It turns out aliens speak English (almost exclusively)
What language should the world speak?
There are enough “unidentified anomalous phenomena” wreaking havoc with climate here on earth right now without adding those in outer space allegedly investigated by government agencies. Yes, I’m talking about UFOs.
After retired Maj. David Grusch’s testimony in January and the subsequent denials by the Pentagon, a congressional subcommittee met to hear from others. We’re in 2023, but these conversations have been going on since 2017 (the 3 Navy videos leaked to The New York Times.)
A NASA panel is reviewing hundreds of sightings over 27 years. Given all the activity here in America, one would think aliens must speak English (see the graphic below.) If aliens speak English, what language should the world speak?
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1604 is the date the first English dictionary was published—2,449 words. (Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary including addendum has 470,000.) At around the same time, the colonization of North America took off.
North Americans spoke an English dialect along with the influence of French and Spanish spoken by colonist and the West African slave trade. The industrial revolution, technology, the innovation of new things (steam engine, dynamite, computers, the internet, vaccines) and ideas added words to the lexicon.
Modern American English took a few hundred years to hatch.
A young boy was rushed to the hospital from the scene of an accident, where his father was killed, and prepped for emergency surgery. The surgeon walked in, took one look and said: ‘I can’t operate on him—that’s my son.’
Perhaps you’re thinking, “how’s this possible? The father was killed.” An example of the sexism of language. The surgeon of the riddle is, in fact, the boy’s mother.
“Men are still very often the invisible standard against which a group’s language is compared,” says Scott Kiesling, scholar of language and masculinity at the University of Pittsburgh.
The assumption is that surgeons, scientists, lawyers, writers, actors are male, unless otherwise proven.
While the protagonists in language development have been mostly men—think of the army, aristocracy, merchants and laborers, printers, dictionary makers, industry and technology people—women’s impact is enormous.
Women influence the bottom up evolution of language.
Language and culture are tightly linked—we use language to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms.
Culture is a vehicle for language dissemination and political influence.
Rosemary Salomone says language influences how we “categorize, evaluate, and remember the world” and “make sense of the human experience.” What are the pitfalls of English’s dominance for native English speakers?
In our conversation on value in multilingualism in culture, Rosemary Salomone and I explore the cultural element of the spread of English—the soft power of English-language in music, movies, television, and social media, as well as the many social and psychological advantages of multi/bilingualism.
At the 14-minute mark, Salomone describes the change in the scientific and academic community. Presentations that once used to be in each scientist and researcher native language are now all in English. You can guess the disadvantage for a non-native speaker—and the loss of cultural nuance for the audience.
From that serious topic, we got into jokes (the most challenging to translate), and business. Some companies have switched to English all over the world. Speak the language or you’re not getting promoted.
But what the culture? At minute 19:30, Rosemary says the question is whether English is becoming detached from American and British culture. “Maybe English is not tied to American culture anymore.”
The thing is American culture is so pervasive around the world—not just Hollywood, but social media. And those sources of exposure have soft power, in addition to actual political power.
Questions of language are inevitably intertwined with questions of national/ethnic identity and class (the latter especially in places where there is a legacy of colonialism).
Fluency, or even just proficiency, in English has increasingly become a tool for economic mobility and access to global markets, audiences, and conversations. What are the consequences for other languages and identities around the globe?
Vindicating Gramsci, the American law professor and linguist explores the far-reaching effects the anglophone language has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business in The Rise of English.
The European Union has used multilingualism to promote integration and economic mobility while tempering the spread of English. Why is multilingualism so important?
Advantages of multi-bilingualism
“The world is chasing after English for the opportunities it presumably offers.” However, intelligence is a multidimensional construct.
The cognitive advantages of bilinguals include: increased attention control, working memory, metalinguistic awareness, and abstract and symbolic representation skills.
“Bilinguals seem more adept at solving certain spatial tasks that require mental manipulation, which may have some connection to mathematical ability. Bilingualism may also influence unconscious processing, like divergent thinking, which helps lay the foundation for creativity.”
After the initial headlong rush to globalization, employers are learning the value of hiring people with facility in multiple languages.
You see the world through “two different conceptual prisms”, viewing events on the backdrop of a broader range of experiences. Using a second language appears to promote deliberation and reduce emotional resonance—which leads to less biased decisions.
Once you speak more than one language, you can learn additional languages more easily. This may be because you’re able to focus on new information while suppressing interference from the language you already know.
Speaking two or more languages may also affect the aging process. It helps preserves the structure of white matter in the brain and wards off dementia as people age.
The pandemic has emphasized the need for language skills, especially in health care. “The health crisis… revealed the limitations of machine translation and the false sense of comfort with English monolingualism that technology has created,” writes Salomone.
Global Englisch?
Perhaps English will become detached from its anglophone cultural associations. Maybe it already has. Alexander Wells talks about “the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch.” Because in many parts of Europe, English is already mixed with words from other languages.
“When Germans say they’ll organise a social event spontan, they mean they’ll work out the details at short notice. To socialise spontaneously, in English, means something rather different. But S. and I and our Neukölln friends have started using it in the sense of spontan. « OK cool text me Sunday and we’ll choose a place spontaneously. » This error is becoming part of our little language, our ultra-local dialect, just among us.”
German wasn’t one of the languages Rosemary and I talked about in our conversation. We outlined how French and Italian are playing deference in education. But being the language of technology and science, English has a way to get through. Italians now say “supportare,” from “support,” when they actually mean sostenere, the Italian word.
That’s not so bad, though. Because bilinguals have their mother tongue to fall back on for private talk, to enjoy literature and poetry, when they want to be proper. English may be everywhere—at airports, in stores and many other places around the world—and play alright with other languages, but anglophones have nothing to fall back on.
Many languages have what we call “false friends”—terms that may seem to translate from one to the other, when they actually mean something quite different. For example, you can be “embarrassed” about something, but when you’re embarassada (Spanish), you’re saying you’re pregnant.
When you lose a language, the culture associated with it goes as well. And that would be a shame. Literary works in translation tend to be hard to read. For poetry and dialects, you lose much of the meaning.
Plurality tends to survive, says Wells. “… just as globalisation renders some things more (superficially) similar, it also generates new kinds of locality.”
“Anytime language reform happens, it has to happen in the context of cultural change.”
- Lal Zimman, Associate Professor Director of Graduate Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Friendship:
When the French wanted to strengthen bonds with the United States, they sent a massive copper structure we now call the Statue of Liberty. French historian Édouard de Laboulaye made the proposal for the statue in 1865. The French contributed funds, and work began in France in 1875 under sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. At 305 feet (93 meters), including the pedestal, the Statue represents a woman holding a torch in her raised right hand and a tablet bearing the adoption date of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) in her left.
In recent years, New York city has seen a bilingual revolution—with many programs of French language immersion.
