Chinglish as full-fledged English dialect
Michael Erard's Wired story on the ways that Chinglish is mutating into a full-fludged (and widespread) dialect poses some interesting possibilities for the language's future, in which tonal suffixes, borrowed vocabulary words, and streamlined grammar open up rich new expressive possibilities. I've always loved English's baking-soda-like capacity to absorb other languages' best features -- the Yiddish terminal "already" at sentences' end, the fantastic Gaelic-salted Irvine Welsh Scots dialect, the many glorious island formations from the Caribbean and South Seas. All my attempts to learn even a few words of comprehensible Chinese have been a disaster, so it's heartening to hear that Chinese may be coming to me, bridging the distance.
It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."...Link (via Futurismic)And it's possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary.
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The Scots the Irvine uses isn't really Gaelic at all - it's apparently a Germanic influenced language... Not that i know much about the subject, but i know for sure there's no Gaelic in lowland Scots - Gaelic is a ridiculous language. whereas Scots is perfectly normal ; )
I'm sure the popularity of Firefly has nothing at all to do with this.
A little strange, scary, and fascinating to consider that one's native language may evolve into something incomprehensible to native speakers due to the increasing numbers of non-native speakers and emerging dialects.
at least we can all agree the Southrons are all pillocks
I've long made note of the alternative pronunciations from my foreign-born professors. My Indian electrical engineering professor used the "w" sound in place of the "v" sound ('woltage' vs. 'voltage') and my high school chemistry teacher was from Alsace-Lorraine and he had some interesting cadences and syllable stresses as well.
And since it hasn't been said yet BOW BEFORE YOUR CHINESE MASTERS.
@3: Fascinating but not too strange. Please direct your attention to Old English (and for once I don't mean the malt liquor):
Maybe I do mean the malt liquor. It is, after all, time to go to work!
At some time in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, full time speakers of Standard English will be outnumbered by full time speakers of nonstandard dialects like Spanglish and Chinglish. English is already spoken as a second language by more people than have it as a primary or only language.
Making this difficult to measure and report is determining just how much English a part-time speaker uses and for what purposes.
the last sentence in the quote I find distressing.
the whole thing sounds clunky. there is no flow to the language.
and for the language that seems to just keep picking up more words it doesn't make sense that it would start dropping suffixes.
I'm all for adopting more bits of language into my vocab, but I don't want to loose the artistic flourishes.
and @5
the W and V thing isn't just with indian english speakers, that has been going back and forth between the german and latin basis of the language for a while (latin had v's but no double u's, and german the opposite. "wine" was originally "vinum" pronounced "winum")
whats interesting is the argument I have heard about Americans speaking more like the English of Shakespeare's time and not the English of today. I thought we were the dregs of society, not the keepers of proper diction.
It's true that American English has preserved a few features of Standard English from the 18th century that have evolved out of use in Standard English. A visitor from England might find our uses of the words 'got' and 'gotten' archaic.
The theory that Shakespearean English is spoken in Appalachia was based on casual observations of a few incidental similarities and is not taken seriously.
I was "full-fludged" once ......
but I got better.
@8
有流程，但是它是不同的流程 -- 更好的流程!
@11
That's easy for you to say.
@6
I understood fair bits of that sentence.. then again my native language is Icelandic..
For example "geardagum" we spell "gærdagur" although its meaning is usually yesterday and not "days of yore" as in Old English.
@8:
The "U" and "V" in Latin were considered the same letter. V when chiseled or written, U when written, and as you point out, was always pronounced as we pronounce W.
Later on, "U" and "V" even in English up until the 1850's or so were considered the same letter -- U was the "vowel form" of U/V and V was the "consonant form" of U/V -- just as C is pronounced in hard and soft forms in different contexts. So in an early 19th century dictionary, "violin" comes BEFORE "umbrella".
Same thing with "I" and "J", BTW.
one step closer to Firefly becoming a reality...
Join the Independent Faction now! The Browncoats need you!
