Farber's Language Reviews

 

We have such things as theatre reviews, movie reviews, books reviews, and restaurant reviews to help trusting readers decide which plays, movies, books, and restaurants are worth their time and money.

So here's a series of language reviews — thumbnail sketches of some of the major languages of the world with comments on their prevalence, their usefulness, the difficulty or ease with which each may be learned, and special characteristics the potential learner should know.

 

French

 

After English, French is the world's most popular second language. Several other languages are spoken by more people: Chinese, English, Hindustani (the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu), Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, Indonesian, and even Portugese count more speakers than French. But French can be heard in practically every corner of the world and is often spoken by the most influential segments of a given population. The old French empire, though not as vast as the British, was nonetheless vast. French is therefore spoken in what you may find a surprising number of countries. So is Chinese, but the French spoken by the educated classes and government officials in Canada, Africa, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific outweighs in cultural influence the Chinese spoken in the Chinatowns of America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, London, and everywhere else.

French no longer deserves its reputation as "the language of diplomacy" (during how many summit meetings since World War II have the chiefs of state been able to communicate even one simple thought to each other in French?), but never mind. French is still respected and revered as a language of cultured people the world over.

Fully sixty percent of all those who come to practice parties at the Language Club in New York come seeking practice in French. Efforts to convince Americans shopping

around for a language to learn to shift their attentions from French to currently more advantageous languages like Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic are usually unavailing. It's French they want!

French lies in the middle range of difficulty to learn. The grammar is mercifully simple, but correct pronunciation with a decent French accent is hard to achieve. And for some reason, bad French comes across as much worse than bad German, bad Italian, bad Spanish, or bad anything else. The native French ear and French attitude are unforgiving.

There are no noun cases, but verbs inflect and adjectives must agree with nouns. There's a subjunctive mood you're strongly urged to learn even though the younger French themselves increasingly ignore it.

If you're planning to study French along with other languages, make sure you learn French best of all. You will be judged in the world by your French, and no matter how well you handle Dutch, Hungarian, Norwegian, or Indonesian, you will not be regarded as a person of language accomplishment if your French is poor.

 

Spanish

 

Spanish seems to be the "natural" second language for Americans, owing to our proximity to the Spanish-speaking centres of North, Central, and South America and the growing prevalence of Spanish in our country. It's easier for Americans to speak good Spanish than good French. It's a more phonetic language and you don't have the problem of the last few letters of a word being silent – as you often do in French. Also, correct Spanish pronunciation is less difficult than correct French pronunciation.

Spanish grammar is similar to French (as is that of all other Romance languages), and the subjunctive tense waits to test your character.

There are some happy surprises in store for Spanish learners. Of course you expect Spanish to carry you through Latin America and Spain, but you may not expect to be able to communicate with the older generation in the Philippines and even with Sephardic Jews in Israel (as well as Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) whose vernacular is a language known as Ladino, a fifteenth and sixteenth century Spanish with a Hebrew admixture that is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Spanish offers perhaps the grandest of good deal opportunities. Whoever learns Spanish holds an option to acquire Portugese at half price.

 

Portugese

 

Don't dismiss Portugese as some kind of slurring, overnasalised cousin of Spanish.

The lightning population growth of Portugese speaking Brazil alone makes Portugese a major world language. Ancient Portugese navigators carried the language to the mid-Atlantic, the African countries of Angola and Mozambique, the enclave of Goa in India, and even the Indonesian island of Timor.

Portugese is the ninth most widely spoken language in the world, after Chinese, English, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, and Indonesian. Thus, Portugese is an intelligent choice for the language "shopper" who wants to be different without abandoning the mainstream.

Portugese nasal sounds are easier than the French and the grammar is only slightly more difficult than Spanish. Because I learned Spanish first, Portugese will always sound to me like Spanish that's been damaged on delivery. (That's just a smile, not an insult. Dutch sounds the same way to anyone who's first studied German, Danish sounds that way to anyone who's first studied Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian definitely fits the description to anyone who's first studied Russian.)

