Tower Of Babble: Non-Native Speakers Navigate The World Of 'Good' And 'Bad' English

[rdearman]

Will you call it a "carrot approach" if the Chinese occupy the British Isles tomorrow and declare Mandarin to be the sole language of high administration and universities? Then, anyone who wants to "get ahead" can learn Chinese. That exactly what the British did in India.

You don't have to go into the future, you can use the past. The Normans invaded the British Isles and imposted the French language for 150 years.

The system that was set up to impose English at the cost of local languages is still in place and is contributing to the English's status as the world's lingua franca.

India has been a free and independent nation for 74 years. This means the system has been self-imposed for 74 years. Which begs the question, why?

[Le Baron]

These are just the bald facts.

Then feel free to cite evidence.

As you have?

Things I hate on the internet are:

1. "But where's the evidence?!" Makes me feel like Richard Dawkins facing Wendy Wright (aka Wendy Wrong)
2. "This is an ad-hominem!!" How many people actually said this thing before the rise of the web?
3. "You're straw-manning me!!" I'm not, if one feels like that one is probably a bit Worzel Gummidge anyway.
4. "It's my opinion/my view"! Big deal. My neighbour's view is that Christian-right political parties are good for the country. She's wrong.

[Le Baron]

India has been a free and independent nation for 74 years. This means the system has been self-imposed for 74 years. Which begs the question, why?

That's not quite how it is though. The residue of colonialism created a two (or more) tier society different from the caste system (and yet absorbing it). It left a legacy where an elite was English educated (much like Freddie Mercury who was essentially Indian, yet couldn't speak it or any of his ancestral languages). Later this has filtered down into the middle-classes and new middle-classes as a known and established elite aim. By the 60s/70s/80s this meshed with the rise of actual 'global English'.

Two nurses who moved-in next to me in about 1997 (In the UK, I had a liaison with one of them ) from Kerala told me they deliberately pursued English to give them 'opportunities'. Also that this is a standard goal in India for people who have the means to do so. This is a clue as to what is going on. In some ways it's been a boon to some in ex-British colonies. There were Kenyan students at my university with impeccable English who no doubt benefited from the otherwise murky history.

So it's not like India in its independence has just failed to reject English, after so much of India had England's footprint forcibly impressed upon it over a couple of centuries. The Norman French you mentioned is from much further back in history and yet has left a residue.

[verdastelo]

The system that was set up to impose English at the cost of local languages is still in place and is contributing to the English's status as the world's lingua franca.

India has been a free and independent nation for 74 years. This means the system has been self-imposed for 74 years. Which begs the question, why?

Essentially all the same reasons, which have led Mozambique to keep Portuguese, Kenya to use English, and Algeria not to part with French. There's something you'll notice in all the former colonies: the elites' for the colonizer's language and a shitty (except for Singapore and Malaysia and probably a handful of other countries) economy.

An Indian politician wrote a well-argued essay on the need to use local languages in administration and education. He was called and is still called parochial by our anglicized elites. You can find it on Feudal Languages vs People's Languages.

Here are a a snippet:

The vast uptake of the English language was NOT during the colonial period, but rather near the end of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800's. This was because the vast majority of scientific and engineering information was published in England and in English and once again if you wanted to "get ahead" then you needed English to be able to use the books and materials available.

I missed it earlier.

The dominance of English in scientific publishing is recent. Until the end of the 19th century, German, French, and English were equally dominant. Then German overlook English for a while and then went into decline. Russian was a contender after the 1950s until the fall of the USSR. English assumed the dominant (more than 50% of scientific literature) position only in the 1950s. And its monopoly (more than 90% of scientific literature) is merely 25 years old. (Source: Michael Gordon's Scientific Babel)



The graph is merely for scientific papers published in hard sciences. In soft sciences, a different picture might emerge. Also, in Germany and Russia, there is a culture to write monographs and books which aren't usually counted towards making graphs such as the above one.

[Cainntear]

These are just the bald facts.

Then feel free to cite evidence.

As you have?

The difference is that I am not calling what you say "views"/"opinions" and what I say "bald facts".

I'm happy to accept that we're on equal footing for not proving our opinions to be objective facts, but you don't seem to be.

[Le Baron]

These are just the bald facts.

Then feel free to cite evidence.

As you have?

The difference is that I am not calling what you say "views"/"opinions" and what I say "bald facts".

I'm happy to accept that we're on equal footing for not proving our opinions to be objective facts, but you don't seem to be.

It's not my opinion, it is an established body of facts. Don't blame me for you being unaware of it. If this was a university symposium I'd be presenting a paper with notes, but since it's a casual forum I'm not going to do that.
It's like Wikipedia when someone writes: 'Michael Jackson is arguably the best-selling pop artist of the 1980s...' and then some weirdo adds: [citation required].

[Cainntear]

It's not my opinion, it is an established body of facts. Don't blame me for you being unaware of it.

Again, you're stating that your point of view is objective fact... why? What is the background that qualifies you to do this?

[Le Baron]

It's not my opinion, it is an established body of facts. Don't blame me for you being unaware of it.

Again, you're stating that your point of view is objective fact... why? What is the background that qualifies you to do this?