People have been talking about "Singlish" in Singapore for decades. It's got bits of Malay thrown in too.
Kiddr01, Lallans Scots developed out of Northern Middle English, whereas Modern English developed out of East Midlands Middle English. They're similar enough to let the English get away with pretending that the Scots are just speaking barbarously nonstandard English, which is of course not true.
I don't think we give nearly enough recognition to how much Scots there is in American English.
Takuan @4, why are you slagging off Southrons?
JMullan @6, cenelice to ganganne hwaer gegan hafde naenig man aer, you betcha. (I stole that from Ellen Fremedon's live journal.)
Danny Universe @3, Ross in Detroit @7: I've been predicting for some time now that in the future, everyone on the planet will be able to speak a language they fondly believe is English, and that many of them will be mutually unintelligible. I'm not sure how much this will affect core English, since it has already lost most of its inflections, all but one of its gendered nouns, and arguably all of its superfluous grammar.
I have real trouble imagining that it will lose its prepositions, definite articles, or suffixes, because doing so would require that English speakers give up three of their most characteristic and ineradicable habits: transforming words from one part of speech to another, lifting new vocabulary from other languages, and dropping the nouns out of commonly used noun-plus-adjective compounds (viz., using graphic instead of graphic element).
All of these habits depend on articles, particles, prepositions, and suffixes to signal how a word is being used. For example, a graphic is a noun meaning "chart or illustration," whereas graphic is an adjective. It's possible to guess from context that the word "conserve" in "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve" is actually "conservation," but in other contexts it can be a verb or a chunk-style fruit jam.
I suspect Chinglish speakers will get better at English until they reach a point of equilibrium between having to learn a lot of troublesome fine points, and being able to unambiguously understand and be understood when they're doing business. After all, it's what everybody else does.
@14
huh, learn something new then. Maybe I should have paid more attention in latin class (or perhaps I assumed to much)
and I think everyone who saw the last crusade knows about the I/J thing
and @11
my google translation is leaving me perplexed.
I get: "A process, but it is a different process - a better process"
me thinks process isn't the best word there. Can ya clue me in on the translation. thanks
This was the part of Firefly that I loved... Living in vancouver you could totally see how this could evolve...
It always starts with the swear-words... In Israel, I was told that all their curses were in Arabic and Russion :). Not sure if its true but when you hear them... :)
Alright, I'll bite. What the hell does "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve" mean?
The whole idea of a "normal" dialect gets corrupted by non-native speakers is too silly to be laughable.
YOUR "normal" dialect ITSELF was mutated from yet another dialect. It's embarrassing when someone believes "their" dialect is somehow more important than others.
A made-up sort of 'universal' (sic) American english flourished for much of a century, largely due to intentional training for radio then TV. It doesn't make it Right, or Natural.
It is interesting that when a group of same-dialect speakers is split geographically, over time dialects DIverge. In many areas of human intercourse things CONverge, ideas develop into similar outcomes. But language and music do the opposite. It probably tells a lot about how we work inside.
#18 my mac gizmo says:
"Has the flow, but it is a different flow -- better flow!"
Ross in Detroit @9: the three biggest grammatical differences I'm aware of are using had/have gotten instead of had/have got, putting an obligatory definite article on university and hospital, and dropping need not/needn't from the everyday spoken language. The rest is mostly vocabulary, and only troublesome when it isn't obvious that the word is unfamiliar: bomb, pissed, knock up, subway, biscuit, chips, first floor, swede, corn, football coach, surgery, roger, fanny, sherbet, mess kit, billion, pants ... a wealth of jokes just waiting to happen.
Tomic @22, why do you sound like you're arguing when no one's arguing with you (yet)?
The whole idea of a "normal" dialect gets corrupted by non-native speakers is too silly to be laughable.
I disagree. Evolution of a language is very slow and involves additions and deletions of things. Dialects of non-native speakers often are very limited subsets of English incorporating a fraction of the vocabulary and discarding many if not most of the grammatical rules. The difference between Standard English - and yes, there is such a thing - and Chinglish is far greater than the difference between American English dialects spoken in the Deep south and New England.
