Culture

文艺版块

Johnson

约翰逊专栏

A language for the world

属于世界的语言

By learning English, people around the globe are changing it, too.

世界各地的人们在学习英语的同时也在改变英语。

What country does French belong to?

法语属于哪个国家？

The answer seems obvious: France, as it says on the label.

答案很明显：法国，顾名思义就是“法国的语言”。

But there are roughly four times as many speakers of French outside France as there are within it.

但法国以外讲法语的人数大约是法国人数的四倍。

Who does Portuguese belong to?

葡萄牙语属于谁？

You might now hesitate to blurt out “Portugal”, remembering that Brazil’s population is about 20 times bigger than Portugal’s.

你现在可能会犹豫一下，而不是脱口而出“葡萄牙”，因为你想起来巴西的人口大约是葡萄牙人口的20倍。

Maybe Portuguese belongs jointly to them both.

也许葡萄牙语属于这两个国家。

But then 70m people live in African countries in which Portuguese is an official language.

但还有7000万人生活在以葡萄牙语为官方语言的非洲国家。

Perhaps it belongs to them, too.

或许葡萄牙语也属于他们。

The English can be under no illusion that the language of the same name is exclusively theirs.

英格兰人绝不会幻想英语为他们所独有。

The small matters of the other nations in the British Isles, and of the superpower across the Atlantic, make clear that it is joint property.

不列颠群岛上的其他几个国家和大西洋彼岸的超级大国都清楚地表明，英语是共同财产。

But these countries—along with Canada, Australia and other Anglophone peoples—must at some point come to terms with the fact that, even collectively, their language no longer belongs to them.

但这些国家--以及加拿大、澳大利亚和其他讲英语的民族--必须迟早接受这样一个事实，即就算他们加在一起，英语也不再属于他们。

Of the estimated billion people who speak English, less than half live in those core English-speaking countries.

据估计，在10亿讲英语的人中，只有不到一半的人生活在这些英语核心国家。

Every day, the proportion of English-speakers born outside the traditional Anglosphere grows.

出生于传统英语文化圈之外的说英语的人的比例每天都在增加。

Perhaps 40% of people in the European Union speak English, or about 180m—vastly more than the combined population of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

欧盟可能有40%的人说英语，相当于1.8亿人，远远超过英国、加拿大、澳大利亚和新西兰人口的总和。

In India, calculations range from 60m to 200m.

在印度，这一数字为6000万至2亿。

Most such estimates make it the second-biggest Anglophone country in the world.

大多数这样的估计结果使印度成为世界第二大说英语的国家。

English-speakers pride themselves on the spread of the language, and often attribute that to an open, liberal-minded attitude whereby it has happily soaked up words from around the world.

说英语的人为英语的传播感到自豪，并经常将其归因于一种开放、自由的态度，因为这种态度，英语欣然吸收了来自世界各地的词汇。

In the coming century, though, English will do more than borrow words.

然而，在接下来的一个世纪里，英语将不仅仅是借来词汇。

In these non-Anglophone countries, it is becoming not just a useful second language, but a native one.

在这些非英语国家，英语不仅会成为一种有用的第二语言，而且会成为一种母语。

Already it is easy to find children in northern Europe who speak as though they come from Kansas, the product of childhoods immersed in subtitled films and television in English, along with music, gaming and YouTube.

现在已经很容易找到说起话来像来自美国堪萨斯州的北欧小孩了，这是小孩从小沉浸在有字幕的英语影视，以及音乐、游戏和YouTube视频的结果。

Today, many learners still aim for an American or British standard.

如今，许多英语学习者仍然力求达到美式英语或英式英语的标准。

Textbooks instruct Indian English-speakers to avoid Indianisms such as “What is your good name?” for “What is your first name?”, or “I am working here for years” instead of “I have been working here for years.”

