English:
The New Tower of Babel?
Many
native-English speakers have seen, and laughed at terrible, often hilarious
mistranslations, particularly from Chinese to English. There are whole websites
devoted to making a mockery of this pseudo-language! At times, it seems as
though they were poorly translated on purpose-no one hired to do these
translations has ever heard of spellcheck?! According to the article, From
English to Chinglish: The Globalization of Languages, in part due to the 2008
China Olympics, the government began cracking down on such infamous translating
errors such as, "if you are stolen, call the police”. What I found
interesting was that this crack-down didn’t occur sooner. The Asian culture as
a whole is oft noted for their pride in academic success, so how did all these
grammatical errors slip by? The answer may be as simple as that there are so
many non-native English speakers using English as their "lingua
franca", that what has long been considered "proper" grammar may
soon become obsolete. It is predicted by 2020, people whose first language is
English, will only account for 15% of the population that learn English. Even
now, the majority of conversations in English are by non-native speakers using
it as a means to bridge the language barrier between foreign lands. As it is
pointed out in Wired Magazine, this influx of non-native speakers communicating
in English, many changes in syntax and grammar will become the norm. Languages
such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin do not use pronouns. The practice
of not making certain nouns plural will be disregarded. If they eliminate them
in their native tongue, why not eliminate them in their bastardized English? It
only makes sense to make English more efficient for its growing supporters.
Interestingly, it was because of this same linguistic influence that Western
Europe split into "realms" of language-Romance and Germanic
languages. English was in fact, a fusion of both! Ergo, it is not surprising
that this trend of English evolving to include other languages is lending to
the depletion of lesser known, indigenous languages. To that end, there are
both pros and cons; if more people can communicate across borders, certain
prejudices will die away and ignorance will (hopefully) diminish. An example
listed in From Chinglish to English is in India, where although Hindi is
considered to be the country's official language, only 1/6th of the population
is native-Hindi speakers. In this case, English is used as an "ethnically neutral
choice" to avoid cultural preferences. However, despite the major pluses
for this new lingua franca, there are negatives to be seen. With more and more
of the populace speaking the same language, albeit with different dialects, the
cultures that make the world so diverse will have less of a place in society.
Certain cultural practices, and possibly certain cultures themselves, will
become as archaic as the languages that they are connected to. It is estimated
that a language becomes extinct approximately every 2 weeks. This is due to
some languages lacking a written form, and others because sometimes as little
as 10 living people speak it, so when they die out, so does their native
tongue. There is a silver lining to this though; there have been recent efforts
to preserve these endangered languages. Many of these languages being
indigenous, the people of which have a deep-rooted link to nature and what it
has to offer, allow for us to study naturalistic points of view and research
that modern science might otherwise fail to unearth.
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