Cursing the Linguistic Tide

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/books/review/language-city-ross-perlin.html

Growing up with the world’s most widely used language as my mother tongue, I often think about what it would be like to be raised in a family that spoke one of the three Baltic languages, or one of the Central Asian stepdaughters of Turkish – for example, Uzbek, Kazakh or Kyrgyz – as one’s native tongue.??As a matter of survival, you’d need to learn at least two other languages proficiently in order to venture beyond the confines of your home and extended family.

My parents, to their everlasting credit, gave me and my brothers a solid grounding in music theory and, for many years, piano lessons.? Our pedagogue was a tall, slender Lithuanian aristocrat.? On occasion, Professor Kuprevicius would get carried away and slip into German or Russian.? After several years under his tutelage, I finally got up the courage to ask him how he came to know so many languages. ‘Volodya,’ he replied (using the Russian diminutive of my name), ‘just to play football with my mates on our street in Vilnius, I needed to know Polish, German and Russian’ – as well as his native Lithuanian, he forgot to mention.

Language is a defining factor. ?We think instinctively in our native language(s); but we can also learn to think in other languages.? My college German professor asserted that your native language is the one in which you pray, do sums, and swear. ?

The lost cause of ‘language purity’ has rippled noisily throughout the ages, as languages adopt and adapt foreign influences.? Predictably, the official, officious ‘harrumphers’ from l'Académie fran?aise and its equivalent institute in Moscow (and elsewhere), all highly learned literati, invoke righteous rage on behalf of their injured respective patrimoines.?

Meanwhile, the seemingly irresistible gravitational pull toward Anglicisation and ?Amerikanisierung’ – a phenomenon I think of as ‘mall-ification’ – continues to plough new rows in the open fields of literally the entire world.? Is this a good thing?? Does it even matter what we think?

I’ve never been to Vientiane or Phnom Penh, but I can tell you three things about these and other rapidly developing capitals of aggressively emerging markets:

(1) If you want to know whether the country you are in was a British or French colony, you will undoubtedly find a Gothic-style cathedral standing out like a sore thumb among the local architecture. ?If the plinth over the main (West) entrance reads ‘Notre Dame du Bon Secours,’ you are visiting a former French colony; if the plinth reads ‘Christ Church,’ ‘St. George the Martyr’ or something similar, you are in a former British Crown colony.

?(2) While the religious affiliation of colonial-era churches may offer a clue to the country’s past, the present and future of the (most likely) young nation you are visiting can be assessed, just as in the early Middle Ages, by the size of the cathedrals – known otherwise as ‘malls’ – being built.? Just as in cathedrals, malls are appointed in accordance with a strictly limited range of options. ?There must be a food court in the central area; there must be a Cineplex (preferably of the ‘Imax’ persuasion); there must be at least two or three retail stores from a high-profile list, including ‘Bath & Body,’ ‘Victoria’s Secret,’ and ‘Abercrombie & Fitch.’ ?Oh, yes, and ‘Starbucks.’? There must be a ‘Starbucks’ or an equivalent – better, of course, the real thing.? If Starbucks has anointed our city, there must be hope for our future.

(3) ?Unless you happen to speak the local language, you are unlikely to be able to assess the subtle yet rapidly expanding practice of anglicising their native language(s).? The under-twenty crowd savours the shock value of using foreign words, to the dismay of their elders: selfies; computer-related technology (‘Internet-ese’); or the latest slang buzzwords from a foreign rapper. ?The list is endless.

Back to Manhattan, even a city-state of New York’s proportions can’t hold off the inevitable for too much longer.? In twenty years or less, even, those 700 exotic languages will have dwindled down to 400, if that.? For the world’s non-English languages, there appear to be two options: adaptation through transformation (Anglicisation), or extinction.