Manx or Spanglish?
The phoney nostalgia of language revivalists is shown up by the vitality of the new Hispanics, says Jonathon Keats
The Manx language was pronounced dead on 27th December 1974, when the last native speaker passed away aged 97 in a fishing village called Cregneash. By outliving his generation, Ned Maddrell became famous, symbolising the lost heritage of the Isle of Man. In his name, the Manx people have spent the past three decades attempting to inspire a revival, compiling vocabularies and teaching the language in school. But with only 150 semi-fluent speakers, Manx remains a far cry in popularity from Welsh or even Scots Gaelic. So is it, as Mark Abley claims in his book Spoken Here, "a test case for rebirth?"
Like the majority of writers about minority languages, Abley is shamelessly biased. Even to question the inherent virtue of linguistic diversity is, among micro-dialect partisans, beyond the pale. David Crystal (Prospect, November 1999) has equated language death with species extinction.
These are the statistics: of the 6,800 languages spoken today, half will be dead by the end of the century- one tongue every two weeks. These are the standard villains: capitalism, tourism, television. And these are the typical arguments for resisting language assimilation: a society that loses its language loses its culture; a country that loses its language loses its autonomy; a civilisation that loses its languages loses its diversity.
Such arguments have, naturally, been advanced on behalf of Manx. Words such as coghal-a big lump of dead flesh after an opened wound-evoke the harsh life lived by Ned Maddrell's ancestors, while his contemporaries left little doubt about their attitude towards the future when they used jouyl, the Manx word for devil, to mean automobile. Its parliament writes all laws in Manx as well as English, lest the island become, in the words of one prickly local, "an appendage of Lancashire county council." But are the stated purposes of rebirth served by holding Manx classes on a modern, English-speaking island?
Clearly, speaking Manx will neither exorcise the island of cars nor impel the children of bankers to expose their tender flesh to the high seas. If the language is not to be a ceremonial artefact of a fairytale past, it can neither enshrine the coghal nor demonise the automobile. To be revived, it must lose its culture, the burden of history. Without the least linguistic guidance, for example, Manx mothers have already fashioned a term for nappies: paggan. If anything, the revival of Manx will obscure the island's past, just as adding lifts and wall-to-wall carpeting to the Temple of Luxor would hinder our understanding of ancient Egypt. Better to let the old language die and serve as an untainted archaeological record.
Of all the arguments advanced by endangered language advocates, only the case for linguistic diversity is coherent. Unfortunately, it also turns out to be irrelevant. Biologists tell us that we should protect species from extinction for self-serving as well as altruistic reasons, that we should care about each plant and animal because any one may some day be found to cure a disease, and because the ecosystem with the greatest variety is the most robust. So it would seem to be with languages: each may contain useful knowledge-the Halkomelem word for wild ginger, th'al?tel, literally means a device for the heart-and allow for a range of expression beyond the main global languages.
The trouble with this analogy is that languages either become extinct or evolve-dropping old-world terminology for new. Wolfsbane, the folk name for aconitum lycoctonum, suggests how this plant was once used in the countryside, yet the term has dropped from our common parlance as we have moved to the city. If it is folk wisdom we want to preserve, we needn't worry whether English survives, but rather concern ourselves with how well anthropologists have documented its earlier forms. To extract knowledge from language, we don't have to keep it alive. We only need to dissect it.
Nor should we be concerned about whether, in the future, society has more languages or fewer. This appears to contradict the experience of bilingual speakers, who tend to find one language clearer or more expressive, for various purposes, than another. But does it? In Mohawk, terms for time and place are interchangeable. The phrase for "I washed the wall all day long" is the same as for "I washed all over the wall." It's an ambiguity to anticipate Einstein. "What the survival of threatened languages means," Abley correctly claims, "is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth."
Yet the Mohawk didn't propose a theory of relativity. The language of higher mathematics wasn't part of their tradition, nor was modern German. Prey to his endangered species analogy, Abley has it all wrong. For the sake of physics and poetry, what matters is not the sanctity of languages, but their indiscriminate mingling, their bastardisation. Rather than worrying whether Manx or Mohawk will endure, we should - atenci?n - embrace the birth of Spanglish.
Ilan stavans has done so, and attracted an armada of enemies. Stavans started teaching Spanglish at Amherst college in the mid-1990s, drawing not only the interest of students, but also of reporters from NPR and the BBC. For his educational efforts, he has been called a "monster" and "anti-Hispanic," and his efforts to compile a Spanglish lexicon have been denounced by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Espa?ola, earning him the title, among his allies, el Salman Rushdie de los latinos.
