EIL/ ELF quote of the day
“The surprising thing to most observers, including some historians of language, is that contact varieties of English came to ‘belong’ to other populations, that Americans and Englishmen who use EIL/ELF (English as a Lingua Franca/ English as a Lingua Franca) are not automatically authorities on it. If they want to use it, they must learn to do so from the Africans, Indians, Chinese who are expert (if, by definition, not native) speakers. Usually, the native speakers of English are quite clumsy in their attempts to use EIL/ELF; they are often objects of mockery to more proficient users” All- American English J L Dillard pg 14
Actually, if you made it to the bottom of the quote you have probably realised that something isn’t right- non-native speakers laughing at native speakers because of their idiocyncratic use of English?? I cheated a bit because all the bits where is says EIL/ ELF above actually said “Pidgin English” in the book, but it is interesting to see the parallels with recent writing on English as a Lingua Franca and to wonder whether we will ever get to the point where Chinese will laugh at the American use of English rather than pay good money to gain mastery of it, or at least it is if you are trying desperately to find a way to prove you haven’t wasted your time and money on a popular linguistics book from 1975…
The main argument of the book is that the influence of Pidgin English (and the earlier original Lingua Franca and Sabir) on American English has been ignored, something that I’ll have to take his word on as I’ve never read anything about the subject before, nor even thought about it until I saw this book going for 250 yen (about a pound).
Words and expressions he derives from pidgin include palaver, savvy, buckaroo, vamoose, mosey, lassoo, hooch, hike, dosie dough (as in line dancing, from the French “deux y deux” apparently, always wondered about that one), baloney, hepcat, fly (meaning cool), kick the bucket, joss (as in “joss stick”, from “deus”, the Portuguese for “god”), kick the bucket, wrangler, Davy Jones’s locker, Johnny come lately, caboose, and caboodle, along with the more famous “chop chop” and “look see”. I was even more surprised that comic book Native American speech has some basis in reality, with the pidgin they spoke again being based on naval lingua franca, with the (in)famous “…um” thing apparently deriving from Portuguese.
The book also has an interesting linguistic theory on why so many people thought they had found the long-lost Ten Tribes of Israel:
“The strangeness of the languages they encountered was almost too much for the European travelers and immigrants. They desperately needed to find some trace of the familiar, to be able to interpret the unknown in terms of some known… The analogy was slight: Hebrew was strange to the Europeans,… and the ‘new’ languages were also strange to him- therefore these languages must be like Hebrew.” pg 5
And two to add to my list of favourite ELT and linguistics book titles:
Pronunciation of the English Language Vindicated from Anamoly and Caprice (Rev James Adams 1799)
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (F Grose, 1785)
And now that I’ve written about it, I can safely throw away that bashed up book with a clean conscience…
Tags: Quotes