From: Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk

Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 12:24:12 GMT

Message-Id: <9502271224.AA09019@nene.cl.cam.ac.uk>

To: rebato-l@netcom.com

Cc: Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk

Subject: The Times, 1995-02-25

Sender: owner-rebato-l@netcom.com

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THE TIMES

Saturday February 25 1995

pa^go 18

Adreso:

The Times

Letters to the Editor

1 Pennington Street

London

E1 9XN

Fakso: +44 171 782 5046

Telefono: +44 171 782 5000

"Letters to the Editor should carry a daytime telephone number. They

may be sent to a fax number -- 0171-782 5046."

Notoj:

Mi legigis la artikolon per OmniPage kaj rapide provlegis. Mi lasas la

originalon apud la komputilo, do vi povas demandi pri eventualaj

eraroj. La nekutima literumo "cringeing" estas en la originalo.

"The Times" estas unu el la gravaj tutlandaj "seriozaj" ^jurnaloj de

Britio.

Subtitolo de bildo de du ^capelportantaj blankuloj parolantaj al

negroj: "A missionary at work in Africa, circa 1800: more than a

billion people are now thought to be English-speakers, so easy is the

language to learn"

>>

The triumph of English

Simon Jenkins

Our infinitely

adaptable mother

tongue is now the

world's lingua

franca -- and not

before time

Sensational news from across

the Atlantic. Representative

Peter King this week intro-

duced a Bill into Congress

declaring that "English be the official

United States language". He wants

all federal support for other lan-

guages and bilingual programmes to

cease forthwith. English, says Mr

King, is the "the bond that unites the

American people".

This is the moment for which the

British have been waiting since the

Boston Tea Party. Pitt is cheering in

his grave. The Spanish dogs are

cringeing in their lairs. As for the

French, pouff! They are nowhere to

be seen. Their response on Thursday

was to expose four CIA men for

engaging in "cultural espionage".

This is Gallic paranoia. The men

were reportedly trying to decipher

some "intellectual property" that has

long baffled American intelligence,

presumably the French language.

Like Mr King, I have always

believed that the sooner the world

speaks English, the happier and

more prosperous it will be. Promot-

ing this language should be a priority

of the United Nations. At the last

count, 650 artificial world languages

have been tried. Esperanto is the

latest to collapse. None has worked

because English has triumphed.

Those who do not speak it are at a

universal disadvantage against those

who do. Those who deny this

supremacy merely seek to keep the

disadvantaged deprived. Mr King is

right: "By encouraging new Ameri-

cans to continue to use their native

language . . . the Government is help-

ing to exclude these immigrants from

mainstream society and any access to

economic progress."

When I first travelled on the

Continent an obligatory item of

equipment was the phrasebook. To-

day most travellers -- tourists, stu-

dents, researchers, businessmen --

simply do not bother. Most of the

people with whom they have contact

reckon to speak English, or are

embarrassed if they do not. This is

not Anglo-chauvinism or linguistic

indolence among English-speakers

(though it is partly the latter). It is an

economic and cultural fact. English

will do in Africa, Russia, the Middle

East, India, South-East Asia, Austral-

asia. It will do because English is the

language the world wants to learn, as

the British Council knows well.

When the Warsaw Pact was wound

up, it was wound up in English.

When the G7 meets, it meets in

English. English is the language of

the United Nations antechamber, of

international peacekeeping, of world

banking, of diplomacy, of air traffic

control. English is the language of

academic research, space travel and

scientific discovery. I am told that

only 10 per cent of library requests for

science and technology material

worldwide are for non-English publi-

cations. English is the global comput-

er language. It is the language of

news gathering and world entertain-

ment. The only sub-

stantial world body

that struggles to

keep going in a

"foreign" tongue is

the French-speak-

ing European Com-

mission in Brussels.

With luck, enlarge-

ment will put an

end to that.

