There are an estimated 1.5 billion English speakers in the world — with another billion or so now toiling away at their English language primers — and English is an official language in more than 75 countries. Last year a Dutch study found that one-third of the commercials on Dutch television contained English words and phrases, and in Taiwan, language students will tell you they’re not just studying English — they’re learning American.
Indeed, as the language goes global, the question of whose English gets spoken — and published — is assuming tactical importance. Just ask any world-class Scrabble player. There are two English Scrabble dictionaries, according to Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak (“Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players”), and the high-strung wordsmiths are at odds over which one to use. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, with 110,000 words, is used in the US, while the Official Scrabble Words, used in the UK and most of the rest of the world, carries an additional 30,000 words. The argument, Fatsis points out, isn’t really about language, but about the number of words that have to be memorized. “Because there is the feeling that American English is what people speak in the rest of the world,” he says, “Americans feel the dictionary should conform to our version.”
Linguistic jingoism cuts both ways, however, and American Scrabble aficionados may want to beware those other word freaks — teenage girls who have been rampaging through bookstores in search of Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison’s novel that has stormed US young adult bestseller lists as a Bridget Jones’ Diary for teens. No matter that most Americans don’t know a snog from a snivel, Rennison’s text is an unabridged lexicon of British slang, where “swiz,” “wally,” and “prat” are thick on the page. Snogging, of course, means kissing, and American teens apparently can’t get enough of it. “Competition to sound more British than their friends is so fierce that thousands of teenagers in the US are writing to Ms. Rennison demanding more Brit slang,” reports the London newspaper Express. As Rennison tells the paper, “American teenagers just cannot get enough of these old-fashioned English expressions, and I think it’s probably because they are a bit rude.”
In any case, don’t expect a snogging fad in South Korea. In that nation, an American accent isn’t just a hot commodity — it’s the only one. “The widespread anti-American attitudes of the ’80s have vanished,” says Mark Curry, a visiting professor at a South Korean university. “Now, youngsters who cannot enter good Korean universities look no further than North America to improve their lot.” American English is also dominant in Japan and Latin America, while British English monopolizes former Commonwealth domains such as the Middle East and Africa.
Elsewhere, the reworking of English Language Teaching (ELT) materials to fit linguistic tastes — like the loutish Americanizing of Harry Potter — seems to be on the wane. “Publishers are much more likely to create an entirely new language course than to adapt an existing one,” says Shelagh Speers, Director of ELT Publishing at Scholastic. Still, some publishers supply two audio recordings: one with a British accent, the other American. And others load up a smorgasbord of British, American, Australian, Irish, and Scottish accents, all ready-to-hand for the jet-setter. Though the book biz is clearly heading toward a one-size-fits-all edition for English markets, it seems that for the moment, anyway, we may be one world, but we are still many dialects.
