Reimagining English

The strength of the English language has long been its capacity to absorb whatever competing languages throw at it. This portmanteau of a tongue owes barbecue to Haitian, guru to Hindi, alcohol to Arabic, coffee to Turkish and Arabic, tea to Chinese and trousers to Irish Gaelic, not to mention its enormous early debt to Latin and the Germanic languages. In a hardscrabble world where the watchword is adapt or die, English has done very well at adapting.

In The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, Montreal author Mark Abley both marvels at the directions in which the language is expanding and wonders whether the centre will hold. He dispenses early on with the battle between stern prescriptivists and easy-going descriptivists about whether English should resist change or throw the doors open to amendments from the pragmatic, the ingenious and the just plain careless. “Amid the commotion, rest assured: I have no ideological ax to grind.” In the global picture he paints, the Lynne Truss school of apostrophe hunting in Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a mere sideshow. Of greater import is the reimagining of the language by those whose first language is not English, such that those in Singapore, who speak a hybrid called Singlish, and Latinos in the United States, who have developed Spanglish. The future may see a greatly enriched English, seizing upon foreign words that fill gaps or provide welcome grace notes, just as other languages draw from English. Alternatively, English may splinter into a variety of new tongues, just as French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian sprang from Latin. Is English the “Latin of the new millennium?” Abley asks.

All that would be stuff enough for one book. But Abley sees even that contest paling before the might of the World Wide Web, where all who sit down at a computer may misspell words, garble the syntax of Standard English or invent a new vocabulary and see their work immediately published and given global reach through blogs and chat rooms. To what degree abbreviations, slang and reformed usages from the internet will catch on with a broader readership is unknowable. Tom Dalzell’s 1996 book, Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang, to name just one compilation, has chapter after chapter of words that flourished and as quickly vanished. But the capacity of new words or phrases to acquire an extended life of their own on the net is considerable. Consider the hardiness of errors. A mistake made on one site may be corrected fairly quickly, but by then it will have been picked up by a hundred other sites. The internet, Abley writes, “is a paradise for amateurs.” And largely through its existence, non-standard pronunciations and spellings are finding an unprecedented degree of permanence. “In the past, mixed idioms [such as Spanglish] were seldom written down. Today most of them exist in written as well as spoken form.”

The test of language books such as this is in the writing and Abley writes well. If he can occasionally strain a metaphor (“When a language slams its foot down on the accelerator, the past shrinks and blurs in the rear-view mirror”), he more consistently finds just the right example or phrase to make his point. He uses the arresting image of the mallard, which broadens its territory by mating with other, more vulnerable species of ducks, to describe the incursion of English into other languages. He has travelled and interviewed widely and eases into focused discussions with seemingly random digressions—a chat with a friend in Los Angeles, a rumination on the songs of Coldplay—that prove to be anything but random. His chapter on the degree to which hip-hop raised the self-esteem of black youths is a model of clarity and incisive detail. Deriding past attempts to pigeonhole the informal English spoken by many black Americans as a foreign language, he notes that it “is closely related to the dialect of southern whites … the lengthening of short vowels, a reliance on double negatives, some systematic changes in verb forms.” His chapter on novels whose authors have created new versions of English with which to tell their tales not only underlines how flexible the language can be but also doubles as a reading list for the adventurous. (I was familiar with Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and, of course, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, but will have to carve out time for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.)

Tidbit follows tidbit: that women pick up accents faster than men; that in South Korea one word for pancake is hat-ke-i-keu, derived from the English hotcake; that in French text speak (sorry, txt spk), the language of mobile phone users, cinéma is 6né (based on the French pronunciation of six). Abley has an eye for the dramatic quote. He cites Chris Hedges, writing in the New York Times on the gap between the classical Arabic used by the elite in the Middle East and the street Arabic in which so much information is communicated. “What if 80 or 90 percent of Americans spoke every day in the brutal and angry cadences of gangsta rap,” Hedges wrote by way of analogy, “while the members of a feudal upper class mused over their own demise in Elizabethan English?”

Abley is sparing with his opinions, but they arrive when needed. Confronted with a patch of self-conscious prattle in a fashion article (“‘It’s hot,’ the Sweaty Betty declares, not at all content with the distinctly non-Vangroovy heat”), he writes it off as “the language of hype, dead at the heart.” (He might have quoted the counsel E.B. White offered in his updating of William Strunk’s The Elements of Style: “Do not affect a breezy manner.”) Although he is not much exercised over what the rules of English should be or concerned about which neologisms should be embraced, he wants the core to stand. He worries about the sort of sickness Alvin Toffler identified in Future Shock, of changes so rapid and disorienting that they leave many people unable to cope. He raises the alarm about jargon and bafflegab and incessant bombardment by “new words we don’t recognize, metaphors we can’t understand, misspellings we find annoying, instructions we fail to decipher, and song lyrics that leave us perplexed.”

Abley has no prescription to offer—this is a lively work of observation, not a tract—but he expresses a hope that, in context, seems as conservative as it is wise. “I would say only that clear, vivid, exact, plainspoken language is the best tool we have for coping with the verbal future.” Amen.