American Language (118 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
the study and employment of the English language by thousands of our students, many of whom adopt the literary and teaching professions, and the translation of books from English into Chinese, bound to retain some of the original mode of expression, have unconsciously and inevitably affected our modes of thought and the expression thereof, so that slowly but surely Chinese diction, grammar and style will adopt to a certain extent the English.
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How many people speak English today? It is hard to answer with any precision, but an approximation is nevertheless possible. First, let us list those to whom English is their native tongue. They run to about 112,000,000 in the continental United States, to 42,000,000 in the United Kingdom, to 6,000,000 in Canada, 6,000,000 in Australia, 3,000,000 in Ireland, 2,000,000 in South Africa, and probably 3,000,000 in the remaining British colonies and in the possessions of the United States. All these figures are very conservative, but they foot up to 174,000,000. Now add the people who, though born to some other language, live in English-speaking communities and speak English themselves in their daily business, and whose children are being brought up to it — say 13,000,000 for the United States, 1,000,000 for Canada, 1,000,000 for the United Kingdom and Ireland, and 2,000,000 for the rest of the world — and you have a grand total of 191,000,000. Obviously, no other language is the everyday tongue of so many people. Spanish, it has been claimed, is spoken by more than 100,000,000,
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but that is little more than half the toll of English. Whether German or Russian comes next is in some doubt, but in any case it is certain that both lie below Spanish. The census of December 17, 1926, indicated that but 80,000,000 of the 150,000,000 citizens of the U.S.S.R. used Russian as their first language; the number has increased since, but probably by no more than 10,000,000.
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German is spoken by 65,000,000 Germans in the
Reich
, by perhaps 7,000,000 in Austria, by a scant 3,000,000 in German Switzerland, by perhaps 5,000,000 in the lost German and Austrian territories, and by another 5,000,000 in the German-speaking colonies in Russia, the Balkan and Baltic states, and South America. This makes 85,000,000
altogether. Italian and Portuguese
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are the runners-up, and the rest of the European languages are nowhere. Nor is there any rival to English in Asia, for though Chinese is ostensibly the native tongue of more than 300,000,000 people, it is split into so many mutually unintelligible dialects that it must be thought of less as a language than as a group of languages. The same may be said of Hindi.
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As for Japanese, it is spoken by no more than 70,000,000 persons, and thus lags behind not only English, but also Spanish, Russian and German. As for Arabic, it probably falls below even Italian.
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Thus English is far ahead of any competitor. Moreover, it promises to increase its lead hereafter, for no other language is spreading so fast or into such remote areas. There was a time when French was the acknowledged second language of all Christendom, as Latin had been before it, and even to this day, according to Dr. Frank E. Vizetelly, the number of persons who have acquired it is larger than the number of those who have it by birth. But the advantages of knowing it tend to diminish as English conquers the world, and
it is now studied as an accomplishment far more often than as a utility. In Czarist Russia, according to a recent observer,
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“the educated classes spoke chiefly two foreign languages, French and German. French was the language of diplomacy, society, and fashion; German was utilized in the more prosaic fields of business and commerce. However, with the staggering efforts now made at industrialization, at attempts, as Stalin puts it, ‘to overreach and outstrip all capitalist countries,’ including America, German is of first importance, with English running a very close second.” In our own high-schools and colleges French is retained in the curriculum, but it is hardly likely that more than 5% of the students ever acquire any facility at speaking it, or even at reading it. In the schools of Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, however, English is taught with relentless earnestness, and a great deal of it sticks. Indeed, even the French begin to learn it.
How far it has thus gone as a second language I do not know, but a few facts and figures taken at random may throw some light on the question. In February, 1929, the Stockholm newspaper,
Nya Dagligt Allehanda
, undertook to find out what proportion of the population of Stockholm had acquired it. All sorts of persons were interviewed, from bankers and business men to taxi-drivers and policemen. It was discovered that every fourth person had enough of the language for all ordinary purposes. This inquiry also showed that 65% of all the foreign business of Sweden was carried on in English. In writing to German correspondents the Swedish firms used German, but for all other foreign correspondence they used English. At the same time the Public Library of Stockholm reported “an incredible inquiry” for English and American books — classical English and modern American. The place thus held by English was formerly held by German and French; the change has come since 1900. In Norway and Denmark there has been a similar movement and in Finland “suggestions have been made that English should replace Swedish as the second official language.” In Estonia, since 1920, “English has been the second language taught to the native-born, and the third to those minorities (Germans, Swedes, Russians, Jews) who use their own tongue first and learn the native language
at school.… A hundred thousand boys and girls in Estonia want to learn English.”
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Its position in Portugal is the same, with no minorities to challenge it, and “a very large proportion of the educated inhabitants [already] have a working knowledge of it.”
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In Turkey, before 1923, the second language was French, but since the proclamation of the Republic “the tendency has entirely changed,… and almost everybody,… not only in Constantinople but throughout Anatolia, is learning English as hard as he can go.… The Ministry of Public Instruction has introduced English as a regular part of the school routine in all the secondary schools throughout the country.… On all sides, and every day, one hears such expressions as ‘I want to learn English’ and ‘How long will it take me to learn English?’ ” All this on the authority of Herbert M. Thompson, professor of English at the Galata Saray Lycée, “the Eton of Turkey.”
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Mr. Thompson says that in the commercial section of the school, “where pupils have the option of learning either English or German,” all save one chose English both in 1928 and in 1929. In the evening classes the number of pupils taking English averages 150–200 a year, whereas the number taking German is but six or eight.
