Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary.
Belgium has two languages, French and Flemish, yet on a recent visit to the country’s main airport in Brussels, I counted more than fifty posters and billboards and not one of them was in French or Flemish. When companies from four European countries-France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland-formed a joint truck-making venture called Iveco in 1977, they chose English as their working language because, as one of the founders wryly observed, “It puts us all at an equal disadvantage.” For the same reasons, when the Swiss company Brown Boveri and the Swedish company ASEA merged in 1988, they decided to make the official company language English, and when Volkswagen set up a factory in Shanghai it found that there were too few Germans who spoke Chinese and too few Chinese who spoke German, so now Volkswagen’s German engineers and Chinese managers communicate in a language that is alien to both of them, English. The six member nations of the European Free Trade Association conduct all their business in English, even though not one of them is an English-speaking country. In India, there are more than 3,000 newspapers in English. For the airlines of 157 nations (out of 168 in the world), it is the agreed international language of discourse.
For better or worse, English has become the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics, and pop music. Already Germans talk about ein Image Problem and das Cash-Flow, Italians program their computers with il software, French motorists going away for a weekend break pause for les refueling stops, Poles watch telewizja, Spaniards have a flirt, Austrians eat Big Mäcs, and the Japanese go on a pikunikku. But if the Briton and American of the twenty-second century baffle each other, it seems altogether likely that they won’t confuse many others-not, at least, if the rest of the world continues expropriating words and phrases at its present rate.
0 kommentar(er)
