before the 1950s, but their influence was largely confined to Britain and America and the richer European countries. After the Second World War, the technology of film screening was more widely available, and except in France, Italy, Sweden and Britain, there was virtually no local film production (or television broadcasting) to balance the available diet of Americanmade (and American-spoken) material. Never had propaganda for the English language been presented in such an entertaining form.
The influence of the movies on the spread of English was–and still is
–incalculable, an influence now intensified by the worldwide distribution of American television programs and advertising. The images and phrases from Madison Avenue–”Try it, you`ll like it,” ”Does she, or doesn`t she?”
”Where`s the beef?”–have become the small change of our everyday conversation and are perhaps one of the U.S.` most successful and pervasive exports. Products like vacuum cleaners, facial tissues and photocopiers are known worldwide as Hoovers, Kleenex and Xeroxes.
The American advertiser John O`Toole describes the advertisers` export of American English: ”The depiction of American life, or at least the popular myth of American life, the good life, a lot of free and easy laughter, and people hanging around in bars and cocktail parties, all looked very attractive and it was associated with American products. In so doing it made the American way of life attractive–and with it the American language.”
American broadcasting, of course, had long been the most potent medium of the English language. And like the English at the BBC, it evolved its own all- American accent, known as ”Network Standard,” the accent of television newscasters, in which the regional characteristics of Southern or Texan or Brooklyn speech would be modified in the interests of clarity, intelligibility and neutrality. This was discovered to be generally admired by most Americans. Among prominent American newscasters, the case of Dan Rather, the most-watched television news broadcaster in the U.S., is typical. He grew up a Texan with a Texas accent, but on the air he works hard to avoid peculiarities of pronunciations and even went to a speech teacher to improve his elocution:
”I worked on my own for a while trying to say `e` as `ten` correctly. Texans, including me, tend to say `tin.` I also tried to stop dropping `g`s.` It never seemed to be a problem except sometimes when I was tired (still the case, I fear), I tended to say `nothin` ` instead of `nothing.` ” On the
”MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour,” Robert MacNeil consciously modifies his use of the Canadian ”ou” vowel in such words as ”house.”
Just as BBC English has its broader-based demotic partner in ”Cockney,” so we find that American English flourishes at a second, broader level. Partly expressed in songs and films the classic mid-American voice known throughout the world of tourism is more nasal, deliberate and harsher than the softer, more polished tones of the television network standard. Just as Cockney is seen as ”inferior” to ”BBC English,” so this broader blue-collar American voice is associated with the less-privileged sectors of American society. Stuart Flexner, editor-in-chief of Random House Dictionary and the author of
”I Hear America Talking,” makes an interesting prediction about American English:
”We Americans are still moving and communicating from one part of the country to another. As Easterners and Midwesterners continue to move to the Sun Belt, the local Florida and Texas speech patterns will be diluted; as people continue to leave large cities for small ones and for rural areas, pockets of local dialects will tend to weaken or disappear. Perhaps someday in the future regional dialects will be no more. Then we may have only two dialects, that of educated urban Americans and that of rural and poor Americans.”
If the distinctive local varieties of American English do not fade in quite the way Flexner suggests, it is possible that people will express at least two speech loyalties, a local one (Texas, Florida, Brooklyn, Chicago, Wyoming) and a socio-national one, either Network Standard (or something close) or mid-American English.
The emergence of a language that could unite the world is the realization of a dream that goes back to the late 17th Century and the beginnings of global consciousness itself. Such ambitions had a special flowering a century ago when, in 1887, Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof launched Esperanto, still the most popular of the many artificial languages, currently used by between 7 million and 12 million people. But neither Esperanto nor Interlingua, Novial and Interglossa, all manmade hybrids, have roots in any community. They remain a slightly stilted monument to late-Victorian scientific rationalism.
The global English of our times has all the benefits of the standardizing process we have been describing. There is a recognized standard in Britain and America. There is also an agreed-upon standardized vocabulary and spelling system. Or nearly. Global English speaks with two voices: British and American. A student in, say, Japan or Saudi Arabia is confronted with not one version but two, a distinction recognized by the main language schools like Berlitz, which offers either British English or American English to their pupils. The differences are essentially of accent, inflection, spelling and, above all, vocabulary: ”apartment” versus ”flat,” ”buddy” versus
”mate,” ”candy” versus ”sweets,” ”diaper” versus ”nappy.” There are so many different expressions that America`s Associated Press and Britain`s Reuters news agencies have to translate English into English. The Reuters office in New York has a 12-page list of common terms requiring translation.
