Is English taking over the world? Or is the world taking over English?

The mishmash of everything just continues, and so will authentic languages. Since I was a teenager, I worked and lived in a multilingual environment when I started a video game studio in Amsterdam. It awoke in me a lifelong passion and interest in languages, and with my studio's 20th anniversary, so comes the anniversary of my language passions. In a brief snapshot of two decades, what can we see about language trends of the future? What about the English language – will it take over the world like it's sometimes proposed? Not even close.

English is widely spoken, by about 2 billion people. But the language of trade mainly influences the objects of trade: goods & services. In fact, it's really popular objects of trade that make up the bulk of popular loanwords. That’s actually not going to replace other languages!

Tentpole Words

I can go into a café in Tokyo, Berlin or New York and go and get a Playstation, or order a Chai Latte, Sandwich or Cappuccino. But wait a minute, those loanwords are not just English but from Europe and India and all over the place. In fact it's often a pretty fascinating and random collection of origins. What makes these words tentpoles is they are so obvious in use and purpose, they are practically a brand like Starbucks and unlikely to drift in meaning or sounding.

Turns out, these items are pretty common across the word, written in English (but different script). (source)

The impression that the world is taken over by "English" is largely due to these words. Ironic many are not even English. In the end, tentpole words are borrowed because they describe a thing that was not there before.

What mysteries could be inscribed in the devnagari script on the storefront? Turns out it's literally the same as in English, just written differently.

Meaning Drift

The most intriguing outcome of Zindler's study is the fact that one third of all Anglicisms are 'imported' without their full English semantic content (Zindler, 1959, p. 19). This means that polysemous words that were used in different contexts by the English-speaking community, suddenly underwent semantic narrowing by the way the German speakers used them. – Uwe Zeidel

So what about the meaning of words? Better be careful. A beamer in German is an overhead projector, while a beamer in English (apparently) is a German car. In Malaysian English, fixing something is to assemble it and to fix it back to repair it. In Korean, 'cunning' is referring to an act of cheating during tests (i.e. he got caught doing "cunning").

This picture came in 'handy'.

Can you pass me my "Handy"? This mistake almost every German speaker will have made at least once. In German, your cellphone is called "Handy," with many speakers assuming this is an English word; it's also used this way in the US and UK. Word origins are curious, do the Japanese know their work for Part-time work is actually German (Arbeit?).

"Handy" is a german word at that point, as it's just repurposing something into a word entirely unrelated for the English word of the same name. So, categories will drift quickly and be re-absorbed into the native language as something else entirely. Also not a threat to replacing languages.

Meaning drift also goes the other direction

Pronunciation Drift

There are quite a few English words in Japanese conversation that aren't even recognized anymore by either English speakers or Japanese. They're essentially just Japanese now. A key reason is the Japanese writing system, specifically with Katakana. It's usually a blessing – any language written as spoken is much easier to learn (unlike English or French). But it does mean foreign words are encoded very literally into the language. Japanese phonemes are precisely written out but are not as close to English, and words often change quite a bit.

Indian Devnagari script is so highly precise in its letters emulating specific tones, that a foreign speaker just following the descriptions of the spoken letters emulates a native Indian accent fairly well.  It gives Indian speakers a head start into other languages.

It is interesting to compare to Hindi, or even generally Indian speakers who use English extensively, mixed into a natural conversation, weaving in and out of various languages with the intent of efficient and fast communication. For a non-native speaker hearing Indians converse and code-switch, the English words can still be distinguished more easily, unlike in Japanese. Why is that? One might say it's because of England's previous colonization and its effects or that there is a prestigious reason to speak English.

But I think it's more about pragmatism, efficiency, and pronunciation. Hindi speakers are most likely to switch into English during the conversation when the concept they are trying to express is simply quicker done at that moment in English or when a particular word is said faster in English.

A reason for this high level of comfort might be that Indian languages overall seem to encode english pronunciation a little better than Japanese Katakana does.

The word kilo(キロ / ???? ) encodes better in Hindi where there’s a convenient way to write ‘LO’ where in Japanese it turned into “RO” .

Changing a language, yes, but quickly reabsorbed.

