The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  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 12 o’clock, emptying the room at the latest until 14 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 that 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 slogan I 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 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 hamburger
s, 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.”

  The French, it must be said, have not been so rabidly anglophobic as has sometimes been made out. From the outset the government conceded defeat on a number of words that were too well established to drive out: gadget, holdup, weekend, blue jeans, self-service, manager, marketing, and many others. Between 1977 and 1987, there were just forty prosecutions for violations of the language laws, almost always involving fairly flagrant abuses. TWA, for instance, was fined for issuing its boarding passes in English only. You can hardly blame the French for taking exception to that. The French also recognize the global importance of English. In 1988, the elite Ecole Centrale de Paris, one of the country’s top engineering academies, made it a requirement of graduation that students be able to speak and write fluent English, even if they have no intention of ever leaving France.

  It would be a mistake to presume that English is widely spoken in the world because it has some overwhelming intrinsic appeal to foreigners. Most people speak it not because it gives them pleasure to help out American and British monoglots who cannot be troubled to learn a few words of their language, believe it or not, but because they need it to function in the world at large. They may like a few English words splashed across their T-shirts and shopping bags, but that isn’t to say that that is what they want to relax with in the evening.

  Go to Amsterdam or Antwerp or Oslo and you will find that almost everyone speaks superb
English, and yet if you venture into almost any bookstore in those cities you will usually find only a small selection of books in English. For the most part, people want to read works in their own language. Equally they want to watch television in their own language. In the coastal areas of Holland and Belgium, where most people can both speak English and receive British television broadcasts, most still prefer to watch local programs even when they are palpably inferior to the British product (i.e., almost invariably). Similarly, two English-language satellite networks in Europe, Sky TV and Super Channel, had some initial success in West Germany, but as soon as two competing satellite networks were set up transmitting more or less the same programs but dubbed into German, the English-language networks’ joint share slumped to less than 1 percent—about as much as could be accounted for by English-speaking natives living in West Germany. The simple fact is that German viewers, even when they speak English well, would rather watch Dallas dubbed badly into German than in the original English. And who can blame them?

  In many places English is widely resented as a symbol of colonialism. In India, where it is spoken by no more than 5 percent of the population at the very most, the constitution was written in English and English was adopted as a foreign language not out of admiration for its linguistic virtues but as a necessary expedient. In a country in which there are 1,652 languages and dialects, including 15 official ones, and in which no one language is spoken by more than 16 percent of the population, a neutral outside language has certain obvious practicalities. Much the same situation prevails in Malaysia, where the native languages include Tamil, Portuguese, Thai, Punjabi, twelve versions of Chinese, and about as many of Malay. Traditionally, Malay is spoken in the civil service, Chinese in business, and English in the professions and in education. Yet these countries are almost always determined to phase English out. India had hoped to eliminate it as an official language by 1980 and both Malaysia and Nigeria have been trying to do likewise since the 1970s.