Can’t You Speak English?!

Is there such a thing as “proper English”?  And how many of us who write and read it each day - whether as a first, or second, or third language - really speak it?

Language is inextricable from human culture, and the study of languages has always fascinated me.  I love looking at the transformation of a language over time, and the various permutations or offshoots of a language (for example, French Creole), along with the differences between different languages.  Differences and changes tell us a lot about the people that speak them, their world view and beliefs, and their relationships to speakers of similar or very dissimilar dialects.

If you’re like me, you believe that language is living, and always changing, and try not to put too much of a positive or a negative spin on the specific changes.  A great example of some radical change is the rise of “Chinglish” in recent Wired article “How English is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand“:

The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They’re the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means “handicapped bathroom.”)

But what if these sentences aren’t really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be.

As the article astutely points out, “By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.”

Regardless of your perspective, this fact is likely to have fascinating consequences for the future of the English language.  This conjures up all kinds of questions that intertwine with culture, politics, economics and technology.  Is there such a thing as an “authentic” or proper language?  (It’s been changing for hundreds of years, and was spoken and written pretty differently even 100-200 years ago–think of Shakespeare!)  What is true language fluency?  Should we attempt to keep a language “pure”?  And if so, what are the costs (both monetary, social, and political) of doing so?

The above statistic, and the pervasive use (both in daily life and in high-level business transactions) of English offshoots like Singlish or various Pidgin languages lead me to think we are too late to “save” the English language (if it even needs saving).  Ask many British citizens and they will say the cause was lost long ago with us Americans.

I’d advocate instead keeping nimble by getting as much familiarity as possible with these other forms of English – from Delhi to Dalian.

For a less serious look at Chinglish (or “bad English” if this is what you believe), check out this fun site.