The first level of the global sway of English is to be found in those countries, formerly British colonies, in which English as a second language has become accepted as a fact of cultural life that cannot be wished away. In Nigeria it is an official language; in Zambia it is recognized as one of the state languages; in Singapore, it is the major language of government, the legal system and education; and in India the Constitution of 1947 recognizes English as an ”associate” official language. In the heady early days of independence, the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared that
”within one generation” English would no longer be used in India. By the 1980s most Indians would admit that, like it or not, English was as much a national language of India as Hindi.
The crosscultural spread of English is unprecedented in other ways. It is more widely used than any of the other colonial languages, including French, Portuguese and Spanish. It even has a wider use than some of the languages associated with international non-Western religious traditions, like Arabic or Sanskrit. In countries like India and Nigeria, English is used at all levels of society: in local English-language newspapers and broadcasting, in public administration, in university education, in the major industries, the courts and the civil service. Indeed, with nearly 200 languages, India needs English to unify the country. Professor P. Lal, a champion of Indian English who runs a well-known writers` workshop, claims that in simple numerical terms, in a country of 750 million, ”more Indians speak English and write English than in England itself. . . You know what Malcolm Muggeridge said: `The last Englishman left will be an Indian.` ”
The power of English in India also extends to fundamentals like choosing a wife. At the Institute of Home Economics in Dehli one girl remarked that 95 percent of Indian men ”do definitely consider English as a prerequisite for brides. . . We are still very much influenced by what the British left us. . . English represents class.”
The students even distinguish between British and American English. In class, for formal writing and to impress their parents, they will use British English. Colloquially, they use American English:
”We`re getting to use American English more these days. That`s because of the influence of movies. . . The books you read are mostly published in America and written by American authors. . . One has a tendency to pick up that kind of speech, any slang that they use.”
At a second, equally important level global English has become the one foreign language that much of the world wants to learn. While this appears to be a nearly universal aspiration, some countries (Singapore, Japan, China, Indonesia and the Philippines) exhibit it more than others. One basic force is an international need and desire to communicate. The more English-speaking the world becomes the more desirable the language becomes to all societies. English is the language of the ”media” industries–news journalism, radio, film and television. Almost any international press conference about an internationally significant event will be conducted in English. The roll call of contemporary world figures who speak to the press in English includes West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Libyan leader and Islamic fundamentalist Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and Philippine President Corazon Aquino; in the recent past, moreover, it was well known that the leaders of France and Germany, Valery Giscard d`Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, used to speak to each other in English.
The demands of modernization, technological change and international bank funding, still largely controlled by Anglo-American corporations, provide the main reason for global English, the language of the multinational corporations. Of the leading countries in world trade, eight are countries in which English either is an official language or was an official language in colonial times: Australia, Canada, India, Malayasia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the U.S. These countries accounted for more than 25 percent of the world`s imports in 1974. By contrast, only four of the leading countries were French-speaking (Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland), accounting for only 15 percent, the second-highest figure for a language bloc.
Many multinational Japanese companies (like Nissan) write international memoranda in English. The Chase Manhattan Bank gives English instructions to staff members on three continents. Aramco–a big oil multinational–teaches English to more than 10,000 workers in Saudi Arabia. In the university language center in Kuwait, English is the predominant language taught, much of it highly specialized. ”The engineering faculty has its own English language, geared to its own profession,” director Dr. Rasha Al-Sabah, reports, ”so we provide a course in engineering English.” The pressure to learn English in this environment is strictly commercial. A businessman who doesn`t know English and who has to run to his bilingual secretary is at a serious competitive disadvantage. The ”necessity of English” has created some interesting business enterprises, perhaps the most famous being the IVECO heavy truck company. Based in Turin, Italy, financed by French, German and Italian money, staffed by Europeans for whom English is only an alternative language, it nonetheless conducts all its business in English.
Giorgia Bertoldi describes a monthly IVECO board meeting in which ”the vast majority of the people attending are Italian or French or German. But the common language is English. Everybody talks English, and the minutes of these meetings are written in English.” Peter Raahage, a Dane, commented that ”you wouldn`t get a job at a certain level in IVECO if you didn`t speak good English.” Company executives take courses to improve their proficiency. Jean Pierre Neveu, an IVECO product planner, points out that for successful trading in the international truck market, the advantage of communicating with the outside world in English is that the company gets its answers in English.
