Everyone speaks English because we don't correct them
On openness to the outsider
In the debates around every aspect of literature and literary culture, in the Anglophone world at least – meaning those as to whether people are reading enough, the future of the humanities or the switch to audiovisual modes of media consumption – it seems ironic that the actually most important theme of today’s world literature, the unprecedented dominance of the English language, barely merits mention. Any more than goldfish remark upon the water they swim in.
My definition of a writer is someone with an unusually involved relationship to language. In this context, it seems to me that any content I can write in the language I am using today, the only language I can use to this degree, is less salient than that the choice of language itself. My native language has become ubiquitous and requisite to a degree that is actively harmful to other languages, not least because an increasing amount of the world’s business is done in a version of it at best deracinated and at worst catastrophically limited.
More perhaps than any other language in history, English has won, and to the extent that English-speaking culture takes any notice of it – with the honourable exception of those defending minority languages in places where English is the main language – it is with a sort of genteel chauvinism as to why English is the best language and deservedly on top.
Well, to be more accurate something called English is; anyone who has spent any time in international environments such as Brussels or Geneva knows that the language being used as a communicative auxillary there has very little to do with any local variety of English. I sometimes dub the English I hear in Brussels ‘The French revenge’, an en-masse calquing of Frenchisms into the English language via with the logic that, if French is no longer going to be the international language, the one we do use should at least be as Frenchified as possible.
A long time ago, I read one of those funny little ‘Bluffer’s Guides’, this one to the English, and it contained the claim that the ubiquity of English worldwide would make the English feel cosy. For my part, I’m not sure that’s the feeling the detached, error-riddled English I encounter in Brussels provoked, often spoken in an American accent and rammed full of register-inappropriate slang; it certainly doesn’t make me feel much at home.
It is a very weird experience to interact with this language as a native speaker of the language it has been named after; you are both advantaged and also forced to simplify yourself. It’s no more comfortable when people who know I'm Anglophone abroad make a demonstrative show of wishing me ‘Good morning’, as I don’t feel ‘Good morning’ belongs to me any more, that those words have no trace of locality. I feel no identification with international English at all. If these non-native speakers did want to make me feel at home they might want to greet me with my native Nottingham’s ‘Hey up me duck’, which has happened more often than you think. The ubiquity of my language has made me retreat to the local.
When I was young, I was quite angry that Anglophone culture was so parochial and uninterested in other languages. That it was entirely acceptable for my young English compatriots just to say ‘Oh, I’m crap at languages’ and be done with it for life, which always left me thinking ‘Well, we can’t all be.’
I made decisions to make sure that it wouldn’t be my destiny and went hard learning German and then French in my 20s and various other languages beyond. That did involve a lot of insisting people who wanted to practice English speak their native tongue with me and on a few occasions even some pretty ugly fights about that1. For all the struggles, it’s all been massively enriching and has led me to my career as an interpreter, although even that career is eroding at the edges due to the increasing dominance of English or at least what gets called it these days.
