The Internationalization of American English: Two Challenges

Driving through rural eastern North Carolina in June 2000, I noted the following sign promoting the sale of double-wide "mobile" homes:

Tres dormitorios! Dos banos! [sic] $199 mes!

Such a sign today would perhaps not surprise a resident of southern Texas or southern Florida, but the use of Spanish as an advertising medium in small towns of the American South is definitely something new, and it illustrates well one of two aspects of the internationalization of American English that students of the speechways of North America will necessarily confront in the next quarter century. True, immigration has for generations brought the United States a rich linguistic heritage, one that long predates the current influx of Spanish-speaking new residents; at various times and places, bilingual and multilingual communities have existed in the United States (as they still do). However, linguistic assimilation has generally brought about a gradual decline in the immigrant tongues and the concomitant rise of English. It is possible that the interaction of English and Spanish will eventually go that same way. But whatever the outcome, at least during the next quarter century the United States will almost certainly continue to move in what is for us the essentially new direction of becoming a bilingual COUNTRY, rather than just a country that contains various bilingual communities. Sociolinguists of both the applied and theoretical sort will have a lot to do in studying the various phenomena of Spanish-English contact and easing the transition. Whatever social and political directions our linguistic future may take, Spanish is sure to play an increasing role, one that is different from anything we have ever experienced.

A second challenge presented by the internationalization of American English arises from the undoubted influence of English as a world language in an increasingly interactive international society. Driving through southern Spain in May 2000, I was struck by the frequency with which English words and phrases were used in local advertising signs--without translations for the benefit of the locals. A few examples that I jotted down are double hamburger, camping--open, beach club, jet ski for rent, garden center, and the brand names (painted on the sides of trucks) Family Frost and Healthcare. Granted that some of these words and phrases were used in part for their appeal to tourists and (somewhat like the double-wide ad in eastern North Carolina) expatriates, a healthy percentage of the tourists and expatriates in southern Spain are not native speakers of English. The advertisers thus assumed that English would be a second language for visiting Swedes, Germans, and Russians. Moreover, the English terms were so ingenuously displayed that I infer many would have been intelligible to local monolinguals as well--that they are, in short, LOANWORDS. Even more startling for one who learned his Spanish in Mexico is the use throughout Spain of the word parking, often abbreviated as just P, to indicate a place to leave one's car, rather than estacion(arse), usually abbreviated as E in Mexico (where P is used instead to indicate a parada 'bus stop'). Likewise, though my Spanish-English dictionary does not say so, STOP means 'stop' in Spain--at least, that is what is written on all the the Spanish stop signs (in Mexico they say ALTOSTOP (together with the equivalent Arabic word) and (I am told) are normally referred to as [stap] signs by Moroccans, whatever language they are speaking. In short, though we live on a polylingual planet, humans are increasingly becoming bilingual, in their home language AND English. While this development has been evident for some time, the coming decades will see an acceleration of the process. All the old candidates for standard auxiliary language--French and Russian, for example--are increasingly outstripped by English as the key to access in science, politics, and economic intercourse.

So even as Spanish makes considerable inroads on American speech, American speech makes considerable inroads on the rest of...