THE PRODIGAL TONGUEDispatches from the Future of English

Chapter 1, Roarific

Jafaikan: Teenagers in London are less and less likely to speak in the traditional Cockney accent, instead many of them use a new transcultural idiom that goes by the name “Jaifaikan”. Besides the obvious Caribbean source, it draws on accents and words from Africa, South Asia and Australia.

“You lookin buff in dem low batties. Dey’s sick, man. Me? I’m just jamming wid me bruds. Dis my yard, innit? Is nang, you get me?”

English- and French-speakers (Canada) wreak havoc on each other’s languages (causano distruzioni).

e. g. “circulation on Autoroute Dix-neuf will have a little perturbation” meaning “traffic on highway 19 will be chaotic”.

David Crystal, eminent linguist, wrote in 2004: “We are living at the beginning of a new linguistic era. I do not believe that ‘revolution’ is too strong a word for what has been taking place.” He based his assertion on three interrelated phenomena:

1. The planetwide spread of English in the late twentieth century2. The disappearance of hundreds of other languages3. The sudden dominance of internet as a means of communication.

The word TEENAGER.

It wasn’t born until the early 1940s. Its very first use though goes back to 1921, when an article in Victoria, British Columbia in The Daily Colonist declared “All ‘teen age’ girls of the city are cordially invited to attend the mass meeting to be held this evening.”

NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH

Unusually, the entire history of the dialect exists in recorded form. In 1946 the New Zealand Broadcasting Service sent mobile recording units around the country to gather soldiers’ and nurses’ wartime messages to their families at home; later on New Zealand decided to record the music being performed in outlying areas as well as the reminiscences of old-timers living there.

women take on a new accent faster than men

people from a lower social class acquire a new accent more quickly than those from a higher class

accents develop most quickly when people from many different places mix together

Somalia. Words about camels have acquired new meanings according to new situations.

Shakespeare was an avid punster and word coiner: how to perform his plays today without making them incomprehensible to young people nor messing around with the language.

PECULIARITY OF THE ARABIC LANGUAGE

In Islam, nobody can alter what God has said. Devout Muslims, like Orthodox Jews, believe their sacred texts are the immutable word of God. Some Arabic texts from what we call the Middle Ages suggested that errors in language were also errors in morality – grounds, in fact, for damnation. The language of the Qur’an (fusha) is also the written language of classical Arabic literature, as well as the language of officialdom throughout Arab and Islamic history to this modern day. If Arabs from different countries meet today, they will be able to speak in classical Arabic and have full understanding. The lasting power of the Qur’an should never be underestimated: it gives God a mother tongue from which any change can appear an unworthy deviation. English has no such stabilizing text: it feeds on novelty. Changes are its meat and drink.

Yet time has transformed the language’s very syntax: in the Qur’an verb-subject-object, in daily life subjectverb-object.

STEVEN PINKER, 2007, THE STUFF OF THOUGHT

“the fortunes of new words are a mystery”, “we still can’t predict when a new word will take root”.

DAVID GRADDOL, LINGUIST, RELEASED A REPORT FOR THE BRITISH COUNCIL IN 1997 ENTITLED “THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH?”

“On the one hand, the use of English as a global lingua franca requires intelligibility and the setting and maintenance of standards. On the other hand, the increasing adoption of English as a second language, where it takes on local forms, is leading to fragmentation and diversity. No longer is it the case, if it ever was, that English unifies all who speak it.”

Chapter 2, Bouncebackability

In 2005 the biologist Rob Wallace, who had just discovered a new monkey and, having the right to pick the name, he sold it. For the first time ever, an animal was named after an online company called GoldenPalace.com.

Words can originate by chance and become popular so that they reach the dictionaries (womlu, bouncebackability). Another common origin for words are TV shows and movies .

Whereas traditional journalism sets out to tell a story, one that will reveal a verifiable truth, “lifestyle journalism” seeks to embody the qualities it evokes and celebrates. If you stick to old words, you can’t be in the know. Ilana Weitzman, editor of En Route in-flight magazine, declared that “when you write about trends, you have to do it in a trendy way.

Samuel Johnson in 1775 completed the first major dictionary of the English language hoping it would fix our language and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered.

DICTIONARIES. The great divide has always been between those who describe and those who merely prescribe. Noah Webster was a prescriptivist: he told readers which words they should use, and which they would be smart to avoid VERBAL ETIQUETTE, but real life does not obey etiquette rules: real language is expressive, creative, bursting at the edges – and fraught (pieno) of ambiguity.

Big dictionaries are nearly impossible to produce nowadays because of length (too much paper and too many volumes would be needed), constant need of updating (aka ‘revision project’), issues in deciding whether a term should make an entry or not. Oxford English Dictionary “The language is expanding so fast, this may be an impossible mission. But we haven’t drawn back from any frontiers we were pressing on before” stated Edmund Weiner (deputy chief editor of the OED).

Volunteers in several nations (only few get payed) continue to read for the OED: one of Weiner’s colleagues decides a list of books and the volunteers read them, highlighter at the ready, and then send back the new data to the editors who eventually decide if the new usages or new words will make it to the dictionary.

