Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [63]
In response to criticism, the British government issued a study the next year ordering that foreign language study be required up to age fourteen, beginning in 2010. But it disappointed many educators and business leaders by leaving in place an earlier decision that no language study be required after that age.
In the United States, a 2010 survey of 3,200 public schools by the Center for Applied Linguistics showed that thousands of schools had stopped teaching foreign languages, mostly because of the economic recession. Hardest hit were traditional courses in French, German, and Russian, while courses in Chinese and Arabic were growing the fastest. Spanish, the most popular foreign language, was found in 93 percent of middle and high schools, largely because of the huge influx of Latino immigrants in recent decades.
The 465,000-student State University of New York (SUNY) decided in 2010 to end all majors in French, Italian, Russian, and the classics, Latin and Greek. Dozens of other universities are doing the same.
According to the Modern Language Association, the proportion of foreign language courses to all college courses in the United States stood at 8.6 percent in 2009, roughly half of what it was in 1965.26 The U.S. is said to be the only major country where a student can complete high school or college without studying any foreign language.
Also in 2009, the European Commission issued a forlorn plea for help in filling a “serious shortage” of interpreters in nearly every language. It bemoaned “the belief that being able to speak English is enough for international contacts, both for one’s work and for one’s personal or social life.”
WHY NOT MAJOR IN JAVA?
Reacting to SUNY’s cutbacks in foreign language study, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy of the University of Strasbourg wrote, “To choose between eliminating French or philosophy . . . what a fabulous choice! Should one take out the liver or the lung? . . . Perhaps it would be wise to introduce in their place, as requirements, certain computer languages like Java [or] what is displayed on our advertising billboards and on stock exchange monitors.”27
Meanwhile, English has been recognized as an official language in some seventy nations, with more than 2 billion total population.28 Countries where English has an official status but is not the native tongue include Ghana, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan.
MORE LIKE A TSUNAMI
Under the rapidly changing circumstances, Crystal’s use of the word revolution to indicate a revolt against the status quo seems outdated only seven years later.
What is happening might be better described as a verbal tsunami that is sweeping across the globe and disrupting—if not enriching—nearly all languages in its path. No shore is unwashed by the waves of new words and new styles of writing and speaking.
Clearly the main catalyst in the past two decades has been the Internet, which has been dominated from the beginning by the United States with its tech terms and slang. In the first wave of websites, over 85 percent were U.S. based. That percentage has dropped considerably since then because of wider usage of local languages, but American English is still the international favorite.
This dominance has forced computer users throughout the world to learn enough American English to get around the Internet efficiently. The pace has been so fast that translators for local and national languages have been unable to keep up in many areas, further forcing people to deal with English terms, whether they want to or not.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
But what to call the evolving international language? In Britain, where language changes arouse much more interest than in the United States, close observers have favored terms like Panglish