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WELL, I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas.
I asked Santa: “Please teach me to speak fluent French overnight,” and he said: “Merde, you don’t ask for much!” and gave me a day off from cooking instead (for which I was very grateful, believe me – I have bitter memories of Yule cooking, with one hand sliding inside a cold-skinned turkey, clutching a slightly slimy mess of stuffing).
I’m desperate to learn French now that I am heading up the African Federation of Science Journalists. One in three of the people I meet on the rest of this diverse continent, at least, speak French as their first or fourth language.
When I think how easy it is to learn a second, third and even fourth language when you’re very young, I wish that all our kindergartens and Grade Rs offered English, Zulu or another major African language, French (or Portuguese) and Mandarin lessons, so that babes would pick the basics up while they’re still in that window of opportunity between birth and six, when learning other languages comes easiest.
There’s quite a bit of research that shows children and adults who speak more than one language well have huge advantages in academic work and, of course, in the business world of today, where being able to slide smoothly into Mandarin or French can give you a massive competitive edge. (It saves you from having to do mental gymnastics to understand Chinglish, too: what does “It’s duty of us that obligation the cultural relic” mean? It sounds about as confused as any attempt of mine at Mandarin would be.)
I have been told on the best of authority (Forbes) that English will continue to be the dominant language of business into the foreseeable future. Which is good news for those of us who have English as our first language (at least I learnt Afrikaans at school, which gives me a head start on Dutch and a working understanding of other northern languages), but bad news for home-language English speakers like the Brits and Americans, who’ll miss out on the mental agility learning two or more brings.
I have at least one acquaintance who would qualify that, huffily, with a comment like: “Well, that’s if you call what they speak ENGLISH!” and proceed to get really upset about our constant use of ‘Americanisms’ like ‘gotten’. (Which is actually an ancient usage that survives today in forms like ‘misbegotten’.)
I find one of the most useful and charming things about my home language is that English is such an old tart. She’ll flirt wildly with any language that calls her over for a fleeting encounter, and come away trailing little bits of Hindi (pundit, bungalow and many more) Persian (shawl, typhoon and the like), Malaysian (ketchup, launch, amuck), German (abseil, kitsch, pretzel, for example), Arabic (cotton, magazine, coffee, lemon, mattress and a zillion more), Italian (as in caricature, broccoli, sonnet and stiletto), Hawaiian (taboo and ukulele), Romani or gypseys (pal and shiv) and Turkic (bosh and bugger, both important modern English words).
Those of us who were born to English take one of two attitudes: resistance and acceptance. The resisters exclaim over every maiming of their beloved language. They insist that the rules must be followed, or disorder will break out and the Tower of Babel be brought back to life.
The accepters say that any language is only really a living language if it moves with the changing populations who speak it. What was once slang (‘okay’, for example) very soon becomes an accepted part of the language. And all too often, expressions that irritate the resisters turn out to have ancient histories.
‘Friend’ used as a verb (‘so he friended me on Facebook’) was being used in the 17th century – for example, “The King friended Lauderdale”. ‘Hang out’ has been in use (as in “Where do you hang out?”) since the first half of the 19th century, and ‘dude’, meaning dandy, arrived on the scene near the turn of that century.
So who cares if the Namibians say “Time is running” when what they mean is “Time is going fast”? I understand it, don’t you? Or if Kenyans say, “Will you pick?” instead of “will you pick it up?” or “it has refused” instead of “it’s stopped working”. Or if speakers of Uglish (Ugandan English) says, “Stop cowardising and go and see the girl,” or “Please don’t dirten my shirt”.
As long as there’s mutual understanding, having a lingua franca (which French once was across the world, the ‘language of diplomacy’) that all can communicate in can only make a globalised world easier to navigate. So let’s not get precious about it as home-language speakers of English. Languages change, even in the hands of their ‘owners’.
How many of you home-language English speakers say “ASwell” instead of “as WELL”? I saw that change happen in my lifetime. In my ears it’s ‘wrong’, but I can understand you perfectly, so “Que sera sera,” as the Italians would say… Now, how do I say Happy New Year in French?
Oh yes, bonne année, dear readers!
