Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [37]
In a 1999 interview, MTV’s David Flack was asked to describe what part English had played in music sent to Southeast Asian youths. Flack, the senior creative director for Asia, said,
It’s in music where the English language is the biggest success. A lot of bands, even local bands, sing in English: It’s the language of rock and roll. One band in India recently argued they could sing in their local language and were quite successful, but generally Indian bands sing in English. . . . [But] as soon as the band wants an international audience . . . it has to be in English.12
MTV has also delved into various international causes such as the struggle for social justice as it has sought to build its appeal to young people around the world. Some observers, however, say that such moves were motivated by earlier criticism that MTV was too much in the pocket of the record companies to take a sincere stand on anything.
As an example of its power to set patterns, MTV created the popular acronym VJ, the video version of a disk jockey. The music channel also grabbed some fame, wanted or not, as the producer of the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show in which Janet Jackson’s bared breast outperformed the football teams.
More recently, the organization has developed a network of TV channels aimed at devotees in more than fifty countries in their local languages.
THE POWER TO ATTRACT
Perhaps the biggest reason that so many young people abroad have latched on to the latest words and music from the United States has been to show their peers that they are right up to the minute with the latest trends. Ever since the war, as Briendwalker says, it has been considered smart to insert American slang into conversations with their peers. It is just as chic to chomp into a Big Mac with fries in Paris or to grab a foot-long at a Subway in Bahrain or St. Petersburg.
The unspoken but clear message conveyed by these widely known meeting places at almost every busy intersection in the world has been, it’s time to learn informal American English the easy way: while enjoying the latest Hollywood movie or TV soap or franchise meal with a large Coke or Pepsi to go, and of course with an American song on an iPod.
ENGLISH OBSCENITIES ARE SEXY ABROAD
Jeremy Wallach reports that young Indonesians use English obscenities for romantic purposes because they are safer and sexier than their own languages. The terms, which they get from broadcast music, apparently free them from inhibitions they otherwise would feel.13
In South Korea, young musicians use English to construct an image of menace or sexual daring as well as to emphasize the contentious, uninhibited nature of their art.14
Jannis Androutsopoulos, a linguistics professor at the University of Hamburg, explains, “Cool, wicked, chill, dope, nerd. Young people around the world use this kind of slang to show they’re connected to American pop culture.” She says such language “is powerfully expressive because—paradoxically—it is both exclusive and global” since it is not available at school or in the mainstream media.15
Androutsopoulos added that the Amglish term flipped out becomes ausgeflippt in German, flippato in Italian, flippe in French, and fliparismenos in Greek, while English partially translated into German results in abchecken (check out), ausflippen (flip out), abhangen (hang out), and abrippen (rip off).
Even more significant is how English in all its forms has penetrated the world far from its traditional stomping grounds in Europe and its native lands. What does the language have that has made it so welcome so fast?
Braj Kachru, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois recognized some basic reasons at a relatively early stage. Drawing on ten studies in 1986, including ones in India, Israel, Singapore,