教科书让说英语的印度人避免印度腔，比如把“你的名字是什么？”说成“你的好名字是什么？”，或者把“我在这里已经工作了很多年”说出“我在这里正在工作了很多年”。

A guide to avoiding Europeanisms has long circulated in European Union institutions, to keep French- or German-speakers from (for example) using “actual” to mean “current”, as it does in their languages.

避免欧化英语的指南一直在欧盟机构内流传，目的是防止说法语或德语的人(例如)用actual（真实的）来表示“当前”，这是actual在法语和德语中的用法。

Yet as hundreds of millions of new speakers make English their own, they are going to be less keen to sound British or American.

然而，随着数以亿计的新英语使用者将英语变成他们自己的语言，他们将不再热衷于让自己听起来像英国人或美国人。

A generation of post-colonial novelists has been mixing native words and phrasings into their English prose, without translation, italics or explanation.

后殖民时期的一代小说家在他们的英语写作中混入了本土词汇和短语，而且没有翻译、标注斜体或进行解释。

Academic movements such as “English as a lingua franca” (ELF) have been developing the ideology that speakers—no longer referred to as “non-native” but rather “multilingual”—should feel free to ignore British or American norms.

“作为世界语的英语”(ELF)之类的学术运动一直在倡导这样一种态度，即说英语的人--不再被称为“非母语者”，而是“多语言使用者”--应该毫无顾忌地无视英式英语或美式英语的规范。

Karen Bennett of Nova University in Lisbon says the university website has been translated using words common in southern European English—like “scientific” for “academic”, or “rector” for “vice-chancellor”.

里斯本诺瓦大学的凯伦·班内特说，该大学的网站在翻译成英语时，已经使用了南欧英语中常见的词汇，比如“科学的”代表“学术的”，“院长”代表“副总理”。

The appropriate local dialect is not British or American but ELF.

当地方言不应当是英式英语或美式英语，而是作为世界语的英语。

Given enough time, new generations of native speakers contribute not just words but their own grammar to the language they learn—from older speakers’ point of view, distorting it in the process.

如果有足够的时间，新一代以英语为母语的人不仅会贡献他们自己的词汇，还会贡献他们自己的语法，从老一代英语母语者的角度来看，这会逐渐扭曲英语。

“I am working here for years” is a mistake today, but it is not hard to imagine it becoming standard in the future in culturally confident Anglophone Indian circles.

“我在这里正在工作了很多年”现在看来是一个病句，但不难想象在未来，这句话会成为文化自信的讲英语的印度文化圈的标准句式。

If this disturbs you, remember that this column is written in a mangled version of Anglo-Saxon, learned badly by waves of Celts, Vikings, Normans and others until it became an unrecognisably different tongue.

如果你对此感到不安，请记住，本篇专栏文章就是用面目全非的盎格鲁-撒克逊语写成的，凯尔特人、维京人、诺曼人等等都学习了盎格鲁-撒克逊语，而且学得很糟糕，直到它变成了一种截然不同的语言。

And take comfort in the fact that such changes usually happen too slowly to affect comprehension in a single lifetime.

令人欣慰的是，这种变化通常发生得很慢，人在一辈子中还不会受到它对理解语言的影响。

Written language is less volatile than the spoken kind and exerts a stabilising force.

书面语的变化程度比口语要小，从而能起到稳定作用。

But if language is always evolving (true to the point of cliché), the adaptations are even more profound when they come as a result of new speakers hailing from different linguistic worlds.

但是，如果语言总是在进化(确实如此，简直是老生常谈了)，那么当来自不同语言世界人开始讲英语，从而带来语言的改变时，这种改变就会更加深远。

No language has ever reached more speakers than English.

再没有哪种语言像英语这样触及了如此多的人。

It is hard to predict how they will change it, but easy to rule out the notion that they will not change it at all.

很难预测人们将如何改变英语，但很容易排除人们完全不会改变英语这种想法。

In the end, it will be theirs too.

最终，英语也将属于他们。

来源：经济学人