 

German

 

Germany didn't leave us a world of colonies where people still speak German, but they may as well have. In addition to being the principal language of Germany, Austria, and one of the three main languages of Switzerland, German is, surprisingly, the language most natives will try first on foreigners when they come visiting in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia – in fact all the way from Germany's eastern border with Poland as far east as Moscow and from the Baltic Sea in the north clear down to the Mediterranean. English may edge German out by the time of the next scientific poll in Eastern Europe, but that leaves a tremendous number of German speakers across Europe and elsewhere. Germany's reunification, reestablishing Germany as the central European power, can only intensify the German language's importance.

German grammar is far from the most difficult, though you'll be hard to convince when you find yourself trapped in one of German's unending dependent clauses. You can wait through lunch for the German noun after a loop-the-loop adjectival clause that might translate literally as "the never- having- definitively- researched- the- mating- habits- of-the- Asian- armadillo- Dr. Schultz," and you can wait even longer for the German verb. It's something you get the hang of, though, and remember, German is family. Its kinship with English will be a boon throughout.

There are three genders in German and officially four noun cases, but they're easy. In only one case does the noun itself change endings, the rest being taken care of by the preceding article, adjective, or other modifier.

German offers dividends to those interested in science, philosophy, opera, and getting a good job in international commerce.

 

Italian

 

Everybody who's ever wrestled with Latin deserves to pick up an Italian grammar book just to relax. Italian is easy Latin, a delight to plunge into. There are three different types of verbs, but noun cases have been eliminated. Unlike French, Italian pronunciation is church bell clear, and you can read Italian off the page and be understood after mastering the regular rules governing the sounds of letters. There are no orthographical booby traps such as the English tough, weigh, night, though, and the dozens of other deceptive spellings we Americans can be grateful we never had to learn as foreigners.

Opera, art, wine, cuisine, history, and archaeology are some of the motivators for learning Italian. Italians are nicer to foreigners trying to learn their language than any other people whose language is a major one. A passable attempt to speak French in France is likely to bring little but grudging comprehension from the French. A passable

attempt to speak Italian in Italy will likely lead to an explosive exclamation, "Ahh, you speak our language!" followed by an offer of a free espresso.

Dutch

 

It's easy to dismiss Dutch as a slim shadow of its big language neighbour, German, and of possible interest only to those Americans eager to ingratiate themselves with an aging aunt in Amsterdam with a valuable art collection. Not so fast. In addition to the Dutch spoken in Holland, there are millions of Belgians whose language may be officially called Flemish but is actually nothing but Dutch going under an assumed name. You've also got millions of educated Indonesians who speak Dutch as a historical echo from the four hundred years of Dutch colonial rule. Moreover, Dutch is the mother tongue of Afrikaans, the language of those white South Africans whose ancestors were the Boers (boer is the Dutch word for "farmer"). Afrikaaners not only understand Dutch but look up to Dutch much as an Alabaman looks up to someone who speaks British English.

Dutch is much simpler for Americans to learn than German. There are only two genders (oddly enough, not mascuine and feminine, but common and neuter). Verb endings don't change as much in Dutch as in German, and its word order is more like English than German's is.

You need not pretend Dutch is a beautiful language. The Dutch themselves joke about the coarseness of their language. It's got more of a guttural sound than Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Farsi. If you want a concert in Dutch guttural, ask the next person who speaks Dutch to say, "Misschien is Uw scheermesje niet scherp genoeg. " It means "Perhaps your razor blade is not sharp enough," but that's irrelevant. That short sentence explodes with five gutturals that cause the speaker to sound like the exhaust pipe of a Greyhound bus through a full set of gear changes!

When you learn Dutch, you can cash in on at least forty percent credit when you decide to take up German.

 

Russian

 

Russian is the world's fourth language in number of speakers after Chinese, English, and Hindustani. It is extremely difficult to learn to speak Russian correctly, but the Russians have learned to be patient with foreigners who speak incorrect Russian. Journalists and others fascinated by discussing recent history with Soviet citizens suddenly free to talk to foreigners get a lot of joy out of knowing Russian. The much touted commercial advantages of learning Russian, however, have so far fallen far short of expectation.

