Is English Emerging as a Lingua Franca in China? How Convenient!
September 30th, 2007 by Vicki BakerIn the midst of making a quite reasonable economic prediction regarding the extent to which China owns our national debt, Grumpypilgrim makes a linguistic prediction that may not be as well-founded: that parents should enroll their children in Mandarin classes because Mandarin will become the new language of commerce. In fact, Victor Mair points out in a recent post on Language Log, English may be emerging as the new language of convenience in multilingual China:
As Exhibit A in support of this proposition, Mair submits the following poster from the restrooms at Beijing Normal University:
Mair writes:
First of all, the handsome young man is enjoining everyone to speak Mandarin **in Beijing**. This must mean that a lot of people at this university and elsewhere in Beijing (much less outside of Beijing, which is supposedly the epicenter of Mandarin usage in China!) do not speak Mandarin to each other.
The campaign against multilingualism is underscored by the fact that the spokesman pictured here might be a translator, which would not be necessary if everyone in China spoke the same language, viz., Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]), the designated national tongue. Even if he’s not a simultaneous translator with the headset of his profession, one wonders why an operator, an announcer, or whatever he’s supposed to be, is pictured making this particular gesture and wearing that type of headset.
A further irony is that the administration of the University felt it necessary to post this slogan both in English and in Mandarin, which raises the very real questions of HANZI literacy and the emerging role of English as a rising lingua franca of convenience (as it is in the world’s other most populous country, India).
(he then goes on to describe the pun on the Mandarin phrase translated as “convenience” - just like the English word, it can be used as a euphemism for “toilet,” which is interesting given where the authorities chose to post this particular public service message.)
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that Americans continue in their complacent monolingualism. Foreign language instruction should start in the elementary grades and continue through high school - high school grads should be required to learn at least one foreign language and have the opportunity to learn more than one. But Spanish or Arabic might be just as strategic a choice as Mandarin. Though marketability of a foreign language can be hard to predict. The demand for Russian translators certainly isn’t what it was.
Here’s another educational poster from Victor Mair which suggests that employees in Beijing’s shopping center have a different conception of the term “customer service” than most salespeople in this country:
If you want to find out why the last 3 forbidden words could not be translated, read about it here.
October 1st, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Gee, I oughta print those off and type them into my Besta English/Cantonese/Mandarin/Japanese talking dictionary and see how it translates them.
Actually, English has become the defacto preferred language for internationial business. This is probably due to many reasons, but the influence of the British Empire, and the fact that English has evolved of the centuries from its Teutonic roots through the continuous addition of common bits of other languages.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Actually, all airline pilots are required to speak English if they do not they cannot fly.
In China the ability to speak English is a prestige thing. To speak English in Beijing is like being part of the upper elite of the country and they are treated as such or act as such (I just smile as they often don’t know who I am.). In Southern China, the people still speak Cantonese as the main language. The Southern Chinese learn mandarin if they want to do business within China. Then, you have the few rich or affluent individuals that have their children learn to speak English.
In other provinces they speak other Chinese languages such as Fujian, or Tibetan. Even, the Mandarin the Chinese speak varies from province to province if not from town to town. Beijing Mandarin has a distinct pattern and sound to it and the Chinese can often tell if a person is from Beijing or not.
For the Chinese to learn English they often need to learn the particular phonemes that we use that is not present in there language. This presents a problem as they cannot hear the sound as we pronounce it such as the ‘v’ or ‘th’ sounds. They end up dubbing in sounds that sound like it and we hear the Chinese mispronouncing words. Only after they learn the phonemes can they actually start speaking correctly. Eastern Europeans have phonemes I cannot hear and I have a hard time pronouncing words in Bulgarian or Croatian.
In Japan there is a strange phenomenon going on as they are using more and more borrowed foreign words in their language. My friends can actually speak to a Japanese person in English by changing the English word by changing the consonant sounds and vowel sounds to Japanese analogs and pronouncing it as Japanese. For example, the word bathtub is pronounced ‘basu-tabu’ and the Japanese speaker can understand what he said. Not always, but the number of words they can understand is very large. Conversely, native Japanese people can speak English quickly as they know the base word and all they need to do is pronounce it properly.