Some of the trickiest questions that editors face involve LOANWORDS from foreign languages. Graeme Diamond, boss of New Words, said “The difficulty always is, are the words being used in a bilingual context where the writer can expect the readers to code-switch, so that it’s really Chinese being used in an English context? At what point does it become English? There’s no hard-and-fast answer. One of our principles would be, is it being used outside the region? Another would be just the sheer weight of evidence.”

If you think about it, dictionaries given over to specific niches – Irish terms, let’s say, or Formula One racing – may have an easier time accepting new words because they have so much less to accept.

URBAN DICTIONARY

The best place to watch the promiscuity in action is the website UrbanDictionary.com. It calls itself “a slang dictionary with your definitions. Define your world.” The invitation is essential – for the charm, along with the risk, of Urban Dictionary is that any visitor to the site can act as a lexicographer. Mere seconds after arriving, a twelve-year-old boy can deliver a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” verdict on definitions that may involve complicated, unrealistic and degrading sex acts, along with many other definitions that are simple, realistic and nonviolent. Urban Dictionary requires neither payment nor registration; it asks no questions. The combination of power, fun and anonymity may help to explain why it has grown to be among the most popular sites on the World Wide Web.

UD sprang to life in 1999 in San Luis Obispo, California (it moved to Silicon Valley six years later). The site’s presiding genius, a software engineer named Aaron Peckham, was an eighteen-year-old freshman at the state university of California Polytechnic when he created the site. It’s both populist and collaborative. More than 6,5 million definitions so far (April 2012) since 1999. Definitions are to be rejected if racist, sexist, sexually violent or nonsensical (also if it’s nothing more than a friend’s name). Almost anything else remains acceptable: swearing is kosher (legitimate), misspelling is fine, and ferocious attacks on famous people are welcome.

“UD’s all about software to help people understand each other”, Peckham explained.

Chapter 3, Throw away your dictionaries, Asian English

English is hard to resist and easy to transform. It has an incredible talent for fusion. Over the past few decades, the language spoken in eastern and southern Asia has grown into a complex of idioms beyond anyone’s control or full understanding.

Malaysia: English + Chinese languages and Malay = Manglish

China: English speakers in China = Chinglish

South Korea = Konglish

It’s possible to draw a few general conclusions about the changes happening to English in the Far East. All across the region, its vocabulary and grammar are undergoing major change. The vocabulary picks up fresh words from local tongues, and old or new, these terms are deployed in a radically simplified grammar. Different countries have arrived at different stages in the process.

Knowing English has become a way to improve your social status, and for students it represent a means to be in touch with the future.

English allows communication between people and societies who share no other tongue.

In India English is an essential language, not only because of its technical vocabularies and the international communication which it makes possible, but also simply to permit two Indians to talk to each other in a tongue which neither party hates. Ambitious young Indians see English as a passport to material success.

Think about call centers that have proliferated Young workers receive lessons in cultural training and accent change (there are new professions like language and accent coach). E.g. Indians repeat several times the same word for politeness in order to reassure the customer, saying like “ok, ok, ok, ok”, whereas a British or an American might find it rude and disconcerting.

Flourishing idioms in India are called Benglish, Punglish and Tinglish, but the most ‘recognized’ is Hinglish. A few decades ago, speaking these mixed lingos used to be something not to be proud of, but now it is just proportion that varies; students from the posher universities use more English and less of the other languages.

SINGAPORE

Singapore has developed a colloquial form of English unique to itself which is named Singlish, aka Singapore Colloquial English or Singapore Vernacular English.

Main characteristics: directness, allowed usage of local expressions in literary contexts (unlike India), fully accepted (something not to be embarrassed about) by Singaporeans but not by government leaders. During British domination, English was chosen as the official language, but after the Second World War, as the empire withered, Singaporeans had to face a hard choice: Malay or Chinese? After they gained independence, prime minister Lee Kuan Yew deicided all his people should speak English; at first 4 languages policy: English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, but from the middle 80s English has functioned as Singapore’s main language. In 2005 he declared “I believe we should all make the effort and consciously speak good English – at home, at work, or in social gathering. Speaking good English doesn’t mean using bombastic words or adopting an artificial English or American accent. We can speak in full sentences, with proper sentence structure, and cutting out all the ‘lahs’ and ‘lors’ at the end of each sentence.”

Lubna Alsagoff, who heads the English Department at the National Institute of Education, says that “Singlish includes; Standard English excludes.” Children are the future of any tongue, and the children of Singapore put pressure on each other to use Singlish.

Standard English in Singapore is intended to arrive without cultural baggage, i.e. a sheer tool.

e.g. of Singlish

Standard English: Did you have a pleasant flight? Singlish: Your plane, how?

Standard English: Good evening. Do you have a reservation? Singlish: You got early-early call, not?

Standard English: Turn off the lights! Singlish: Off the lights! They use ‘off’ and ‘on’ as verbs.

High school students here still have to pass Britain’s GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams, of course by using standard English. The requirement appears to smack of colonialism, yet to some Singaporeans Standard English is a means of escape, even of liberation.

Vocabulary is only the start. The local divergence from Standard English extends to the structure of sentences and the sounds that words make in a mouth: 1. The verb to BE shows up when you might doubt its usefulness but vanishes when you’re expecting it (e.g. He very sad); 2. Preposition are in flux; 3. Adverbs like ‘already’ and ‘only’ appear at the end of sentences; 4. Influence of Chinese syntax.