The jobs with gargantuan salaries promised to Russian speakers as a fruit of the resurgence of free enterprise in the Soviet Union are few and shaky as the early enthusiasm of foreign investors gives way to wait and see attitudes. Long range, Russian remains a good bet for those willing to learn a language for career advantage. And in the meantime you can enjoy reading Chekhov and Dostoyevski in the original.

The Russian alphabet may look formidable, but it's a false alarm. It can be learned in twenty minutes, but then you've got to face the real obstacles, such as three genders;

six noun cases with wave upon wave of noun groups that decline differently; a past tense that behaves like an adjective; and verbs that have not just person, number, and tense, but also something called "aspect" — perfective or imperfective.

Knowing Russian yields a lot of satisfaction. You want to pinch yourself as you find yourself gliding through a printed page of a language you may have grown up suspecting and fearing. Russian, like German, crackles with good, gutsy sounds that please you as they leap from your tongue. Russian is a high gratitude language. The new immigrants from the Soviet Union, though they speak one of the major languages of the world, don't expect Americans to know it. They'll be overjoyed to hear their language from you.

One advantage of choosing Russian is the head start it offers in almost a dozen other Slavic languages, should you suddenly want or need one.

 

Chinese

 

Chinese is actually more of a life involvement than a language you choose to study. When you're in your easy chair studying, Chinese has more power to make you forget it's dinner time than any other language. It has more power to draw you out of bed earlier than necessary to sneak in a few more moments of study. There's simply more there.

More people speak Chinese than any other language on earth. There's hardly a community in the world that doesn't have someone who speaks Chinese as a native. Even in the 1940's, when I first began studying Chinese, there was a Chinese restaurant and a Chinese laundry even in our small town of Greensboro, North Carolina. You can count on conversation practice in Chinese from the Chinese laundries of Costa Rica to the Chinese restaurants of Israel.

The Chinese Communists on the mainland and the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan agree that the national language of Chinese is the northern Chinese dialect of Mandarin. Accept no substitute. Be sure you know what you're doing if you set out to learn any Chinese dialect other than Mandarin! It was almost impossible to find a Chinese person in a Chinese restaurant in America who spoke Mandarin forty years ago. They all spoke a subdialect of Cantonese, being descendants of the Chinese labourers who came to build America's transcontinental railroad in the 1800's. Today it's almost impossible to find a Chinese restaurant in America where the waiters don't speak Mandarin.

Don't let yourself be drawn into Cantonese merely because your Chinese friends happen to be of Cantonese descent or because your new employees are from Cantonese speaking Hong Kong. Even the Cantonese themselves are now trying to learn Mandarin!

Spoken Chinese is enthrallingly easy. There's nothing we could call "grammar" in Chinese. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives never change endings for any reason. I once caught a showoff student of Chinese trying to intimidate new students by warning them that Chinese had a different word for "yes" and "no" for each question! That's largely true, but not the slightest bit difficult.

The closest thing Chinese has to what we think of as grammar is what we'll call "interesting ways." When you pose a question in Chinese you present both alternatives. Thus, "Are you going?" becomes "You go not go?" or "Are you going or not?" If you are going, the word for "yes" to that question is "go." If you're not going, you say "Not

go." Likewise, "Are you going to play?" becomes, literally translated, "You play not play?" To answer "yes," you say "Play." "No" is "Not play."

You've already learned some of the "middle language" essential to the mastery of Chinese. Don't fear that, because there's a middle language, you're being called upon to learn two languages to acquire just one! It's a shortcut. The middle language is English – the way a Chinese person would say it if all he could do were to come up with the English words literally and nothing more. Thus, "Do you have my pencil?" in middle language is `You have I-belong pencil, no have?" "The man who lives in the white house" becomes "Live in white house-belong man."

I find it helpful to look for the middle language no matter what language I'm studying. In Russian, "The vase is on the table" becomes "Vase on table." "Do you have a pen?" becomes "Is by you pen?" "I like the cake" in Spanish is "To me is pleasing the cake." "Where have you studied German?" in German is "Where have you German studied?" "Do you want me to help?" in Yiddish is "Do you want I should help?" – a construction that should come as no surprise to anyone with immigrant Jewish grandparents.

The middle language helps you get the hang of things. Once you see the structure as revealed by the middle language, it's easier for you to climb inside the targt language. Learning the "interesting ways" through middle language is especially important in Chinese.

