If the English don't speak English, who does?
Dr Mario Saraceni has wrongly called on the millions who speak English around the world to lay claim to the language, rather than us.
England does not own English, says Dr Mario Saraceni, of the University of Portsmouth. No, well, with a billion English-speakers round the world, it wouldn’t, would it? The question is what we are meant to do about it.
Dr Saraceni himself comes from that strange and debatable enclave called Academe, situated in the English speech-community, but not part of it. It employs a jangling, barbarous tongue of its own. Thus the doctor declares an interest in “the applicability of Systemic Functional Linguistics and of Multimodality for (critical) textual analysis”. Good. But the key to his thought is perhaps his first book, published in 2003: The Language of Comics.
Generations of English children have been puzzled by the ambition of Dennis the Menace or Beryl the Peril to build carties. These racing vehicles, so easily constructed from soap boxes and pram wheels, turned out to be go-carts. Why call them carties? Because DC Thomson, the comic people, are based in Dundee.
Most Scottish people do speak a kind of English. How lovely if they spoke Gaelic, but they don’t. Even “Lallans” is simply a northern English dialect, no more Scottish in origin than jute or claret. English people, as call-centre research has found, like most varieties of English spoken in Scotland. But Scottish speech patterns do not even tickle the global behemoth of English, let alone penetrate its blubbery vastness with their feeble flensing-irons.
Perhaps 5,222,101 people live in Scotland. In India, about 120 million more speak English as a first language. But what do we know of their varieties of English? Not much: the Kumars and memories of Peter Sellers probably sum it up. Our tendency, though, was – and is – to laugh at Indian English, since foreigners are funny.
Nowadays we take care not to put it so crudely. But in the 1890s, when F Anstey (real name Guthrie, best known for his father-son reversal novel Vice Versa) wrote the serial Baboo Jabberjee for Punch, it was thought humorous for the housemaid to jump with shock, being “unaccustomed to dark-complexioned gentlemen”. Even then, most of the humour came from the language of the hero, Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, an Indian law student visiting London. “Permit me most respectfully to bring beneath your notice,” he says, “a proposal which I serenely anticipate will turn up trumps under the fructifying sunshine of your esteemed approbation.”
This is Anstey’s attempt at Baboo English, the kind spoken by “an Indian office worker or bureaucrat,” says the Oxford English Dictionary, nervously adding “in later use often offensive”. But it is notable that at the very period Anstey was having such success with Baboo Jabberjee, Ernest Bramah was entertaining readers with his Kai Lung books.
Bramah (real name Smith) got no closer to China than Weston-super-Mare, but conjured up an imaginary Mandarin world through his narrator’s invented English: “ 'It has been said,’ he began at length, withdrawing his eyes reluctantly from an usually large insect upon the ceiling and addressing himself to the maiden, 'that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without any loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night.’ ”
Naturally, this is nothing like the English spoken in Hong Kong. There, visitors today note items of vocabulary such as shroff (“cashier”), godown (“warehouse”) or nullah (“water channel”). None of these comes from Chinese. Shroff is ultimately from Arabic sarafa, “to exchange”, a word that in the past 500 years has passed from Persian to Anglo-Indian and spread along Eastern trading routes. Similarly, nullah comes from Bengali, and godown from Malay via Anglo-Indian. These words, all listed in the OED, are like antique portable writing-desks, charming survivals of the trading world of past centuries, but of little consequence for the linguistic mix of modern Canton.
Dr Saraceni is right – trivially. English spoken in India, Hong Kong, Nigeria, even Australia (with its annoyingly influential rising intonation, making statements sound like questions) is beyond our control. Did we ever think otherwise, when our favourite hobby is complaining about Americanisms? With American English, we have the last laugh, for Valdez is coming, not to mention Santa Anna, Alfredo Garcia and the whole gang. By 2050, there should be 100 million Hispanics in the United States speaking a language very different from that conceived by our fathers four score and seven years ago, as it were.
Yet, if anyone wants to learn English English, like Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, they’ll still come, virtually at least, to the Angles’ heartland, which since the fifth century has been relocated from Angeln, in the southern Jutish peninsula (now in Schleswig-Holstein), to a spot where Wessex, Essex and Mercia meet and I am typing these words. So let’s keep it up.
