Let every new word bloom
David Humphries
August 13, 2011Trying to keep Americanisms out of Australian speech ignores the way language works.
''We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language'' - Oscar Wilde, 1882.
Forgive Mr Wilde, for he wasn't to know the avalanche of Americanisms soon to swamp the English-speaking world, even though there were signs aplenty.
English has won the battle of languages. Practice has made it the least dispensable, so English-speakers are less inclined to learn second languages. It's the mother tongue of at least 400 million people worldwide, but perhaps four times as many use it with some competency.
Why, then, do our hackles rise each time we read or hear in the Australian context a word or phrase we recognise as American? Why do these ubiquitous exports from the world's most enthusiastic and successful exponent of modernism generate such indignation among ABC radio listeners and Herald readers, for instance, and what can be done to stem the infiltration, if indeed it should be slowed?
Some resentment, of course, is plain anti-Americanism. Not a lot can be done for this minnow view of the shark as cultural, economic, even militaristic predator.
''People who are worried about American influence will be worried about symbolic manifestations,'' says Pam Peters, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Macquarie University, where she has taught the scientific study of language for 37 years.
''People see them as invasions but Australians have imported them, adopted them and adapted them. It's not exactly colonialism.''
The hackles are on show wherever the power relationship is unbalanced, which is pretty well everywhere for America. This same imbalance helps explain why Americanisms flood elsewhere but, for instance, Australianisms rarely take root there. Mark Twain was so taken with the expression ''my word'' on a visit to Australia that he urged fellow Americans to import this ''music to the ears''. They didn't.
The weaker mimic the stronger and more prestigious, in all sorts of fashions and circumstances. ''Oversexed, overpaid and over here'' wasn't Australian in origin, and nor are predictions of succumbing to 51st statehood.
But language goes to issues of national identity. It distinguishes us and frames thoughts about ourselves. Our propensity for abbreviation - ambo, journo, pollie - goes to our discomfort with verbosity, even eloquence, and our readiness to converse with the linguistic equivalent of shrugged shoulders. How far are you going? Not far. When will you be home? Not late. How much did it cost? Not much.
Do we become internationalist at the expense of our Aussieness? Peters thinks we're overreacting. ''My advice? Cool it,'' she says. ''This is a global phenomenon. Australia is not being particularly sucked in. I've got plenty of evidence of Americanisms getting to Britain before they got here. We're pretty fast because our internet use is quite advanced here, so we're quick at taking things, but we're not the only sucker here.''
Traces of Americanisms - terms such as digger and dig - can be found in Australian gold rushes. The arrival of ''talkie'' films in the 1920s gave the shift a big push, as did the presence of American servicemen in World War II. Later, it was TV and the internet.
In 1998 Peters wrote a monograph for the book Americanization in Australia. ''With all the emotion, it's often unclear whether the complaint is a kind of patriotism, an instinct roused in defence of cultural purity, or a pre-emptive salvo against imminent military invasion.
''What is always surprising is the paucity of linguistic evidence on which the claim [of American language takeover] is based. The language is seen as infected, and corrective action needed to combat the health hazard.''
So small was the impact on Australian grammar and phonology, she said, that Americanisation must be slight and temporary. And many borrowings from American English enriched our language because Australian adaptation gave words precise meanings not necessarily evident in the words they replaced or joined.
''Though we have taken on many words and phrases from American English, they serve to fill lexical gaps, or to extend our lexical resources for specifying the details of a particular domain.''
''Movie'', for instance, helps distinguish the fictional film from the documentary. ''Vacation'' has become more specific than holiday, Peters argues, because it suggests elements of the exotic and luxurious. Phrases such as ''you're welcome'' and ''have a nice day'' were quickly assimilated precisely because Australian English had no native courtesies to address people with whom one was not acquainted but with whom one wanted to maintain good social relations.
''Synonyms are rarely the same in their contexts of use,'' Peters says.
''I would venture to say that Australian English is no more likely to become Americanised than English English became Frenchified as a result of 300 years of occupation. Enormous amounts of French vocabulary were absorbed, but English is still Germanic in its systems. The host language or dialect simply neutralises the aliens.''
Try assuaging Robert Solomon's despair at the American import by resorting to a French failure. ''If one had just awoken from the long sleep enjoyed by most of the population in relation to their language,'' he wrote for Quadrant magazine four years ago, ''one might confess to being amazed at the infusion of American vocabulary and accents which had taken place''.
Solomon recalled Tony Blair's farewell lament as British PM - ''the Labour Party went aywoll from the British public''. ''This just happens to be one of my pet aversions because I'm old enough to remember British and Australian soldiers in the Second World War going AWL - absent without leave. The adoption of the incorrect abbreviation (AWOL) leading to a pronounceable acronym typifies all that is worst with American mangling of English.''
