Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [47]
FAMILY DIVISIONS
The worldwide popularity of English can also present big problems down the road for individuals and families who don’t speak it but face pressure to have their youngsters learn it in school. Parental motives may be innocent enough—to help their children succeed in today’s English-dominated world—but the result may be children who cannot or will not speak the native language of their own parents and grandparents.
AS ENGLISH SPREADS, INDONESIANS FEAR FOR THEIR LANGUAGE. That was the headline over a New York Times article by Normitsu Onishi who quoted several mothers of schoolchildren facing that dilemma. “They know they’re Indonesian,” one mother of three was quoted as saying. “They love Indonesia. They just can’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. It’s tragic.”39
Onishi wrote that a person’s language essentially determines his or her social status, and that until the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, Javanese was at the bottom, Bahasa Indonesia was above, Dutch was the tops, and English was discouraged. Since then, he wrote, English has become the new Dutch.
Aimee Dawis, a communications teacher at Universitas Indonesia, told Onishi, “Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It’s just occurring naturally.” The trend is apparently being led by well-to-do parents who can afford private school for their offspring.
OPINIONS ELSEWHERE
As English/Amglish rolls around the world, the debate about its effects is growing. In Thailand, the main complaint is the quality of teaching. Private companies that need employees fluent in the language seem to be the driving force. But many teachers are only part-time workers who may not know English well, so the net effect often merely adds to the linguistic confusion.
In other places, the main worry is the effect on native languages. In an article on the Global Envision website, several respected authorities are quoted as believing that the net result may be a strengthening—not weakening—of native tongues as a type of resistance to Amglish and a desire to preserve local culture.40
Singapore teacher Anne Pakir calls Singlish—a mixture of Chinese and English—a “killer language” because it has made a shambles of her efforts to teach English. On the other hand, author Salman Rushdie says “To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.”41
Juliane House, professor of applied linguistics at Hamburg University, adds that English can help preserve local dialects. “Paradox as this may seem, the very spread of English can motivate speakers of other languages to insist on their own local languages for identification, for binding them emotionally to their own cultural and historical tradition.”
A POLITICAL BACKLASH
At the start of the twenty-first century, the world’s love affair with almost all things American turned somewhat sour. The attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in 2001 jarred the nation into realizing that it had some serious enemies beyond the oceans which had protected the nation for so long. In a speech nine days later, President George W. Bush asked, “Why do they hate us?”
Although his word they seemed to refer only to the 9/11 terrorists, who were mostly Saudi members of al-Qaeda, it soon grew to include the 1998 bombers of the U.S. embassy in Kenya and anyone else who could be described as violently anti-American. A month after 9/11, a mob of Pakistanis torched a KFC restaurant in Karachi when they were blocked from venting their wrath against the local U.S. consulate. The crowd did not realize that the restaurant owner was a locally grown Colonel Sanders.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 added to the negative feelings in much of the world. An international