A Language That Has Ausgeflippt

By Otto Friedrich

The United States and Britain, George Bernard Shaw once remarked, are two nations separated by a common language. Today he might say much the same thing about the U.S. and the whole world. ICE CUBOS, says a sign in the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Lebanese audiences watching Rambo shout exhortations in English, and a Japanese rock-'n'-roll hit begins, "Let's dancin' people/ Hoshi-kuzu nagarete feel so good . . ."

It was the British empire, on which the sun never set, that originally spread English around the world, along with tea breaks, cuffed trousers and the stiff upper lip. But when the imperial sun finally did set after World War II, the American language followed American power into the vacuum. Key reason: the language has a rare forcefulness and flexibility. Even the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary last month incorporated such Americanisms as yuppie and zilch. Explained Editor Robert Burchfield: "Our language is changing slowly, and America is leading the way now, not Britain."

Commerce is the driving force. The ads in Italy's Corriere della Sera for just one day included the words personnel, administrator, quality audit, contract manager and know-how. Germans routinely refer to their employer as der Boss, who is expected to be a good Manager. "American English is definitely the model, not English--this is what we see looking through French advertising," says Micheline Faure, organizing secretary of a Paris group called AGULF, which was formed to resist the linguistic invasion. Japanese ads, posters and shopping bags are full of a special kind of American English, often starting with an enthusiastic "Let's," as in "Let's hiking" or "Let's sex."

Hand in hand with commerce goes technology, and the tools of technology were mostly baptized in the U.S. The French still cling to ordinateur instead of computer, but in Italy even schoolchildren call it by its American name. Also floppy disks, lasers, compact disks, software. Germans buy Tapes, not Magnetbander. In fact, they call the whole field hitec.

And the athletic life. A French magazine called Vital (pronounced Veet-al) is full of terms such as le rafting and le trekking. The Germans go in for das Joggen, while Italians turn to il body building.

And show biz. Words such as network, rock, video, new wave, hit parade, album all turn up in Swedish or, for that matter, Arabic. Show biz helps introduce the language of romance: sexy, playboy and, eventually, baby sitter. In Japan, the English names for sexual organs are considered more polite than the Japanese terms, and pink is now the Japanese word for all erotic entertainment.

This combination of money and technology, show biz and sex appeal strikes many foreigners as the epitome of the American success story, and so they adopt English words that imply success itself: super, blue chip, boom, status symbol, summit. Some of that, clearly, is just snobbery. Through U.S. television, says British Grammarian Randolph Quirk, a foreigner can pick up an Americanized vocabulary "if you want to show you're with it and talking like Americans, the most fashionable people on earth." On the other hand, some upper-class Egyptian youths think it is chic to use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words like--well, merde.

Foreign languages do not simply acquire American terms, of course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt.

The Japanese, though, are the past masters at making such words pay their way. Sutoraiku, for example, is the kind of strike that a pitcher throws across the plate, while sutoraiki is the kind that workers go out on. It was inevitable that the Japanese would import "word processor" and just as inevitable that they would shorten it to wa-pro. Then the younger generation seized it and made it stand for "worst proportions," meaning an unattractive woman.

In a number of countries, traditionalists stoutly resist the American invasion, which they deplore as "cultural imperialism." France's AGULF has spent the past nine years suing organizations that violate France's law against the commercial use of foreign terms. It has had small fines imposed on about 40 defendants, including the Paris Opera and TWA (for issuing English-language boarding cards).

Most linguistic experts strongly oppose such artificial attempts to control language by decree. They argue that languages must keep changing as new problems arise and new information needs to be communicated. Besides, the portion of English words in any major language is not statistically large --generally less than 5%, according to some estimates--and the process of adopting new words follows a sort of international balance of trade. Discotheque came into American usage from France, posh from England, brainwashing from China and so on. "I dislike any form of nationalism," says Italian Novelist Alberto Moravia, "least of all a nationalistic attitude towards language."

To the extent that such a nationalism reflects social prejudices, the criticisms become self-contradictory. Lillian Chao, professor of English emeritus at National Taiwan University, fears that the spread of English is doing subtle damage. "China has always been a civilization of great politeness and courtesy," she says. "But now our young people, through the English they're studying, are learning to be so offhanded. They say 'Hi' to everyone they greet, and everything is 'O.K.' " Well, exactly.

With reporting by Leonora Dodsworth/Rome and Georgina Oliver /Paris, with other bureaus