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
I asked Santa: “Please teach me to speak fluent French overnight,” and he said: “Merde, you don’t ask for much!” and gave me a day off from cooking instead (for which I was very grateful, believe me – I have bitter memories of Yule cooking, with one hand sliding inside a cold-skinned turkey, clutching a slightly slimy mess of stuffing).
I’m desperate to learn French now that I am heading up the African Federation of Science Journalists. One in three of the people I meet on the rest of this diverse continent, at least, speak French as their first or fourth language.
When I think how easy it is to learn a second, third and even fourth language when you’re very young, I wish that all our kindergartens and Grade Rs offered English, Zulu or another major African language, French (or Portuguese) and Mandarin lessons, so that babes would pick the basics up while they’re still in that window of opportunity between birth and six, when learning other languages comes easiest.
There’s quite a bit of research that shows children and adults who speak more than one language well have huge advantages in academic work and, of course, in the business world of today, where being able to slide smoothly into Mandarin or French can give you a massive competitive edge. (It saves you from having to do mental gymnastics to understand Chinglish, too: what does “It’s duty of us that obligation the cultural relic” mean? It sounds about as confused as any attempt of mine at Mandarin would be.)
I have been told on the best of authority (Forbes) that English will continue to be the dominant language of business into the foreseeable future. Which is good news for those of us who have English as our first language (at least I learnt Afrikaans at school, which gives me a head start on Dutch and a working understanding of other northern languages), but bad news for home-language English speakers like the Brits and Americans, who’ll miss out on the mental agility learning two or more brings.
I have at least one acquaintance who would qualify that, huffily, with a comment like: “Well, that’s if you call what they speak ENGLISH!” and proceed to get really upset about our constant use of ‘Americanisms’ like ‘gotten’. (Which is actually an ancient usage that survives today in forms like ‘misbegotten’.)
I find one of the most useful and charming things about my home language is that English is such an old tart. She’ll flirt wildly with any language that calls her over for a fleeting encounter, and come away trailing little bits of Hindi (pundit, bungalow and many more) Persian (shawl, typhoon and the like), Malaysian (ketchup, launch, amuck), German (abseil, kitsch, pretzel, for example), Arabic (cotton, magazine, coffee, lemon, mattress and a zillion more), Italian (as in caricature, broccoli, sonnet and stiletto), Hawaiian (taboo and ukulele), Romani or gypseys (pal and shiv) and Turkic (bosh and bugger, both important modern English words).
Those of us who were born to English take one of two attitudes: resistance and acceptance. The resisters exclaim over every maiming of their beloved language. They insist that the rules must be followed, or disorder will break out and the Tower of Babel be brought back to life.
The accepters say that any language is only really a living language if it moves with the changing populations who speak it. What was once slang (‘okay’, for example) very soon becomes an accepted part of the language. And all too often, expressions that irritate the resisters turn out to have ancient histories.
‘Friend’ used as a verb (‘so he friended me on Facebook’) was being used in the 17th century – for example, “The King friended Lauderdale”. ‘Hang out’ has been in use (as in “Where do you hang out?”) since the first half of the 19th century, and ‘dude’, meaning dandy, arrived on the scene near the turn of that century.
So who cares if the Namibians say “Time is running” when what they mean is “Time is going fast”? I understand it, don’t you? Or if Kenyans say, “Will you pick?” instead of “will you pick it up?” or “it has refused” instead of “it’s stopped working”. Or if speakers of Uglish (Ugandan English) says, “Stop cowardising and go and see the girl,” or “Please don’t dirten my shirt”.
As long as there’s mutual understanding, having a lingua franca (which French once was across the world, the ‘language of diplomacy’) that all can communicate in can only make a globalised world easier to navigate. So let’s not get precious about it as home-language speakers of English. Languages change, even in the hands of their ‘owners’.
How many of you home-language English speakers say “ASwell” instead of “as WELL”? I saw that change happen in my lifetime. In my ears it’s ‘wrong’, but I can understand you perfectly, so “Que sera sera,” as the Italians would say… Now, how do I say Happy New Year in French?
Oh yes, bonne année, dear readers!
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
