It dispenses with idioms, literary language and complex grammar. It’s no use for telling jokes – ‘The only jokes which cross frontiers involve sex, race and religion and you should never mention those in an international meeting,’ says Nerrière. So his books are about turning complicated English into useful English. For example, chat becomes speak casually to each other in Globish; and kitchen is the room in which you cook your food. Siblings, rather clumsily, are the other children of my parents. But pizza is still pizza, as it has an international currency, like taxi and police.
As befits a successful businessman, Nerrière identified his market, took out trade protection on the name ‘Globish’ and began to sell his books, manuals and training aids in shops, by mail order and on the internet. Interestingly, it’s quite difficult to find many examples of what the courses consist of unless you buy them; they’re not freely available by just surfing for ‘Globish’.
Although Nerrière’s claims for Globish are specific and utilitarian, this idea of a simplified, worldwide, cross-cultural adaptation of English is seen by some as a kind of third-millennium revolution where cultural barriers melt away, and the globe becomes one big Globish-speaking market place.
Globish may not be able to cope with jokes, but Nerrière still seems to be getting the biggest laugh out of his product. On the one hand he makes no great claims for Globish – it’s not Shakespeare, it has no beauty or poetry, it just gets a very basic job done. But on the other, as a Frenchman who must have spoken English through gritted teeth in all his years at IBM, he can barely conceal his delight that Globish could perhaps be the canker that eats away at the dominance of proper, full-strength English. ‘I am helping the rescue of French, and of all the languages that are threatened by English today but which will not be at all endangered by Globish. It is in the best interests of non-Anglophone countries to support Globish, especially if you like your culture and its language.’
A Klingon Hamlet
On a cold wintry day in a small theatre in Arlington, Virginia, Stephen Fry is appearing as Osric, the foppish courtier whom Hamlet mocks so accurately. But not any Osric. This version of Hamlet is in Klingon, the invented language that was created for one of the characters in the sci-fi TV series Star Trek. The Klingons (one planet, one people, one language, no Babel-like multiplicity of tongues) are those warlike, carapace-headed aliens who first appeared in a 1967 episode of Star Trek and proved so popular that they were upgraded from bit part to permanent crew in the later series and films. They fitted in neatly between the Vulcans and Romulans, and of course their distinctive foreheads made them instant party headpiece heroes.
Tonight’s performance has been organized by a group of Klingon aficionados. Now a Star Trek convention is an event of myth and beauty, but an entirely Klingon gathering is a thing bizarre and ugly. The language is all guttural and rasping, and, befitting a warrior species, it’s blunt, military and lacking in any delicacies or niceties. There’s no word for hello in Klingon, just what do you want?
Stephen Fry with the creator of Klingon, Dr Mark Okrand
So how would the sublime poetry of Hamlet work in Klingon? Its inventor, linguist Mark Okrand, is here to unpack the mysteries of this fictional tongue. He explains that James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty, the Starship Enterprise’s engineer, made up the initial Klingon dialogue for the first Star Trek movie in 1979. This was dialogue in its loosest term – essentially an assortment of grunts. Okrand was asked to create a real Klingon language, with vocabulary and grammar, which actors could learn for later Star Trek movies.
‘To make up a non-human language, first we have to know what the human language is, so we can make this one be “not that”,’ says Okrand. ‘Human languages have certain things in common: they all have vowels, consonants, words, syntax. Certain sounds tend to go together in the same language and certain sounds tend not to. So, to make Klingon a non-human language, it made sense to violate the rules.’ There were some constraints. The sounds had to be guttural, because the script said so. Okrand decided not to have a z sound in Klingon at all, ‘because there’s lots of zees and zots in science fiction.
