Posted Monday, August 31, 2009 at 10:36 p.m. by Chris Amico in Mess Of A Language about China and Chinglish
With the World Expo coming, Shanghai has joined the War on Chinglish. And so, as sure as there is smog in Beijing, there is a new round of stories touting China's official efforts to copy edit the worst linguistic offenders.
But it gets me thinking about Chinglish again, and more broadly, Konglish, Singlish and all the other creoles, sublanguages and other linguistic concoctions people use when one language just isn't enough.
In 2007, the IHT noted the rise of English as the first truly global language:
As a new millennium begins, scholars say that about one-fourth of the world's population can communicate to some degree in English.
It is the common language in almost every endeavor, from science to air traffic control to the global jihad, where it is apparently the means of communication between speakers of Arabic and other languages.
It has consolidated its dominance as the language of the Internet, where 80 percent of the world's electronically stored information is in English, according to David Graddol, a linguist and researcher.
There may be more native speakers of Chinese, Spanish or Hindi, but it is English they speak when they talk across cultures, and English they teach their children to help them become citizens of an increasingly intertwined world.
Later in that piece, it's said that there are more non-native speakers of English than native speakers, which is interesting to think about as Shanghai, and China more generally, tries to copy edit itself: It is taken for granted that so much is already translated, that English (to whatever degree) is in no way out of place on signage and menus. This is true in Shanghai, just as it is in Qingdao and Dalian and Dandong.
In English as a Global Language, author David Crystal lists more than 50 countries with significant English-speaking populations.
I used to argue with a British friend of mine about who was speaking the right flavor of English: whether bonnets belonged on automobiles or Amish women and other nonsense. Looking at the statistics, though--the multitude of dialects just within England, the nationalistic Atlantic split, "Canadian English"--I have to wonder, who really owns this language? Does anyone?
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sep 1, 2009 at 2:29 a.m. // Alex said:
I wrote a very long post, which I just deleted before submitting this form. Far too lengthy and complex. New version:
I was at an outsourcing conference in Dalian around 4 months ago. During the conference an American lady that worked in a business development function for HiSoft, a local Dalian company, made a quip that Chinglish wasn't all that bad compared to most Indian software workers.
She successfully played up the Chinese idea of 'correct' regarding a language while belittling locally perceived competition en-masse (while Dalian is small, for many BPO services it views India as a massive invariant block of competition which evidently can be summed up in a few lines). This amused and disappointed me in equal measure. How can a language spoken by a native speaker not be 'correct'?
The rest of this post is an experiment. Key words: Africa, India, self perception, China, inferiority complex, French, romantic, Italian, gregarious, Hong Kong'ese', flied lice, Alabama, redneck drawl, Nicaragua, cocaine.
sep 1, 2009 at 11:24 a.m. // Chris Amico said:
I'm pretty sure keyword concentration has lost its luster, but let's see what happens. Glad to have my blog be a petri dish.
This idea that there even is a "correct" English is something I'm starting to question, given the global nature of the language. An old editing teacher I had, who was a linguistics PhD, might put it this way: There is such a thing as standard English (or rather, a standard American English, and standard British, and so on), and there are non-standard Englishes, which account for dialects and local vocabularies.
Non-standard versions of English, or any language, though, can still be internally consistent and therefore "correct."
sep 1, 2009 at 4:55 p.m. // Alex said:
Just ask Raymond from Wafangdian English Language Super School
http://www.daliandalian.com/blog/wafangdian-english-language-super-school
sep 3, 2009 at 3:53 a.m. // Bill Chapman said:
The IHT says "about one-fourth of the world's population can communicate to some degree in English." That may be the case, but English remains far from universal.
I'd like to see wider use made of Esperanto. A good place to learn is www.lernu.net