Well I wouldn't say 'qualifies' me in every respect, but I spent 12 years as a senior researcher under a reader in economic history at a fairly prestigious university. I did a lot of research on the use of culture and language in building colonial influences and hegemonies (usually economic via cultural influence).

Now I could be merely saying all that, because everyone wants documentary evidence for every utterance. However I'm not prepared to post my life on the internet to be searched and torn apart for delectation.

[Cainntear]

It's not my opinion, it is an established body of facts. Don't blame me for you being unaware of it.

Again, you're stating that your point of view is objective fact... why? What is the background that qualifies you to do this?

Well I wouldn't say 'qualifies' me in every respect, but I spent 12 years as a senior researcher under a reader in economic history at a fairly prestigious university. I did a lot of research on the use of culture and language in building colonial influences and hegemonies (usually economic via cultural influence).

Now I could be merely saying all that, because everyone wants documentary evidence for every utterance. However I'm not prepared to post my life on the internet to be searched and torn apart for delectation.

I wasn't going to demand proof. Again, when I mentioned evidence before, it was because you were saying that what you said was objectively true and what I said was objectively false.

I'm actually quite surprised by that, though. As a professional historian, I would have expected you to understand that history is open to interpretation. History tells us correlation, but not causation, because there's no control experiment -- we can't say for sure things would have turned out significantly differently if one particular event hadn't happened. And as a professional economist, I would have expected you to understand about complex systems and emergent phenomena, rather than offhandedly poo-pooing the whole idea as "Woolworth's pick-and-mix".

Here's a thought to consider... it's an entirely unprovable and unfalsifiable argument, but that's OK, cos we're talking about history:

If English's strength comes through propaganda, one of the most powerful forms of pro-English propaganda came unintentionally from the eastern bloc authorities. By overemphasising the evils of America, they created a false dichotomy, and given that the regimes in communist countries were oppressive and authoritarian, in doing so they effectively presented the idea that America was the epitome of freedom and free expression. Not only did bootleg US recordings gain even more cachet than their legitimate counterparts in Western Europe, the act of learning the language became an expression of rebellion.

I suggest that the lifting of the iron curtain accelerated the uptake of English as a lingua franca, as the first eastern Europeans to break out into the wider world had pretty good English (by the standards of the time) and likely good German, but no knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian etc.

Even within eastern European countries where Russian had served as the common language for decades, English quickly took over as lingua franca, not as a western imposition, but as a means of eliminating Russian.

Now I'm not going to ask you to accept that I'm right, but I don't see how you can say I'm definitely wrong.

[aaleks]

Here's a thought to consider... it's an entirely unprovable and unfalsifiable argument, but that's OK, cos we're talking about history:

If English's strength comes through propaganda, one of the most powerful forms of pro-English propaganda came unintentionally from the eastern bloc authorities. By overemphasising the evils of America, they created a false dichotomy, and given that the regimes in communist countries were oppressive and authoritarian, in doing so they effectively presented the idea that America was the epitome of freedom and free expression. Not only did bootleg US recordings gain even more cachet than their legitimate counterparts in Western Europe, the act of learning the language became an expression of rebellion.

I suggest that the lifting of the iron curtain accelerated the uptake of English as a lingua franca, as the first eastern Europeans to break out into the wider world had pretty good English (by the standards of the time) and likely good German, but no knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian etc.

Even within eastern European countries where Russian had served as the common language for decades, English quickly took over as lingua franca, not as a western imposition, but as a means of eliminating Russian.

I was born in the USSR (Russia), went in school in the USSR, and I was in my teens when that contry stopped its existence. So I was supposed to be subjected to that communist propaganda, but the only anti-Americans propaganda I remember was about the racial problem. Maybe something like "overemphasising the evils of America" was the case in the 1930's or 1950's, but not in the 1980's. Sometimes it seems like people living in the western countries think that the USSR stayed the same all those 70 years. It really is the truth, though, that back then many people had a rather idealistic image of the US, and the western world in general. Those illusions worn off pretty fast in the 1990's when former soviet citizens became free... from all they savings, their jobs, sometimes from their homes, and even from their very lives.

I don't know what is so surprising in a good level of English by the 30 years old standarts the eastern Europeans had, the soviet educational system was rather good. Better then the westernised dumb-down version of it we have these days. Besides there were schools with a foreign language as main subject. I don't know how to call the schools in English, in Russian it will be "спецшкола", "специализированная школа" which litterally means "specialized school". And you wrong in thinking that people in the USSR didn't learn French, or it was somewhat unpopular. In my school they taught us either German or French, we were supposed to choose one of them. In my class most kids wanted to learn French. By the way, in one very popular movie for kids of 1980's the characters were learning French. Traditionally there were three langauges taught in soviet schools - English, German, and French. While English would be the most popular, German and French were about at the same level. Spanish and Italian would be rather "exotic" languages in a sense at that time becuase, normally, they weren't taught in school.

The only former soviet/eastern European countries where Russian could be replaced by English I can think of are the Baltic ones. But I don't know how good most of the people living there are at English. Either way, leaving out those three contries, I wouldn't so boldly claim that English took over as lingua franca in the former soviet republics, if nothing else because many, if not most people there, usually speak Russian as their native language.