Klingon grammar was made as non-human as possible. English, with its subject then verb then object, has the most common word-order structure: Dog bites man. Okrand chose the least common structure for Klingon with the object coming first then the verb and then the subject. So instead of saying, ‘I boarded the Enterprise,’ in Klingon you’d say ‘The Enterprise boarded I.’ Or, instead of Osric shouting, ‘Look to the Queen there. Ho!’ during the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, he cries (in Klingon) ‘Ho! To the Queen there, look!’ There are no tenses and no infinitives.
Klingon has a small vocabulary of around 2,000 words, many of them reflecting the bellicosity of the warrior race. Phrases like ‘May you die well!’ or ‘Fire torpedos!’ or ‘Thrusters now!’ are undoubtedly handy in galactic battle; not so helpful in day-to-day life. There are some wonderful insults too. ‘Your mother has a flat forehead!’ is one to be used with caution.
You would think that a language which has no word for love would make an uneasy bedfellow with Shakespearean prose. Why on earth would anyone choose to translate Hamlet into Klingon iambic pentameters? Well, in Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock, General Chang, Chief of Staff for Gorkon, the Chancellor of the Klingon Empire, has to quote some Shakespeare.
‘We arrived on the set one day,’ recalls Okrand ‘and the director, Nick Meyer, says, “I need one more line: To be, or not to be.” Now, one of the things about the grammar of Klingon is that there’s no verb to be, so all I had was or and not. What I came up with was “Live or live not” which was yIn pagh, yInbe. I suggested it to Christopher Plummer, who was playing General Chang, and he goes, “YIn? YIn? That sounds too much like the Ying Tong song from The Goon Show. Think of something else.” And I said, “Well, what about taH pagh, taHbe?’ To go or not to go on?’
And so, in the movie, Chancellor Gorkon delivers the line ‘You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original and General Chang says: taH pagh, taHbe. To be or not to be, that is the question which preoccupies our people, Captain Kirk.’ The Klingon Shakespeare Restoration project took up the Klingon challenge and has so far translated Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing.
It’s Mark Okrand and the Klingon fraternity’s attention to detail which makes Klingon the most spoken, perhaps the boldest, of the invented fictional languages. It’s difficult to learn, fiendish to pronounce, and yet people do seem to want to sit down and study and pass their Klingon certification exams. Some linguists find the academic potential irresistible.
Dr d’Armand Speers was a linguistics student at Georgetown University when he saw a flyer on the bulletin board advertising the Klingon Language Institute. He insists he wasn’t a big Star Trek fan or into uniforms and prosthetic foreheads but he was intrigued by the advert. He joined up, learned to read and write Klingon and after some years became a fluent Klingon-speaker. In the meantime he got his Ph.D., married and had a child. And then he did something quite extraordinary. D’Armand takes up the tale.
‘My son was born in 1994, and I decided as a linguistic fun thing to do that I would speak to him only in Klingon. I wanted to see if he would acquire the language in the same way that humans acquire human languages. And it was an interesting question because, when Mark Okrand created the language, he wanted to make it in ways that were different from human languages. So what would a human mind do when it encountered a language like this? There were two possibilities. The human mind would learn it as designed, meaning that we’re more pliant than we think. Or it would change it into a more human structure. And either way it went, it would be a fascinating thing to see happen.’
D’Armand was the only one who spoke Klingon to the baby. The child’s mother and everyone else spoke English. So what happened?
‘Well, he was learning it,’ says d’Armand. ‘We had a lot of fun. We would play language games,
and I would say things to him like “Where’s my cheek?” in Klingon, and he would point to my cheek. And then one day we’re playing, and I had his bottle that he would drink from, and we didn’t have a word for bottle. We didn’t have a word for diaper or high chair or most domestic things. I had words for shuttlecraft and phaser and transporter ionization unit but I didn’t have bottle. So we were using the Klingon word for drinking vessel, HIvje, and I used it in a sentence. I didn’t point at it, I didn’t look at it, I didn’t do anything like that, and this two-year-old toddler started crawling over towards the bottle and grabbed it. And at that moment I knew that this was working! He was learning this language, and it was very exciting.’
