English as facade

Fascinating interview in today's NZZ on the need to learn foreign languages. English serves as the language for foreign diplomacy and image building, which has little to do with local, or national, politics.

The quote below calls attention to the split between global English statements and native language talk, but it projects the source for this division onto some kind of foreign trickery, as if speaking in English were now a ruse. Really Western European and American readers have contributed to the separation of local and global discourses by not pursuing an education in foreign languages

NZZ Online: Herr Detweiler, als Sinologe sprechen Sie Chinesisch und haben in China gelebt. Nun gibt es in den Research-Abteilungen der Banken viele Experten, die noch nie einen Fuss auf chinesischen Boden gesetzt haben, aber ganze Research-Paper zum Thema verfassen. Kann man die chinesische Wirtschaft überhaupt analysieren und verstehen, ohne die Sprache, das Land, die Mentalität und die Politik zu kennen?

Christopher Detweiler: Analysieren geht. Aber in China gibt es zwei unterschiedliche Welten: Eine Welt für die Bevölkerung – die Zeitungen und die Reden der hohen Funktionäre der Partei sind auf Chinesisch –, und es gibt eine zweite, englische Welt, die allein für das Ausland bestimmt ist. Je nach Sprache liest und erfährt man ganz andere Sachen. Wer kein Chinesisch spricht, hat eine ganz andere Perspektive auf das Land als die Chinesen selbst.

English as an Alibi

Lots of people in Europe speak English, but what is really fascinating is why they do so. On the surface, they all learn English so that they can participate in the global economy, the internet, English pop culture, American science, you name it.

Still, behind the obvious rational reasons, lie others: The desire to preserve their own culture. A paradox, learn English so that you don't have to give up your native tongue. This is a deal that small religious groups have long had--the worldly language, the private language and the sacred language. Secular Europe has the first two.

So every worldly Dutchman learns English, but never with the thought of abandoning his native tongue. Indeed, the bond is stronger than ever. Learning English does not make Europeans less nationalistic, it allows them to quiet, discretely become more so.

It is easy to pay respect to the global behemoth, who can deny the dominance of English, but then once having done so, Europeans no longer need to learn the many other languages spoken around them.

I remember in the late eighties watching a young Frenchman speaking to a teller in a Frankfurt bank. They both were speaking awkward English to each other about some financial transaction. In another era, the German woman would have spoke some French and the visiting Frenchman some German. But in an English dominated world, they were not compelled to learn each other's language.

Now Europeans can increasingly retreat behind their native languages without imagining that they are speaking to a European audience. The Dutch are speaking only to other Dutch speakers--not to the Brits, the Germans or the French, because they can safely assume that people from those language groups are likely to only have English as their second language.

The first thing to creep back into the picture, then is nationalism, initially aimed against non-European immigrants who speak no English.

The Loss of Strangeness

What's missing from the current American assumption about the global and its Englishness, is the wonder at difference, at the strange ways of another civilization, that there could be some completely different manner for people to treat each other and distinctly different values about books, marriage, religion, war, health than our single universally applied assumptions. I miss the care one needs to take while entering a new culture.

Now, there may be moments when caution is required, but behind any quiet first steps into a strange city, there lies implicit a fundamental sense that back home is superior.

Only the most stubborn fanaticism is treated as outside the global, and while it needs to be treated cautiously, it is never seen as a respectful alternative, never the sense that in this other society things are done differently for good reasons.

Whereas in the nineteenth century for an American to visit France or Russia, it meant to enter into a "new world" that one could not dismiss as backward. They were parallel societies.

The out-dated notion of civilizations, in the plural, meant that there were a goodly number, not a very many but more than a handful, of different ways to organize life.

Now the assumption is that one global norms exists which has many variations, most of which are measured in relation to some imagined standard of advanced modernity.

Even up until the end of the Cold War, there was the cautious respect for the limit of Western civilization. Now there are just pockets of intransigence.