The reasons for this linguistic fatwa are as disparate as the factions engaged in it. Conservatives want to protect their native tongue from mingling with another they consider inferior, while liberals want to protect ethnic minority children from being trapped in the lexical no-man's-land of their doggerel upbringing. Yet for all that opposition, nobody seems even to have defined Spanglish before Stavans compiled his lexicon: "Spanglish (SPAN-gleesh), n, m, mestizo language, part English, part Spanish, used predominantly in the United States since the second world war. Also Casteyanqui, Gringonal and Inglanol."
Spanglish has no pretence of standardisation; even in name, the language isn't uniform. It comes in many blends, each with a patchwork vocabulary as discombobulated as old-world Yiddish, yet with an essential difference. Rather than evolving with gradual geographic migrations, Spanglish moves with the scattered alacrity of mass culture. The product of simultaneous explosions in population and technology, Spanglish is more particularly American than the star-spangled banner or apple pie.
Stavans first came to appreciate the language by listening to one of his students. A Chicano ex-gang member from east Los Angeles on an affirmative action scholarship, she felt out of place at a liberal arts college in waspy Massachusetts. After two and a half years, she told her profe that she was going back home. "I don't feel bien," she confided. "I'm just a strange animal brought in a cage to be displayed pa'que los gringos no sienten culpa." Stavans couldn't persuade her to stay. "Judging from her vocabulary and syntax," he realised, "she had already departed New England for Los Angeles. She was inhabiting the language of her turf, su propia habla, not the language of the alien environment where she found herself at present."
Spanglish doesn't belong to any particular region, yet there are realms in which even Aramaic would sound less foreign. Academia is just the most obvious. In business, speaking Spanglish is as good as declaring bankruptcy. And in society? Only disembowelling your host would be considered more gauche.
Spanglish is a language of the impoverished - although by no means an impoverished language - a tongue which stigmatises those who use it outside the ghetto, as if what they had to say were worthless. Yet, again like Yiddish in previous generations, it also links people thrown together from different countries and connects the underbellies of distant cities: an ad hoc umbilical cord between Americans newly born. Spanglish is spoken not only by Mexican gang members in Los Angeles and Cuban bouncers in Miami, but by Chinese cabbies in New York. There is also an emerging pop culture. Hip-hop musicians such as Latin Lingo and Chicano Soul 'N' Power rap in Spanglish. Authors including Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros have worked it into their fiction. Most significant of all, in a country where the Latino population will shortly surpass that of white Anglo-Saxons, Spanglish is the lingua franca of talk shows on the Telemundo and Univision cable networks, watched by millions daily.
Much has changed since the collision of Spanish and English first sounded along the Santa Fe trail in the 1820s, but Spanglish still belongs to the frontier, the badlands of assimilation. Social class may explain the mistreatment of Spanglish speakers individually, but when Nobel prize winner Octavio Paz judged the language "neither good nor bad, but abominable," he wasn't in the least concerned with people.
Members of the linguistic elite hate Spanglish because they believe it threatens the lexical purity, and undermines the structural rigour, of English and/or Spanish. Both accusations are justified. A Spanglish sentence might begin in Spanish and end in English, or vice versa. The decision is a matter of personal expression, up to the individual speaker. Meanwhile, there's more shared vocabulary every day. Masculinity is macho. Stationario is writing stationery. Occasionally, a single word straddles both sides of the etymological boundary, such as amigoisation, defined by Stavans as "the process of Mexicanisation of the US southwest." ?Qu? pedo!
Spanglish flourishes for all the reasons that minority languages are threatened. Capitalism, tourism and television have eroded the linguistic authority of Spanish and English, encouraging their casual intermixture as an uninhibited expression of Latin American culture. This is why linguists, assiduously cultivating exotic Mohawk, treat Spanglish as a weed, perhaps the only tongue less palatable than Ebonics. A mere dialect, they say: mutant, cancerous.
Stavans, on the other hand, compares it to jazz: syncopated, a language of improvisation. You can hear it in his translation of the first chapter of Don Quixote with which he ends his elegant treatise-cum-lexicon: "In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, viv?a, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase."
Spanglish is a broken language: lawless, fugitive. It loosens the tongue, belongs to nobody, yet will speak up for anyone. It thrives in neighbourhoods where Spanish and English barely survive. It adopts and adapts. It lives in the present. And that is what makes it, unlike schoolbook Manx or Gaelic, authentic.
