How to Learn Any Language 53

How to Learn Any Language 53

English
The mere fact that you’re reading these words right now calls for self congratulations. It means you’re fluent in the winner, the international language, the number one language of all time!
When a Soviet plane approaches the airport in China, the pilot and the control tower don’t speak Russian to each other. They don’t speak Chinese. They speak English. If an Italian plane is about to land in another part of Italy, the Italian pilot and the Italian traffic control person also speak English.
When the Israeli general and the Egyptian general met in Sinai in October 1973 to talk truce in the Yom Kippur War, they didn’t speak Hebrew. They didn’t speak Arabic. They spoke English.
When Norwegian whaling ships put into the port of Capetown, South Africa, to hire Zulu seamen, the interviewing is not done in Norwegian or Zulu. It’s done in English.
The parliaments of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway send delegates to a body called the Nordic Council. Their official meetings are conducted – at great expense in interpreters and simultaneous interpretation equipment – in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. When the meetings end, however, and the delegates from the three neighbouring countries adjourn to the bar and the dining room, they all start speaking English with each other!
Haven’t you noticed something odd about protestors you have seen on TV demonstrating in Lithuania, Estonia, Korea, Iraq, Mexico, and other countries where neither the protestors, the ones they’re protesting against, nor the local media speak native English? In addition to the signs and banners in their own languages, they always carry signs and banners in English. And for good reason. They want their message to reverberate around the world.
On a map of Africa, Nigeria seems a tiny patch where the bulge of that gigantic continent meets the body. Inside that patch, however, live between 100 and 120 million people speaking 250 different languages, with names like Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Nupe, and Oyo. From their first day of school, the children of Nigeria are taught English. Without English, not only could Nigeria not talk to the world, Nigerians couldn’t even talk to each other.
When a Nigerian educator, Aliu Babtunde Fafunwa, proposed in early 1991 that Nigerian children begin their education in their 250 respective mother tongues, the government newspaper itself wrote in an editorial, “The least luxury we can afford in the last decade of the twentieth century is an idealistic experiment in linguistic nationalism which could cut our children off from the main current of human development.” That’s hardly a hate filled denunciation of former colonial masters.
Every attempt to launch an artificial international language has so far failed. Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Kosmos, Monoglottica, Universalsprache, Neo-Latine, Vertparl, Mundolingue, Dil, Volapuk, even an international language based on the notes of the musical scale, all started out weak and gradually tapered off. My guess is they always will. You can no more “vote” a language into being the international language than you can vote warmth into a blizzard.
Languages attain prominence something the way individuals and countries do, through all kinds of force, including war. There’s an added element in prominence, however. Brute force is not enough. The winning language must have a degree of acceptability to the losers.
Russian emerged from World War II as a mighty language, but it failed to bluster beyond the bounds of the Communist empire. Russian even failed to inspire people to learn it inside their empire. Students in Hungary, Romania, and East Germany knew no more Russian after eight years of schooling than Americans know French after similar exposure.
English, on the other hand, was welcomed. Africans and Asians may not have rejoiced at being forcibly incorporated into the British Empire, but they recognised that the English language, if learned by all, was a unifying tool that enabled different tribes who lived five miles apart to communicate for the first time, in a language brought down upon them from thousands of miles away.
A wolf will lift his neck to let a larger wolf know that he accepts the other’s dominant role as leader. The entire world has lifted its neck to acknowledge English as
the language of choice in the modern world. It wasn’t all military and commercial power, either. American movies, songs, comic strips, TV series, even T-shirts all helped make English the international language of the earth by acclaim.
But only the shortsighted will consider the dominance of English reason to return foreign language materials to the bookstore and forget the whole thing. It’s precisely because the peoples of the world honour our language that we get so much more appreciation when we go out of our way to honour theirs.

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