We no speak americano

[muckefuck]

monshu drew my attention to an article in the most recent Economist about the adoption of English by foreign companies (a process it terms "Englishnisation"). He was particularly struck by this bit:

Still, Englishnisation is not easy, even if handled well: the most proficient speakers can still struggle to express nuance and emotion in a foreign tongue. For this reason, native English speakers often assume that the spread of their language in global corporate life confers an automatic advantage on them. In fact it can easily encourage them to rest on their laurels. Too many of them (especially Englishmen, your columnist keeps being told) risk mistaking their fluency in meetings for actual accomplishments.

Naturally, this got me thinking about the issue of linguistic privilege more generally. (That last line in particular is an almost perfect summation of the whole phenomenon of privilege.) I went looking for examinations of the concept online and found this excellent essay (with links to research findings! Those of you who aren't new to the privilege discussion--which should be everyone reading this--can safely skip the first half-dozen paragraphs.)

Of course, since the author has bigger fish to fry than I do, he leaves off mentioning some manifestations of native English-speaking privilege that are more salient to me because I encountre them on a daily basis. For instance, he talks about English as capital and how mere possession of a fluent command of it secures speakers good-paying jobs at home and abroad. In the language fora I frequent, one of the ways this plays out is that even the most unsophisticated speakers can present themselves as experts and receive a certain amount of deference. Time and again I've seen natives capture the benefit of the doubt in a disagreement with a much better-educated non-native speaker. American youngsters in particular are prone to consider their opinions authoritative when really they're hardly in a position to generalise about their own dialect of American English, much less the totality of varieties going under the name of "English". I've made this mistake many times myself and now am far more cautious about branding something "incorrect" as opposed to simply unidiomatic in the varieties most familiar to me.

Related to this is a certain lack of humility about the extent of one's own ignorance of anything not in English. Before it became fashionable to say "Everything's online nowadays" it was common to hear "If it's important, it'll be translated". Of course, anyone who's tried to do serious research in any field that isn't very limited in both time-depth and geographic scope knows this isn't true. But still an English-speaker can be dismissive about works which aren't available in his native language and receive a more sympathetic hearing than, say, a Finn or a Bengali would.

Another area of particular interest to me is that of borrowing. An English-speaker takes for granted that words from his native language have permeated every significant vernacular on the planet--often in large number. Moreover, if the usage in the foreign language doesn't match the usage in his own, it is somehow wrong. I've witnessed the embarrassment of Germans over the use of such words as Handy and Bodybag, which sound ludicrous to a German-speaker. Meanwhile, English-speakers freely and unapologetically create mock Germanicisms like "Freudenschade" and "Blinkenlights". (A similar double-standard involving Spanish has been criticised by Ana Celia Zentella in the book José, can you see?, who laments that English-speakers' disregard of all grammatical norms of Spanish "passes as multicultural 'with-it-ness.'")

Of course there's much more to be said in this vein, but it all adds up to "The English-speaker is right even when they're wrong". And that's on top of English-speakers hogging the space for discourse purely on account of not having to put as much thought into how to structure what they're saying. It will be interesting to see how this dynamic shifts if there comes a time when "native-speakers" become a minority and cease to wield such disproportionate economic power. (Not in my lifetime, I don't think, but the world is full of surprises.)

Comments

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I think that it was good for me that, very early in my career, I had to write technical documentation specifically to be as comprehensible as possible to non-native English speakers. It makes one think that much harder about word choice and double meanings in every language. As a consequence, I try very hard to do things like not use "since" meaning "because" in my formal writing.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's another one of those funny things: Native speakers are always held up as the gold standard, but sometimes an L2 speaker is actually better at writing for an international audience.

The first time an English-learner asked me what the rules were for position of adverbs in English, I had no idea what to say. I knew what sounded right to me, but I'd never tried to figure out why. But I can tell you the rules for German because I had to learn them myself.