Chinese has no alphabet. Each ideogram or character is complete unto itself and each must be learned. There are said to be as many as eighty thousand Chinese characters. Fear not. You can carry on fairly sophisticated conversations with knowledge of a few hundred characters and you can carry on like a Ming orator once you compile a couple of thousand. You can read a Chinese newspaper with fewer than six thousand. Though lacking an alphabet, Chinese nonetheless has 214 radicals, the elements that make up the building blocks for almost every Chinese character. The fact that there are clusters of Chinese characters that surrender to you by the family group makes the going quicker and easier.

One problem: the pronunciation of each Chinese character is always one syllable and one syllable only. Therefore, the same sound has to represent a lot of different things. We have a slight touch of that in English – a pier has nothing to do with a peer – but imagine how much utterance duplication you'd have if each word in the language were limited to one syllable only. (Beginners who learn that the Chinese word for "chopsticks" is kwai dze and "bus" is gung gung chee chuh may object. I simply mean that the term for "chopsticks" is two separate words [characters] in Chinese and the term for "bus" is four!) A Chinese textbook for Americans that makes no pretense of being complete lists seventy-five different meanings for the sound shih alone!

Chinese differentiates among the various possibilities of meaning by the use of tones. Each Chinese word is assigned a specific tone, like a musical note. Mandarin Chinese has four tones, Cantonese has nine.

The word wu in Mandarin's first tone means "room," in tone two it means "vulgar," in tone three it means "five," and in tone four wu means "disobedient."

Take the sentence "Mother is scolding the horse." The spoken Chinese transliterates as ma ma ma ma. If we want to make it a question and ask "Is mother scolding the horse?" just add a fifth ma. Without the tones a Chinese person would hear an

unintelligible babble. With the correct tones, however, it would be as clear to him as "Peering at a pair of pairs on the pier" is to us.

Ideally you should know the tone of each word and the circumstances under which words shifts tones, but until you attain that lofty peak, you'll be okay if you do your best to imitate the tonality of the native Chinese speaker on your cassettes.

Much is made of our ability to read the Chinese soul through the Chinese language. "Tomorrow" in Chinese is ming tien, which literally means "bright day." The character for "good' literally depicts woman with child, suggesting that a mother and child are emblematic of everything good. The character meaning "peace" depicts a woman under a roof. The character for "discord," however, is three women under one roof!

All that is indeed fun but hardly a cryptanalysis of the Chinese soul. After all, how much can you tell about the English soul by noting that the word breakfast really means "breaking" the "fast' 'you've engaged in since your last bite the night before? Japanese

 

Like Chinese, Japanese conversation is fairly easy, but the written language is complicated. In wartime, America turned out interpreters in Japanese and Chinese at a satisfactory rate by going straight for the spoken language and ignoring the written language completely. You may be tempted to do the same.

Certainly you can prioritise the ability to speak and understand over the ability to read and write, but I urge you to undertake serious study of the written language and continue steadily. If speech is to be your "hare," let writing at least be your "tortoise."

Written Japanese is not as difficult as you might fear. Japanese uses several thousand characters borrowed from the Chinese, but it uses them in a different and more limited way that makes them easy to learn. The characters are used along with two syllabaries, sets of simple written symbols, each of which represents not one single letter but a complete syllable.

Japanese has no tones to worry about, and Japanese grammar involves the learning of certain speech patterns more than changes in verbs, nouns, and adjectives.

Japanese has a clarity missing from Chinese. Learn a Japanese word from your book or cassette and your Japanese friend will understand it at your first attempt to use it.

The commercial advantages of learning Japanese are obvious and on the rise. But even if your Japanese never reaches a level of proficiency enabling you to do business in Japanese, your Japanese host and associates will appreciate your efforts. They, after all, had to learn English. You did not have to learn Japanese. Yet.

 

Arabic

 

Arabic is elusive, guttural, and rewarding. Arabic script, written from right to left, writes each letter differently depending upon whether it occurs at the beginning, the middle, or the end of a word. Learn it, however, and you'll be welcome from the North Atlantic coast of Africa clear through the Middle East to the borders of Iran and Pakistan. Arabic is also the religious language studied by millions of Muslims around the world whose native languages are not Arabic. The Arab population of the United States is growing rapidly. You can hear Arabic on the streets and deal in Arabic in the shops of places like Dearborn, Michigan, where there is a substantial Arab population.

