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In the Year 2104 -- Americans Will Speak a New Kind of English
Like other major languages in history, American English as we know
it will be transformed by the diverse communities seeking to retain
their own identities in the United States
By Franz Schurmann, Pacific News Service
What will Americans be like linguistically in a century from now?
Given that America will still be a world-spanning empire and
civilization, we can look for cultural clues in earlier empires and
civilizations.
Dialects are variants of established languages. Pidgins are amalgams of
two languages. English is a pidgin. In the 14th century English
storytellers, notably Chaucer, decided to fuse French, the language of
the Norman conquerors of Britain, with the common Anglo-Saxon language
(itself a pidgin of two Germanic languages).
But a more dramatic pidginization occurred two centuries later when the
Mughal (Mongol) conquerors of India created an empire that lasted three
centuries. Now, despite many cultural variants, the current official
languages, Hindi for India and Urdu for Pakistan, both have their
origins in "Hindustani," the pidgin name used by the Mughals and then by
the imperial British.
American troops in Iraq and Iraqi merchants are already creating pidgins
of English and the Iraqi dialects of Arabic. That is similar to what
Mughal soldiers did when they went into town to haggle. Urdo/Urdu is a
Turco-Mongolian word that meant a "military encampment." If American
soldiers and merchants should still be stationed in Iraq in 2104 then
it's a good chance that a new language will have arisen, e.g., "Amerarab."
And then some writers, like Chaucer, will see if they can sell a novel
written in Amerarab.
When the Western Roman Empire officially fell in 476, Britain's
Latin-speaking population, mostly soldiers, were worried what to do. But
contemporary English archeologists found out what Roman soldiers did.
The archeologists carried out diggings in all towns that had the suffix
"chester," an Anglo-Saxon variant of Latin "castrum," for military
encampment. There are dozens of cities and towns in England with the
suffix "chester." Since most of the Roman military encampments were
built by a single plan, the archeologists could judge what happened
before and after 476. The archeologists concluded that most soldiers
remained in Britain and became merchants.
In the heartland of the USA a new pidgin is arising called "Spanglish."
Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington warns Americans that Spanglish
already poses a mortal threat to English. But there is a good chance
that in 2104 Spanglish storytellers will replicate the historical
formation of English. They will create a new pidgin language that has a
Spanish syntax, just as English is based on an Anglo-Saxon syntax.
African Americans speak English as do their millions of kinfolk in
Africa and the Caribbean. But they also speak dialects of English that
other Americans have difficulty understanding. Some linguists classify
the Gullah language, spoken in the North Carolina islands, as a pidgin
that is based on West African syntax. But others say Gullah is a dialect
of English, just as French, Spanish and Romanian began as offshoots of
Latin.
I remember an incident when I was in Guyana in South America. Guyana's
population is 40 percent black, mainly middle-class, and 50 percent East
Indian, mainly rural. Once, when traveling inland, I heard a number of
my Guyanan companions speaking a language I had never heard. When I came
close to our table where we were eating, they quickly shifted to
English. I sat down and waited politely until I could ask them what
language they were speaking. When I finally asked them, to a man they
said in unison: English. But I persisted and soon enough they gave in
and said: Creole. I was still not satisfied. I knew that Creole was a
kind of dialect but also an intellectual word I rarely heard from
ordinary people. Then one of the men at the table said, "Yes, we call
both English, but we have two kinds of English, one for our people and
one for outsiders." I then said, "I'm the outsider." And we all laughed.
African Americans, especially from the South, have family get-togethers
that can include many hundreds of participants. They, too, according to
AfricanAmerican friends, speak two kinds of English. Yet, the attempt by
many African Americans to get Ebonics, a dialect of English, recognized
as a valid language failed because Ebonics is a private, not a public,
language.
Back in the early 1800s the "Massachusetts Reformers" like Horace Mann
had educational visions of what the new America should be. The reformers
were deeply affected by ancient Greek civilization, what they overlooked
was that the Greeks could not get together to face a mortal danger
coming from Macedonia. Not long after they preached their visions of the
new America, the Civil War broke out and the North came close to losing
at Gettysburg.
The Massachusetts Reformers wanted to create a new nation and
nationality. They wanted all people to become part of one national
identity. But African Americans in the east and south, Latinos and
Asians in the west, and Indigenous people everywhere in the USA, have
insisted that their identities must also be preserved. From these
peoples, who now are a majority in California, the core issue is
language, and their efforts to retain their collective identities will
lead to the transformation of American English as the language of all.
Franz Schurmann, emeritus professor of history and
sociology at UC Berkeley and author of numerous books. |