Helen Pinnock, a Herald reader of Chifley, was none too pleased with an eastern suburbs boutique urging shoppers to ''get the look this fall''. She complained: ''Oh please, this is Australia. It's autumn.''
Fall is olde English for autumn, commonly used in Shakespeare's time but having fallen into disuse in England by 1788. Of course, it already had been transported to America, where it is interchangeable with autumn. Other ''Americanisms'' fall into the same category. Gotten, for instance, particularly offends Australian language purists but again is olde English. The -que suffix - in cheque, for instance - is the adaption of English to French spelling, because the English were particular Francophiles in the 18th century. Those spellings came here but not to America, where the old version - check - persists.
All this, of course, is cold comfort to spirited defenders of local lingo. Pinnock was right; this is Australia, and here the season is autumn.
I don't know Pinnock's age but her objection suggests she no longer is a filly. ''Older people have this attachment, especially in language, to things English,'' Peters says. ''If they see anything else, they'll almost routinely say it's American.''
The young, of course, often aren't aware that words and phrases are recent arrivals to Australian English. And they'll prefer them over more authentic Australianisms anyway. Where is youthful admiration expressed in terms of bonzer, ace and grouse ahead of filthy, sweet, neat or groovy?
Sussex thinks the shift is most emphatic in our greetings. Hi has displaced hello or g'day.
''It's especially significant because we rarely change our greetings,'' Sussex says.
Peters says trendy words are easily added to a dynamic language because users think that embracing them says something about their worldliness and aspirations. ''It's these words people react to so much.''
So can be it blocked, even slowed? The French thought so. Their Academy, the institutional defender of French culture, stipulates what their language can and cannot do, and their Toubon Law has sought to legally enforce commercial language since 1994. But still thousands of American language exports penetrate French. Older French hate it but younger French admire America, not Britain, as a modern progressive Anglo society, and embrace Americanisms.
The British Council has spent serious money trying unsuccessfully to control the way the rest of the world speaks English. Even the Japanese cannot keep their language borders secure.
''Language doesn't stand still,'' Peters says. It didn't stand still in the time of Shakespeare, who alone is credited with creating (or at least making the first recorded use of) 2035 words. And it won't be stagnant after America's global power subsides.
Forgive Mr Wilde, for he wasn't to know the avalanche of Americanisms soon to swamp the English-speaking world, even though there were signs aplenty.
English has won the battle of languages. Practice has made it the least dispensable, so English-speakers are less inclined to learn second languages. It's the mother tongue of at least 400 million people worldwide, but perhaps four times as many use it with some competency.
And American English is easily the dominant variety. The two most universal words are OK and Coke, both American in origin. The rest of the world could live without Coke, but the universality and succinctness of OK suggests communication would be impaired without it. And the linguist Roland Sussex has collected 10,000 Americanisms he says have penetrated Australian usage (The Macquarie Dictionary, for comparison, contains 112,000 entries).
Why, then, do our hackles rise each time we read or hear in the Australian context a word or phrase we recognise as American? Why do these ubiquitous exports from the world's most enthusiastic and successful exponent of modernism generate such indignation among ABC radio listeners and Herald readers, for instance, and what can be done to stem the infiltration, if indeed it should be slowed?
Some resentment, of course, is plain anti-Americanism. Not a lot can be done for this minnow view of the shark as cultural, economic, even militaristic predator.
''People who are worried about American influence will be worried about symbolic manifestations,'' says Pam Peters, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Macquarie University, where she has taught the scientific study of language for 37 years.
''People see them as invasions but Australians have imported them, adopted them and adapted them. It's not exactly colonialism.''
The hackles are on show wherever the power relationship is unbalanced, which is pretty well everywhere for America. This same imbalance helps explain why Americanisms flood elsewhere but, for instance, Australianisms rarely take root there. Mark Twain was so taken with the expression ''my word'' on a visit to Australia that he urged fellow Americans to import this ''music to the ears''. They didn't.
The weaker mimic the stronger and more prestigious, in all sorts of fashions and circumstances. ''Oversexed, overpaid and over here'' wasn't Australian in origin, and nor are predictions of succumbing to 51st statehood.
But language goes to issues of national identity. It distinguishes us and frames thoughts about ourselves. Our propensity for abbreviation - ambo, journo, pollie - goes to our discomfort with verbosity, even eloquence, and our readiness to converse with the linguistic equivalent of shrugged shoulders. How far are you going? Not far. When will you be home? Not late. How much did it cost? Not much.
Do we become internationalist at the expense of our Aussieness? Peters thinks we're overreacting. ''My advice? Cool it,'' she says. ''This is a global phenomenon. Australia is not being particularly sucked in. I've got plenty of evidence of Americanisms getting to Britain before they got here. We're pretty fast because our internet use is quite advanced here, so we're quick at taking things, but we're not the only sucker here.''
