Talking About Words: Exporting English

With Prof. Richard W. Bailey

‘Nederlandse militairen de laan uit wegens drugs'

(Netherlands military have been dismissed because of drugs)

Whatever the balance of trade may be in other commodities, lots more people pick up and use our words than give words back to us. Borrowing from foreign languages is a decreasingly common practice in English, and in the 1990s only one exotic word entered widely into circulation, tamagotchi (1996), and that one was speedily replaced by a synonym based on English syllables, cyberpets (also 1996).

The words from the '90s still in use include off-message, screen saver, spam and web —none of them in the least foreign. There were a few more foreign words brought in in the 1980s— fatwa (1989) and intifada (1985)—but not many.

People who like the cosmopolitan character of the English vocabulary think of English speakers picking from the best of the foreign and making our language copious, abundant, and discriminating. (The end of this argument is that English is the greatest language ever spoken.)

People who dislike the impurities introduced into English from afar lament borrowing and find English chaotic, irrational, and, in sum, a mess. (The end of this argument is that English is tumbling down like the tower of Babel.)

People do not borrow words because they have no way of talking about a new idea. When English people arrived on the Atlantic seaboard, they called a large thrush a robin even though it had little in common with the English bird of the same name. They might as easily have called the furry, stinky black animal with the white stripe down its back a polecat, a long-established English word for a similar mammal, rather than borrowing the word skunk from the Native Americans. There are lots of reasons to borrow words and lots not to borrow them. Once can never be entirely sure just what word will attach itself to what idea.

When English words are exported to other languages, it may be equally hard to discover the reason. After the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, for instance, garments for Chinese women suddenly had English words like happy or beautiful embroidered on them.

It was widely thought that those wearing these garments did not know what the words meant but, whether they did or not, the display of English words was a sign of liberation from xenophobic Maoism. Nowadays such garments may contain racy words: for instance, the word slut worked into the weave of women's stockings, or a thesaurus of English words involving sexual acts imprinted on the shirt of a Chinese athlete appearing at a televised press conference. What are the reasons behind these borrowings? They are not entirely the result of innocent ignorance.

In some language communities the importation of English words may be the cause for great alarm. Korean has, over the past half century, adopted many English words: ku-pi ‘coffee', bang-ül tomato ‘cherry tomato', remocon ‘remote control', o-ba-i-tü ‘vomit' (derived from overeat ), meeting ‘to have a blind date'. For Korean purists, these developments are worrisome. One wrote that English is “a serious threat to the purity of not just the language, but also of the Korean psyche.”

A more extreme example of the hatred of foreign words was found in Albania, a country brutally ruled by Enver Hoxha who, after World War II, broke first with the Yugoslav Communists, then with the Russians and finally with the Chinese. From 1978 to 1991, Albania was almost entirely isolated. Foreign influences were ruthlessly suppressed; new terms (and new things) were carefully censored, and the few foreign influences allowed into the language were assigned translated names rather permitted as borrowed words.

Regional expressions and nonstandard forms were suppressed in the most remarkable act of linguistic Big Brotherism in modern times. A few words that had hidden their foreign origins through long use, or were seldom encountered in communist Albania, survived: biftek ‘steak', for instance, and smoking ‘dinner jacket, tuxedo' (derived from smoking jacket), both coming into Albanian from French.

Albania has a long way to go on the road toward English words but it has started, appropriately enough, with biznesmen ‘business man' and buznesmene ‘business woman', xhins ‘jeans' (masculine plural) and xhinse ‘jeans' (feminine plural).

Far more temperate is the attitude of the Dutch toward English, though as recently as 1992 the Parliament declared that Dutch, not English, would be the language of higher education. Even so, in certain disciplines, English is permitted for all sorts of communication.

English loans in Dutch abound: off-Broadway ‘alternative theatre', off-line ‘not connected to a central processor', off-the-road ‘off-road vehicle', offset ‘method of printing', off-shore ‘drilling for oil in coastal waters', off the record ‘confidential or unofficial conversation', off-white ‘shade of white tinted with brown'.

Sometimes these borrowings conceal themselves in Dutch clothing diepvries ‘deep-freeze', luidspreker ‘loudspeaker'. English words uproot other borrowings. In Dutch, people would formerly eat dejeuneren , now they have lunchen. Coiffeur has become hair stylist, and the place that used to be a boetiek or boutique is now merely a shop.

Unlike other commerce that has been restricted by tariffs or embargoes, the trade in words goes on with very few restrictions and in very many places. Having spent a millennium with a balance of trade bringing in more words than were exported, English is now the overwhelming source of raw materials for the other languages of the world.

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003.