English and the Language of Others

ROBERT J . C . YOUNG

Any consideration of English in the context of a literature for Europe prompts the question of whether English can be contained within the paradigm of Europe, whether it could or should ever be restrained from overflowing its edges and boundaries. While English was created from the crucible of European languages, its filiations have long since stretched far beyond the borders of the continent. 203
For a long time now, English has undergone cultural encounters with the language of others who dwell far beyond the limits of its own originating continental space. Moreover, as we know, English itself as a language has spread around the globe: 203
the result that English literature has found itself marked by other cultures in the categories used to describe its own ‘others’: 203
So perhaps those who complain about the globalization of English should start with India, except that they need to remember that there the language locks inexorably into a Hindi which is itself spattered with English and ‘chalta hai’! English has shifted. Hinglish has reached. 203
If English has become Indian, then maybe it’s not so much that English has been globalised, overpowering all other languages, as that it has a constant facility of self-hybridisation, mixing with other languages in a recurring ‘make nice’. 204
English, you might say, is at least suited to be a global language since it’s already a hybrid compound of the languages of Europe: just as with Conrad’s Kurtz, all Europe went into the making of it. Now it is merging with other languages of the world, picking up not just individual words but developing new hybridised forms – Banglish, Chinglish, Punglish, Singhlish, Spanglish, Inglish, Hinglish… 204
English has always been voracious, insatiable, languishing in a constant state of desire for other languages to partner with. In recent years, as from the very first, English has been engaged in a constant practice of mixture, absorbing other languages and dialects 204
The intense history of the language politics of South Asia means that there the choice of language can never be separated from cultural, religious and class or caste issues. 205
One of the distinctive things that emerges in any study of postcolonial literature is the degree to which many if not most postcolonial societies, and the writers in them, operate in a multi-lingual environment. 205
In the 19th century, Indian intellectuals were certainly influenced by the tree/ filiation stammbaum model of languages developed by European historical philologists, which produced the idea that nations and races should be sealed homogeneous units comparable to a language, with the corollary that the nation should have a single language with borders as clearly marked as those on the map. 206
Note to self: check the languages in SA which one is spoken the most vs population
In essay tell story of student calling Afrikaans the racist language (connect to previous project and apartheid)
Writers, it seems, are expected to choose just one language, and certainly not move between languages within a single work, even if that is often the way people speak. 207
Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who in 1982 changed from writing in English to Kikuyu for his novel Devil on the Cross. For Ngugi, the practice of writing in English, the language of his former colonial master, became unthinkable, a betrayal of his own national culture. Ngugi’s situation, however, was complicated by the fact that his ‘nation’ operates in a multilingual environment in which different languages are spoken by different ethnic groups. His decision to reject English, therefore, and to write in his native Kikuyu, was in part an anti-colonial strategy, but also simultaneously an assertion of a minority language against the dominant language of Kenya, Kiswahili. Although Ngugi now writes in Kikuyu, he then translates himself into English, which remains the language in which his novels are most widely read. So in the end, it seems, he has to succumb to the power of English anyway. 209
More positively, you could say that English has taken over a special role as the language of translation. It is by a long way the most translated-into language, the largest target language on earth. This means that, as in the case of India, where English is the official language of communication between the state and those states that have official languages other than Hindi, it becomes a kind of mediating medium between languages. 209
But then to hybridise English is, in a way, as I have suggested, simply to take coals to Newcastle, English to the Angrezi, a process of code-mixing which in some ways is a kind of translation, but a translation that simultaneously goes on within a language as well as between languages – what Roman Jakobson calls ‘intra-lingual translation’.35 It is this double process that defines the essential characteristic of any process of cultural translation. So global writing in English is not a fixed form but one engaged in a constant process of intra-lingual translation, merging with the languages of the world but always specifically responding to the particular demands of different localities, becoming, in Sheldon Pollock’s formulation, a kind of ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’. 210-211

Young, Robert J.C. “English and the Language of Others.” European Review, vol. 17, no.1, 2009, pp.203-212. The University of Auckland Library, doi: 10.1017/S1062798709000660