52. ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE (Part-2)

Mandarin Chinese, or Guoyo, spoken by some 750 million people, has twice as

many speakers as any other language in the world, but see how far that will get

you in Rome or Rochester. No other language than English is spoken as an

official language in more countries—forty-four, as against twenty-seven for

French and twenty for Spanish—and none is spoken over a wider area of the

globe. English is used as an official language in countries with a population of

about i.6 billion, roughly a third of the world total.

Of course, nothing like that number of people speak it—in India, for instance, it

is spoken by no more than 40 or 50 million people out of a total population of

loo million—but it is still used competently as a second language by perhaps as

many as 400 million people globally.

Without any doubt, English is the most important language in the world, and it is

not hard to find impressive statistics to prove it.

"Two thirds of all scientific papers are published in English," says The

Economist. "Nearly half of all business deals in Europe are conducted in

English," says The Story of English. "More than seventy percent of the world's

mail is written and addressed in English," says Lincoln Barnett in The Treasureof Our Tongue." It is easy to let such impressive figures run away with us. The

Story of English notes that the main television networks of the United States,

Britain, and Canada enjoy audiences that "regularly exceed one hundred

million." Since the population of the United Kingdom is 56 million and that of

Canada only a little over 25 million, that claim would seem to be exaggerated.

So too almost certainly is the same book's claim that "in total there are probably

more than a billion speakers of English, at least a quarter of the world's

population."

The simple fact is that English is not always spoken as widely or as

enthusiastically as we might like to think. According to U.S. News & World

Report [February 18, 1985], even in Switzerland, one of the most polyglot of

nations, no more than io percent of the people are capable of writing a simple

letter in English.

What is certain is that English is the most studied and emulated language in the

world, its influence so enormous that it has even affected the syntax of other

languages. According to a study by Magnus Ljung of Stockholm University,

more than half of all Swedes now make plurals by adding -s, after the English

model, rather than by adding -ar, -or, or -er, in the normal Swedish way.

The hunger for English is gargantuan. When the BBC English-teaching series

Follow Me was first broadcast in China, it drew audiences of up to one hundred

million people. (This may also tell us a little something about the quality of

alternative viewing in China.) The presenter of the program, Kathy Flower, an

unknown in England, is said to be the most familiar British face in China after

the queen. At all events, there are more people learning English in China than

there are people in the United States. The teaching of English, according to The

Economist, is worth £6 billion a year globally. It is estimated to be Britain's sixth

largest source of invisible earnings, worth some £5043 million a year.

English words are everywhere. Germans speak of die Teenagers and das Walkout

and German politicians snarl "No comment" at German journalists. Italian

women coat their faces with col-cream, Romanians ride the trolleybus, and

Spaniards, when they feel chilly, don a sueter. Almost everyone in the world

speaks on the telephone or the telefoon or even, in China, the to le fung. And

almost everywhere you can find hamburgers, nightclubs, and television. In 1986,

The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or lessuniversal. They were: airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette,

sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no

problem. As The Economist put it: "The presence of so many words to do with

travel, consumables and sport attests to the real source of these exports—

America."

Usually English words are taken just as they are, but sometimes they are adapted

to local needs, often in quite striking ways. The Serbo-Croatians, for instance,

picked up the English word nylon but took it to mean a kind of shabby and

disreputable variation, so that a nylon hotel is a brothel while a nylon beach is

the place where nudists frolic. Other nations have left the words largely intact

but given the spelling a novel twist. Thus the Ukrainian herkot might seem

wholly foreign to you until you realized that a herkot is what a Ukrainian goes to

his barber for. Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly

recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream, the

Lithuanian for moving pictures, and the Serbo-Croatian for payday. The

champion of this naturalization process must be the Italian schiacchenze, which

is simply a literal rendering of the English shake hands.

The Japanese are particular masters at the art of seizing a foreign word and

alternately beating it and aerating it until it sounds something like a native

product. Thus the sumato (smart) and nyuu ritchi (newly rich) Japanese person

seasons his or her conversation with upatodatu expressions like gurama foto

(glamour photo), hai-kurasu (high class), kyapitaru gein (capital gain), and

rushawa (rush hour). Sebiro, for a suit of clothes, looks convincingly native until

you realize that it is a corruption of Savile Row, the London street where the

finest suits are made. Occasionally the borrowed words grow. Productivity was

stretched and mauled until it emerged as purodakuchibichi, which, despite its

greater length, sits more comfortably on the Japanese tongue. But for the most

part the Japanese use the same sort of ingenuity miniaturizing English words as

they do in miniaturizing televisions and video cameras. So modern girl comes

out as moga, word processor becomes wa-pro, mass communications becomes

masu-komi, and commercial is brusquely truncated into a short, sharp cm. No-

pan, short for no-panties, is a description for bottomless waitresses, while the

English words touch and game have been fused to make tatchi geimu, a

euphemism for sexual petting.