English, language of all nations

More people may speak Mandarin or Spanish, but our mother tongue is understood everywhere

Katharine Whitehorn

The Guardian Monday 17 October 2016

Several days ago I was badly late for dinner with Sigourny Luz, the Australian actor who shares my house with me, and my younger son, Jake Lyall, who is an actor in California, but was visiting.

I had been kept by an event for the young at the English Speaking Union about speech-making. It dealt not only with how to make a speech, but also how to assess any speeches they may be called upon to judge. And, what with all this coming my way, I found myself, as ever, feeling incredibly lucky for having English as my native tongue.

It’s so easy reading the books of what used to be the empire and with the news and so many films coming from across the Atlantic. Also, even apart from these admirable enjoyments, there’s the likelihood that in most of the places where they speak different languages, there will be one person, at least, who is paid to cope with the English language. We are, on the whole, understood wherever we go.

Although Mandarin and Spanish are now, in fact, the two most common languages in the world, English is still seen by many as being the most influential. It is, according to scholars such as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the language that connects the most people worldwide. English is probably as universal as it is likely to get. We don’t run the world any more, but we may as well be grateful that so many people still use our language.

I was late for that dinner, but I employed my recently brushed- up skills and gave a polished speech to make my apologies – and my companions both understood me perfectly.

 

Snow

from the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them a lot, espe­cially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow.

Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba. Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home, explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school, we had air-raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. She drew a picture of a mushroom on the black­board and dotted a flurry of chalkmarks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all.

The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked, “Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.

But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded. “Why, Yolanda dear, that’s snow!” She laughed. “Snow.”

“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.