English Take-Over?

In the Sunday “Weekly Review” of the Times there was an engaging essay about the state of the English language in the international arena.   It author is Pamela Druckerman, one of the paper’s contribution opinion writers, and its title is “Parlez-Vous Anglais?  Yes, of Course.”  I am usually glad to have that response to that particular question when I pose it, but Ms. Druckerman has sniffed out some cultural angst in it.  For the article’s sub-headed summary is this: “Europeans speaking perfect English sounds like good news for native speakers, but it may also be a threat.”  Well, the Times’s op-ed page is full of threats unknown in previous generations, or even in previous weeks.  When I was a kid, peanuts were an occasional treat at the ball game or the County Fair.  They now require red alerts from the school nurse, prophylactic inhalers and a hot line.  And who am I to doubt that the world daily becomes a more dangerous place?  Still, the idea that the continuing growth of the English language as an international medium of communication is a “threat” puzzles me in the extreme.  In fact, it is a development to which I can see no down side.

Articulate speech is the critical feature of human existence in the animal world.  In many of our great myth systems the destruction of a supposed original universal speech (think Tower of Babel) is a disaster to be remedied only by miraculous restoration (think Pentecost).  So great has been the felt need for a universal medium of linguistic communication that there have been many attempts to create one ab novo; but even the best known example,  Esperanto, caught on about as well as spiritualist table-rapping, and mainly with the same crowd.  The re-creation of spoken Hebrew worked out better than a slightly earlier effort to re-classiicize Greek, but such efforts have not created a world language.

Ms. Druckerman sees several tines on the  forked  “threat” of the spreading use of “good” English among the world’s non-native speakers of that language, two of which I find most curious and, if I may say so, culpably Americo-centric  The first is that if the Croats and Tamils all start talking with each other with the fluency of a Clifton Fadiman, Americans, who are notoriously bad about learning languages already will more or less give up altogether and thus be clueless when the foreigners retreat to their own gobblebygook.  “If all we know is English we won’t know what the rest of the world is saying about us.”   If this is a problem, it is caused not by the establishment of a de facto universal language but by the shockingly deficient system of public education in this country.  And unless one is brain dead, one knows perfectly well what they are saying about us.  Unfortunately.

The second threat appears to be economic.  If everybody in the world speaks really good English, English-language institutions of higher education will spring up everywhere from the Gobi Desert to the Mato Grosso, and students will choose to go there instead of here because the education will be of equal quality but cost much less.  There are already significant institutions of higher education conducting their business in flexible and fluent educated English throughout the “non-English” world, and there are bound to be many, many more.  What this actually suggests to me is that the world greatly admires our colleges and universities, but suspects that it is possible to offer quality education without forty-two highly compensated deans of diversity and a procurement officer specializing in the soft toys needed to add comfort to the “safe spaces” to which American students must retreat when traumatized by the naked “cultural appropriation” of a student Hallowe’en party at which fellow students showed up in sombreros, lederhosen, or conical witch-hats.  I am being a little provocative here, perhaps, and a little parodic, but only a little.  

Several of our current presidential candidates are rightly railing against a cost crisis in American higher education that leaves in its wake bankrupt parents or deeply indebted graduates or both—the proposed solutions being debt forgiveness and “free college”.  But if the biggest financial institution in the country (i.e., the government) decides that it is going to start lending money at apparently advantageous rates to people to go to college, people are going to borrow that money with sub-prime enthusiasm just as surely as they will “buy” a McMansion on the same terms.  Fly-by-night institutions will spring up like on-line fungi and fiercely chase after those bucks.  Not all of them are diploma mills, just most of them.  Study software engineering or “hospitality studies” today and pay for it tomorrow.  Nor, I am embarrassed to say, have the fly-by-day institutions such as those I have been associated with during my career been loath to waddle up to the trough.  The nearly obscene rise in costs at our colleges and universities has many causes, but prominent among them is a huge expansion of administrative costs in the creation of student services of dubious relevance to academic goals or outcomes.

How I tire of drivel about “cultural appropriation,” incidentally.  Culture is mainly appropriation, and no aspect of culture has been more appropriative than language.  An important aspect of the genius of English is the voraciousness and generosity of its appropriation.  Beginning as a German dialect of limited lexicon spoken by King Alfred’s ancestors halfway through the first millennium, English took on thousands of words from the Scandinavian stock, often at the point of a spear, other thousands of standard Latin words relating to the church (kirk, ecclesia), political administration, the law, and the arts and sciences of all kinds.  After the Norman invasion it swallowed the Viking version of emerging French more or less whole.  In the Renaissance, learned men consciously imposed another vast round of Latin from that language’s more erudite level.  Medical men mainly went for the Greek.

English is gradually taking on the role once played in western culture by Latin, but now on a global scale constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous and instantaneous reach of the Internet.  Consider the state of learning in Europe in the millennium between 500 and 1500 of the Christian era.   At the beginning of that period Latin, the old language of the decaying imperial power, was still a vital and palpitating language of important cultural elites.  In the fluent and learned form used by Jerome and Augustine, it reflected the rhetorical practices and literary achievements of the Augustan age.  While never ceasing to develop to some extent as a living language, it became largely frozen in time.  We call it, curiously, a “dead” language, but it’s hard to do that if you have read the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (twelfth century) or the letters of Petrarch (fourteenth) or the Principia Mathematica of Newton (seventeenth).  The language was far from dead.  It just didn’t have any native speakers, with the exception perhaps of a few juvenile oblates in monasteries who had arrived so young as to have forgotten their infantile babbling in Saxon or Basque.

               It became the stable “father tongue” of a Europe in which there were a couple of dozen constantly evolving mother tongues, only some of which (the so-called Romance languages) actually derived from “classical” Latin.  It is a wonderful experience to be able to communicate with fluency and effect in a tongue not native with another person doing the same thing.  Through the Enlightenment a scholar in Prague could and did have copious technical and literary communication with a scholar in Aberdeen.  Their commonly acquired language was the real “level playing field”—rather as championship athletic contests are often played on grounds that is the home turf of neither team.

            The deeper historical causes of the current primacy of English are of course rather political and brutal, but that is a completely different story.  The “fact on the ground” is that if you want to have a decent material life in today’s world—and most people do—it is a palpable advantage to be able speak, read, and write the English language well.  And I am not at all offended when I see a photograph of a cane-cutter in Mozambique wearing a Yankees hat.  Good for him.