Y’all better learn the language: How American English is quickly killing the British tongue

Every morning on the way to work, I hear an advertisement on a local radio station for Italian football that makes my insides chafe.

Aside from pronouncing Serie A incorrectly, the advert refers to football as soccer, and does it in such a carefree manner you are sure the man speaking doesn’t know or doesn’t care that he has transgressed against the tongue. How do you live with yourself calling football soccer?

After several months of this ad I realised that the man was correct and I was wrong. The advert had merely cottoned onto the fact that English was now an American language, not a British one.

I once wrote that the French language was doomed to irrelevancy because of the stringent rules placed upon it. You see, language is a living and breathing thing; it cannot be codified in books and so should be allowed to become the plaything of organisations, to live in mouths of speakers and not in books.

French, with its decrees from Paris on what is a word and what isn’t, has become out of step with the world. It is interesting to note that it was France that popularised egalitarianism, but words in Paris can only come from one organisation. I can assure you that France will always be manning the barricades against the language’s extinction due to the restrictions placed on its use.

The same sniffy approach to language is exhibited by those who use British English and still think Brittania rules the waves. Some even take a superior tone whenever you use an Americanism. British English has already retreated to dictionaries, where it gathers dust. Those who unbendingly stick to British English as standard are deluding themselves.

English, as a whole, has too many unpronounced consonants cluttering its lexicon, and British English is the most egregious example of this. The Britons, with their surfeit of letters (traveller when traveler would do and save on ink and effort) and mannerisms, are increasingly out of step with our American-led century.

HOLLWOOD INFLUENCE

American English tends to have a more utilitarian approach, even if our brothers in Washington cannot pronounce aluminium.

American culture, thanks to the Hollywood dream machine, has become what the world aspires to. Its companies are bigger than they have ever been and its financial power has only gotten stronger over the years.

Some of American companies’ logos are more recognisable than the cross, and the language they speak shall end up being the default tongue of the world.

In numeracy, the British already lost out. The British billion has 12 zeroes while the American one has nine. Guess what; the world adopted the American version of the billion.

In 2008 Portugal voted to support changes to Portuguese spelling to make it simpler. The reason was that all those additional consonants and flourishes of accents on top of letters did not go down well in Brazil.

The country has close to 20 times the population of its former colonial masters and a lot more Portuguese speakers, so the adoption of the colony’s spelling mannerisms ensured that in the future everyone will speak — or at least spell — with one voice.

Perhaps we should apply the ways of the colony to the mother country when it comes to English. America is bigger and has more English speakers than England ever will, and it has a more vibrant and engaged population mangling the language.

Many seem to think that France is losing the battle to English. It didn’t just lose to English, it lost to American English. The words that the French academy spends time crafting Gallic alternatives for, like email and walkman, are jettissoned from America.

In a world where Uncle Sam underwrites global trade, has the world’s reserve currency and is the leader in IT, surely the English that shall be spoken and spelt in this century shall be more New York than York.

English may be a global language, but its capital is America. The language written and spoken in the future will owe more to Hollywood and Fifth Avenue New York than Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens.

WHICH DICTIONARY?

The two prime drivers of neologisms in English today are information technology and culture, and both these sectors are dominated by America. Selfie, google, normcore... it seems like all new words are coming from one side of the pond.

I will go out on a limb and say that if the Daily Nation were a 2015 start-up, we would be using Merriam-Webster as a guide, not the Oxford Dictionary. The subs shall burn my effigy, but I am convinced of this fact.

Obviously, there need not be any argument between British and American versions of English as both can exist as synonyms; all we need to remember is that the American one is standard.

Do you think that our Chinese overlords are interested in learning British English or the American version?

China holds the world’s largest reserves of American dollars and buys up the most American debt, and the Chinese will obviously learn that gotten is the correct past participle of get.

Everyone who speaks English as a second language now will learn of trash and not garbage, and everyone already uses soda instead of the Church-of-England-approved fizzy drink.

They will say I am good when asked how they are, and may even call our beloved football soccer and spell colour without the “u”.

They will also atrociously spell words like recognisable with a “z”.

American English has become the world’s lingua franca; it is how ideas will be shared in the future in science, technology and finance.

Have you gotten me?

________

COUNTING THE COST

Module-II university students getting a raw deal

I recently compared the cost of private universities and public ones and was shocked to see that the difference is not great for Module-II students.

In some courses the difference in cost between University of Nairobi and Strathmore is a few thousand shillings.

The cost may be comparable but the benefits seem more stacked on the private side. Also, while parallel students pay the costs, they are still enmeshed in all the lecturer-attendant strikes. First, we should ask where the money contributed by Module-II student goes.

If it is enough to hand them a far superior learning environment and education in a private university, does that mean they are subsiding regular students?

In many, if not all, courses, parallel students outnumber regular ones — in some courses the ratio is 5:1 in favour of parallel. If that is the case, why do we refer to them as public universities?

The government should consider also subsidising the so-called private universities and setting up bursaries for students wanting to go there.