Your investment in Arabic is likely to gain in value when Israel and the Arab states achieve a settlement allowing for commerce and development to replace a half century of open warfare.

 

Hebrew

 

Hebrew is one of the more difficult languages, and the numerical incentives for tackling it are not great because Hebrew is spoken only in Israel and in small communities of Israelis in America and other Western countries. Until recently the teaching of Hebrew was illegal in the Soviet Union, but classrooms are overflowing now across the country as Jews prepare to emigrate to Israel or assert their Jewishness inside the Soviet Union. Hebrew is spoken wherever Jews worship around the world, and there is a surge of interest in learning Hebrew among young Americans who were born Jewish even though they may not have had a strong Jewish upbringing.

If you're not Jewish and choose to learn Hebrew anyhow, you will set loose waves of appreciation among Jews grateful to outsiders willing to go to that much trouble.

Once you learn the Hebrew alphabet, you'll be in command of virtually the same alphabet used by Yiddish, a language based on fifteenth century low German that was spoken by millions of East European Jews before Hitler's extermination and is still understood in a surprising number of places. It's also the alphabet used by Ladino, the "Spanish of Cervantes" that became the "Yiddish" of the Jews of Spanish origin who scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean after the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition. There are few language thrills that can match that of an American who learned the Hebrew alphabet in Hebrew school looking at a printed page in a language he didn't know existed (many Jews themselves are totally unaware of the existence of Ladino) and discovering he can read it and understand it with his high school Spanish!

 

Greek

 

Modern Greek has a grammar slightly less glorious than that of its ancient civilisation. In difficulty, Greek falls somewhere between French and Russian. Each verb has two forms and verbs change according to person, number, and tense. The future tense is almost as easy as it is in English — the word tha serving the role of our will. Adjectives agree with their nouns according to gender (three of them) and number.

Greek enjoys a leftover prestige, not only from ancient times but from the not long vanished tradition of the scholar who prided himself on being at home in Latin and Ancient Greek. Every five minutes during your study of Greek you'll be reminded of our debt to the Greek language. Zestos means "hot" ("zesty"), chronos means "time" or "year," "number" is arithmo, when you want your cheque in a restaurant you ask for the logariazmo (as in "logarithm"), the Greek word for "clear" describing weather is katharos (as in "catharsis"), "season" is epohi ("epoch"), and so on.

Greek may be the language of one small European country only, but there are thriving Greek communities throughout the Middle East, Egypt, and other parts of Africa, and the United States. Enterprising Greeks have carried the language around the world.

 

Swedish, Danish, Norwegian

The Scandinavian languages are lumped together because of their similarity and the reliability with which natives of one Scandinavian country can deal with the languages of the others. That similarity is something for you to know and enjoy, not something for you to mention to the Scandinavians themselves. They're horrified when outsiders say, "Gee, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are all alike!" They prefer to dwell upon the differences. There was a popular movement in Norwegian early in the twentieth century to change the language for no apparent reason other than to make it less like Danish.

If your aim is to communicate in all three countries, learn Norwegian first. It's the linguistic centre of Scandinavia. A Dane can deal comfortably with Norwegian, but much less so with Swedish. A Swede can deal comfortably with Norwegian, but much less so with Danish. A Norwegian can deal comfortably with both Swedish and Danish.

The Scandinavian languages are relatively easy for Americans to learn. They're Germanic languages, related to English, but vastly easier to learn than German. The verbs don't change for person and number, and only slightly for tense. The word order follows English obligingly most of the way. Like Dutch, the Scandinavian languages have two genders – common and neuter – and the definite article follows the noun and becomes one word. (For example, "a pen" in Norwegian is en penn, "the pen" is pennen)

Holland is said to be the non-English speaking country with the highest percentage of people fluent in English. The three Scandinavian countries are close behind. You may never need their language no matter where you go or who you deal with in Scandinavia, but Scandinavians are among the most appreciative people on earth if you know their language anyhow.

