Each new language you learn means you have acquired another soul, according to an east European proverb. You don’t have to be a romantic to believe that your language, much more than your currency, defines a national community and culture. English speakers are fortunate – our language is becoming the universal form of linguistic exchange. But every other language is at the receiving end of English’s triumph, raising all manner of fundamental fears. It is one of the reasons that globalisation is regarded with increasing suspicion; it implies the slow death of the cultures that are embodied in languages other than English.
The disappearance of the world’s small languages is now happening at a rapid pace.
David Crystal, honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor, says that half the world’s currently spoken 6,000 languages will have died out over the next century. But it is not just 3,000 means of technically talking to each other that will have disappeared; 3,000 means of understanding the world will have died as well.
Wittgenstein is the most famous exponent of the notion that the structure of language is the essence of being. “The world is all that is the case” was the first of his famous propositions in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but the last was “The limits of my world are the limits of my language”; language, in other words, is all. It is
not merely the key to meaning; it defines our very humanity.
But the issue is not only the future of small languages; larger languages are under pressure too. Wittgenstein would have had understood the growing tensions over the use of language in the European Union, and which is going to become more acute if the EU expands to 27 countries. Translation between the 11 languages of the EU consumes a third of the commission’s administrative budget, and every country assuming the presidency of Europe’s Council of Ministers has to decide how much money it will spend on translation.
It has fallen to Finland, during the current presidency, to stir up the linguistic hornet’s nest. It has elected
not to translate German, so that for four months there has been a running battle between the Germans and Austrians, outraged that their language should be relegated to the same standing as Greek or, worse, Catalan. German may be spoken by 100 millions members of the EU, but it is not one of the EU’s official languages.
But the Germans themselves are not their language’s most ardent defenders. “Schröder go home” shouted the placards at a union demonstration in Berlin recently. Equally, the language of most of Germany’s top companies is English. Daimler-Benz, having taken over Chrysler, speak English at board
and senior management level; same story at Deutsche Bank, Siemens and BMW. The European Central-Bank, based in Frankfurt, has given up completely; its working language is English. English words and sentences pop up all over Germany, inserting English values into the bedrock of Germanness.
The Germans are on the
way to becoming like the Dutch, Scandinavians and Swiss; English is, in effect, their second language, in which a growing number of citizens are effectively bilingual. You cannot pursue an international career without English or even understand the lyrics of most popular music; the German top 20 always contains songs in English. It is no accident that one of Britain’s booming
industries is English teaching; the UK earns more than $3 by a year teaching English to 600,000 students annually.
The open question is whether the increasing role of English in Europe portends it driving out the native languages. Crystal argues that bilingualism tends to be a phase before the dominant language, even in such countries as Denmark or Sweden, it will be because the political, economic and social elite will have taken a deliberate decision to drop their native language and adopt English.
The more probable outcome is that Europe’s will continue to speak their own language together with English, rather as the Boers in South Africa speak both Afrikaans and English. The dropping of your own language is not something you do voluntarily; it contains too much meaning and culture for that. It is only if your language is overwhelmed by the size and power of others that it is extinguished because the dominant economic and political forces in the culture have not the power to sustain their own
language before the challenge; the 3,000 languages that Crystal predicts will disappear will be the languages of tiny native tribes and groupings.
So the likelihood is that the large, native, non-English national languages in the EU will survive, at the same time as most Europeans acquire English as a second language. In the process, Europe will have achieved a vital goal – the common language it needs to begin the establishment of a genuine common European economic and political culture.
The British look on this process with benevolent indulgence; it is our language, after all, that is becoming the new common second language. The more dangerous threat we do not appreciate is that British English is under the same
threat as German and French; the dynamism of English comes from the United States. American English contains ideas and values that are as foreign to us as English is to German and French, but which are immediately transparent when French and German speakers use English and makes them so hawklike about the consequences.
The British don’t have that advantage. While other Europeans may manage to sustain their cultures and gain access to a new common language, we risk simply becoming the melting-pot. Unless we are as attentive as other Europeans to our culture; to speak English as our native tongue could be as much a curse as an advantage.
American English contains ideas and values that are as foreign to us as English is to German or French
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