::A Geek in Korea::

I read this article on Wired magazine about how Chinese translators are running around Beijing trying to wipe out any traces of “Chinglish” before the English native speakers arrive to take pictures and make fun of their poor English skills.

“Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It’s not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of “har-muh-nee,” it’s “har-moh-nee.” And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”

Basically, this is happening all over the world, Korea included. I have a JOB because of this phenomenon. I’m here to keep people from adopting the “Konglish” pronunciations as the default, and people pay me a salary to try to break their Korean speech patterns when they speak English.

If you’ve ever taught or spoke to a very young child that attempts to speak English sentences they use the wrong cadences and breaks. They speak and intone English like their native language, and it comes off as broken and weird. Getting enough practice with a foreigner at a young age will help you break this habit, as will immersive English training. The only problem is that there aren’t enough teachers to go around, and those that are here are too expensive. A student in a Korean elementary school can study English in their primary class, but they won’t be able to effectively communicate until they have one on one class time with native speakers.

“English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: “How many informations can your flash drive hold?” In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don’t require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: “Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?”

This article is somewhat redundant, in that if language changes, the grammar and sentence structure changes too. My PARENTS speak with different grammar and rules than I do, and we grew up in the same household. These sorts of rules vary by education, class, and region. Languages are influenced by their surroundings.

Despite my attempts to surround myself with English speakers and English media, I still occasionally mirror Korean in my speech, if unintentionally. For example, I give verbal “grunts” to indicate I am listening like Koreans do instead of asking questions you know the answers to like Americans tend to do. I’m still a native speaker of English, but being surrounded by Korean for so long has changed the way I speak, write, and talk.

“And it’s possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out “Environmental sanitation needs your conserve,” maybe conservation isn’t so necessary.”

I both like and dislike this idea. The purpose of language is the communication of ideas, and grammar are the rules for organizing those ideas. If you change grammar and the idea is still accurately communicated, then there is no problem. However, if you make things less precise and less accurate by stripping out grammar, that’s damaging the sharing of ideas.

I deal with horrendously poor essays from students that have only a few basic understanding of grammar that make my head ache trying to decode. I try my best to understand, but this is where a lot of information is “lost in translation.” Solid grammar is like a cup for holding information. The better the cup, the less information that is spilled along the way to the next person.

“Any language is constantly evolving, so it’s not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what’s happening to English may be its own thing: It’s mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue — what’s coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.“

This is what I thought was really interesting about this article. English isn’t the lingua franca. What a native speaker considers “Broken English” is what most people in the world know. This “Panglish” varies from region to region as it mingles with other languages, but is generally understood all around the world as long as the key concerns are finding bathrooms, checking into hotel rooms, and finding a taxi cab. When I can go to a country as poor as Cambodia and get around by telling a tuk-tuk driver where to go in English, Panglish is here and it’s amazing to consider it’s influence.

If you talk to people in the Commonwealth of English Nations, they consider American’s form of English broken too. Just ask your English friend to say the word “Aluminum”. I enjoy the variations and differences in English that I encounter, and am employed to bring more people into the fold of people that understand and can communicate together. It might not be a complete or total understanding, but it’s a start. As long as native languages exist next to English, there isn’t anything lost by the spread of English. While this isn’t always possible, the freedom of travel opened up my a default worldwide language is huge.

(I’m saying that as an Native English speaker. Would I feel the same if I was a native Chinese speaker and had to learn an entirely new language? What if Korean was the default and I lived here? Or what if Japanese because some sort of default? I don’t know.)