BBC enquires “Why do some Americanisms irritate people?”

Jul 21, 2011 by

Recently a student of mine forwarded to me this article from the BBC website. BBC has long been the stronghold of “proper English”, so I am not completely surprised to see such a strong rhetoric coming out of a BBC writer. Still, the piece is based more on “epistemological populism” than on real understanding of language. And so it is full of fallacies, myths and errors. Here are some of them.

Fallacy #1: passing aesthetic judgments about a language/dialect. There is no objective way to measure “goodness” or “beauty” of a language or a dialect. Just as the author of this article, Matthew Engel rightly claims, “Britain is a very distinct country from the US. Not better, not worse, different”. The same can (and should) be said about the language: British English is very distinct from American English. “Not better, not worse, different”. Hear? Not better! Just different. Enough with the “propah English” snobbery.

Fallacy #2: British English is “the original version of the English language”. The proponents of this view assume that British English is closer to the way English was in “the good old days”, before the establishment of the United States. In other words, they believe that Shakespeare spoke “propah” BBC English. As we’ve already discussed, Standard American English is in many respects closer to Elizabethan English than BBC English is. Shakespeare himself probably sounded more like a Midwesterner than a posh Londoner today. And it’s not just the pronunciation. Vocabularies and grammars too have changed on both sides of the Atlantic. For the great bard, both the hood and the bonnet referred to articles of clothing, not parts of a motorcar.

Fallacy #3: The importation of Americanisms opens the door to the importation of American culture (which in due course would lead to the disintegration of the British culture). The second, parenthesized part of this fallacy I won’t even address here. But when it comes to the connection between importation of words and importation of culture, Matthew Engel got it all backwards. Rather than being the opening act in the drama of foreign cultural invasion, vocabulary migration is a mere symptom or side-effect of that invasion. Americanisms penetrating British English is a result — not a cause of — cultural penetration. As Matthew Engel rightly notes, “American culture is ubiquitous in Britain on TV and the web”. American movies, newspapers and magazines, TV shows are all “manifestations of American cultural power”. Technological innovation is not far behind. The reason that Brits use e-mail rather than e-post is because they didn’t invent it. It’s the same reason Americans have sputniks and Russians don’t have satellity (from satellite).

Fallacy #4: (American) English is the language of global communication because of some inherent properties it has. According to Matthew Engel,

The French have always hated this process with a very Gallic passion, and their most august body L’Academie Francaise issues regular rulings on the avoidance of imported words. English isn’t like that. It is a far more flexible language. Anarchic even. That’s part of the secret of its success. It has triumphed where Latin, French and the artificial language of Esperanto all ultimately failed, and become the natural medium of global communication.

The truth of the matter is quite the opposite: it is not some inherent property of English, such as its flexibility in admitting “immigrant words” (i.e., loanwords) or ease of grammatical structure, that allowed it to become the language of global communication. Quite in reverse: the fact that it has been imposed on a lot of adult foreigners has caused it to become both flexible in borrowing words and simpler in its grammatical structure. You can read more about this here.

So next time you wonder “Why do some Americanisms irritate people?”, just remember that the answer is all about culture and politics, not language per se. English on both sides of the Atlantic is “gloriously nuanced, subtle and supple” in its own distinct ways.


Like this post? Please pass it on:

Previous Post
« 		| Next Post
»

Related Posts

Subscribe For Updates

We would love to have you back on Languages Of The World in the future. If you would like to receive updates of our newest posts, feel free to do so using any of your favorite methods below:

      

Tags


  • Bill Chapman

    I hope you'll allow me to comment that Esperanto should not hasve been brushed off so quickly. Esperanto has caught on, and is a remarkable success story. Indeed, the language has some remarkable practical benefits. Personally, I’ve made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. And then there’s the Pasporta Servo, which provides free lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90 countries.

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    @Bill Chapman: Thank you for sharing your story about Esperanto. You are absolutely right that it shouldn't be brushed off too quickly. Nor should French, IMHO: as this map shows (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/french_official_language_world_map.svg/800px-french_official_language_world_map.svg.png), it has done well around the world too, and with over 67 million speakers around the world, I wouldn't brush it off too quickly either.

  • Brian Barker

    Esperanto is a remarkable success story. In no way can it be described as a failure.

    During a short period of 123 years and despite persecution by both Hitler and Stalin, Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook.

    Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include financier George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.

