51. ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE

In Hong Kong you can find a place called the Plastic Bacon Factory. In Naples,

according to the London Observer, there is a sports shop called Snoopy's

Dribbling.

(The name becomes fractionally less alarming when you know that dribbling is

the European term for moving a soccer ball down the field), while in Brussels

there is a men's clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city

it had a sign saying: SWEAT-690 FRANCS. (Closer inspection revealed this to

be a sweatshirt.) In Japan you can drink Homo Milk or Poccari Sweat (a popular

soft drink), eat some chocolate called Hand-Maid Queer-Aid, or go out and buy

some Arm Free Grand Slam Munsingwear.

In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, a largely Muslim city seemingly as remote from

English-speaking culture as any place in Europe, you can find graffiti saying

HEAVY METAL IS LAW! and HOOLIGAN KINGS OF THE NORTH! In the

Europa Hotel in the same city, you will find this message on every door: "Guests

should announce the abandonment of theirs rooms before 1z o'clock, emptying

the room at the latest until 1 4 o'clock, for the use of the room before 5 at the

arrival or after the 16 o'clock at the departure, will be billed as one night more."

Is that clear? In Yugoslavia they speak five languages.

In not one of them does the word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country

says just that.

I bring this up here to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is

the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if they

carry English messages even when, as often happens, the messages don't make a

lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser which says: "Mr. Friendly

Quality Eraser. Mr. Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near you, and steals in

your mind to lead you a good situation." On the bottom of the eraser is a further

message: "We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in

Mother Earth." It is a product that was made in Japan solely for Japanese

consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it. Coke cans in Japan come

with the siogan FEEL COKE & SOUND SPECIAL. A correspondent of The

Economist spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that said:O.D. ON BOURGEOISIE MILK. BOY MILK. A shopping bag carried a picture

of dancing elephants above the legend: ELEPHANT FAMILY ARE HAPPY

WITH US. THEIR HUMMING MAKES US FEEL HAPPY. Some of these

items betray a distinct, and yet somehow comforting, lack of geographical

precision. A shopping bag showing yachts on a blue sea had the message

SWITZERLAND: SEASIDE CITY. A range of products manufactured by a

company called Cream Soda all used to bear the splendidly vacuous message

"Too fast to live, too young to happy." Then some spoilsport informed the

company of its error and the second half of the message was changed to "too

young to die." What is perhaps most worrying is that these meaningless phrases

on clothing are invading the English-speaking world. I recently saw in a London

store a jacket with bold lettering that said: RODEO-100% BOYS FOR ATOMIC

ATLAS. The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for?

So how many people in the world speak English? That's hard to say. We're not

even sure how many native speakers there are.

Different authorities put the number of people who speak English as a first

language at anywhere between 300 million and 400 million. That may seem

sloppily imprecise, but there are some sound reasons for the vagueness. In the

first place, it is not simply a matter of taking all the English-speaking countries

in the world and adding up their populations. America alone has forty million

people who don't speak English—about the same as the number of people in

England who do speak English.

Then there is the even thornier problem of deciding whether a person is speaking

English or something that is like English but is really a quite separate language.

This is especially true of the many English-based creoles in the world, such as

Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, and Neo-Melanesian (sometimes called Tok Pisin),

spoken in Papua New Guinea. According to Dr. Loreto Todd of Leeds University

in England, the world has sixty-one such creoles spoken by up to zoo million

people—enough to make the number of English speakers soar, if you consider

them English speakers.

A second and rather harsher problem is deciding whether a person speaks

English or simply thinks he speaks it. I have before me a brochure from the

Italian city of Urbino, which contains a dozen pages of the most gloriously

baroque and impenetrable English prose, lavishly garnished with misspellings,unexpected hyphenations, and twisted grammar. A brief extract: "The integrity

and thus the vitality of Urbino is no chance, but a conservation due to the factors

constituted in all probability by the approximate framework of the unity of the

country, the difficulty od [sici communications, the very concentric pattern of

hill sistems or the remoteness from highly developed areas, the force of the

original design proposed in its construction, with the means at the disposal of the

new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city even." It goes on like that for a

dozen pages. There is scarcely a sentence that makes even momentary sense. I

daresay that if all the people in Italy who speak English were asked to put up

their hands, this author's arms would be one of the first to fly up, but whether he

can fairly be said to speak English is, to put it charitably, moot.

So there are obvious problems in trying to put a figure to the number of English

speakers in the world. Most estimates put the number of native speakers at about

3,30 million, as compared with 260 million for Spanish, 150 million for

Portuguese, and a little over loo million for French. Of course, sheer numbers

mean little.