Jonathon Keats is a novelist and essayist. He is a director on the board of the US National Book Critics Circle.
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Postimperial fusions
Pico Iyer finds that the loveliest legacy of empire lies in "Indlish," which continues to create new, comedic worlds
The assault began as soon as I set foot in India. "If Aggrieved," said the sign in the Bombay customs hall, "Please Consult Asstt Commissioner Customs." Aggrieved mostly by that extra "t" in "Asstt," I proceeded into the merry mayhem past a sign that informed me gravely, "Please ensure that your drawers are locked properly." My underwear in place, I stepped outside and into an ancient Morris Oxford. A "Free Left Turn" was to the right of us and a "Passenger Alighting Point" to the left. India's anarchy was in full swing, buses saying, "Silence please" on their sides, the mudguards of trucks responding with "Horn OK please," and my own little car making its contribution with a sticker on the back window: "Blow Your Horn/Pay A Fine."
India is the most chattery country in the world, coming at you in almost 200 languages, 1,652 dialects and a million signs on every hoarding, car hailer and passing shop. Yet the signs are just familiar enough to seem completely strange. We passed a Textorium as we jangled into town, and a Toilet Complex. We passed the Clip Joint Beauty Clinic, the Tinker Bell Primary School and Nota Bene Cleaners of Distinction. One apartment block advised all passers-by: "No Parking for Out Siders. If Found Guilty, All Tyres will be Deflated with Extreme Prejudice." A sign in front of a decaying Dickensian manse announced: "Yogic laughter is multi-dimensional." Beside it, between pictures of movie stars, a board advised that "Dark Glasses Make You Attractive to the Police." Perhaps they had been fashioned by a proud graduate of the course I had seen advertised in a national paper: "We make you big boss in English conversation. Hypnotise people by your highly impressive talks. Exclusive courses for exporters, business tycoons."
It might seem imperious, taking note of English misplaced in translation, or imperfectly learned. After all, my nonexistent Hindi would provoke more than multi-dimensional yogic laughter. Yet all the miscegenated signs in India speak for something more than just linguistic mangling: they clutch at you with the plaintiveness of a child of a secret union that neither of its parents will acknowledge.
I am entirely Indian myself, by blood, though born in England. I never saw the incongruous merging of those cultures in their prime, or the protracted divorce that followed. But even for me, and even 50 years after what is known as "independence," a large part of the romance of India lies in the culverts and civil list houses, the cantonments and canteens that still dot the hill stations and tropical valleys of the subcontinent. In their day they stood for occupation, even oppression. But now, standing for a liaison that neither party sought, they speak for something more wistful, to do with the coloniser colonised. And language, the words that startle and bewilder on every side, hints at something that historians and politicians overlook. As you walk past an "Officers' Mess," across from a sign for the "Bombay Colour Sergeants," you are somewhere unique, not quite past and not quite present-the realm of Indlish, or Englian, or Hinglish (the language of Zee TV news broadcasts). More Indians speak English than there are English people, but I came to feel that the one companion who had been with me all my life, the English language, had stolen away and come back in a turban, a finger to its lips.
The hybrid forms of this unlikely tongue first came into being when the merchants and adventurers of the East India Company arrived in the 17th century. Soon Shakespeare and the Bible were being recited around India. And yet - such is the logic of empire - the more the seeming invaders held on to India, the more India held on to them. By the middle of the 19th century, up to 26,000 words had travelled from the subcontinent back to Britain, and many of them referred to goods as indispensable as your pyjamas or your punch. Mother England stocked up not just on cashmeres and mangoes and loot, but the words for them too.
Words are how we see the evidence of cultures flirting and stealing into one another's chambers. The signs of India - "Causeway and Crowded Locality Ahead," "Poultry Care Clinic" - show how each was haunted by the other, and how a sense of rich and poor was challenged and upended. Any Briton who reclined in a sense of superiority over the natives had, in Emily Eden's apt words, the assumption "jungled out" of him.
In an ill-lit office in New Delhi, I found a mildewed copy of Hobson-Jobson, the great lexicon of British India. I discovered from it that "ducks" referred to "gentlemen belonging to the Bombay service," and that a "Lady Kenny" was a "black ball-shaped syrupy confection." The cobwebbed book showed how foreignness, and its opposite, danced so close together that soon it became hard to tell one from the other. "Home," it says, in one of its more poignant definitions, "in Anglo-Indian and colonial speech... means England." I was put in mind of the Englishman Fowler, in The Quiet American, telling a Frenchman that he's going back. "Home?"the Frenchman asks. "No. England," Fowler replies, quickly.
