About a decade ago, while backpacking with a group of friends, I arrived late one evening in front of a sausage stand in Vienna. We picked through our pockets, trying to figure out what we could buy with the last of our schillings before we caught a train to Hungary. “Bitte . . . wurst . . . ?” asked Pete, working through his meager memories of high school German. The owner just stared at him. “Viel?” he tried. Nothing. Finally, exasperated, I jumped in. “Do you speak English?”
“Of course!” he cried.
Of course! Why would the guy running the street cart in a back street of Austria in the middle of the night not speak English? Why wouldn’t a Cyclo driver in Vietnam, or a Turkish backgammon player, or a Romanian cabaret owner, or any of the other members of the international community who have greeted me with a hearty “Hello, American!” not speak our mother tongue with a larger vocabulary than most VH-1 reality stars?
No, English is not the most widely-spoken language in the world. Mandarin is. In some surveys, Spanish also ranks higher in native speakers. But these win by population alone. By and large, 1 language, the one that a Chinese person would use to speak to a Spaniard, English has quickly become the unchallenged leader.
A half-century of American cultural dominance has made English the preference of businessmen, programmers and – much to the annoyance of the French – diplomats. Yesterday, the Eurovision song contest concluded in Moscow. Though all the nations of Europe enter this crazed pop-music competition, the primary language used – much to the annoyance of the Russians, the Germans, and the French (again) – is English.
This would seem shocking to a scholar in the Shakespearean era, when, even with the expansion of the British Empire, English speakers numbered only about two million. It would even surprise the international studies departments of the 1960s, when English speakers topped 250 million, and popular academic opinion was that the language would stumble on the global stage.
But the Internet has put English on the verge of ubiquity. It’s by far the most-used language on the Web, with 452 million speakers. The Chinese – who number 321 million online – could play catch-up, but they’ll find, as a rule of thumb 2, a global community built primarily using English-based programming, presented primarily in English.
Why should we give a damn 3? Because, particularly in the past 10 years, English has begun to approach what was once the realm of science fiction novels and dubbed movies – a language the whole world speaks.
“It’s not politically correct to say it, because people think it’s a product of imperialism,” says Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst for Global Language Monitor. “But English has become the de facto global language. That’s the reality.”
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Getting down to brass tacks 4: How has English become the lingua franca? The same way we got that phrase from the Italians – stealing.
Payack’s Austin-based company analyzes buzzwords for businesses, but by far its own most buzz-worthy claim is that the English language is approaching 1 million words. With 14.7 words added to the vocabulary every day, Payack says, we’ll pass that benchmark at 10:22 a.m. Stratford-on-Avon time on June 10.
The prediction is controversial, since no one can agree on what constitutes a “word.” The Unabridged Oxford Dictionary has 450,000 entries, Merriam Webster’s Unabridged has 650,000. They include some disputable terms – say, “OK”5 or “ain’t” – that would make your 5th grade English teacher wince. But they do not yet have “zombie bank,” which describes bankrupt financial institutions that continue to operate. Or “Jai Ho,” the Hindi word made popular by “Slumdog Millionaire.” Dictionaries decide every year what to keep and what to discard, ruling, for instance, that “bling” makes the cut, but “ROTFL” does not. No one really knows how many words are in English, because the measure itself is arbitrary.
But if June 10 may not be the exact date English goes platinum, there’s a good chance we will someday – or have already – crossed the million-word mark.
That’s because the language is a mutt that – from its inception – has attracted an amalgam of immigrants, invention and slang. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes kicked things off in the 5th century, bringing their own brand of low Germanic to the Isle of Britain. Then, in 1066, the Normans, French-speaking Vikings, rolled in, influencing the local Anglo-Saxon language, which itself had absorbed parts of Celtic and Old Norse.
About the time of the Renaissance, Latin and Greek was thrown into the whole kit and caboodle 6 by scholars who considered Middle English vulgar. The centuries roll by, and words keep getting absorbed – “alcohol” from Arabic, “bungalow” from Hindi. Which is why only the English-speaking world can be entertained by a spelling bee. To know another language is to know how to spell it. In English, who knows where that word has been, or what rule it must follow?
We still add foreign words to our lexicon, but neologisms are the more common additions today. At the Global Language Monitor, Payack weighs the spread of “recessionista” and “chiconomics” for possible inclusion, and already believes “defriend” – as in, to drop someone on a social networking site – has reached critical mass.
There are those who wince at the continued bastardization of English, “prescriptivists” who believe in rules and dictionaries. Then there are those who, like Payack, are “descriptivists,” embrace this constant evolution of English. Theirs is a struggle of geeks, described by author David Foster Wallace as “the seamy underbelly of US lexicography [of] ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor.” While admitting that English has, over time, changed from using “thou” to “you,” and accepted words such as “clever,” “banter” and “prestigious” (all considered errors or slang at first), Wallace nevertheless considered himself a prescriptivist, someone who stood up for the idea that certain constructions are better than others. Ebonics did not amuse him.
But Payack believes that its English’s very adaptability that has encouraged its spread. France, for instance, has a national language authority, an arbiter of what is right and faux. “English is the people’s language,” Payack says. “Young people learning it think of it as their own. It evolves from the bottom up.”
