Who owns English?

It’s a provocative question. So provocative, in fact, that Newsweek International decided to put it on the cover of its March 7 issue, and I was sucker enough to buy it. Rarely does the content of Newsweek or Time ever live up to the covers, so I don’t know why I should be disappointed this time. In any event, the content, such as it is, of the particular article “Not the Queen’s English” can be summed up in the following four points:

1. English language instruction is a hugely lucrative industry.
2. “If you can’t speak English, it’s like you’re deaf and dumb.”
3. Non-native speakers of English now outnumber native speakers 3 to 1. Why is this important? Never before has there been a language that’s spoken by more people as a second than a first.
4. There is no World Standard English, but there is an international “brand” of English, and despite regional variations in vocabulary and pronunciation, it’s the non-native speakers who are doing a better job of communicating in it than those who insist upon the Queen’s English and all its idiomatic colloquialisms.

Conclusion (mine): Everybody knows that language is a fluid thing. It trickles and eddies, flows and overflows. It penetrates, erodes, refracts. Eventually, a point of saturation will be reached. In the meantime, there is indeed a lot of money to be made, and only a fraction of it will be made by Brits and Americans. I think it’s fair to say that nobody owns English anymore; it’s a mass market commodity sold dirt cheap on every corner. Imagine one advertisement selling equally effectively in each and every corner of the globe. This is a great triumph for English. Nothing is wasted, people say, and a language grows neither richer nor poorer; it just is what it is. But I wonder, in 50 years or so, will Spanglish, Hinglish, Greeklish, and other such tongues be mutually comprehensible or will they be useless double corruptions that got out of hand? (Blogos [see March 1] is more optimistic.)

Linguistic imperialism is hardly the issue when the “oppressed” are clamoring, supplicating themselves, and paying exorbitant prices for access to “the language of empowerment.” Nevertheless, I think English is already going down in history as a language killer; it’s another sort of mass extinction we can blame on the Americans. Diversity guards against the loss of any given species, and I think that bilingualism and multilingualism will keep total domination by English at bay for the foreseeable future, maybe indefinitely. In fact, the way I see it, English may be among the first to fall in the killing spree. The descriptivists will judge me for this, but in English, there is an –s on third person singular verbs. There is a difference between who and whom, and pil(l) and peel, and pique and peak (and peaked and peaked).

Back to the bottom line, runaway inflation will inevitably leave a currency devalued. Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Walker Percy and all those guys said it first, but it’s all a matter of mass reproduction and overabundant representation. Performance is privileged – over property, permanence, and sadly, precision.

The picture was taken by Kyle Reed in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province. Coincidentally, statement Number 2 (above) was made by a 12-year-old girl who makes her home there. According to Kyle, the Chinese means something like: "Entrance to bus station here" but the sign was written in Chinglish (English words with Chinese syntax).