Chinglish is more akin to a pidgin, although it may not meet the technical definition.
The real mystery is this "Standard English" concept: Who speaks it? I consider myself a pretty standard guy, and I use the word "y'all" fairly frequently.
Find me a "standard" 2nd person plural, and I will give you one standard dollar.*
---------------
*Not true.
To paraphrase Henry iggins, Americans haven't spoken English in years.
@#8, #14 FWIW
V in Sanskrit/Hindi is pronounced somewhat between V and W. (There is no "W".) I have heard this in Russian too.
In Arabic, one letter represents the sound W, O, or U, depending on the word. (There is no "V" although there is an "F" the voiceless equivalent.)
Not sure, but I think U and V are both pronounced W in Latin. "Weni Widi Wici."
ObQuote: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll
I want to point out a fascinating article on English usage, which makes a strong argument for the continued teaching and encouragement of Standard English.
It is TENSE PRESENT. Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage By David Foster Wallace. It was originally published in the 4/02 issue of Harpers Magazine and I hope it has been reprinted in available form. I kept the magazine because it's a brilliant article. This appears to be a more or less readable though unattractive copy of it:
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
@12
exactly :D
@18
replace 'process' with 'flow' in translation, as per you @8 "the whole thing sounds clunky. there is no flow to the language."
flow is microcultural if not personal subjective, so there is flow, though different, even better. like mobiles, microblogs, and having other things to do force our hands, or like haiku or poetic metrics -- *glish can be punchier and more powerful when it lacks indirect construction, it can be more profound for its freedom from cliche.
this might be half the reason writers age so well: their flow grows foreign and affects us as such.
if you love language, then you love it all.
it's technically incorrect and a bit prejudicial to write "there is no flow" to chinglish or the like. being flamey in chinese was to smile over it :)
DO NOT WANT
I encourage any one learning English to learn to speak it properly. And I wish we English speakers would sit down and decide just which was is proper. Phrases like this "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," are only understandable with a ton of context and body language. It's no replacement for grammar that's at least remotely correct.
@11: Your invention of 'liu cheng' as an approximation for 'liu li' or 'liu chang' (I don't have a Chinese text editor on this machine) and clunky sentence structure is a perfect illustration of Chinglish.
Lu Chang, her brother, is burning with rage.
I'm actually not sure what "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve" means.
Environmental sanitation = clean environment
needs your conserve = need to avoid wasting? need to safeguard?
You need to not waste our clean environment -or-
You need to safeguard our clean environment
That doesn't seem right. Maybe You need to safeguard our environment by cleaning it?
In other words: Don't litter?
Honestly if English goes this route I'm afraid the environment (and whatever we need to be doing to it) is out of luck.
I think I speak for all Killing Joke fans when I say: "And the meaning of words / When they cease to function / When will it start worrying you?"
My best friend grew up in a trailer park in the bayou, so we speak Tringlish.
You fittin to go store?
Aye. Then we's fittin to eat.
A funny column about the degeneracy of the english language:
Earth calling Great Britain: You're no longer great and you're about to become un-Britified. A growing number of uneducated peasants are taking over the political arena and the cultural institutions. Now they've hijacked the English language, seriously proposing to dumb it down by spelling all words phonetically. I guess the American ghetto vocabulary ("dawg," "hoe," "gangsta") wasn't enough of a simplification to make yourself understandable. Together with Portugal we're now closing in on our Third World friends in Brazil. No need for messy translations anymore, since every citizen of the World Empire (c) will be able to say the magical words "I need money" and "I've got hoes in the back, wanna go foh a raaiidh?"
http://www.corrupt.org/columns/victoria_mcmagnus/idiocrats_hijack_british_language
#26
You or Ye
one dollar please.
@1
Go gcreime cúnna ifrinn do bhall fearga.
