Tgk1946's Blog

From Spoken Here (Mark Abley, 2004) pp88-94

After Atlanta was awarded the 1996 Olympic Games, and Sydney the games for 2000, neither Americans nor Australians embarked on a crash course of foreign-language learning. They were confident the world would come to them, trying to speak the language of the hosts. But when Beijing won the right to hold the 2008 games, about six hundred thousand residents of the Chinese capital were told they would have to learn English if they wanted to keep their jobs. Taxi drivers, sales clerks, and many government officials had no choice: unless they could demonstrate a basic grasp of English, they would be fired. The city’s radio waves overflowed with English lessons.

China has some way to go before it catches up with its neighbors. In the 1990s the Far Eastern Economic Review called English “Asia’s premier language,” “part of the identity of a new Asian middle class,” “the single common link among the region’s wildly diverse peoples,” and “Asia’s unifying tongue and its language of opportunity.” Across the world’s biggest and most populous continent, English is often seen as a key to economic growth. It can open other doors, too. In countries like Burma and Tibet, where growth has arrived without democracy, English performs the job it used to perform in South Africa: acting as a language of resistance, a way for oppressed people to make their plight known to the wider world. Aung San Suu Kyi — like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi before her — speaks English. The despots in dark glasses do not.

Once they had a chance to vote on the matter, the subjugated people of East Timor were clear on what they didn’t want: Indonesian soldiers occupying their country. In 1999 they broke free after nearly twenty-five years of Indonesian rule. The occupiers destroyed much of East Timor as they left. Shocked surviving Timorese, as they wandered through the wreckage of their capital city, Dili, found themselves facing hard questions about what they did want.

One of the main issues involved the choice of a national language. The older generation of freedom fighters preferred the colonial tongue, Portuguese, seeing it as central to East Timorese civilization. Most of the young rejected that; schooled in Indonesian, they had no desire to embark on basic Portuguese. Despite the unsavory political baggage that Indonesian carried, some people wanted to continue using it. Still others plumped for Tetum, the most widespread of the nation’s fifteen indigenous languages. But having been suppressed by the Indonesians, it too was foreign to many Timorese.

So a fourth option arose: English, the language of the global market- place, the Dili moneychangers, and many of the U.N. soldiers who were safeguarding the country’s freedom. Independence is no time for nostalgia, the proponents of English said. Even though it’s the mother tongue of nobody in East Timor, is it not essential to prosperity? Fretilin, the party that won the first legislative election, called English “a vital tool for the dissemination of our ideas” and proposed to make it, “to a certain extent,” a working language of the new administration.

The leading specialist on East Timor’s languages, an Australian linguist named Geoffrey Hull, has advised the country’s leadership to pro- mote Tetum and Portuguese. But positive reinforcement alone may not do the trick. Hull also says that foreign companies should be forbidden to label products in English only, that all English-language TV programs should be subtitled in Tetum, and that advertising in English should be banned. If Tetum and Portuguese are to thrive, he warns, the use of English must be limited. For “English is a killer language.”

That’s not how it’s viewed in Malaysia. The country has a magazine, Junior, that could hardly be more different in tone from magazines aimed at teenagers in Europe and North America. Instead of features on fashion, movies, and the music industry, one recent issue contained articles on giant pumpkins, Christmas carols, and Stonehenge. There was a long book review of Rich Dad, Poor Dad: “It exercises the mind to think of possibilities and options which will eventually make the person stronger in terms of achieving financial targets.” There was an article about a Web site called thinkgeek.com. And, taking up more space than nearly everything else in Junior combined, there were English lessons.

They came in various forms. A vocabulary test on the letter u asked for definitions of words like “unequivocal,” “ubiquitous,” and “umbrage.” Sixteen closely printed pages entitled “Language Wisdom” consisted entirely of English exercises. An article on strategies for passing the Malaysian university entrance test concentrated on English fluency: “You don’t study a language, you live it… Speak and read in English whenever you can.” Junior cautioned its readers against dating; instead, a columnist gave advice on English skills. “You must read consistently and write a lot,” she told an anxious student who had asked “What can I do before it is too late?” “You have to read almost all your free time to make up for all that you have lost.”

English is the mother tongue of almost no Malaysians. In number of speakers, the national language, Malay, is followed by Chinese, Hindi, and Tamil. Junior draws readers from each of those groups, because English is one thing they can agree on: it’s desirable to them all. The magazine’s publicity doesn’t bother to claim that Junior is fun; it urges teenagers to “read Junior for self-improvement.” Mastery of English, it appears, is the quintessence of self-improvement.

