English as a global language

I often overlook the opportunities I’ve been given as a native English speaker. I don’t have any teaching qualifications and don’t plan to make a career as an English teacher, but it has been a good way to live here and support myself. There’s never been another language that has reached the scope and influence of English. Latin was the lingua franca of Europe for centuries, but it never reached a global scale (I guess it has in scientific nomenclature, but it’s not used much in any other context).

At the earliest stages of globalization, languages and cultures and economic systems mixed as people traveled and traded around the world, and what happens with any clash between standards (not unlike VHS versus Beta or BluRay versus HDVD), the most popular one – not always the best one – wins out entirely and becomes the standard. In this case, the Anglo-American culture and economic system was the most powerful, so it became the world standard. There’s never been language teachers travelling the globe as there are today with English teachers, so I should consider myself lucky having been born at the time and place where I was. On a related note, last week I went to a gathering for a Changzhou expat group and the language everyone used to converse was English, even though less than a quarter of the attendees were from English speaking countries. It was mostly Europeans, particularly from France, Germany and Austria, and a few from Turkey. In general, among the foreign companies in Changzhou, if they aren’t Japanese, Taiwanese, or Korean, then they are most likely French or German.

The Chinese script had a similar role in East Asia as Latin did in western Europe. The system of Chinese characters is one part of the written Japanese language and was formerly used in the Vietnamese and Korean languages. Chinese will become more important as a world language (see an excellent article on the spread of Mandarin) but, to make a snap judgment, it’s unlikely to become the global language when English is already so widely in use around the world in business and academia. And Chinese has some disadvantages that limit it’s appeal beyond East Asia, such as the difficult writing system. Another related note: one of the eminent American scholars of the Chinese language, John DeFrancis, died this month. He was a persistent critic of the Chinese writing system and advocated reforms that went far beyond the simplification of a number of common characters in the mid-20th century.

One of the reasons English has been widely adopted and extremely successful as a world language is because it adopts foreign words and phrases so easily (but that does make spelling difficult; I’m often explaining to students “this is a French word, that’s why the vowels are strange” or “this word comes from Greek, that’s why the ‘ph’ is used in place of ‘f’). Chinese has no easy method of importing foreign words; acronyms are left unchanged but foreign words and names are translated into characters that sound similar (or close enough). I like learning the names of foreign people, cities, and companies, because some are hilarious ( “Mi er wo ji” for Milwaukee, “Pu li se tong ne” for Bridgestone, “A nuo Shi wa xin ge” for Arnold Schwarzenegger – the last two sound pretty close if you say them fast). Interestingly, Japanese has a separate alphabet, in addition to using traditional Chinese characters, that is used for transcribing foreign words.

One consequence of the large number of speakers using English as a second language and the flexibility of the English lexicon and grammar is that it is rapidly evolving outside of the countries where it is officially spoken. When there are many more students learning English in China than are people in the United States, it will be altered a great deal by those second language speakers, and we should realize that we now have far less influence over how it evolves.

Finally, here’s a discussion of the few English words that come from Chinese (from the obvious – ginseng – to the unexpected – ketchup).