Traces of Americanisms - terms such as digger and dig - can be found in Australian gold rushes. The arrival of ''talkie'' films in the 1920s gave the shift a big push, as did the presence of American servicemen in World War II. Later, it was TV and the internet.
In 1998 Peters wrote a monograph for the book Americanization in Australia. ''With all the emotion, it's often unclear whether the complaint is a kind of patriotism, an instinct roused in defence of cultural purity, or a pre-emptive salvo against imminent military invasion.
''What is always surprising is the paucity of linguistic evidence on which the claim [of American language takeover] is based. The language is seen as infected, and corrective action needed to combat the health hazard.''
So small was the impact on Australian grammar and phonology, she said, that Americanisation must be slight and temporary. And many borrowings from American English enriched our language because Australian adaptation gave words precise meanings not necessarily evident in the words they replaced or joined.
''Though we have taken on many words and phrases from American English, they serve to fill lexical gaps, or to extend our lexical resources for specifying the details of a particular domain.''
''Movie'', for instance, helps distinguish the fictional film from the documentary. ''Vacation'' has become more specific than holiday, Peters argues, because it suggests elements of the exotic and luxurious. Phrases such as ''you're welcome'' and ''have a nice day'' were quickly assimilated precisely because Australian English had no native courtesies to address people with whom one was not acquainted but with whom one wanted to maintain good social relations.
''Synonyms are rarely the same in their contexts of use,'' Peters says.
''I would venture to say that Australian English is no more likely to become Americanised than English English became Frenchified as a result of 300 years of occupation. Enormous amounts of French vocabulary were absorbed, but English is still Germanic in its systems. The host language or dialect simply neutralises the aliens.''
Try assuaging Robert Solomon's despair at the American import by resorting to a French failure. ''If one had just awoken from the long sleep enjoyed by most of the population in relation to their language,'' he wrote for Quadrant magazine four years ago, ''one might confess to being amazed at the infusion of American vocabulary and accents which had taken place''.
Solomon recalled Tony Blair's farewell lament as British PM - ''the Labour Party went aywoll from the British public''. ''This just happens to be one of my pet aversions because I'm old enough to remember British and Australian soldiers in the Second World War going AWL - absent without leave. The adoption of the incorrect abbreviation (AWOL) leading to a pronounceable acronym typifies all that is worst with American mangling of English.''
Helen Pinnock, a Herald reader of Chifley, was none too pleased with an eastern suburbs boutique urging shoppers to ''get the look this fall''. She complained: ''Oh please, this is Australia. It's autumn.''
Fall is olde English for autumn, commonly used in Shakespeare's time but having fallen into disuse in England by 1788. Of course, it already had been transported to America, where it is interchangeable with autumn. Other ''Americanisms'' fall into the same category. Gotten, for instance, particularly offends Australian language purists but again is olde English. The -que suffix - in cheque, for instance - is the adaption of English to French spelling, because the English were particular Francophiles in the 18th century. Those spellings came here but not to America, where the old version - check - persists.
All this, of course, is cold comfort to spirited defenders of local lingo. Pinnock was right; this is Australia, and here the season is autumn.
I don't know Pinnock's age but her objection suggests she no longer is a filly. ''Older people have this attachment, especially in language, to things English,'' Peters says. ''If they see anything else, they'll almost routinely say it's American.''
The young, of course, often aren't aware that words and phrases are recent arrivals to Australian English. And they'll prefer them over more authentic Australianisms anyway. Where is youthful admiration expressed in terms of bonzer, ace and grouse ahead of filthy, sweet, neat or groovy?
Sussex thinks the shift is most emphatic in our greetings. Hi has displaced hello or g'day.
''It's especially significant because we rarely change our greetings,'' Sussex says.
Peters says trendy words are easily added to a dynamic language because users think that embracing them says something about their worldliness and aspirations. ''It's these words people react to so much.''
So can be it blocked, even slowed? The French thought so. Their Academy, the institutional defender of French culture, stipulates what their language can and cannot do, and their Toubon Law has sought to legally enforce commercial language since 1994. But still thousands of American language exports penetrate French. Older French hate it but younger French admire America, not Britain, as a modern progressive Anglo society, and embrace Americanisms.
The British Council has spent serious money trying unsuccessfully to control the way the rest of the world speaks English. Even the Japanese cannot keep their language borders secure.
''Language doesn't stand still,'' Peters says. It didn't stand still in the time of Shakespeare, who alone is credited with creating (or at least making the first recorded use of) 2035 words. And it won't be stagnant after America's global power subsides.
No comments:
Post a Comment