Flipping past the pages on antonyms, prefixes, suffixes, and punctuation, I came across a general-knowledge quiz for young Malaysians. It had questions on Babe Ruth and the Statue of Liberty. It inquired how tall the towers of the World Trade Center had been. And it asked the location of Coca-Cola’s headquarters. The obvious theme is the United States. But the subtler theme, I think, is power.

Power is language. In a courtroom, when a trial ends, only the judge has the power to “pronounce a sentence.” Worries about pronunciation have led, in South Korea, to a fast-growing syndrome: English envy. As the Los Angeles Times reported in April 2002, rich parents in Seoul and other cities have begun hauling their toddlers to plastic surgeons for a frenectomy — a membrane-slicing operation designed to lengthen the tongue. The procedure does nothing for a child’s ability to speak Korean, but it supposedly helps in the pronunciation of English. With their longer tongues (so the theory goes), Korean children will be able to say “right” and “wrong” without fear of “light” and “long.”

Devotion to English, like any faith, demands proof of commitment from its adherents. In this case, the little children pay the price of their parents’ zeal. Futile for linguists to point out that the sons and daughters of Korean immigrants in Australia and North America learn to dis tinguish r from l just like other kids; futile to explain that Korean and Japanese people often confuse the letters for the simple reason that their own languages don’t enforce that phonetic distinction. A frenectomy, like a circumcision, is a covenant of sorts. It requires a child to be subjected to serious pain in return for the promise of intangible rewards. Snipped membranes are becoming the foreskins of Seoul.

Frenectomies aside, many Korean infants were already spending several hours a day in front of TV sets watching English-instruction videos, and some Korean children were suffering anxiety attacks from the pressure to achieve fluency. “English makes children’s lives hell!” declared a cover story in a national magazine. By 2002 the language had become a business worth three billion dollars a year in South Korea alone. “Learning English,” said the host of an English-language talk show, “is almost the national religion.”

No religion could want a more effective evangelist than China’s Li Yang. Even before the spur of the 2008 Olympics, the former disc jockey claimed to have taught English to more than twenty million Chinese people in a decade. His workplace, as often as not, is a football stadium, where he induces packed crowds to yell out phrases like “No pain, no gain!” “I have heard so much about you!” and “Don’t mention it, anytime!” Li’s meetings have a political edge — the man’s Web site says that his personal motto is “stimulating patriotism, advocating national spirits, conquering English and revitalizing China.” But few of his students show up for the politics. They’re looking for a chance to progress in English outside the constraints of a classroom, where if you make a public mistake you lose face. The coolest way to learn is to participate in the high-decibel rallies of what Li calls “Crazy English.” Above a rock ’n’ roll beat, he tells people to overcome their inhibitions and speak English as fast as possible, as clearly as possible, as loud as possible. Crazy English precludes embarrassment.

Li has led People’s Liberation Army soldiers in shouts of Crazy English atop the Great Wall. He has done the same with Shanghai brokers on the floor of China’s leading stock exchange. His slogans include “Learning English is a piece of cake!” “Make the voice of China be widely heard all over the world!” and “Make 300 million Chinese speak fluent English!” This exclamatory pastime is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise. “The best way to love your country,” the Times of London quoted Li as saying, “is to learn English, get an MBA and run a great business.” As well as being a nationalist and a gifted performer, the man is a realist. “Chinese people don’t learn English because they love it,” he explained, “but because Coca-Cola and Microsoft rule the world.”

It was a task once assumed by the British Empire, and no love was lost between Beijing and London as long as the British ruled Hong Kong. While the Union Jack fluttered above their heads, people in the territory were careful to maintain their Chinese identity. But as the deadline drew near for London to relinquish control, English names in Hong Kong became trendy. Civic Wong. Neon Chan. Jackal Chang. The territory was suddenly alive with people calling themselves Apple, Sherlock, Civil, Cinderella. As long as a name sounded fresh and English, its meaning didn’t matter — any term would do. Shining Sun. Beauty Bee. Businesses followed suit; one company took the name So So Shoes.

In the Hong Kong of the mid-1990s, English was starting to assume the decorative role it had already played for a generation in Japan. There, English has many uses. One of them is to be a fashion accessory – a language whose function is glamour. It doesn’t matter if the glamour carries little or no semantic meaning; the mere atmosphere of English is message enough. The language acts like a brand name. It soothes. It titillates. For its internal market, Japan has produced a soap dish that says “Beautiful time partner,” a pencil case that reads “Your soul, spirit, pride, passion and yourself. Oh, skull and crossbones!” and a T-shirt that asks, “Would you like to make some love? Nope. You have to lost weight, right?” Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in November 2000, Barbara Wallraff cast doubt on the idea that English is becoming the language of the world. She observed that the number of mother-tongue speakers of English is still dwarfed by the number of mother-tongue Chinese speakers, and that a few other big languages, such as Spanish and Hindi, are also growing fast. While English is widely spoken in foreign classrooms, the exact total of second-language learners is impossible to pin down. Many people find it in their interest to overestimate their command of English. The language still has a long way to go before it is truly global.