But perhaps the largest advances of English have been made in Latin-America. Half a century ago English was little used in the lands and islands settled by the Spaniards and Portuguese; the second language in all of them, in so far as they had a second language, was French. But the impact of the Spanish-American War has forced French to share its hegemony, as the English occupation of Egypt has pitted English against it in that country, and indeed throughout the Levant. The Latin-Americans still prefer French on cultural counts, for they continue to regard France as the beacon-light of Latin civilization, but they turn to English for the hard reasons of every day. This movement is naturally most marked in the areas that have come under direct American influence — above all, in Puerto Rico, where about a fourth of the people now speak English
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— but it is also visible everywhere below the Rio Grande. In the Philippines a survey of tenant rice-farmers’ families, made so long ago as 1921–22, showed that 34% of the children were literate in English, as against only 2% literate in Spanish. Among the older people twice as many were literate in English as in Spanish. English is now widely used in the courts, executive offices and Legislative Assembly of the islands, and is frequently employed by political orators.
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Under the Constitution of the new Philippine Commonwealth, Art. XIII, Section 3, “the Legislative Assembly shall take steps toward the development and adoption of a common national language based on one of the existing native languages,” but there is not much likelihood that any such artificial tongue will be perfected in the near future, or that it will be used by the generality of Filipinos when it is. Meanwhile, “until otherwise provided by law, English and Spanish shall continue as official languages” — with English, it will be observed, put first.
English is making steady inroads upon French as the language of diplomacy and of other international intercourse, and upon German as the language of science. In the former case, to be sure, French still offers a sturdy resistance. “There are certain respects,” says Dr. Herbert Newhard Shenton in “Cosmopolitan Conversation,”
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“in which the international-conference movement is characteristically French. This does not apply to all classes of interests in the movement, but does apply to the movement as a whole. The favored rendezvous of conferences are in France or in French-speaking countries; more of the permanent headquarters are located in France than in any other country, and many others are located in French-speaking countries.” Thus French “still remains the preferred official language of international conferences.” But certainly not by the old wide margin. Of the 330 international organizations dealt with in Dr. Shenton’s book, 282 have one or more official languages, and among these 78% include French and 58% English. A century ago, or even half a century ago, the percentages would have been nearer
100% and 25%. Perhaps the turn of the tide came with the Versailles Conference. At that historic gathering the two representatives of the English-speaking countries, Wilson and Lloyd George, had no French, whereas the French spokesman, Clemenceau, spoke English fluently — incidentally, with a strong American accent.
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Thus English became the language of negotiation, and it has been heard round council tables with increasing frequency ever since.
All over the Far East it has been a
lingua franca
since the Eighteenth Century, at first in the barbarous guise of Pidgin English, but of late in increasingly seemly forms, often with an American admixture. In Japan, according to the Belgian consul-general at Yokohama, it is now “indispensable for all Europeans. One can do without Japanese, but would be lost without English. It is the business language.”
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In China, according to Dr. Lim-boon Keng, president of Amoy University, “we have practically adopted English,” and in India, though but 2,500,000 natives can read and write it, it not only competes with Hindi in business, but is fast becoming the language of politics. Those Indians who know it, says Sir John A. R. Marriott
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“are the only persons who are politically conscious. Indian nationalism is almost entirely the product of English education; the medium of all political discussion is necessarily English.” It is, adds R. C. Goffin,
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“the readiest means of obtaining (
a
) employment under the government; (
b
) employment in commercial houses of any standing, whether Indian or foreign; (
c
) command of the real
lingua franca
of the country — for Hindustani is of very little use south of the Central Provinces; (
d
) knowledge of Western ideas, both ancient and modern.… English in other ways has
shown itself a useful instrument for a country setting out to learn the habits of democracy. It is most convenient for the politician, for example, to be able to employ a language with only one word (instead of three or even four) for
you.…
There is no country today where a foreign language has been so thoroughly domesticated as has English in India.”
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Altogether, it is probable that English is now spoken as a second language by at least 20,000,000 persons throughout the world
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— very often, to be sure, badly, but nevertheless understandably. It has become a platitude that one may go almost anywhere with no other linguistic equipment, and get along almost as well as in large areas of New York City. Here, for example, is the testimony of an English traveler:
It was only on reaching Italy that I began to fully realize this wonderful thing, that for nearly six weeks, on a German ship, in a journey of nearly 10,000 miles, we had heard little of any language but English!
In Japan most of the tradespeople spoke English. At Shanghai, at Hong Kong, at Singapore, at Penang, at Colombo, at Suez, at Port Said — all the way home to the Italian ports, the language of all the ship’s traffic, the language of such discourse as the passengers held with natives, most of the language on board ship itself, was English.
The German captain of our ship spoke English more often than German. All his officers spoke English.
The Chinese man-o’-war’s men who conveyed the Chinese prince on board at Shanghai received commands and exchanged commands with our German sailors in English. The Chinese mandarins in their conversations with the ships’ officers invariably spoke English. They use the same ideographs in writing as the Japanese, but to talk to our Japanese passengers they had to speak English. Nay, coming as they did from various provinces of the Empire, where the language gready differs, they found it most convenient in conversation among themselves to speak English!
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And here is that of an American:
In Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Munich, Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, nearly all of Switzerland, and in such resorts as Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Carlsbad, Deauville, Biarritz, Vichy, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Lake Como, and the entire Riviera, it is difficult to find a first-class hotel
where they are willing to permit you to hear the language of the country. One might think the employees were required to abjure their own tongue.
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