The language games continued. Every night father and son would cuddle up and sing a lullaby together – that soothing little ditty the Klingon Imperial Anthem, with the tender chorus ‘Our empire is great, and if anyone disagrees, We will crush them beneath our boots.’ The toddler began to learn to count in Klingon and was learning a few words and colours when suddenly, at around the age of two and a half, he stopped being interested.
‘I would say something to him in Klingon and he would say it back in English,’ remembers d’Armand, ‘and I would try to encourage him, and he started to resist it. We would always count things, he’d count the stairs as he was walking up, and one day he was walking up the stairs counting in Klingon – “wa’, cha’, wej” – and then he looked and he realized that it wasn’t me who was there but it was my wife, and he says, “four, five, six” and switches right in the middle of it.’
The Klingon conversations stopped. D’Armand’s son had lost his motivation to acquire a language which only his father spoke. He wanted to communicate with his non-Klingon-speaking friends at playgroup and with his mother and other people around him. He gave up Klingon in the same way immigrant children tend to give up the parents’ language once they’re into their peer group.
D’Armand’s son, a teenager now, is ‘the sweetest kid’ with no warrior tendencies or unfortunate guttural speech problems. He says he’s keen to learn Klingon but, as he’s passed the age of being able to acquire it naturally, he’ll have to do it the hard way, learning it like any other second language.
Arika Okrent, the actress who played Gertrude in the Klingon Hamlet, is not only a level 1 Klingon-speaker and a fine Gertrude but she has a doctorate in linguistics, specializing in invented languages. She explains why she thinks Klingon is so popular.
‘The reason this language is so successful and why fans do the work of learning it is because it does fit so well together in so many respects. And these days, if you want to create a fictional universe and make a film about it, it’s no longer any good to just stick in some zurg and blordon and zorbot, you’ve got to make a fully realized, grammatical language, something that fans can sink their teeth into.’
Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, 1984
The popularity of Na’vi, the language created for the film Avatar, is a similar case to Klingon. A fellow linguist, Dr Paul Frommer, undertook to create the language from scratch and used the tools he had learned as a linguist to make it work like any other language with its own syntactic rules. The success of Avatar has spawned a huge online Na’vi-learning community which now rivals Klingon to the extent that Dr Frommer is giving up his university job to concentrate on expanding the language.
An interesting question is whether the fact that the Na’vi in the film are rather gentle and mystical, quite unlike the Klingons, means that the people who speak it have to acquire some of their softer, nature-loving attitude. Arika thinks people choose a language in order to participate in a thing that suits them best.
But in serious linguistic terms has anything useful been learned by invented languages? Does it tell us about where language comes from and where it goes?
Arika has a theory: ‘Well, it’s given me a deeper appreciation for natural language and all its flaws and all its engineering problems and ambiguities and irregularities. They all serve a purpose and they suit the way that we think. And we in a way need our languages to be as messy and sloppy as they are in order to do the wide and wonderful range of things that we do with language. And if you want the whole range, you’ve got to have the sloppiness in there.’
Dialects and Accents
When is a language not a language? When it’s a dialect, perhaps? There’s no universally accepted answer. Some linguists say there’s no difference at all. I suppose you could argue that French, Italian and Spanish are just ‘dialects’ of Latin. Or that Cockney or Geordie are languages. But that’s just being difficult.
As we’ve seen, language is always evolving and changing, often without clear borders. The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich cited this aphorism: ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ That’s clearly the case with, for example, Serbo-Croatian, the language spoken by the people of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro when they were part of Yugoslavia. Since independence, however, each republic has established its own official language – Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. But they’re all just dialects of the same South Slavic language. Contrast this with English, which is spoken in numerous places around the world but classified as different standard dialects – Standard American English, Standard Australian English and so on.