All this is true — and beside the point. When it comes to science and business, technology and entertainment, politics and engineering, the dominance of English is incontestable. It is the common idiom of the world’s elite, the repository of global ambition. It has become, if you like, the defolt language of the planet. Als cool, bebi. A century from now, perhaps only the poor, the old, the isolated, and the stubborn will be unable to function in English.

Wallraff’s article elicited dozens of replies and commentaries on the Atlantic’s Web site. A Scotsman living in the long-contested region of Alsace noted that parents on the French side of the border with Germany want their kids to learn English (“What’s the point of learning German?”). Their neighbors across the Rhine share the same desire (“What’s the point of learning French?”). The European future, to this correspondent, appears monolingual: “This is sad. Language is at the heart of a country’s culture. There is something rich and satisfying about French. Subtle and appealing. But it will become a handicap. The Internet will see to that. I only hope I am wrong. Europe and the world will be a sadder place.”

Another respondent was blunter: U.S. English, he said, is destined to dominate the world. “Commerce demands it and the growing need for universal law supports it. It’s not even much of an issue . . . It’s pretty much unstoppable short of nuclear winter.” For this man, a language is a tool, a verbal machine. Other correspondents raised questions of diversity and cultural nuance, provoking a terse rejoinder: “Nuance is highly overrated. In business and law the Last thing I want is nuance. In nuance is a legal case. I want stark, bleak, naked, cold and heartless clarity in my business documents. And that is what I shall have.”

If clarity is winning out over diversity, the dream of Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof is coming true at last. Part of the dream, anyway. Zamenhof was a Jewish eye doctor in Bialystok, a city that now lies in eastern Poland near the border of Belarus. In the 1870s, when he began his life’s work on languages, the city stood in the heartland of Yiddish. It was a crossroads for Russians and Poles, Jews and Gypsies, Germans and Ukrainians and Lithuanians. Zamenhof’s father taught languages in Bialystok, but the young man rebelled against such work. “In that town,” he was to write, “an impressionable soul might . . . become convinced at every step that the diversity of languages was the single, or at least the primary, force which divided the human family into unfriendly parts.”

So he set out to invent a new language — a language whose rules are simple, straightforward, and free of annoying exceptions. Zamenhof built its vocabulary from a mixture of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic roots. All its nouns end in -o, all its adjectives in -a, all its adverbs in -e. No letters are silent. Thanks to the systematic use of suffixes and infixes, the language has the virtue (if it is a virtue) of predictability. A tree is arbo; a small tree is arbeto; a big tree is arbego; a forest is arbaro. Near is proksima; far is mal’proksima. True is vera; false is mal’vera. Hot is varma; you can guess the word for cold. But try as he might, Zamenhof couldn’t get away from ideology. Man is viro; woman is vir’ino. A husband is edzo; a wife is edzino. At the base of the language is maleness; anything female is an afterthought.

If everyone were to speak his rational idiom, Zamenhof thought, conflicts between nations would dissolve. In 1887 he published An International Language: Preface and Complete Grammar, a book whose goals were as grand as its title suggests. The author used the pseudonym of “Dr. Esperanto” — Dr. Hopeful, that is. Esperanto became the name of the language and of an entire movement, complete with flag and anthem. Enthusiasts took it up around the world. Thousands of books would be published in Esperanto. Millions of people would learn it. Bertrand Russell and Leo Tolstoy were among its early advocates, Umberto Eco and Vaclav Havel among its later admirers. You can now find Web sites devoted to the language. It may still have a couple of million speakers. Yet the enthusiasm is gone: Esperanto is fading away.

The main reason is the sprawl of English. Amid the polyglot confusion of eastern Europe — a confusion that was, of course, immensely creative — Zamenhof never imagined that any existing language would become so dominant. He conceived of Esperanto as neutral territory, a realm of the mind where all peoples could gather as equals. A noble ideal, while it lasted. But his language came without factories or stock markets. No government would issue decrees in it; no studio would make movies in it; no army would fight on its behalf. Lacking any sort of power, Esperanto didn’t have a hope.