How the English Language Is Globalizing Source: “Most Imported Words Are Nouns,” Progressive...

How the English Language Is Globalizing

Source: “Most Imported Words Are Nouns,” Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), October 17, 2007, http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=108&subsecid=900003&contentid=254478

http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=108&subsecid=900003&contentid=254478

http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=108&subsecid=900003&contentid=254478

How the English Language is Globalizing (1)

The world's first language broke up long ago. It has about 6,900 descendants, from Ethiopia's Aari to Burma's Zyphe.


The search for a specific world number is hopeless, as definitions of "language" and "dialect" are subjective.


Papua New Guinea leads the world with 820 living indigenous languages -- more than a tenth of the world's total -- distributed among 5 million people


Overall, the number of world languages is shrinking. About 500 Native American, Siberian and Australian languages are spoken only by small numbers of elderly people


But English and the other widely spoken tongues are getting bigger, in part by importing words from other languages.

New "English" words Recently Approved by Merriam-Webster and Oxford Concise English Dictionary (1)

manga, from Japanese for comic book (or literally "pointless drawing")


qigong, a Chinese meditation technique


coqui, an onomatopoeic term for a Puerto Rican tree frog;


Bhangra, the Punjabi music style


Singlish, the Singapore and/or Sri Lankan variant of English


fitna, an Arabic term for social unrest or rebellion against a legitimate ruler


two words, dohyo and mawashi, related to sumo wrestling


taikonaut, a Chinese astronaut


gulet, a Turkish wooden pleasure-boat

Globalization of Language is not a New Trend (1)

English has been "globalizing" for over 1500 years, beginning with the infiltration of words like wall, jar and gum (from Latin, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian) into the old Anglo-Saxon language.

Globalization of Language is not a New Trend (2)

Noah Webster's first American dictionary in 1806 added hundreds of Native American words -- skunk, raccoon, hickory, succotash and moose all originate in Algonquin and Iroquois languages.

Other Examples of Languages That Have Gone Global (1)

Japan : haiku, samurai, zen, geisha; manga, karoshi, salaryman, sushi.


Persia then, Iran now: chess, apricot, magic, jasmine; chador, ayatollah, fatwa.


The Incas and Aztecs: condor, cocaine, llama, beef jerky; chili, chocolate, coyote, mescal, tomato.


Viking-age Norway: berserk, fjord, iceberg, reindeer, saga, ski, Viking, walrus.


Pre-colonial Malay world: bamboo, gong, paddy, java, orangutan, amok, bantam, yo-yo.

Most Imported Words Are Nouns (1)

The Oxford CED's 28 new foreign words come from a rainbow of languages -- Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tahitian, Turkish, Welsh, Yiddish


24 are nouns, joined by three exclamations and one adjective.


Though the number of things and experiences expands with globalization, technology, and popular culture, ways of describing them remain constant.

World's Most Globalized Language: English

Continents and regions contributing words to the English language:

Africa North America

Asia Arabia

Australia South Pacific

Europe Caribbean

South America

What They Mean

• Blue jeans, gum, hamburgers, coca-cola, tycoons, bikinis and frozen mocha.

• Is a globalizing American culture creating a homogenous world? Or is a globalizing world creating American culture?

• All these words, except "blue" and "frozen," are imports -- from Renaissance Europe, the Incan empire, the South Pacific, pre-colonial Africa, German immigrant communities, traditional Japan and classical Arabia.

Examples

Mocha… is the name of the Yemeni port from which coffee (an Arabic word) was first exported in the 12th century.

.)

Gum

…seems to be a survivor from the ancient Egyptian, brought into English via Greek. (It has beaten out a logical competitor -- the Aztec word "tzictli" or "chicle," referring to the actual gum base, which holds out mainly in the candy trademark Chiclets.)

Hamburger

…has an obvious origin in north Germany.

Tycoon

…is the Japanese title -- itself based on a Chinese phrase meaning "great prince" -- of a high Tokugawa-era official, brought back from Tokyo by Commodore Perry in the 1850s and stuck firmly in the language by White House staffers who used it as a nickname for President Lincoln.

Coca-cola

…combines the Quechua word for the coca plant and the Malinke name for a West African nut used to flavor the drink

Bikini

…recalls the unfortunate coral atoll in the Marshall Islands used to test nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Coral, by the way, is Greek, and "atoll" is from Divehi, a language spoken in the Maldives Islands southwest of India.

Jeans

The Academie Francaise has resentfully admitted "blue-jean" into the French language, as a "mot d'origine etrangere." But in fact, the term jeans itself is French. Brought into English in 1577, "jeans" was originally French dockside slang for denim-wearing Italian sailors from Genoa ("Genes" in French). Denim too is French, referring literally to fabric "from Nimes."

How the English Language Is Globalizing Source: “Most Imported Words Are Nouns,” Progressive...

Documents

Transcript of How the English Language Is Globalizing Source: “Most Imported Words Are Nouns,” Progressive...