    The new study course http://www.lernu.net is currently receiving 123,000 hits per month – That can't be bad :)

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    @Brian Barker: as I commented above, one shouldn't brush Esperanto off too quickly, as the author of the BBC article does (one more mistake he made!). However, I wouldn't go as far as claim that it is among the most frequently spoken languages in the world. The number of native speakers is quite modest, despite the few big names such as the ones you cite. Estimates vary, but the numbers are most certainly not in hundreds of thousands, let alone millions. And when it comes to Wikipedia, this page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias) states that Esperanto is the 27th language, behind both Danish and Arabic. Nor is Wikipedia use of language very representative of of how widely these languages are spoken: http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/the-linguistic-geography-of-the-wikipedia

  • Miĉjo

    Thank you for your analysis of this BBC article, and for not brushing off Esperanto as a dead, marginal or crackpot language, which I suspect is how the BBC sees it. However, I do have something to say about one of your statements, and a couple of others following it:

    "I wouldn't go as far as claim that it is among the most frequently spoken languages in the world."

    I’m not sure that Esperanto is in the top 100 languages, but it’s definitely in the top 200 – if you count non-native speakers as well. It makes perfect sense to do that for Esperanto, for two reasons: 1) it was designed to be and is currently used almost exclusively as a second language; 2) it is easy enough to learn and master that proficiency is an easily attainable goal, and mastery is reasonable. If you rank the world’s languages by total number of speakers, both native and non-native, what quickly becomes apparent is that the numbers decrease rapidly with descending rank. By the time you get to the 100th position, you’re in the 6-million-speaker range; at 200th, less than 2 million speakers. At around 2 million proficient non-native speakers, Esperanto ranks about 180th in numbers of speakers among almost 7,000 languages, which technically places it among the “most frequently spoken languages”, even if, at 2 million, it is not a much-spoken language. It is, however, Wikipedia-article ranking notwithstanding, a widely spoken language, with representation in 200+ countries.

    You're right about estimates varying, but they are not all equally credible. The most scientific estimate of recent date was put forth by the late Dr. Sidney S. Culbert, linguist, psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, Esperanto speaker and longtime contributor of number-of-speaker figures to the World Almanac and Book of Facts, with extensive experience researching numbers of speakers of various languages. We don’t have all the details on his methodology, but we do know that at least for Esperanto, it involved in-field research, tracking down and interviewing Esperanto speakers where they lived. We also know that his definition of “speaker” was the widely-recognized and well-defined “FSI level 3” – basically, “professionally proficient”. The Almanac rounds off its figures to the nearest million, and the first of Dr. Culbert’s Esperanto figures it published was 1 million speakers. Before he passed away about 8 years ago, that figure had been increased to 2 million. That is the figure I find most credible, and the one I quote.

    In all fairness to Brian, Danish and Arabic only very recently pulled ahead of Esperanto in terms of numbers of Wikipedia articles. I agree, number of Wikipedia articles isn’t always a meaningful indicator, but as long as they’re not stubs or bots, they do say something: that real people out there speak the language well enough to write articles in it. Other statistics, on the other hand, may be more meaningful. For instance, http://stats.grok.se/ gives number-of-hit figures for Wikipedia articles in various languages. If you select a language and leave the “article title” field blank, you get traffic to the top 1000 articles at the end of last year. If you then total traffic to all but the top ten articles (which include outliers like “Welcome Page”, which *everyone* looks at, even if they’re not really interested in reading anything), and divide into the total number of speakers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers), you get number of speakers per page hit for the top 11-1000 articles. For the large Western European languages of English (4.2), French (3.6), Spanish (5.6) and Portuguese (6.4), the numbers fall into a surprisingly narrow range. (German [1.4] and Japanese [1.2] are much lower.) And Esperanto? If we assume 2 million speakers, we get a figure of 4.8. While this doesn’t prove much of anything, it does at least suggest that the 2 million speaker figure for Esperanto is plausible.

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    I am not quite sure why the discussion revolves around Esperanto, which has not been brushed off as "a dead, marginal or crackpot language" — after all, it's been compared to French and Latin, in the original quote. As far as "frequently spoken languages", we linguists are interested in natural, living languages, and therefore it's the numbers of native speakers, not second language learners (whatever the level of proficiency) that matter the most. Esperanto is, after all, an artificially created language, and even though it did acquire a few native speakers, the numbers remain low, in low thousands. As for the number of Wikipedia pages or hits or whatever, you can't seriously think that speakers of all languages have an equal access to that sort of technology?! So these figures are not reflective of speakers…

  • Bertilo

    The figure 2 million for Esperanto speakers (i.e. mostly second language speakers) is not seen as particularily credible by most Esperantists that I know, and I know quite a few. I don't believe that figure myself for a minute (although I am a very active Esperato speaker).

    Esperanto is still a small player, although it's much bigger than most people think it is. So enough with the propaganda here, OK?

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    Thank you for sharing your opinion, Bertilo!

  • Asya Pereltsvaig

    An excellent piece in response to Matthew Engel's article: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/2925/