The backlash against global English

I came across this New Yorker piece about J. M. Coetzee, a kind of Native English speaker publishing his novels in Spanish translation instead of the original English:

“El Polaco,” which is set in Barcelona, is about a romantic entanglement between Witold, a concert pianist of about seventy known for his controversial interpretations of Chopin, and Beatriz, a music-loving Catalan woman in her forties who assists him during his stay in the city. Fired more by mind than body, the two attempt to conduct their affair using the kind of stilted, colorless “global English” to which international communication so often defaults…

In “El Polaco,” the difficulties Witold and Beatriz experience in establishing and maintaining their relationship owe in part to their using a common language of convenience: neither has a perfect command of English, let alone an organic cultural connection to it. Their ostensibly shared language becomes a barrier to intimacy—ultimately an insurmountable one. Even as he writes in English, Coetzee is culturally and intellectually well placed to critique it in this way. The “studied quality” of his speech and prose, as Attwell puts it, “lends credence to his suspicion that English cannot be his mother tongue.” His growing alienation from that language has bought his writing closer to that of Beckett, in the latter’s French period—or to that of Nabokov, whose “feeling for English words is exact,” as Coetzee writes in the notes of one lecture from his university-professor days, “but deliberately remains that of a connoisseur, an outsider.”

This topic fascinates me because my native language is American English in all its idiomatic glory, packed with cultural references, slang, and life. Yet the English I use in day-to-day life is more often the dreary global English that’s precise, measured, free of slang, unmoored from any culture, yet the main means of communication across the globe.

I have a tough relationship with the latter. I almost wish it would disappear in order for real English to be liberated.

I also use two other languages on a daily basis, the Russian spoken by Ukrainians — there are some stark differences between that and muscovite Russian, that are as obvious as the differences between American and British English, and to a lesser extent Ukrainian.

Coetzee’s plight fascinates me because my guess is that the Russian spoken in Ukraine will suffer the same fate as his native Afrikaans, a colonial appendage that nobody really needs or wants around.

One reason I learned Russian so quickly and thoroughly is that I abhorred speaking stilted, lifeless global English during my first years in Ukraine. While I’ve used Russian in a lot of different places to get by while traveling through Central Asia, Mongolia, and a bit in China, it’s never been divorced from daily life in Ukraine; it’s a language deeply tied to urban culture in Ukraine.

That’s also probably why I don’t particular enjoy speaking Russian to Russians. I couldn’t care less about Pushkin, Tolstoy and “high” Russian culture. I’ve simply never been interested in all of that. I don’t get their cultural references, nor do Russians understand Ukrainian humor and culture.

With English, I can easily slip into the cultureless and blasé international form of the language. It’s at least neutral. Russian lacks this. Thus the default because muscovite Russian rather than a neutral form.

And thus the language I’ve spent more than a decade polishing, building up cultural references in, and making my own has turned into a dead end. I doubt Russian in Ukraine is going to completely die in the near future, but its days as a cultural force are over. Even if it’s the language I speak at home now, still speak to friends in, it’s obvious that the language is moribund.

Ukrainian is a curious thing as well, and has more in common with global English than meets the eye. Most Ukrainians native speaker speak a dialect of Ukrainian rather than the standard language. And there’s some level of feeling that’s just not there when non-native speakers switch to it.

A good friend of mine switched a few years back, and it almost felt like he became a different person. I understand why he dit it and even support the logic of it. But do I ever miss the way he could tell a story in Russian. The way he talked was so authentic, so impossible to translate because it was so connected to life in Ukraine.

It’s going to take at least a generation for Ukrainian to become a living language for all of the middle class, urban Ukrainians that have been switching over the past year. Of course It’s a small price to pay for independence.

What’s frustrating is very few people are talking about this lost linguistic generation.