More in general, Nury Vittachi, one of the Hong Kong’s leading authors and journalists, declared about Englasian: “Asia in way behind the West, when it comes to understanding that there is no right or wrong in language – language is about communication, and if you succeed in precise, clear communication, then language is doing its job. […] Throw away your dictionaries. The unwritten language Englasian really is threatening to supplant English as to business language of Asia”. According to Vittachi, Englasian is a result of the merging of English vocabulary, which is now unstoppable in many tongues, and Chinese grammar, which is wonderfully simple. “So the simplified English spoken in Asia is actually one of the easiest languages to learn.”

Englasian is producing variations in how syllables are stressed, and it is also characterized by the absence of word-ending consonants.

Chapter 4, Your rule will soon be here, Global English

This chapter deals with the modifications English is undergoing throughout its assimilation all around the globe. M. Abley once compared the power of English with Wal-Mart’s because of its size, its convenience, its phenomenal growth, its ability to overwhelm the competition. Another image he used after some people got offended by seeing their language associated to a cheap supermarket chain is that of a mallard, and the effect this species have recently had on other species of duck. They have flourished over the past century, extending their range across the continent. They now breed with much less common black ducks to such a point that anxious biologists evoke “a breakdown in species integrity.” This loss of biological diversity means that in what we still sometimes call the natural world, one type of duck is becoming ever more dominant.

The total number of English-speakers had already reached one and a half billion. The language exists in a multitude of hybrid forms. They can be a creative force – sometimes. Encroachments of English were first observed many decades ago. Just think about Gaelic spoken on Canada’s East Coast: during the 1940s it has already become half English and half Gaelic because people living there, though they still spoke Gaelic, were surrounded by English (radio, newspapers, schools, speech of other people) and because they lacked words for many items (e.g. banana, tomato, etc.).

English is now ‘colonizing’ Europe, Africa and Asia. The Dutch University of Technology in Delft is bilingual. To give you an idea of how high the level of English spoken by the students is, you should know that they award with a sausage the worst teacher on campus – worst means sausage in Dutch – for the worst mistake he or she made speaking English. Dutch language bristles with English words, and they often found a second home in it, mixing with local words and creating neologism.

Words used to take decades to move across languages. Now they do so within years, if not months or even weeks. E.g. zap became zapper (Dutch), zappen (German), zappeur (French), zapear (Spanish), zaping (Greek), zapping (Italians got it right) and several other European versions.

An English word does NOT always keep its meaning when it enters a foreign language.

What is it like to see your mother tongue being taken over by foreign words and cadences? English is nowadays’ lingua franca, historically following French and earlier Latin. English began to exerts its dominance only with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. During the XIX century speakers of both the American and British varieties have long complained about a transatlantic invasion of their speech. Fowler, in favor of BE, Mencken in that of AE. Even today, despite standardizing forces like travel, big business and Hollywood, the differences between BE and AE still loom large. The language of power though no longer inhabits London, and we’re witnessing a rapid growth of Americanisms in the countries where a British-based English has long been the norm.

Speaking under the influence of English:

- Slovakian: although English has not yet exercised a big influence on the sentence structures, it has inevitably enriched our vocabulary, in particular that of the young generation;WHEN IT COMES TO YOUNG CULTURE ENGLISH MINGLES AND MERGES WITH OTHER LANGUAGES.

- French: e.g. Panique à la Pop Academy the kind of hybridization the book embodies is hard to interpret as a creative force. It suggests that French educators still look at English as a way to keep juvenile eyes glued to the page. Anglicisms make the text seem cool.

- Finnish: the everyday lives of Finnish adolescents and young people in modern Finland are heavily saturated with Anglo-American or English-language media and popular culture (blogs, fan fiction, interviews are all in English). It’s more than just a professional asset; it’s a personal force, a social tool.

- Turkey- Eastern Europe: especially considering music (Russia, Germany)- Africa (music again, pidgins in Senegal, Nigeria etc)- Chile, Iraqi Kurdistan: recent development of studies of English- China (300 million people are studying English)- Mongolia: way of opening windows on the wider world- Nepal where, despite 120 indigenous languages, urbanite people mix up half English and half Nepali

when they speak a sentence

“There is a coolness factor with technology, as with aspects of youth culture”, explains B.D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University and the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. “And non-English-speakers who study in English-speaking institutions often find that since they get their technical training in a foreign language, it is very hard for them to talk about that technical stuff in their native language”.

Difficulties. Its spelling is unpredictable, its pronunciation variable, its vocabulary huge. Its grammar, while deceptively simple, contains a mass of pitfalls, phrasal verbs being the trickiest of all. Prepositions. movements are afoot to promote a significant simplification of the language for the foreign learners:

- Basic English, C.K. Ogden, 1930 vocabulary of 850 words, simplified grammar. The novelist H.G. Wells predicted in 2020 almost everyone in the world would speak and understand English.

- Nuclear English, professor Quirk, 1981- Globish, Jean-Paul Nerrière, 1989 stripped-down version of English, vocabulary of 1,500 words.

