[lit-ideas] Re: Are they synonymous?
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:11:39 EST
In what languages are you fluent?
Julie Krueger
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: Are they
synonymous? Date: 1/28/2007 11:23:49 A.M. Central Standard Time From:
_andreas@xxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx) To:
_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on:
From: "David Ritchie" <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Given the history of languages, dialects and identities, should we be
surprised? I
> imagine (I only know a little of the academic literature on the subject)
American English
> to be unusual among world languages, a truly national and quite
democratic--by which I
> mean no academy or brahmin class controls it-- version of Hoch Deutsch, a
language
> everyone more or less understands and has done so for some considerable
time.
Well, yes, many people were surprised. In the late 70s and early 80s, when I
lived in
Germany, you couldn't live there without speaking German. Only a few spoke
English. Daily
life in the shops, the university, and the bureaucratic and legal system was
entirely in
German.
I was in Paris every few months throughout the early 80s and I lived for a
year in France in
the mid-80s. Not even the clerk at the information counter at the main train
station for
international trains could speak English. If you didn't speak French, you
could only point
at things.
At my cousin's wedding in Brussels in 1984, the guests sat at tables
arranged by language.
The French speakers here, the German speakers there, the Flemish at that
table, and so on.
But by the mid-90s, and especially in the last five years, the change has
been astonishing.
Literally everyone in Germany and France under 35 or so speaks English.
These countries have
become what Denmark and Sweden had already achieved in the mid-80s: general
fluency in
English.
English is the working language of Europe. They use it so they can all talk
together. There
is hardly any point in learning French or German anymore, unless one is an
academic. At ABB,
the Sweden construction company (like Halliburton, but without the war
profiteering), all
internal communication is in English.
None of us back in the 70s and 80s expected this. Germany would be Germany,
and so on. That
anyone in Paris would ever ever speak English? And even smile? Ludicrous.
As for David's second point: does anyone control English? No. English has
passed on to
become a global language, spoken by more people than Brits and Americans.
Add up all the
Europeans, the Indians, and so on.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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