 

Polish, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian

 

These western Slavic languages use the Roman alphabet. The eastern Slavic languages use the Cyrillic (sometimes mistakenly called the Russian) alphabet. Don't suggest it after a few drinks in Warsaw, but Polish might be better off using the Cyrillic alphabet. A Polish sound resembling the sh combined with the following ch in push charlie is spelled szcz in Polish. That sound, which requires four letters in the Roman alphabet, needs only one in the Cyrillic! Romanising Slavic languages leads to orthographical madness. A newspaper reporter in a small Southern town went into his editor's office and said, "There's been an earthquake in the Polish city of Pszczyna." He showed the editor the story off the wire. After a momentary frown the editor looked up and said, "Find out what the name of the place was before the earthquake!"

Except for Polish, none of these languages has much bounce beyond its borders, but if your reason for wanting to learn them involves family, love, or business, that won't matter. All Slavic languages are grammatically complex. Verbs change for reasons that leave even those who speak Romance languages weeping over their wine and wondering why. There are at least six noun cases in every Slavic language, sometimes seven.

The big payoff in learning any of these Slavic languages is the automatic down payment you're making on Russian itself. Russian will be a breeze if you already know another Slavic language, and conversely, the other Slavic languages will come more easily if you already know Russian.

Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukranian, Byelorussian

 

Everything stated above about the western Slavic languages applies to these eastern Slavic languages with one exception – they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with slight variations from language to language.

The similarities between Serbian and Croatian, the main languages of Yugoslavia, are so striking the languages are usually lumped together as Serbo-Croatian.

If you know any two Slavic languages, you can make yourself understood in any of the other Slavic languages. That may be challenged by Slavic scholars, but it works well in real life between the western border of Poland and the Ural Mountains and from the arctic tip of Russia to the Black Sea beaches of Bulgaria.

Indonesian

 

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation. Consisting of hundreds of islands spread out over a South Pacific area the size of the United States, Indonesia is easily the largest country in the world about which the most other people in the world know the least. With enough mineral wealth in the ground to make it an economic superpower, Indonesia is still frequently confused with India or Polynesia.

Indonesian is the easiest major language in the world for a foreigner to learn. It was called Pasar Malay ("Bazaar Malay") by the colonial Dutch who looked upon the Indonesian language as a kind of baby talk for servants and merchants. When Indonesia won independence in 1948, the ruler, Sukarno, did his best to take that unstructured language and graft some sophisticated grammar onto it to make it more regimented and thus difficult. He failed.

Indonesian still has nothing that will be regarded as grammar by anybody who's done battle with Latin or Russian. There are suffixes and prefixes aplenty, neat and regular, that convert verbs into nouns and give verbs additional meanings and the like, but no inflections according to person, number, tense, aspect, or anything else.

Indonesian uses the Roman alphabet and is delightfully easy to pronounce. If you've ever studied any other language, you'll marvel at how quickly and clearly you'll understand and be understood.

Indonesian is closely related to Malayan, the language of Malaysia and Singapore, and gives you a head start in Tagalog, the major language of the Philippines.

 

Hindi and Urdu

 

The spoken languages of India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, are so close that the true language lover is tempted to take the plunge even though both languages use different and, to us, unfamiliar scripts (Devanagari, and a mixture of Persian and Arabic). Though other languages abound on the Indian subcontinent, Hindi-Urdu united their respective

nations and whoever jumps in (despite the current lack of good learning materials) will be able to communicate with a population second only to that of China.

 

 

Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian

 

Despite the grammatical complexity and the relatively small pool of native speakers, an occasional adventurer is drawn almost masochistically to the three Finno-Ugric languages. If you were the hated kid in ninth grade who stayed after algebra class to beg the teacher to introduce you to calculus, they might want to try one of these.

Every word in all three languages is accented on the first syllable – every single word, names and all, giving those languages the sound of a pneumatic jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk. There are, in Finnish, fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in the plural. Hungarian and Estonian aren't far behind. And that's the easy part!

People whose language you choose to learn often ask polite questions about why you wanted to learn their language. Let on to a Finn, a Hungarian, or an Estonian that you know a little bit of their language and you will not merely be questioned. You'll be cross examined!