Neither a pidgin nor an artificial language like Esperanto- Eurospeak, i.e. the informal name for the formal vocabulary of the European Union (some words

are now acceptable in BE, still odd in AE)- Basic Global English (BGE), Joachim Grzega 750 words, 20 grammar rules, + 250 words learners

are asked to find in any subject area they please and memorize

ACCENT

“Dear Anglo-Americans, please show us you are also taking pains to make yourselves understood in an international setting” wrote Mikie Kiyoi, a Japanese woman from the International Energy Agency in Paris. English in its new global form is now spoken widely, and its British or American form are not necessarily a model. ACCENT MATTERS FAR LESS THAN INTELLIGIBILTY. CULTURAL REFERENCES (English’s enormous store of proverbs, metaphors, idioms, catchphrases) MAY BE TOTALLY UNWELCOME. English in an international environment is more easily spoken and understood between foreigners just because they do not imply as much cultural references, strong accent and unusual vocabulary as native speakers.

Chapter 5, Hippu Hangu, Language in Japan

All over the Far East English has the purpose of carrying an air of authority as well as glamour. The dramatic, almost tectonic shifts in Japanese are being considered in this chapter. Under the influence of English, its vocabulary is altering with cut-and-paste speed. The HYBRID SPEECH that many young people now favor in Japan may well embody the most radical incursion English has yet made on another widely spoken language, but the question is now whether modernization results in a cultural cost higher then we like to believe.

Nature has kept Japan isolated for centuries, so Japanese is what experts can call an “isolate”: linguistically, it stands apart. It couldn’t be linked to any known language nor big language famililes.

Japanese is unconceivable without Chinese influence. About 1,500 years ago it used to be an unwritten tongue before Buddhist monks sailed to Japan carrying texts written in Chinese Chinese characters – kanji – settled down. Out of convenience or homage, Japanese people borrowed a host of Chinese words, often transforming the pronunciation. Moreover, they didn’t feel comfortable in kanji aloe. And so, more than a thousand years ago, a pair of local writing systems emerged, KATAKANA and HIRAGANA. They became kanji’s complement since they’re both phonetic and each one of them contains 48 signs, one for every basic syllable.

In Japan it’s possible to come across 4 or 5 ways of writing (alphabets) in a single sentence: kanji, katakana, hiragana, romaji (the Roman Alphabet), Arabic numbers. As if all that weren’t enough, Japanese texts can

be read in different directions. Top to bottom is the most common, but sometimes they move from left to right, and occasionally from right to left.

Despite the simplification of kanji, the writing of these characters still take an amount of knowledge and hard work that astounds most Westerners. In 1981 the government published a list of characters for daily use, but even so, no less than 1,945 characters. However, spoken Japanese can be extremely concise, but context is everything.

Interesting and complicating difference European tradition of rhetoric has aimed at convincing a listener by force of logic and argument. Japan’s tradition is one that cherishes nuance and tolerates ambiguity, inviting a listener to come up with an implied meaning. Japanese and English could not be more disparate languages. Americans find Japanese expressions vague; Japanese find English unforgiving. Japanese doesn’t have as many oaths as English, and more generally a translator has to balance explanation and implication.

KEIGO: system whose rules place vocabulary at the mercy of social context. It’s not just a question of taste or decorum, it’s embedded deep within the language. The linguist Yasuto Kikuchi has defined it “the Japanese heart, our way of thinking, our way of behaving, our way of assigning value.”

Merging of languages. Many dozens of Japanese words have made their way into mainstream English (arts, martial and culinary ones includes, karaoke, manga. In exchange, hundreds and hundreds of words – even entire phrases – have pushed the other way.

n Japan English is everywhere on people’s clothes or on shops’ billboards. For decades these strange sentences – like The sea roars a lullaby or Carrying out out of a breakfast corner should withhold – went by name of Japlish (now insulting), now Engrish.

Why do they make such blunders anyway?

1. English often functions simply as a design element in Japanese products.2. In matters of phonetics and grammar, as well as vocabulary and social context, the differences

between English and Japanese are huge.3. Some apparently inexplicable errors can be traced back to mistranslation.

Historically, we know that in 1920s there were only 162 English or American words in Japanese; in 1964 nearly 3,000 western-words; today 50,000 would be a conservative guess. Why so many? 1. The Japanese have consistently held an extraordinarily negative view of their own language. 2. Phonetic, i.e. to borrow is easier than to invent.

TEENAGERS and their jargon:

- Adaptations of words or full American sentences e.g. to go to a family restaurant = famiru, to undergo cosmetic surgery = operu (from operation)

- Wordmaking: gathering English terms and morphing them into something else, which is new to both languages. Many of them are wonderfully inventive and revealing e.g. haroo waaku from ‘hello work’ is a job center.

- New vocabulary fits into an underlying structure that accepts change slowly: Japanese phonetics don’t have L and V, in fact rabu hoteru would be lavu hotelu which comes from love hotel. F-words have entered the lexicon

- Teenagers prefer using English-originated words even if they have the Japanese words e.g. miruku (milk) instead of the traditional word that literally means ‘cow breast’ because it’s more hygienic.

Among all Western words the most interesting are those that embody foreign ideas (homu for home, differs from ie, the multigenerational household with traditions).

