Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 28, 2018 at 4:12:29 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]
>
> Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
> No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting? 
> By Jacob Mikanowski
> Jul 27 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance>
>
> On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking 
> Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one 
> employee: “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English … This is America.” A 
> video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with 
> one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a “fiesta” protest in front of his Manhattan apartment 
> building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.
>
> As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on 
> a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of 
> English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating 
> English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a 
> hundred years. It’s a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 address to the American 
> Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that “we have room for but one language here, and that is the English 
> language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not 
> as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse”.
>
> As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to 
> dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years 
> ago. Yet from a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that 
> is threatened by English.
>
> Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious 
> beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 
> 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official 
> language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used 
> by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of 
> education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the 
> have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, 
> avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, 
> literatures mangled.
>
> One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so 
> many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from 
> Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant 
> superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a 
> German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English – he is the author of the collections 
> Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes – published the Dictionary of European 
> Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include 
> “last-minute”, “fitness”, “group sex”, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.
>
> In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem 
> the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist 
> Lauren Collins has wryly noted: “Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are going 
> to trade out ‘sexting’ for texto pornographique?”) Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly 
> sped up.
>
> The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The 
> writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of 
> denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or 
> grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the 
> style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily 
> digestible in an anglophone context.
>
> [snip]
>
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