Swahili

 

Swahili enjoyed a surge of support beginning in the late 1960's among young American blacks who wanted to reconnect to their African roots. Anyone who pressed on and mastered Swahili would today speak a language spoken by fifty million people living in central and eastern Africa, including the nations of Kenya and Tanzania in which Swahili is the national language. Swahili is a Bantu language, and once you learn it you can expect easy going when you decide to learn Kiganda, Kikamba, Kikuyu, Kinyanja, Kichaga, Kiluba, Kishona, Kizulu, Kikongo, and Kiduala, all of which are spoken over smaller areas in Africa south of the Sahara.

Swahili uses the Roman alphabet. The Say It In Swahili phrase book advises us not to be discouraged by words like kitakachonisahilishia, because Swahili grammar is mercifully regular and logical!

 

English

 

The mere fact that you're reading these words right now calls for self congratulations. It means you're fluent in the winner, the international language, the number one language of all time!

When a Soviet plane approaches the airport in China, the pilot and the control tower don't speak Russian to each other. They don't speak Chinese. They speak English. If an Italian plane is about to land in another part of Italy, the Italian pilot and the Italian traffic control person also speak English.

When the Israeli general and the Egyptian general met in Sinai in October 1973 to talk truce in the Yom Kippur War, they didn't speak Hebrew. They didn't speak Arabic. They spoke English.

When Norwegian whaling ships put into the port of Capetown, South Africa, to hire Zulu seamen, the interviewing is not done in Norwegian or Zulu. It's done in English.

The parliaments of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway send delegates to a body called the Nordic Council. Their official meetings are conducted – at great expense in interpreters and simultaneous interpretation equipment – in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. When the meetings end, however, and the delegates from the three neighbouring countries adjourn to the bar and the dining room, they all start speaking English with each other!

Haven't you noticed something odd about protestors you have seen on TV demonstrating in Lithuania, Estonia, Korea, Iraq, Mexico, and other countries where neither the protestors, the ones they're protesting against, nor the local media speak native English? In addition to the signs and banners in their own languages, they always carry signs and banners in English. And for good reason. They want their message to reverberate around the world.

On a map of Africa, Nigeria seems a tiny patch where the bulge of that gigantic continent meets the body. Inside that patch, however, live between 100 and 120 million people speaking 250 different languages, with names like Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Nupe, and Oyo. From their first day of school, the children of Nigeria are taught English. Without English, not only could Nigeria not talk to the world, Nigerians couldn't even talk to each other.

When a Nigerian educator, Aliu Babtunde Fafunwa, proposed in early 1991 that Nigerian children begin their education in their 250 respective mother tongues, the government newspaper itself wrote in an editorial, "The least luxury we can afford in the last decade of the twentieth century is an idealistic experiment in linguistic nationalism which could cut our children off from the main current of human development." That's hardly a hate filled denunciation of former colonial masters.

Every attempt to launch an artificial international language has so far failed. Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Kosmos, Monoglottica, Universalsprache, Neo-Latine, Vertparl, Mundolingue, Dil, Volapuk, even an international language based on the notes of the musical scale, all started out weak and gradually tapered off. My guess is they always will. You can no more "vote" a language into being the international language than you can vote warmth into a blizzard.

Languages attain prominence something the way individuals and countries do, through all kinds of force, including war. There's an added element in prominence, however. Brute force is not enough. The winning language must have a degree of acceptability to the losers.

Russian emerged from World War II as a mighty language, but it failed to bluster beyond the bounds of the Communist empire. Russian even failed to inspire people to learn it inside their empire. Students in Hungary, Romania, and East Germany knew no more Russian after eight years of schooling than Americans know French after similar exposure.

English, on the other hand, was welcomed. Africans and Asians may not have rejoiced at being forcibly incorporated into the British Empire, but they recognised that the English language, if learned by all, was a unifying tool that enabled different tribes who lived five miles apart to communicate for the first time, in a language brought down upon them from thousands of miles away.

A wolf will lift his neck to let a larger wolf know that he accepts the other's
dominant role as leader. The entire world has lifted its neck to acknowledge English as