It’s become difficult for young people to learn and master kanji, so people’s vocabularies today are very poor and they’re forced to use new, queer words and expressions. Some think that since lifetime employment doesn’t exist anymore, relationships are simpler and so has become language. Nonetheless, Japanese are losing the ability of writing kanji by hand, and the anxiety is that their children won’t be able to read and understand traditional literary texts.

Rules were not an issue; the hierarchies and deferences of national life were echoed in the language, but they’re becoming qualities of the past. Does language still need its many words for subtle gradations of bowing?

Languages, like teenagers, love to run free. New words and expressions may seem charming, or exasperating; but what matters is THE SHEER SCOPE OF CHANGE. THE PRICE OFNOVELTY MAY BE A SEVER DISTORTION OF THE LANGUAGE. Something new is bubbling up in the malls and arcades, clubs and cyberspace that young people inhabit in Japan. It’s casual, unpredictable, impolite. It draws on English as a minute-by-minute inspiration, but it’s not a slave to English – some of its coinages are purely Japanese and wonderfully subtle.

Japan has a special place in the virtual future: novels, especially related to cyberpunk movement -> Japanese words, names (corporate and geographical). “Never,” writes Takao Suzuki, “has it occurred to the Japanese people that their language could be an asset in the international arena”.

Chapter 6, Radiante, Language in Los Angeles

Once the whitest city in America, Los Angeles can now be considered the most multicultural city in the history of the world, according to a PBS documentary. The influences it gets are many, and belonging to many environments and geographical origins.

- It’s impossible not to mention the so called Hollywoodspeak. In Hollywood common phrases change form or get shortened, and it’s worth considering you don’t have many friends, you’re more likely to have frenemies. e.g. have him return (i.e. have him return a call); to roll a call (i.e. to make a call), to jump/hop off the line (to hang up).

- Some of LA public high schools provide classes in Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese and so on, and Orange County is home to more Vietnamese people than anywhere outside Vietnam. Some other

languages have not only survived but thrived: Farsi, Kurdish and Armenian are good examples. In each of those languages, actors and producers in LA make TV and radio shows for their original lands.

- U.c.l.a. slang 5 a guide compiled by linguistics students in 2005. Some of the terms are really local, some others are old and wide spread, but some are brand new, though nobody knows which ones are going to last. E.g. ‘dumb fine’ and ‘mad beef’ demonstrate the tendency of some adjectives of losing their negative connotation and become on the contrary unambiguously positive, like ‘sick’, ‘wicked’ and ‘bad’ (e.g. that song is sick, man). ‘Pimp’ (as well as its feminine equivalents ‘pimpette’ or ‘pimptress’) means in LA any man or boy successful with the opposite sex.

- LA is a place of incongruities, with synagogues on the boardwalk and visible porn shops. Just because of these contradictions, LA bears an uncanny resemblance to the English language: new peoples are new to one as new words are to the other. The city’s international airport LAX is the Ellis Island of our time. “To migrate is certainly to lose language and home, to be defined by others, to become invisible or, even worse, a target; it is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul. But the migrant is not simply transformed by his act; he also transforms his new world. Migrants may well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridization that newness can emerge.”

- One big problem about immigration “If you think of LA as a room, it would be fair to say that I’ve been deliberately neglecting an elephant sitting by itself in the corner. Lots of Angelenos choose to do the same – they behave as if the elephant weren’t there, or they pretend it’s no bigger than a mouse. But soon I think they won’t have a choice. The elephant is not aggressive. It just keeps on growing.”

- FOOD. One of the easiest routes along which foreign words move into a language. E.g. ‘boba’, a type of coffee (very different though) which got popular in Taiwan in the 1980s. Mexican food has become Americanized at a point where nobody non-Chicano would be puzzled hearing tacos, tortillas, limón, serranos etc.

- LATIN-AMERICAN COMMUNITIES. The number of residents in LA County exceeds 10 million, Latinos are very close to an absolute majority. In today’s school district roughly 73% of children are Latin Americans; blacks, whites and Asians make up the remaining quarter.The problem is that you don’t really see them since they do jobs scarcely visible (nannies, cooks, gardeners, waiters…), and consequently their voices are hardly heard. However they begun to be audible thanks to language, even in TV commercials, but there are still subtle boundaries beyond which their voices do no reach.

- Terminology. Latinos doesn’t work for everybody since Mexicans and people from Central America don’t like this Mediterranean tone. Hispanic has a colonial ring, thus thumbs down. Since the higher percentage is of Mexican American, you can call them Chicanos, but this again does not fit other Latinos.

- SPANGLISH. “Straight up, it’s called Spanglish”. What’s refreshing, even liberating, is the lack of apology. Many terms which are or come from Spanish are present in u.c.l.a. slang 5, despite the number of Latinos students is still very low. In LA there’s a multitude of Spanish-language Tv stations, newspapers, magazines, websites and radio stations. Racist –or at least national- discriminatory entities like English First movement saying “Treat Hispanics like Americans” often get the Chicano favorite response: their people didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them.Spanglish is not a creole nor a pidgin. The NYC poet and journalist Ed Morales states “when we speak Spanglish we are expressing not ambivalence, but a new region of discourse that has the possibility of redefining ourselves and the mainstream.” A blend of languages can, in places like LA,

Texas, California etc., act as a catalyst. Spanglish is an answer to a very specific problem: how to communicate and live in the USA.

