Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [44]
EFFECTS ON OTHER LANGUAGES
It is only natural that the revolution in English, with its growing prominence in the world, would cause changes in other languages. This is even true for Asian languages that use ancient images as letters and symbols, a system that presents the greatest contrast to the Roman letters of English.
In Japan, the presence of English is huge, and it is having a profound effect on the Japanese, according to Alexander Michaelson, an American student living in Japan. He notes a distinct movement away from kanji, the characters inherited from the Chinese, toward more and more katakana, the phonetic system that represents foreign words in Japanese.
In China, English is cutting deep into the learning of Chinese by those who were born there. Zhang Ming-jian, an associate professor at Qingdao University, reports that “too much focus on English has led to a lack of enthusiasm in learning the Chinese language and culture and decreasing proficiency in the mother tongue as well.”31
In South Korea, English has replaced Chinese as the source of most loan words since World War II, when the nation was freed of Japanese rule. Since the Korean War, the American influence has increased greatly. Joseph J. Lee, a graduate student at San Francisco State University and a former teacher in Korea, says English words picked up phonetically include coffee, orchestra, cherry tomato, and plastic bag, the Korean equivalent of vinyl envelope.
In Greece, where the natives are especially friendly to American tourists because they spend so much more money than others, everybody connected to the travel business knows English. That includes ferryboat crews, hotel clerks, taxi drivers, police, shopkeepers, and guards at historic sites. In fact, English is creeping into almost every corner of Greek life and raising concerns about the ability of the language to keep its famed heritage as the oldest European language.
Many Greeks have become fed up with the incursion of English words. In 2001, a group of intellectuals including professors and playwrights launched a verbal war against Greeklish, claiming that there was an “unholy plot” by international computers against demotic (modern) Greek. Words singled out for derision included erkodission for air conditioning, frikaro for freak out, komputeraki for laptop, and rockatzis for a fan of rock music. Ten years later, it was clear that the purists were losing the fight.
OBAMA, JAPANESE ENGLISH TEACHER
President Obama was in office only a short time before he unknowingly became a linguistic as well as an inspirational symbol with a worldwide following.
His inaugural speech was circulated internationally on CDs and in books. In Japan, for example, 200,000 CDs and more than half a million books containing the speech were sold within nine months, according to the New York Times.
It reported that most Japanese bought it because the speech used simple English terms that can help the Japanese learn English. Others reportedly bought it for the inspiration they got from it.
THE KILLER INSTINCT
English seems to have an ability to fracture or kill other languages and turn the results into new mixtures with their own special vocabularies. According to Paul Z. Jambor, “the Maori language in New Zealand was slowly displaced by English in most domains until its recent comeback.” He added that several aboriginal and North Amerindian languages “were in a sense killed by the English language.”32
Meanwhile, English is rapidly turning Spanish into Spanglish, particularly in the United States.