| 1 | 1 | | In January 1964, while touring on the Continent, the Beatles rerecorded their fourth |
| 2 | | single in German: 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' translated as 'Komm, Gib Mir Deine |
| 3 | | Hand’. For some years, it had been de rigueur, a matter equally of diplomacy and |
| 4 | | commercial good sense, for bestselling UK pop artistes to do foreign language versions |
| 5 | | of their hits. |
| 2 | 6 | | After the Beatles-led worldwide dissemination of rock music, however, the practice |
| 7 | | ceased. Partly, this was because the English language was the one most naturally suited |
| 8 | | to the muscular demands of rock; and partly because of the sheer scale of its impact: |
| 9 | | Continental audiences demanded the original, the real thing; not something artificially |
| 10 | | rendered into their native tongue, something ersatz. |
| 3 | 11 | | The reactionary commentators who denigrated rock in the 1950s and 1960s as a |
| 12 | | culturally harmful phenomenon could hardly have dreamed how culturally valuable it |
| 13 | | would prove: as a major stanchion on which the worldwide advancement of the English |
| 14 | | language was built. Significantly, the nine-part TV series The Story of English opens with |
| 15 | | a snatch of Russian rock music: the lyrics are in English. |
| 4 | 16 | | The premise of the programme is that English has now become the first truly global |
| 17 | | language, the genuine lingua franca. Though rock music has been of inestimable value - |
| 18 | | particularly in fostering a universal awareness of English in children and young adults - |
| 19 | | other factors have been critic al. Prime among them, of course, was the Marshall Plan1) |
| 20 | | and the ensuing social, economic and technological hegemony of America. |
| 5 | 21 | | The post-colonial situation must also be considered. When the British withdrew |
| 22 | | from the Indian sub-continent and large parts of Africa, their most abiding legacy was |
| 23 | | the English language itself. It was adopted officially by a number of emergent countries: |
| 24 | | the neutral option, as it enabled leaders to avoid favouring one or other of the competing |
| 25 | | local tongues. |
| 6 | 26 | | Of course, the circumstances in which English has flourished means that it has |
| 27 | | assumed wildly divergent forms. One of the ground-rules of this series is that no one |
| 28 | | dialect or patois is inherently superior to any other. They are all simply varieties of |
| 29 | | English. After all, the notion of a Queen's English, or even a BBC English, is a faintly |
| 30 | | ridiculous one. Just as dictionaries are out of date by the time they are published, so |
| 31 | | those who assume the existence of a kind of echt English, of which the other forms are |
| 32 | | bastard offspring, have missed the point. English has proved durable because of its |
| 33 | | suppleness and readiness to change. The hip argot of today is the BBC English of |
| 34 | | tomorrow: only this week a TV weatherman referred to a bank of cloud 'getting its act |
| 35 | | together'. Also, English has that magpie quality of absorbing useful pieces of other |
| 36 | | languages - de rigueur, ersatz, lingua franca, echt - without ever endangering its essential |
| 37 | | character. |
| 7 | 38 | | In its examination of the mutability of the language, The Story of English adopts a |
| 39 | | radical stance. No doubt many of us are conservatives in matters of language, finding the |
| 40 | | disposable neologisms of Californian surfers, for example, intensely irritating. Yet the |
| 41 | | more modish, the more cryptic a conversation, the more delight The Story of English |
| 42 | | apparently takes in recording it. |
| 8 | 43 | | The Story of English seems to treat the spread of the language entirely positively, |
| 44 | | which raises one of the possible shortcomings of the series. It seems to pay too little heed |
| 45 | | to the negative aspects of all this - particularly the role of the language in ushering in |
| 46 | | American socio-economic imperialism, the condition sometimes referred to as |
| 47 | | Coca-colonialism. |
| 9 | 48 | | Even so, it's clear that the English language is still the UK's richest natural |
| 49 | | resource. Viewed from that perspective, the government plans to cut the budgets of the |
| 50 | | British Council and the BBC World Service seem more misguided than ever. |
| | | |
| | | from 'The Listener', September 18, 1986 |
noot 1: Marshall Plan: a programme of U.S. economic aid for Europe after World War II