- “Funny” t-shirts are sold with sentences that rely on people’s bilingualism because of the deep discrepancy between Spanish and English meanings

- LA’s fondation name is EL PUEBLO DE NUESTRA SENORA DE LOS ANGELES DE PORCIUNCULA- Chicanos and Latinos born in the US speak English more fluently than Spanish, though they often

tend to speak with a characteristic rhythm and melody. Latinos children complain they don’t speak a better Spanish.

Chapter 7, Every single trend, Black English and Hip-Hop

If we want to grasp the music, the dress, the behavior, the moves, the very language of the young, we need to learn about American black culture, and Black English. Edith Folb, white female linguist, published in 1976 a study about the language of the black teenagers; by doing this she gave them a sense of pride to their knowledge. She watched their habits, like ‘shooting the dozens’, and high lightened that some element of competition – or battle, even – was essential: along with their witty or brutal dismissal of others, they would boast about their own prowess: sexual, of course, but also verbal. You needed to be adroit with language if you hoped to be a pimp.

In the early 1970s “rap” simply meant talk itself. But put together the rap, the toasting, the boasting, the dozens and the graffiti, and you have the foundations of global youth culture stretching ahead into the XXI century. What we’re missing of those years is the beat and the dance of black youths in the Bronx, the DJs and B-boys, the MCs – masters of ceremony, or microphone controllers – who organized rap and sing. Their genius was to blend protest and pleasure, fury and joy.

BE has several names, each one of them being problematic for some reason: BE, Black Vernacular, African American English, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Ebonics, Broken English etc. Although some people believe this idiom has its roots in dialects in West Africa, BE is closely related to the dialect of southern whites: the lengthening of short vowels, a reliance on double negatives, some systematic changes in verb forms. It should not be surprising, given that both dialects emerged from the same principal source: the nonstandard English that belonged to the Scots, Welsh, Irish and emigrants from rural England in the XVII and XVIII centuries. BE has some aspects in common with West African languages however: pronunciation, granted. Other than that, socially, more than structurally, BE echoes Africa.

From its birthplace amid cotton and tobacco, the dialect expanded with the northward and westward migration of African Americans that began in the late XIX century.

Today they usually code-switch with ease and fluency, and they have a greater self-esteem than during the 70s, mostly thanks to Spike Lee, movie director, and to hip-hop and its worldwide success.

Variations of standard grammar in BE:

1. Omitting the –s from the third-person-singular verb2. Nonstandard pronoun (e.g. them boys shot him)3. Double negatives

4. Loss of the verb to be5. Dropping of g in –ing verbs6. Replacement of a ‘th’ sound by ‘d’

One of the first practices in the hip-hop movement was TAGGINGinvented names for artists, MCs, DJs and so on. What began to matter was the un-named, the power of naming and misnaming (think about Malcolm X and Muhammad Alì, the Notorious B.I.G. and so on). Hip-hop is a style of dance music, but it’s one in which language and its history matter. It has succeeded in restoring poetry to its ancient role as an oral medium after decades of marginalization in textbooks and graduate seminars. RAPPING IS AN ART OF LANGUAGE. “No one is quite as deliriously and unapologetically in love with the way words sound as are rappers” writes the New York journalist Adam Sternbergh. Not only rappers introduce new words, they also alter the connotations of old ones.

Gangsta rap we’ve seen verbal aggression has always been part of the movement, but in the 1990s, some rappers and music producers, finding their audience weary of the usual product, began to ratchet up the invective to an ever greater level of intensity. The effect of gangsta rap, like that of hardcore porn, depends on transgression and repetition. Frequent critics are: rap being the result to minstrelsy, misogyny, glorification of crime, its keeping blacks down by showing them like gagsters.

Before hip-hop there was rhythm and blues, before R&B there was jazz. Naming became for black jazz musicians an act of resistance to an unjust system in which their compositions were often stolen, their creativity betrayed. Hip-hop talk reveals what happens when an oppressed people seizes the language of the overlord and throws it back in his face.

N-word. The rapper Tupac Shakur brilliantly summed it up: “Niggers was the ones on the rope hanging out on the field. Niggas is the ones with gold ropes hanging out at clubs.”

Nowhere has the music’s power been proven more starkly than in hip-hop’s other home, Jamaica. Earliest DJs, dancehall whose lyrics are as vicious as gangsta rap. What used to be rasta-spiced English (Bob Marley’s) is, today, more likely to rhyme in shifting mixture of English and Jamaican creole. If you want to fight the power you have to choose to avoid a language with authority’s odor.

In Canada, or French-speaking African countries, hybrid phrases are the rule. French + English + Creole. This genre of music is growing fast in China and India too. Every country is starting to produce its own hip-hop artists. But where English is the native language, should they adopt the Black American English lexicon or adapt it to their customs? In the UK, for example, doesn’t it sound unnatural to rap about guns, expensive cars (which most youths can’t afford) and misogyny is a bigger deal?

Nearly thirty years have elapsed since hip-hop burst into the mainstream. Besides, its use in innumerable movies and TV shows has made it familiar to people who would never walk to the Bronx or Harlem. Its language has slipped into everyone’s language e.g. G.W. Bush saying ‘yo’ to call Tony Blair.

