Sign of the Time? – Moon of Alabama

September 30, 2005

Sign of the Time?

Each time has its Lingua franca. A language widely used to communicate in cultural exchanges between different countries and populations.

Greek, Latin, French, German have been used as such in the western hemisphere. Today the lingua franca is English. It sneaks itself into the native languages. It is modern, hip and cool to use it.

Walk through any European city and you will see lots of English words used in public space. There are "Sales", "Beauty Shops" and "Happy Hours" everywhere.

So when I saw this sign in front of an ‘elite’ bar in a hip part of town in Hamburg, Germany, I was awestruck by the use of German. I have seen "Happy Hour" signs in Turkey, Spain, France, Poland and elsewhere throughout Europe. I never noticed one announcing a ‘happy hour’ in the native language.

Maybe this is just an aberration. But it also could be something else.

After WWII the European cultures have been dominated by the Anglo-american. Is this about to change?

Posted by b on September 30, 2005 at 13:13 UTC | Permalink

Comments

I live and work in Europe, and you are pointing out something that we’ve actually been discussing. People are voluntarily abandoning English terms (particularly Americanisms), and companies that used to communicate in English, to simplify things, are going to the expense of translating into various European markets, rather than using English. An extra cost for the Bush & Blair adventure.

Posted by: SteinL | Sep 30 2005 14:22 utc | 1

I just spent two weeks in Paris and was struck by seeing that almost every t-shirt worn was in English or near-English- even political ones. English was the language of marketing and consumption. French was the language of small businesses.

Posted by: biklett | Sep 30 2005 15:45 utc | 2

Meet George Jetson

Posted by: fauxreal | Sep 30 2005 15:55 utc | 3

Abandoning English would be predictable—the reason for picking it up in the first place, basically, is because of the dominance of the U.S. and U.K. economies over a period of centuries. It has become clear that the U.S. has lost its shine, and has been eating the seed corn too (i.e. cutting budgets for R&D, which is where future economic expansion comes from), and nice though the U.K. may be, they are no longer dominant.

If English gets dropped, that may even be a good thing for English—the more widely a language is used, the harder it is for it to change; any significantly changed version is labelled a dialect and left to fend for itself. Maybe if the U.S. collapses into bankrupt barbarism, when it breaks back into civilization again American English will have simplified spelling and grammar, which would be a tremendous boon. (No more “flour” vs. “flower”—and you’ll be able to tell the “flower” that grows on a plant from the “flower” that flows.)

What will be more interesting will be the fate of commercial English. Will it completely abandoned? That would be a tremendous waste in the short term, and large companies don’t like that. So will we see English embedded in international commerce the way Latin is embedded in Catholicism?

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Sep 30 2005 16:44 utc | 4

Sankaracarya,
( http://www.americansanskrit.com/articles/a_sacred.html , Part III)
Satsangatve nissangatvam
nissangatve nirmohatvam
nirmohatve niscalitatvam
niscalitative jrvanmuktih
In a state of satsanga, good company, comes non-attachment;
in non-attachment, a state beyond confusion;
in truth beyond confusion, motionlessness;
in motionlessness, living freedom.
I find Sanskrit intriguing partly because it is effectively and poetically concise.
For a Lingua franca, I think the some ancients surpassed where we are struggling to as yet arrived today.

Posted by: Juannie | Sep 30 2005 17:54 utc | 5

Maybe the bad guys in movies will change their German accents for American ones?
Will far-right speeches in Turkey be mocked as “sounding better in the original American”?
.

Posted by: Grand Moff Texan | Sep 30 2005 18:43 utc | 6

You are pointing out some cultural signs that I really want to track. The Delong blogathon says that when we fall into our depression, we will shift into export industries. Well, maybe that will happen. I don’t know if our standard of living is going to fall enough while the quality of our exports stays high enough for us to have any export markets. Another matter is whether Europeans, Japanese, and other peoples are going to what to buy what we have to sell. Should we be looking for pick-ups in international movie making, more horror movies from Japan, more Japanese animation, Korean and Taiwanese movies? Perk up your ears while overseas and let’s see what’s going on.

Posted by: christofay | Sep 30 2005 23:35 utc | 7

wow! great news! english may survive its destruction by the media and PR hacks of the world after all.

Posted by: lenin’s ghost | Oct 1 2005 0:50 utc | 8

If Americanism becomes passe what in the world will we do with Mickey Mouse?

Posted by: jm | Oct 1 2005 1:29 utc | 9

Fuck Mickey, my Italian immigrant grandparents always used that as an adjective for a joker, someone who if he put their pants on in the morning and returned with all limps attached in the evening had to count it as a job well done, as in “President Bush is Mickey Mouse.”
I thought it was a bad day when Levi’s closed their last U. S. plant. But it’s weird days, I just saw Lee Iacocco and Snoop Dog in the same tv ad.
Things are spinning fast but spinning bad for the U. S. and not spinning the bad guys out of the saddle.

Posted by: christofay | Oct 1 2005 1:52 utc | 10

At this point, I doubt we will see the demise of English soon. In Asia I have found it to be the lingua franca similra to the Greek “Koine” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek> in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Where I work, there are many people from the mainland PRC and from HK. Since most mainlanders don’t speak Cantonese, and many HK peoples’ Mandarin is still rather weak, they will use English. Also, we have other students and professors from all over the Asia, and the working language is English. The fact that the many langauges of East Asia don’t even share a common character set (unlike the languages of Western Europe) makes English necerssary to them.
It *is* possible that this may change, but what would replace it? The Francophones would be very pleased if French became the language of international exchange, but what would make that happen? More HK students are begining to study German (studying there is such a bargain), but it is not widespread. Spanish? In Asia (as far as I can see), almost no one uses Spanish, which would make better sense as an international language than English, with the way it’s orthography matches pronunciation. But I think that history & money flow are against that happening in Asia (in the Americas, it’s a different story).
Spoken Mandarin Chinese could be a contender for new lingua franca, but since becoming literate in Chinese has such a steep learning curve, I can’t really see it replacing English, but time will tell.
So, instead, I see English remaining an international lingua franca for quite some time, even if the “empires” that founded them are no longer powerful, just as Koine was *the* language six hundred years after Alexander’s empire fell to pieces.

Posted by: hk-reader | Oct 1 2005 3:31 utc | 11

Funny:
A readers letter to todays Financial Times

Gestalt über alles
From Mr Florian Lennert (London School of Economics)
Sir, with only a little schadenfreude I read the fascinating article “The unavoidable English language” (September 24) regarding the takeover of the global linguistic hinterland by the wanderlustig Anglo-Saxon language. This phenomenon is clearly a welcome manifestation of the zeitgeist and serves as a leitmotif of a contemporary weltanschauung.
Clearly a language blitzkrieg would not be desireable, would create a lot of angst and would lead to a not so gemütlich lebensraum for all. So we language doppelgänger should accept this diktat of realpolitik and not abseil into weltschmerz with a rucksack full of schnapps. Instead we should celebrate the glitzy gestalt of English, our ersatz language of choice.

Posted by: b | Oct 1 2005 15:03 utc | 12

Back to Main