The Mother Tongue (29 page)

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 200 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 [
sic
] communications, the very concentric pattern of hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly 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 330 million, as compared with 260 million for Spanish, 150 million for Portuguese, and a little over 100 million for French. Of course, sheer numbers mean little. 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 1.6 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 700 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 Treasure of 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 10 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 £500 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 te 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 less universal. 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),
haikurasu
(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.

This inclination to hack away at English words until they become something like native products is not restricted to the Japanese. In Singapore transvestites are known as
shims,
a contraction of
she-hims.
Italians don't go to a nightclub, but just to a
night
(often spelled
nihgt
), while in France a self-service restaurant is simply
le self.
European languages also show a curious tendency to take English participles and give them entirely new meanings, so that the French don't go running or jogging, they go footing. They don't engage in a spot of sunbathing, but rather go in for
le bronzing.
A tuxedo or dinner jacket in French becomes
un smoking,
while in Italy cosmetic surgery becomes
il lifting.
The Germans are particularly inventive at taking things a step further than it ever occurred to anyone in English. A young person in Germany goes from being in his teens to being in his
twens,
a book that doesn't quite become a best-seller is instead
ein steadyseller,
and a person who is more relaxed than another is
relaxter.

Sometimes new words are made up, as with the Japanese
salryman
for an employee of a corporation. In Germany a snappy dresser is a
dressman.
In France a
recordman
is not a disc jockey, but an athlete who sets a record, while an
alloman
is a switchboard operator (because he says, “allo? allo?”). And, just to confuse things, sometimes English words are given largely contrary meanings, so that in France an
egghead
is an idiot while a
jerk
is an accomplished dancer.

The most relentless borrowers of English words have been the Japanese. The number of English words current in Japanese has been estimated to be as high as 20,000. It has been said, not altogether wryly, that if the Japanese were required to pay a license fee for every word they used, the American trade deficit would vanish. A count of Western words, mostly English, used in Japanese newspapers in 1964 put the proportion at just under 10 percent. It would almost certainly be much higher now. Among the Japanese borrowings:

erebata—elevator

nekutai—necktie

bata—butter

beikon—bacon

sarada—salad

remon—lemon

chiizu—cheese

bifuteki—beefsteak

hamu—ham

shyanpu setto—shampoo and set

Not all languages have welcomed the invasion of English words. The French have been more resistant than most. President François Mitterrand declared in 1986, perhaps a trifle excessively: “France is engaged in a war with Anglo-Saxon.” The French have had a law against the encroachment of foreign words since as early as 1911, but this was considerably bolstered by the setting up in 1970 of a Commission on Terminology, which was followed in 1975 by another law, called the Maintenance of the Purity of the French Language, which introduced fines for using illegal anglicisimes, which in turn was followed in 1984 by the establishment of
another
panel, the grandly named Commissariat Général de la Langue Française. You may safely conclude from all this that the French take their language very seriously indeed. As a result of these various efforts, the French are forbidden from saying
pipeline
(even though they pronounce it “peepleen”), but must instead say
oleoduc.
They cannot take a
jet airplane,
but instead must board an
avion à réaction.
A
hamburger
is a
steak haché. Chewing gum
has become
pâte à mâcher.
The newspaper
Le Monde
sarcastically suggested that sandwich should be rendered as “deux morceaux de pain avec quelque chose au milieu”—“two pieces of bread with something in the middle.”

Estimates of the number of anglicismes in French have been put as high as 5 percent, though
Le Monde
thinks the true total is nearer 2 percent or less. (Someone else once calculated that an anglicisme appeared in
Le Monde
once every 166 words—or well under 1 percent of the time.) So it is altogether possible that the French are making a great deal out of very little. Certainly the incursion of English words is not a new phenomenon.
Le snob, le biftek,
and even
le self-made man
go back a hundred years or more, while
ouest
(west) has been in French for 700 years and
rosbif
(roast beef) for 350. More than one observer has suggested that what really rankles the French is not that they are borrowing so many words from the rest of the world but that the rest of the world is no longer borrowing so many from them. As the magazine
Le Point
put it: “Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauffeur.”