The spread of terms like ‘yo’, ‘bitch’, ‘bling’ and ‘down wit dem’ doesn’t mean that everyone who uses such words loves the music of Jay Z or Chuck D. But it suggests they admire their attitude: that in-your-face pride. That hatred of submission. That refusal to apologize.

Chapter 8, words@future.now, Language is Cyberspace

This chapter deals with a particular subculture, that of MMORPGs – i.e. massively multiplayer online role-playing games – and especially with the global communication they lead to through a written language. Its creators are a self-appointed élite. The interesting aspect about it is this copious vocabulary comes to life through fingertips, not lips. Despite the existence now of VoIP (voice over internet protocol), it looks like writing is not going to be considered as a sheer substitute for speaking any longer. Modern teenagers are used to feelings that flow through their fingertips and eyes, bypassing mouth and ears. And even if we might not like the idea of internet being as a big revolution in human history as electricity (as Bill Gates said in 2000), we must as well admit that internet has already collapsed time, democratized knowledge, transformed work and weakened national boundaries. a

In the idiom of chatrooms and text messages some elements of traditional grammar have little space, that is:

- Capital letters- Regular punctuation- Traditional spelling- Correct grammar

Regarding the alleged growing ignorance of children in grammar and writing, studies have been made and the results are often contradictory. According to Coventry University, in spite of all these variations made by youths within their writing in social networks or MMORPGs or chatrooms, “there is no evidence to link a poor ability in standard English to those children who send text messages. In fact, the children who were the best at using ‘textisms’ were also found to be the better spellers and writers.” On the contrary, the chief examiner for Ireland’s Department of Education noted that “the emergence of the mobile phone and the rise of text messaging… would appear to have impacted on standards of writing”, and suggested that text messaging “seems to pose a threat to traditional conventions in writing.”

Long messages are awkward to write, and they cost more to send. Dot mobile, a phone company for British students, launched a series of classics in texting format. The beginning of Hamlet’s best-known soliloquy is rendered as “2b?Ntb?=?”. And a compressed version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice reads like this: 5SistrsWntngHsbnds.NwMenInTwn-Bingly&Darcy-Fit&Loadd.BigSisJaneFals4B,2ndSisLizH8sDCozHesProud.SlimySoljrWikamSysDHsShadyPast.TrnsOutHesActulyARlyNysGuy&RlyFancysLiz.SheDecydsSheLyksHim.Evry1GtsMaryd. In 2006 New Zealand Government announced that if high school students used text speak on their finals wouldn’t suffer any penalty if the ideas were correct.

LOLCATS are what linguists call “snowclones”: a formulaic expression (like “X is the new Y”) that allows anyone to fill in the blanks. A lolcat is a cute pic of a cat (usually) over which a big caption tweaks and twists conventional spelling and grammar. E.g. I is a burrito (hi here’s a burrito).

Abbreviations. Used in texting, chats and MMORPGs can lead to confusion. The rules are: spell out as few words as possible; invent abbreviations; use a single letter or number when it sounds roughly like a word or syllable made up of several letters.

Metaphors. In such a ‘computer era’ as today, the power of technology extends to the metaphors we use – the imagery that gives flesh to our thoughts (e.g. to pour gasoline on human imagination). Terms from cyberspace and technospeak. But someone says the machinery we have created should not be used as a metaphor of our selves.

Poetry. In cyberspace poems can find a surprisingly large audience. G. K. Pincus created poems based on the Fibonacci sequence and called them Fibs; after 2 months from the moment of their publication online they ended into a book.

Computer-bred language is becoming a normal part of oral communication. You might say that the improvisational brio of emails puts them in the same relationship to traditional letters that jazz bears to classical music – keeping in mind that composers and performers can be masters of both genres.

BLOG. Shortened form of “web log” it’s a publishing platform, not a form in itself. It comes with a set of technologies, but then so does journalism. Blogging is always denigrated as a bad form of writing, which it often is. But a lot of people who blog aren’t mindful of the fact they know they’re not good writers, and they don’t care about not being good writers. One aspect which is truly ‘dangerous’ of blogging, is that blogs are dumbing down reading more than writing: easy skimming, microblogging from cellphones, twittering. And if brevity is now the soul of written communication, the consequences for book publishing can only be dire.

Information is being democratized, internet is acting as the printed Bible did during the Reformation. However it’s worth considering the hypothesis that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in ‘digital’ way will be abandoned, and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. A further problem might be the power to decide what information is useful (What do Google and searching engines organize knowledge aiming to?)

Women are targets of harassment even on the internet: someone with a female username is 25 times more likely to be harassed than someone with a male username.

In some parts of the world a blog, even a text message (or a status on FB) can be a truly radical use of words: think about Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Philippines, the Arab Spring (Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia mostly). The most relevant fact is that one-to-many communication acts like a GIANT MOUTH, either for good or bad goals (e.g. uprisings but also humanitarian, first aid…)

SOCIETY WITHOUT THE SOCIAL. A bad side of internet and computer knowledge, is our “continuous partial attention”, “we’re so accessible we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves… We are everywhere except where we actually are physically.” Linda Stone, former vice president of Microsoft. Just think about mp3 reader (formerly Walkman), and how we isolate in our personal soundtrack Atomization by little white boxes and cell phones. Students need help in evaluating what is important in a text and what’s not. It’s a culture of immediacy. We have the meaning (data) but we miss the experience.

