Cocky, smug, overweening – it is lucky that English is such a profligate tongue, with so many words available to describe subtle shades of meaning for various things, in this case its sense of superiority over its siblings in the global family of language.
English is the most widely spoken language the world has ever known, prodigiously dominant despite being notoriously difficult to learn. This is possibly another reason why it has tickets on itself, to employ an Australian idiom.
It has about 400 million native speakers. When you add to that those who use it as a second language, around 1.5 billion people can chew the fat in the mother tongue every day. According to the Guardian, it is “the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology”.
The primary reason, in time and importance, is empire – the British empire really was one on which the sun never set, and wherever on the globe it went, and in whatever time zone it measured the hours, it did not waste any of those hours learning the local lingo. Instead, it imposed its own on its conquests. The devastating effects have been well reported and were as severe in Aotearoa New Zealand as anywhere else.
LINGUISTIC MONGREL
The colonisers did not speak anything that could be described as pure English because English is not pure. It is a polyglot tongue, a linguistic mongrel, born out of various waves of invasion and colonisation of England itself. The language of the original Celtic speakers was modified first by German invaders (Angles and Saxons) and then by French (Normans). As the instructional website englishlive.ef.com puts it, English “takes … Germanic and Norse grammatical roots and pronouns and prepositions [and] adds in the extensive French and Latin-influenced vocabulary.” No wonder it’s hard to learn.
It has achieved dominance for a variety of reasons. For one, it is supremely adaptable, appropriated handy bits of the local language wherever it went, taking words from other languages wherever it goes: pyjama, bungalow, sauna.
Surely all this is to the good. It was the goal of Esperanto, the artificially constructed universal language founded in 1887 so that the children of men might come together united by a common tongue. To see how well a common tongue works to unite people, one need only look across the Pacific to the United States.
There are other reasons to temper enthusiasm about the dominance of English, not least that this can be mistaken for superiority. This phenomenon is particularly insidious in scientific research, where there has been a creeping assumption that if your results are published in English, they are more significant than if they appear in another language. Surely there is something wrong if you’re just doing your work in Polish.
MEANING MATTERS
Anthropologists and linguists still argue about whether a language has specific forms of knowledge or ways of looking at the world within it. In Aotearoa New Zealand that argument seems to have been well settled. NZ English has incorporated words such as whanāu, whakapapa, mahi and many more. They would not be in use if they did not describe something for which English does not have exactly that meaning.
This phenomenon has led some thinkers to argue for teaching pre-colonial languages. How would it affect American society if its children grew up with a knowledge of American Indian languages?
Alongside such thinking is small but tangible evidence that the global dominance of English is facing some challenges. It has a hefty competitor increasingly throwing its weight around on the neighbourhood language block: Chinese. As China has spread its influence into Africa and the Pacific, it has put its mouth where its money is with considerable investments in more than 40 schools around the world to teach Chinese language and culture through its Confucius Institute network. There are now 500 of these in 138 countries, including NZ.
Paradoxically although the technology of the internet accelerated the spread of English, other technology means it is no longer necessary to understand it. Computerised translation mechanisms are increasingly sophisticated, meaning it is possible for non-speakers to understand each other via online translation.
“We will at some point have devices that translate our speech into any major language,” says Gaston Dorren, author of the language history Babel. “We’re not quite there yet and it may take longer than the boffins think, for language is more complex than they give it credit for.”
As you may have noticed.