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Of course, just because English is so adaptable, so absorbing, doesn’t mean we use all its armaments.
Oxford says 47,156 words in its own dictionary are considered “obscure,” while one need only visit a few online Scrabble sites to taste the arcane depths of our tongue.
David Crystal, the author of numerous books on English, has said the best way to measure a language’s size is not by entries in a dictionary, but vocabulary. And not just any vocabulary.
“The distinction between ‘words’ and ‘lexemes’ 7 is critical when you’re studying vocabulary. If we count Shakespeare’s words, in the grammatical sense, we get around 30,000. If we count Shakespeare’s lexemes, we get less than 20,0007,” he writes on his blog.
How many words do you really know? Crystal suggests you go through about 20 pages in a medium-sized dictionary, counting the words you understand. Multiply that number by the number of pages in the dictionary.
“Most people know half the words – about 50,000 – easily. A reasonably educated person about 75,000,” he told the BBC. “An ordinary person, one who has not been to university say, would know about 35,000 quite easily.” But even that number does not reflect our “active” language, the words that actually cut the mustard 8 – which averages about a third less than what we know.
Reaching 1 million words – which Crystal thinks has already happened, if you factor in slang and technical terms – is irrelevant to English’s reach. What is relevant: that the words in the active vocabulary change in every generation, evolving as they spread.
“In my view, the momentum of growth is so great that there is nothing likely to stop its continued spread as the global lingua franca, at least in the foreseeable future,” Crystal writes in “English as a Global Language.” The downside, of course, is that as English becomes more common, other languages kick the bucket 9. There are 6,909 “active” languages today, according to SIL International, which publishes a survey called the “Ethnologue.” Of those, researchers consider 457 to be nearly extinct.
But even among the survivors, there is great disparity – 94% of the world speaks only 347, or 5%, of the languages on that list.
The fight over “English only” laws in the US misses a larger point, Payack says. More and more tongues are dying off, left to museums and computer databases. People who worry about the Spanish-language influx in California and Arizona may feel they’ve lost a battle, when in fact English has won the war.
Could anything stop English’s dominance? Paul Lewis, editor of the “Ethnologue,” says that a language’s fortunes are often tied to economics. “If China surpasses the US as an economic power, it’s certainly possible,” he says. “After all, French used to be the dominant world language.” Even if that came to pass, though, Payack thinks the scales have shifted too far in favor of English. The only threat he sees is the possibility that English could break down into the “Lishes” – Spanglish, Chinglish. But “so long as we have a more interconnected world,” Payack says, the Lishes will exist only as regional dialects, not full-fledged languages.
That, some scholars agree, is a good thing. While Crystal stresses that we must chronicle and protect our linguistic heritages, his two bits 10 are that a world language crosses borders and differences.
“I believe in the fundamental value of a common language, as an amazing world resource which presents us with unprecedented possibilities for mutual understanding, and thus enables us to find fresh opportunities for international cooperation,” Crystal writes. “In my ideal world, everyone would have fluent command of a single world language.”
1. “By and large” is a sailing term, with references going back to 1669, combining “by the wind,” or directly into the wind, and a “large,” or powerful, wind. A ship that can sail by and large can go well in all directions.
2. The first reference to “rule of thumb” comes from a 1692 fencing manual. It refers to a rough approximation, an allusion to the fact that the first joint of an adult thumb measures about one inch.
3. A “dam” was a nearly worthless Indian coin introduced in 1540. So the phrase was originally “I don’t give a dam,” something like “it’s not even worth this penny.” Over time, dam was replaced with “damn,” as in damnation.
4. An American phrase, likely dating to Texas in the 1860s. Brass tacks were used as the foundation of upholstery; “down to brass tacks” came to mean getting down to basics.
5. Running for president in 1840, supporters of Martin Van Buren tried to distract from the candidate’s aristocratic-sounding name by stressing that he was an ordinary man from Kinderhook, New York. He was “old Kinderhook,” or “OK.”
6. Actually a redundancy, since “kit” and “caboodle” have pretty much the same meaning – a collection of things. “Kit” comes from the Middle Dutch “kitte,” a wooden vessel. But by the 1700s it had evolved to its modern usage. “Boedel” is also Dutch, meaning inheritance or possessions. This became “boodle,” and eventually “caboodle” dating back to at least 1848. In 1861, there’s a citation for “kit an boodle,” which caught on but evolved.
7. A lexeme encompasses all forms of a single word. Runs, ran and running are all forms of the same lexeme, run. Crystal is arguing that you can’t count all the different conjugations in Shakespeare as separate words.
8. As far back as 1659, there are references to something “as strong as mustard.” Something that could “cut” that zesty flavor is even better, so by 1898 America, being able to “cut the mustard” came to mean rising above.
9. Dates at least to Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 2,” but it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Back then, “bucket” was a term that could describe a beam from which something can be hung. The image here is of an animal hung for slaughter, kicking the beam from which it is suspended.
10. The Spanish peso was a common form of current in the American colonies. A “bit” denoted a Spanish real, or one-eighth of a peso (pieces of eight). Two bits, then, equaled 25 cents. Giving your “two bits” came to mean expressing your opinion.
Source for footnotes: wordorigins.org