Love stories can blossom through these new means of communication.

Chapter 9, How very, Words and the Fictional Future

Even in a fictional future, we expect the language to be futuristic, it would be awkward to hear someone in year 3042 speaking like our grandparents. And when an imagined culture or planet falls into disarray, that disorder needs to be reflected in its language.

Intimate RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND POLITICS.

The greatest intuition about language and politics in fiction belongs to George Orwell. In 1984, the dictator’s most effective means of control is verbal. The official language is Newspeak, whose speakers can entertain no opinions that deviate from the party line; all doubts and independent thoughts qualify as crimethink. Orwell’s achievement in 1984 was to create a form of language that embodies the most insidious type of social repression.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962. He gave voice to a British culture of random adolescent violence in a future language heavily influenced by Russian. Other expressions who escaped the Russian virus, are plausible new meanings for existing terms, e.g. a cigarette in the novel is a ‘cancer’, an erection is a pan-handle. Anyway language alter when society, not just technology abandons its previous codes.

Amid all the imagined disasters, the heartfelt calamities, a few writers of speculative fiction have chosen to embody a healthy, peaceful society in a language to match: J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, whose language, called Kesh, suggests what is not present in our through what is present in itself (e.g. ‘to have’ is intransitive, ‘to be rich’ is the same word as ‘to give’). The message from countless writers, artists and filmmakers is clear: we’re in deep trouble. Our way of life is not sustainable. If the earth can no longer cope with us – if we can no longer cope with ourselves – what kind of language will we utter?

Cyberpunk writers don’t face an easy task when they create new words to come, yet they seem especially gifted.

Ci sono parecchi esempi in questo capitol, ma nulla di sostanziale.

Chapter 10, The Soul’s Ozone, Keeping Language Real

What are the most significant findings of this book?

1. The prevalence of slang and new expressions among the young – especially in the company of electronic devices – tends to baffle older people.

2. The old rules of language use in many countries are eroding.3. Written languages are becoming less buttoned up.4. English –and others too – has greater differences among its many varieties. Although there’s

nothing uniquely 21st century about the process, today’s mixing involve a greater number of cities, countries and peoples than ever before.

5. In the past, mixed idioms were seldom written down, whereas today most of them exist in written as well as spoken form the main reason is Internet (barriers are crumbling).

6. In many countries, multilingualism is only natural (e.g. Morocco, Sri Lanka, Philippines).7. What applies in food, music and fashion holds true in language as well: idioms that once existed far

apart, distinct in time and place, are beginning to unite. The counterpart to a piece of worldbeat music featuring marimbas, djembes and electric guitars – the counterpart to a restaurant dish containing lamb, squash and lemongrass – is a message-board posting in Filipino, English, Spanish and Latin.

8. When languages approach and touch each other, their speakers have a larger vocabulary to draw on. Healthy languages are enlarging. Boundless variety reigns supreme because of:

(1) The voracious speed of English at its blurring edges – in Singapore, India, South Africa and so on.

(2) The endless growth of scientific and technological language.(3) The way we now conceive language as embracing, not rejecting, words that come from the

margins and subcultures of society.9. Standard grammars, on the contrary, are going toward a simplification.10. Just as English lords are invariably mocked in popular culture, so is pompous speech regarded with

general disdain. Because, even if in the wealthy countries the vast majority of people are literate, slang has not fallen away.

11. The remorseless expansion of the overculture goes hand in hand with the birth and growth of subcultures. We all need to find our niche, and when we’ve found it, we protect and cherish it with words than only people within the chosen group will be able to understand specialized vocabulary builds and sustains group identity, “providing a strongly affective identification for its speaker”.

12. “Any technology” wrote Marshall McLuhan, “gradually creates a totally new human environment”. But computers have transformed the way we live and work beyond the wildest imagining of scientists and engineers just half a century ago. Here, surely, is the core of what Crystal described as a “revolution”.

13. When the culture changes, the metaphors need to changes as well, or else they become obsolete.14. One thing computers allow us to do, is take an active part in the evolution of language. Because of

computers, language has been democratized. Knowledge has been democratized. Meaning itself has been democratized. We’re at liberty to wonder, of course, whether so much democracy is a good thing. The printing process was crucial in the long, slow process by which SPELLING became standardized (Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster); cyberspace is doing the opposite.

15. In the past few decades the barricade between oral and written language has fallen away. The style of newspapers, magazines and books has grown more offhand and flexible.

16. Alvin Toffler warned, rather dramatically, that millions of people will find themselves disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments because we grew used to speed and perpetual change.

17. Mark Abley, the author of this book, finally expresses his own opinion by saying: “I would only say that clear, vivid, exact, plainspoken language is the best tool we have for coping with the verbal future. Such language stands up to time. It does not easily go out of date.” He then quotes G. Orwell again, who said, defending the language “has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. […] What is above all needed is to let meaning choose the

word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them”.

18. “plastic words”, defined by Uwe Poerksen, German scholar and linguist, are abstract nouns like ‘process’, ‘interface’, ‘problem, ‘information’, which go a long way toward establishing a modular international language, deprived of anything specific and variable. They can mean anything and nothing.

19. Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies that “the language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.”