These days, I suspect, every Englishman - every tycoon or pundit or thug (all the words come from India) - knows what a guru and a mantra is and has possibly consulted one himself. India began by sending its verandas to England, its bungalows and juggernauts, and very soon was following up with its avatars, its notions of karma and nirvana.
"They gave us the language," says a character in Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album, "but it is only we who know how to use it." And though that has the ring of agitprop, it reminds us of one way in which the conqueror got taken over. Jane Austen has been embangled and set down in the drawing rooms of Calcutta in the work of Vikram Seth; Dickens has been given a spin and moved to a dusty Bombay apartment block in the novels of Rohinton Mistry. The empire never left, it is tempting to conclude, it just settled down in a back street in Madras, and started to tell its story from the other side.
As I went up into the Himalayas, past mouldering Anglican churches, I was reminded of my duty at every turn. "If Married Divorce to Speed" or "Do Not Nag While I am Driving." Some injunctions were simply incomprehensible-"No Dumping on Berms" or "Watch for Octeroi." Even when you can follow the words, they seem to bite their own tails by being placed in sentences that do everything they can to undermine their own solemnity. Indian English comes at you with the tinkle of an advertising man who's got his hands on the ten commandments. There's a trace of sententiousness in it, and yet the loftiest sentiments are placed inside the jingly sing-song of a children's ditty. A decade before, travelling across my stepmotherland, as I think of it, I'd been struck by the signs that said, "Lane Driving is Sane Driving" or "No Hurry, No Worry," but now they had been joined by half a hundred others, trilling, "Reckless Drivers Kill and Die, Leaving All Behind to Cry." And the majesty of such slogans ("Thanks for Inconvenience") is only slightly diminished by the fact that 500m Indians cannot read a word of any language, let alone the Hinglish along its roads.
It is as if a language has been dreamed up by a clergyman in cahoots with a mischievous schoolboy, drawing their inspiration from Lewis Carroll and pledging themselves to turn VS Naipaul on his head. Never use one word when 30 will suffice. Never use a simple locution if a complicated one will serve. Honour your "felicitations" as if you were an "affectee."
"The ceremonies should be quite pompous," a friend declared innocently, as I stepped into a marriage hall in Bombay (one memsahib who had never sailed back to England, I recalled, was Mrs Malaprop). And when I opened the Times of India, I found a whole section devoted to "matrimonial notices," in which prospective brides were glowingly described as "homely" and "artful" and "wheat-coloured" (which, in the logic of Indian English, means domestically minded, culturally inclined and fair-skinned).
In this cheerful mingling of proportions, a country of the poor makes the things of the rich its own. In the poor parts of Bombay, ramshackle huts call themselves "Marriage Palaces" and old buses have "Semi-Deluxe" written on their sides as if words still had a sympathetic magic, and just to invoke a quality was to bring its blessing down among us.
In Calcutta's bookshops the bestselling author is PG Wodehouse, and the faded glory of his diction confers a gay Edwardian tilt on the most everyday transactions. The young may "air-dash" to a "Mega Exhibition Showcase of Ideal Lifestyle," but everything else proceeds as if nothing had changed, as if everything is in the hands of far-off gods who cannot always be relied upon. The sign that every foreigner comes to dread in India's airports, stations and hotel lobbies, is "Inconvenience is Regretted."
The literature of English these days is ever more in the hands of those who may be regretting the inconvenience. They took the words that empire brought, and kept them going, much like those coughing Morris Oxfords, and even made them new. "Devotees are warned," says the sign in a Hindu temple in Bombay, "that to sit on the rocks much deep in the sea water away from the sea shore is not only encroachment on government property but is also dangerous to their lives, including valuable ornaments."
We start by laughing at the follies of another culture's misappropriations. We move towards bewilderment, as we sense that we're not quite in the culture we left, and yet not in the one we think we're going to. And we end up somewhere completely different, not quite irony and not quite romance. As I prepared to fly out of New Delhi last year-"Be Like Venus: Unarmed," instructed the sign at the airport beside me - I began to wonder how far I was really going. "Blighty," after all, is the Hindi word for "foreign."
Pico Iyer is the author of "Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home" (Bloomsbury)