The path to Code-switching

An interesting phenomenon and evidence of a culture's pushback to a foreign language comes in how to interpret code-switching habits in a language. Code-switching is common in languages that have become very comfortable with broad sets of English in their language, such as mixing English with Malay, Chinese (especially Cantonese & Hokkien) or Hindi and other languages Indian. Sentences are effortlessly weaved together with a focus on efficiency and clarity, adapted to the level of the speaker in terms of all available languages.

Ambiguity of language descriptions: Two Indian shows described as in the Hindi language, but one is almost entirely in English by comparison to the other.

Some languages have built-in benefits to adopting nouns or verbs from abroad. Nouns are easiest to adopt, and easiest in a language that doesn't modify nouns with male/female or singular/plural modifiers. That's why integration in Japanese, Malay, etc works relatively smoothly, while English words in German for example create a variety of inconsistencies and weirdnesses - is a word male/female, how to adopt plural forms etc.

Verbs are tough to deal with for most languages, but some languages have a shortcut that makes them very versatile at adopting them: Complex Verbs. This is essentially a kind of "noun doing" or "verb doing" combination where verbs, even adjectives can be used to create a verb without the bother to change the foreign word at all. In Hindi you can say "Google Karna", in Japanese you can say "Google Suru". In German "Googlen...Googlnen?" - it's more hit and miss.

Code Switching vs Script Switching

Different languages have various methods for making foreign/english words easy to identify. Indian speakers might flip a sentence block to English and back, while written Hindi, being too good at incorporating english into their native script, kind of has to absorb the English and it makes it harder to read and identify that way. Is it a foreign word? Hindi word? The trade is pronunciation is actually very close to the real English word, but the script might struggle a bit.

Now you now Lady Gaga's real name: ??????? ???? ???????? ????????! (source)

Japanese figured out a different way, and is using a completely separate script, Katakana for foreign words. It's script switching! It's highly efficient at calling out where words end or begin, make it very readable for identifying names, nouns and foreign concepts. It doesn't always make it easy to pronounce though.

As you can see above, Red marks the coffee spot.(source)

So, different strategies to integrate enligh into the main language, but the end result will be eventual total absorption and change.

Cool and Practical - sounding English has it's limits.

When a word is borrowed from one language into another, it usually does not retain all the meanings it originally bore (Busse & G?rlach, 2002, 26f.). In most of the cases, semantic narrowing, broadening, or shift is taking place. – Uwe Zeidel

Words get adopted because"

-         The word is shorter (shortness ALWAYS wins with language).

-         Sounds cool and international.

-         Avoids ambiguity with other local words or goods that would clash with it.

-         Adds variety and novelty (sometimes it's nice to have more than one word).

-         Someone copyrighted this thing!

The purpose of language adoption is speed and clarity and sometimes a coolness factor. But what can also happen is that English can get too cool and essentially feel like trying too hard, and hence feeling pretentious and inauthentic.

You can see this play in code-switching. Someone that to stay in 'proper English might come off as pretentious or trying too hard / showing off they were abroad. A kind of "c'mon we know you speak the other languages too". So there's often a limit to the use of English, a subtle pushback, a check to its usefulness.

Adopted Words Is Nothing New

All the above text is a long way of saying languages are not going away, and waves of adoption will sweep over the world based on the current trade lingo. Previous waves are still visible, from Portuguese or Spanish loanwords, or even prominent arabic influences in South-East Asia or Buddhist influences that went from India all the way to Japan, such as the Sanskrit word 'Sewa Karna' meaning 'Service rendered with affection', which seems quite close to the Japanese Sewa 世話 in meaning.

Conclusion

Languages are frameworks, manipulators of content, reshapers, and repurposers for their speakers. Languages are efficient at -doing- things to solid objects, nouns. This mirrors society's interest in things. We trade things, and trade into the language itself.

Language learning is like reading from a constantly re-arranging bookshelf

But a language as a framework is much more complex, with nuance and inference, expressions of feelings and intent, possibilities and emotion. Languages are not going anywhere. They shuffle and rearrange even as you learn them, and that keeps it exciting.