Linguists used to

attribute the dominance of English to

imperial history: "Had it not been for

Francis Drake, the world would

speak Spanish." Yet Spain, Portugal,

The Netherlands and Arabia all have

imperial histories. The world's most

prominent tongue is Han Chinese,

with more than a billion adherents

but it is not one language, being as

variegated as French, Spanish or

Italian. There are 370 million native

English speakers and 240 million

Spanish speakers in the world,

followed by Hindi, Arabic, Bengali

and Russian in that order. Add those

who now treat. and use, English as

an official language or a lingua

franca (such as millions of Indians

and Africans) and English shoots

over the billion mark. The Cam-

bridge Encyclopaedia of Language

puts it at a maximum of 1.4 billion

speakers.

To deny English supremacy is not

to stand up for little nations or for

cultural diversity: it simply keeps

non-English speakers poor. It also

costs millions of pounds in transla-

tion. Linguistic chauvinism stops

young people getting better jobs and

stops their communities from inte-

grating into wider polities. One of the

poorest states in

south India used to

be Kerala. In the

1960s the state gov-

ernment introduced

compulsory Eng-

lish into the schools.

The state is now one

of the richest, since

Keralans can do

business in an inter-

national tongue and

find jobs throughout the Middle

East. This has not damaged Keralan

culture.

English has not won the battle to be

the world's language through a trial

of imperial strength. As the American

linguist Braj Kachru points out,

English has achieved its hegemony

through its inherent qualities, by "its

propensity for acquiring new identi-

ties . . . its range of varieties and

above all its suitability as a flexible

medium for literary and other types

of creativity. "

English has few inflections,

endings or cases. Its grammar is

based on simple word order. It has no

clicks, tones or implosives. Its alpha-

bet is phonetic and has 26 letters

(against 74 in Khmer and 85 in

Cherokee). A student of Chinese or

Japanese must learn 2,000 charac-

ters. English script can be scrawled

and shorthanded. As a spoken

tongue, it may be an ugly duckling

alongside Italian or Irish. Yet its

pidgins are easy to learn. Any

language that can enable Shake-

speare to talk to Al Haig is a triumph

of communication.

English need not be protected by

French Academies, Canadian consti-

tutions or Flemish language rioters.

It can survive in the backstreets of

Harlem or the opium trails of Burma,

on a Soyuz spacewalk or the throne at

Buckingham Palace. The world must

just take a deep breath and admit

that it has a universal language at

last. It would save itself much money

and trouble. The one quid pro quo it

should demand is that English

lexicographers bow before the great

Webster, and accept American or-

thography. English spelling is still

awful. If we English can alter denie

interiour and musick, we can surely

end the absurdity of thorough, centre

and enough, if the world is to learn

them by heart.

Then linguists can devote

themselves to defending and

preserving the world's "sec-

ond" languages, not as rivals

of English but as manifestations of

ethnic and cultural character. Eng-

lish is a bastard tongue, displaying

character only in dialect. To want to

protect French from Anglicisation as

an international language is a lost

cause. To protect French as one of the

aesthetic marvels of European civili-

sation is essential. To insist that

Welsh sit alongside English on a

Dyed station or in a Cardiff parking

ticket brings ridicule on a lovely

language. But by all means encour-

age it in schools, promote its litera-

ture, even subsidise its television

channel.

Language is the most vivid trace

element of ethnicity in the world's

history and geography. I am in-

trigued that there may once have

been 2,000 distinct languages in

South America, relics of the primeval

grunts that mankind brought across

the Aleutian bridge from Siberia in

10,000 BC. Few of them were record-

ed and only some 600 still survive,

most of them still unstudied.

I am equally intrigued by the

"isolates", languages whose vocabu-

lary and grammar evolved from the

earliest past uncontaminated by any

other tongue. Most have gone:

among a handful of survivals are the

Japanese Ainu, the Mexican Tarasca

and the precious, mysterious Basque,

Europe's only aboriginal tongue.

These languages merit the protec-

tion we give to works of ancient

architecture. They are the archaeolo-

gy of civilisation; full of wisdom

legend and beauty, messages from

the Earth's own time-travellers. All

this will vanish if linguists expend

their energies trying to compete with

English. So Congress must vote the

King language Bill. John Major

might even take a leaf from the same

book and demand English language

supremacy in Europe at the 1996

summit. That is an act of federalist

harmonisation that should warm the

most sceptical heart.

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