”This gives two advantages. One is to have a language that is easier for everyone to understand, and second, it does without any translation.”
What is true of individuals and companies applies, at large, to countries. If the people do not know English, they cannot benefit from multinational development programs. The classic case is China. For centuries China preserved a lofty isolation from the outside world. After the Revolution of 1949 it sustained a Marxist contempt for Anglo-American culture. Briefly in the 1960s there was a Russian-learning phase. Then in the late 1970s and 1980s the decision to develop China`s industrial and technological base by encouraging Western investment and Western expertise has led to a crash program of English teaching.
Chinese television began to transmit several English-language classes each week, with titles like ”Yingying Learns English” and ”Mary goes to Peking.” The most popular was a BBC-produced series, ”Follow Me,” which achieved an audience of more than 50 million and transformed the host of the program, Kathy Flower, into a media celebrity. Flower describes the contemporary craze for English in China: ”You go into a shop and find two 60- year-olds practicing the dialogue from `Follow Me` the night before.” The passion for English drives people to make extraordinary sacrifices. A young man whose monthly wages are 36 yuan spends one third of his total income on English classes, dictionaries, cassettes, novels.
For a developing country like China, Singapore or Indonesia, English is vital. As well as being the language of international trade and finance, it is the language of technology, especially of computers, medicine, the international-aid bodies like Oxfam and Save the Children and of virtually all international quasi-diplomatic exchanges, from UNESCO to the World Health Organization to Miss World to the Olympic Committee to world summits. The textbook case in the new sphere of Pacific prosperity is Singapore. Now the most prosperous Far East Asian society after Japan, Singapore is a multiethnic society that has been rigorously educated in English by its long-time prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who was not above lecturing ministers and civil servants on good grammar. Until the mid-1980s the ”English First” policy was seen as integral to the island`s success. Now, with a falling growth rate and the first stirrings of real opposition to the ruling People`s Action Party, the future of Singapore English may be less certain.
The power of English is not confined to the invention and manufacture of new technology. All major corporations advertise and market their products in English. Nowhere is that more dramatically apparent than in Japan. Of all the things Japan has imported from the West (to which Tokyo advertising bears witness), few have had as great an impact as English words. The Japanese have always borrowed words, first from the Portuguese and Dutch who landed in trading ships in the 16th and 18th Centuries, but since the end of World War II so many new words have been added to their vocabulary–more than 20,000 by some estimates–that some fear the language will lose its identity.
Special dictionaries have been produced to explain the meaning of, for example, ”inflight,” ”infield,” ”input” and ”influenza.” Better than these straight imports there is Japlish (or Janglish): fascinating new formations like ”man-shon” (mansion), Japanese for an apartment/condominium; or ”aisu-kurimu” (ice-cream). Ownership is important. If you don`t live in a ”man-shon” you live in a ”mai-homu” (my home). The Japanese now have
”mai-kaa,” ”mai-town,” and ”mai-com” (my computer). Television has embraced Japlish with enthusiasm. One nightly baseball program is called
”Ekusaito Naita” (Excite Niter i.e. ”an exciting night game”). Another popular program of songs is called ”Reffsu Go Yangu” (Let`s Go Young). It was inevitable that when a new weekly glossy magazine was launched in Tokyo in 1985, it bore the name Friday. Even the hit songs in the Tokyo Top 20 have English titles.
English as the language of international pop music and mass entertainment is a worldwide phenomenon. In 1982 a Spanish punk-rock group called Asfalto
(Asphalt) released a disc about learning English that became a hit. The Swedish group Abba records all its numbers in English. Michael Luszynski is a Polish singer who performs almost entirely in English. There is no Polish translation for words like ”Baby-baby” and ”Yeah-yeah-yeah.” Luszynski notes wryly that a phrase like ”Slysze warkot pociagu nadjedzie na torze”
does not roll as smoothly in a lyric as, ”I hear the train a-coming, it`s rolling down the line . . . .” This will sound better to a Pole or to a Japanese simply because they grew up listening to English and American lyrics. With a few exceptions, the culture of popular entertainment and mass consumerism is an Anglo-American one, expressed in varieties of English.
Perhaps the most scientific study of the invasion of a language by English comes from Sweden. Prof. Magnus Ljung of Stockholm University, investigating Swinglish, the English hybrids in the Swedish language, questioned some 2,000 Swedes.
