[lit-ideas] Re: Are they synonymous?
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 09:23:45 -0800
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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