Max Weinreich’s own Yiddish is classified as a language, even without an army, navy or nation. Occitan, Provençal, Breton, Welsh, Manx, Gaelic – they’re all languages. So it’s a subjective argument, but for the purposes of this chapter let’s agree that a dialect is a variant of a language, usually regional. And in Britain we’ve got lots of them. From Scouse to West Country, Brummie to Cockney, Geordie to Scots, the British Isles are groaning with a rich and varied abundance of dialects. They’re brimming over with words and expressions which take us right back to our linguistic roots – Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Norse, Celtic, Norman. Most dialects can be understood by non-dialect native English-speakers although accents and individual words can often flummox us.
Barnsley poet Ian McMillan lives and breathes Yorkshire and is a collector of local words, some of which can be pinned down to a single town or village. One word, lenerky, which means ‘soft’ or ‘floppy’, is found only in the tiny village of Grange Moor in West Yorkshire. There are some glorious words like bartled, to be smothered in something nasty, or plotter for mud or gloppened for astounded.
Ian says he speaks Barnsley rather than Yorkshire because within the dialect there are a huge range of accents, often changing from one village to another. He illustrates his point with a map of Yorkshire and shows how, in the space of just a few miles, the Yorkshire accent changes. His finger traces a journey from Hull in the east to Leeds (‘long es and very slow’) and Bradford (‘they don’t say their ts’) and then down to Barnsley (‘harsh … it’s to do with the harsh winds of Yorkshire; you don’t want to open your mouth too far’). Ian’s finger hovers over the A61 as it makes its way down towards Sheffield. ‘That’s where an isogloss happens, where language changes over a small space. The th hardens to a d. So you start off from Barnsley, going “now then, now then”, and as you approach Sheffield your vowels will be going “nar den, nar den”. We call Sheffield people deedars, for the way they change the th in thee and thou to d.’
By the time Ian’s finger stops its linguistic travels at the border with north Derbyshire, we’ve entered a foreign land. ‘My Aunty Mabel, who was from Chesterfield, would say things like “I’ve just had double glazing fitted in my arse.” Or she’d say, “I’ve got a detached arse.” ’ Somewhere in the twenty-odd miles from Barnsley to Chesterfield, along the invisible isogloss line, house had changed to hears then to harse and ended up as arse.
Like all dialects, Yorkshire Tyke bears history. The traces of all the people who’ve come and gone and the work they did – it’s all there in the layers of speech, says Ian, often without us knowing.
‘Whenever I speak in my voice, behind me, in a huge line, are standing a
ll the people who ever spoke like me. So that when I’m walking through Barnsley and somebody shouts to a lad, “Come on, clarteead, frame thissen!” you think, wow, that’s a term from down the pit.’
Ian explains that a clout was a kind of nail used in the coal mines. Clout head or clarteead means ‘idiot’. And frame thissen has Old English roots meaning ‘get on with it!’
‘So, somehow, the language carries on, using specific industrial terms that have gone, and they just hang on, like a kind of cloud or a ghost language … When the word dies, then the memory of a way of life will go as well. When a word isn’t spoken any more then the roots of that word wither away.’
Ian remembers being told at school not to speak with his broad Yorkshire accent if he wanted to get on in life. ‘And when I was first on the radio, a Barnsley listener rang up and said, “Tha’ can’t talk like that on’t wireless.” I said, “But I talk just like you.” And he said, “Ar, but tha’ can’t talk like it on’t wireless. They’ll think tha’re common!” ’
A generation or so ago, speaking in anything other than Received Pronunciation – the Queen’s English – was regarded as a social disadvantage. The ideal was to speak in a way that revealed nothing about your background, your class or where you’d been to school. As the elocutionist Arthur Burrell wrote in 1891: ‘It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed.’
RP developed from what was an essentially regional accent in the south-east of England. When William Caxton set up England’s first printing press in 1473, he chose, largely, the spelling and pronunciation of the South-east/Midlands dialect as Standard English, as that was the most populous region of England and home to the royal court at London.
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