Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [5]
There is no doubt that Standard English remains the prevailing language of business, government, and the media in the United States. But it is also clear from the many variations of it that the language is being transformed into something quite different from what it was only half a century or so ago.
Also changing in a big way is the ancient concept of language discipline. What matters now is no longer whether people speak or write correctly; it’s whether they make sense and are understood, regardless of the rules or standards that are followed or not followed. As George Orwell observed, “Correct grammar and syntax [are] of no importance as long as one makes one’s meaning clear.” You can almost hear the amen chorus.
The groundswell toward less formal language is also being driven by the growing mix of the world’s tongues in the United States and elsewhere. The crescendo of competing dialects and accents serves to further break down old barriers and install new, less confining ones. The numbers alone are impressive.
According to reliable British sources,3 about 2 billion people speak some form of English, including about 500 million who grew up in an English-speaking household. The other 1.5 billion speak it as a second, third, or fourth language. Almost all these people speak an Amglish version of English.
If you take British author Robert McCrum’s definition of “English speaking,” the total number shoots up to 4 billion, more than half the earth’s population of 7 billion, give or take a few hundred million. McCrum includes anyone having “knowledge of or acquaintance with some kind of English.”4
With that definition, even a sheepherder in Nepal might know what to do if he and his flock came to a fork in the road with a signing saying STOP. But just as a few swallows don’t make a summer, a few words don’t make a person conversant in a language.
The British Council, a government-supported nonprofit with a mission to promote the language, estimates that by 2020, “nearly a third of the world’s population will all [sic] be trying to learn English at the same time.” That total might include the wordy writer of the prediction.
PALINISMS TURN GENERATIONAL
In response to some Facebook critics of the TLC reality show Sarah Palin’s Alaska in November 2010, sixteen-year-old daughter Willow showed that she had learned Amglish well at her mother’s knee.
After acronyming a few obscenities, she accused critics of being “jealous of my families [sic] success and you guys aren’t goin [sic] anywhere with your lives.” Her older sister Bristol added, “you’re running your mouth just to talk sh-t.”
After a brief session with Mama Grizzly, they apologized.
THE NEED FOR LEADERSHIP
As the third millennium neared, confusion over language standards was reaching a peak in the United States. English teachers appeared unable to explain why verbal SAT scores were dropping so steadily. And many students must have wondered why they were penalized for saying and writing things that were making equally young musicians and comedians filthy rich.
Older people who were not swept up by the new lingo probably wondered whether to ignore what they had learned in school or keep trying to conform while so many around them were not. And many young adults must have pondered when to follow the rules and when to run with the crowd. Everyone wanted to know how to act cool in the changing language environment.
Among those raising questions publicly was President George W. Bush when he asked, “Is our children learning?”5
Educators were shifting millions of students into remedial English courses without knowing how best to solve the plague of early dropouts from school. Many parents were also getting worried about whether their children’s language was good enough for the job market.