Largely unnoticed by English speakers, our fellow Europeans are sullenly suffering the colonisation of their native languages by Anglo-American terms.
Linguistics experts met in the Swiss capital Bern on Tuesday to share ideas on how to deal with the growing language divide within French, German and Italian-speaking communities.
Who can get by these days without knowing the
meaning of whistleblower, laptop, roaming or task force? They are all
words that have entered into common usage in Swiss national languages.
Behind
the laughter at the many comic examples of pseudo-English which have
popped up, there is dismay at the unstoppable stream of borrowings and
fear for the very survival of the continent’s languages.
Guest
speaker Alfred Gilder, terminology chief at the French finance
ministry, captured the mood of the conference with the battle-cry
“modernise or die!”.
“If a language is not capable of creating new words to describe new advances, it will die,” he warned.
Gilder
summed up his philosophy of linguistic integrity by using a drinking
metaphor. “I like Bordeaux very much and I like whisky too but I would
never mix the two!”
Beginning of the end
A point echoed by several speakers was that
English has become so dominant in certain fields, such as finance and
science, that courses in some disciplines are now exclusively being
taught in English in some countries. The beginning of the end, as
Gilder sees it.
The conference, attended by some 200 delegates, was organised by the Swiss Federal Chancellery.
Vice-chancellor
Thomas Helbling told swissinfo.ch that Switzerland, with its tradition
of language diversity had possibly less to fear from the influence of
English. But he stressed that the home languages needed to be preserved.
“I
definitely think that we should learn a second national language before
English. It is part of our tradition and culture to speak to each
other, as you can see at today’s conference where three languages are
in use on the floor.”
Global dominance
Of course borrowing words and expressions from
other languages is a natural function of language development and
English itself has absorbed countless influences in its history – from
Latin, French and Hindi, to name but a few.
What is different
about the current dominance of English is that it is the first truly
global language and it is spewing out words at a pace that other
languages have no chance to compete with.
This rapid evolution
favours those who can ride the English wave but creates a language
divide, akin to the digital divide, for those who are poor in English.
Germanic
expert Jürg Niederhuaser illustrated this problem neatly by quoting the
head of a research department in a Basel pharmaceutical company, who
said:
“In the section I lead, people like to joke that without English you won’t get so much as a cup of coffee.”
Bénédicte Madinier, French Ministry of Culture
Uniformity
Bénédicte Madinier, another guardian of the
French language who works for the French Ministry of Culture, spoke of
the linguistic uniformity that is fast becoming established worldwide.
“It
is not a question of denying the interest, the necessity of an
international language of communication, a lingua franca, …. What must
be avoided is that the lingua franca becomes lingua unica,” Madinier
said.
Madinier has a role in the French establishment’s
complex system of screening new English words and either approving them
for adoption into French or coming up with a new French form.
The
French can boast to have possibly the only language on the planet which
put forward its own version of the word computer which is still in
popular usage – “ordinateur”. But such victories are few and far
between.
False friends
The English influence is so pervasive now that
languages are cobbling together words that either exist in a different
form or mean something quite different in English.
So you want
to get your hair done? In French-speaking Switzerland you have to ask
for a “shampooing” followed by a “brushing”. Those crow’s feet
bothering you? It might be time for a “facelifting”.
Or perhaps
you want to order an overhead projector for your speech? That will be a
“beamer” to your Swiss hosts. And if you happen to point out a vintage
car to a German-speaker, don't forget to call it an “oldtimer”.
Last
but not least is “last but not least”, the most overused English
expression among the Swiss, which pops up without fail in every speech
and presentation, as any English speaker living here will testify.
Clare O’Dea, swissinfo.ch, December 16th 2009