#1,
There's quite a bit of Gaelic in Lowland Scots, as it goes. Just off the top of my head, the following are originally from Gaelic: "skelp," "breeks," "brae," "keech".
I teach English in Beijing. Sometimes my students teach me Chinglish. The article does a really good job of summing up some of the significant changes from standard English: countable nouns, prepositions,and definite/indefinite articles all go out the window pretty quick. My English has suffered.
I don't believe that Chinglish will become a standard dialect though. For that to happen, you would need Chinglish speakers to regularly speak the language to one another, so that some basic language rules can solidify. Chinese speakers of different dialects already have a standard common language - putonghua (Mandarin). Chinglish results from lack of practice, rather than habituation. (The situation in Singapore is different. They use English daily to bridge dialects. And Spanglish is a primary language for most of its speakers) For the most part my students just really lack oral practice. Even after decades of grammar in school, they lack the confidence to form sentences. There is a definite range from Chinglish to fluent English, rather than a discrete, separate language.
I suppose its hard to deny that English has slipped free from the English/Americans,and in the next few years, anything could happen to it. Cool.
Language certainly is a virus and there is not one English but many Englishes: British, American, Canadian, Australian, Singlish...
The article is poorly and draws linguistically ludicrous conclusions.
English, of course, has evolved and will continue to evolve. But the examples in the article are not examples of language evolution; they are examples of language learners making elementary mistakes related to the underlying grammar of their own language. Millions of english speakers learning, say, French, over the last 100 years have made many of the same errors because of their imperfect understanding of, say, verb conjugation. None of this has changed French, and English-speakers don't now learn a simplified French with English grammar. They learn standard French...and until they get really good at it, they continue to make the kinds of mistakes typical of people with English as a first language.
Spanish, French, Italian, etc. all developed from Latin. But they all developed when the Latin spoken by native Latin speakers changed in various regions. They *did not* change because Gallic or Celtic schoolchildren didn't learn Latin well in school.
American English is different from South African English is different from Australian English is different from RP English (and there are lots of other English dialects, too). But the changes in all of these dialects were driven by changes in how the native speakers spoke the language, not by how the American Indians or Aborigines or Zulus learned English. And of course the same is true wrt Old English-Middle English-Modern English.
But Chinglish as described in this article is not a dialect of English any more than "US High School French" is a dialect of French (notwithstanding that there are probably 1000's of Frenchmen who recognize the dialect).
/rant
I liked the idea of the characters speaking Chinese in Firefly, but I wish they'd bothered to learn a bit of proper translation; it was really hard on the ears.
I prefer the "Ocean's 11" model where the Chinese is left in and everyone just understands it for some reason.
>> #41
This.
I don't think Chinglish will replace any of the grammatical structuring of English.. I think this whole article is a bit of a fanciful Firefly-esque vision of the future, one that will not take place within our lifetime.
English, despite all claims to its being extremely haphazard and as Mr. Nicoll put it "a cribhouse whore" in terms of purity, does have an extremely evolved and strict set of rules that take a breathtakingly large amount of constant usage to gain acceptance of change into academia (and even then you'll find that many purists don't soften to new rules or usages, take the excruciating "my bad" for example.)
You wouldn't believe the resistance of the fellows at the OED to change, and despite what this article claims they are the keepers of English in the most academic sense. The Chinese will not want to appear as somehow imperfect in speaking English, for the same reasons as anyone else. To imply that they would suddenly lower their standards because they outnumber us is a fantasy.
If you find this article interesting, then you will probably be interested in reading more about Singlish
I teach English in Taiwan and have learned some Mandarin, which has made me think about language differently from Western languages. Personally, I believe, articles and countable nouns will probably disappear eventually. Further down the road, I wouldn't be too surprised to see verb tenses go.
Surprised not to see any reference to Pidgin English in the article. The hybridisation of Chinese and English has been going on at least since the second half of the 17th Century. But I suppose that pointing this out would have slightly undermined the customary Wired tone of Extraordinary And Earth-Shaking New Phenomenon Emerges, Challenges Everything You Think You Know!!!
