Behemoth, bully, thief: English taking over the planet

I'm always interested in language. I keep noting that the easiest way to distract me and get me off-topic is to raise something that relates to dialect or a foreign tongue. So this Guardian article distracted me from sermon preparation (where I was kind of not quite getting it).

I'm thinking to my recent experience of the last handful of years of watching a lot of foreign-language films of television series. Many of them spoken in languages I'm not well acquainted with and subtitled (Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Japanese) some in languages I know fairly well (Spanish, French, American English -that last is a wry dig!). And so I've been observing with one part of my brain when English has been getting into those other languages (and for AmEng go along to this blog).

I note that English swearwords have become almost ubiquitous alongside or replacing native words and phrases. But I do wonder whether Tim Parks may have overstated his case or missed seeing it from a different angle:

The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

My response is that perhaps this is more to do with culture than specifically language. That is to say the Hollywood story industry and its ancillaries.

I'm not saying that English as a language isn't influential, as I said above, I do notice it creeping into other languages and even influencing grammar. However, I do also notice that there are things that the subtitled translation doesn't pick up eg the change from formal to informal address -'you'- or a switch from Swedish to Danish in The Bridge which tells you something about the characters' relationship but isn't signalled in the subtitles. That doesn't seem to indicate Englishising. And in any case the variability of English itself may militate against this idea: regional and class and subcultural dialects some of which are driven by other-language contact may make a big difference in this analysis.

If we're worried about range of expression, it's capitalist globalising culture we should worry about; panicking about English may be a huge distraction from the real task.



Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet | News | The Guardian