@32 I don't think he meant either 流利 or 流畅. No need to invent 流程 to mean "flow"; "There is no flow to the language." "有流程..."
I don't see how this is a step towards the future as depicted in Firefly. In that future, everyone speaks perfect, standard English, relegating horrendously pronounced, occasionally grammatically suspect Mandarin to non plot related asides. (And, oh yeah, Chinese people have all but disappeared. A major reason why I wouldn't want that future to come to be.)
The logical extension of what this article proposes is actually exactly the opposite of what we see in Firefly: horrendously pronounced, grammatically suspect English and perfect, standard Mandarin.
@38
You use "ye" in everyday conversation? (Honest question. Some people do.) Still, I refer you to my footnote.
I wish I was a hep enough cat to understand all this Firefly talk.
I gotta say, though, I'm pretty shocked at all the Correct English ideas in the comments here. Maybe it's the same cyclical concept as Transformers and Get Smart and all that old school entertainment being re-packaged into Summer blockbuster movies. You know it's absurd but you can't help but watch. :)
@Strophe #26:
"Y'all" may be non-standard, but it's clearly contracted from "you all", which is perfectly understood in standard English: "you" is 2nd person, and "all" denotes that it is plural. Another standard construction, semantically similar though syntacically different, would be "you guys" (or its non-standard lexicalized variant, "youse guys"). Just because standard English lumps 2nd person singular and plural into the same word doesn't mean that the distinction cannot be made.
A more interesting point is whether "y'all" is the obligatory plural in your dialect, and "you" can only be understood to be singular. And what about possessive forms? If "you" cannot be singular, is the same true of "your"?
@ROSSINDETROIT #7: Are there really full-time speakers of Spanglish and Chinglish?
@Lord Peter #43: I agree wholeheartedly, though I think one could read into your comment about Latin something that I don't think you meant, that the changes in Latin had nothing to do with contact with other languages in the regions they were spoken. This is certainly not true, as French has Gallic influences, Romanian has Slavic influences, etc. Your're right about language change not being driven by schoolchildren learning second languages poorly.
@samu #47: I was similarly surprised to see no mention of Pidgin, not only because of its history as a hybrid of English and Chinese, but because the name came to be applied more generally to other hybrid languages!
As for the Wired article, I found it to be mostly fluff and speculation, and I didn't believe any of the claims, aside from particulars of how Chinese speakers render English, which I have no reason to doubt. For instance, is it really true that there is more English conversation taking place among nonnative speakers of English than native?
"After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary. "
Except I really can't figure out what that means.
@43
as a trained linguist, I thank you for tempering the abject frustrated horror these comments had generated within me. I hope you have many children.
Although I must add: many languages, and especially Romance ones, were the result of children (though not necessarily schoolchildren) learning a language incompletely. Typically one parent spoke one language, and one parent spoke another local language.
If a thousand speakers of U.S. High School French (USHSF) moved to Provence, it would become a dialect of the region. If 1,000,000 speakers of USHSF moved there, it would become the new standard Provencal French in one generation.
Just to reiterate: article was awful and naive
Strophe / nprnncbl:
Yes, in Ireland it is pretty common to use the word 'ye' as a 2nd person plural. Also the bastardisation yiz/youse:
* "Are ye coming for a pint?"
* "Are yiz coming for a pint?"
* "Are youse coming for a pint?"
Also, 'you' is absolutely a standard 2nd person plural.
you, pers. pron., 2nd pers. obj. (nom.), pl. (sing.)
I. As plural, used in addressing a number of persons (or, rhetorically, of things).
- OED
..and I'm still waiting for my (Not True) dollar :D
@Arkizzle #53- I think Strophe was asking for a form that not only was plural, but also not singular, as given in the example "y'all".
#52- I'm with you on the children/schoolchildren distinction, especially given that widespread formal schooling in a second language is such a relatively recent phenomenon.