Murat, a Kazakhstani oil executive, sat in our living room and appraised the unabridged dictionary with a curious eye. “Big book,” he observed. Murat has an English vocabulary the size of the average American 2-year-old’s.

But his is a vocabularythat is markedly different, including words like “homesick,” “government,” and “international.” He arrived in Boston three months ago with no English words at all. When he returns to Kazakhstan next week, he will be one of the 10 executives in his company who “speak English.”

We explain that the dictionary is an “English word book,” as a look of dismay clouds his face. “How many?” he asks. “A half a million, more or less.” That puts his stock of 2,000 words in sorry prespective. We hasten to explain that we normally use only a fraction of those words; in fact, my wife and I don’t know most of them. That relaxes him a bit. It is not easy to learn a third language at age 44.

Murat continually consults his Russian-English pocket dictionary. (Kazakhstan has been too isolated to justify Kazak-English dictionaries.) When Murat was younger, he learned Russian for the same reason he now learns English: It was a requirement for getting ahead.

The Kazakhs may not have English dictionaries, but they have gas and oil. Lots of gas and oil. And so Murat leaves his wife, children, and two granddaughters to spend three months at Bentley College’s World Learning Center, receiving individual tutoring in English mornings and afternoons. The program is mostly populated with foreign students preparing to attend American colleges.

Murat is in the smaller “Executive Program. ” My wife and I are his “social conversation partners” on late Friday afternoon and in the evening. We take him to the Science Museum and Home Depot and discuss what we’ve seen and thought.

Murat is a living rebuke to those American rednecks who want to declare English as the nation’s official language and deny students the Band-Aid of bilingual education. Forces more potent than mere legislation guarantee that English will remain the national language.

As Max Weinreich puts it, “A language is a dialect that has an army and navy.” English has both, plus an Air Force, Marine Corps, space programs, and multiple stock markets in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia.

The Good Old Boys will never require an English-Spanish phrase book to purchase Bull Durham tobacco down at the general store.

Immigrants from Asia, Africa, and South America will learn English for the same reason our polyglot ancestors who came through Ellis Island speaking Swedish, German, Italian, etc., switched to English: old-fashioned economic necessity. It didn’t require an act of Congress.

The choice is learn English or languish. In Murat’s case, the choice is learn English or depend on translators to caution you as you attend those meetings with American wheeler-dealers in Fort Worth and New York City. One can’t be an effective player in any of the currant Great Games without English.

The sun never sets on the English language because it was left behind when the British began to close down the Empire. And by the time colonialism had imploded, the abandonment of English had become impractical.

By then, English had united nations like India – which has at least two dozen distinct languages – each with its own set of dialects. To give any one of them dominance would have produced a cultural civil war. So, of necessity, English remained the official language of Pakistan, India, etc.

A second reason why English is the only game in town is that it has the vocabulary to do the work of the modern world. Urdu, Hindi, and Swahili just can’t cut it when dealing with 20th-century science and technology. In vain, some European linguists have attempted to develop designer equivalents of the scientific vocabulary produced in these United States.

French rednecks – whose language does have the capacity to mediate modern science and technology – have abandoned this competition and redirected their efforts to getting rid of the despised “Franglias” – adopted English words.

(But as fast as the French Academy excommunicates “les weekends” and “le mailing,” the French population adopts “le chewing gum” and “le snaque-barre.” Talk about trying to sweep the beach clear of sand.)

A third reason is that English is already the international language. The UN does its business in English. English controls international air traffic and runs the Internet. (Anatoly Voronov, Russia’s director of Glasnet, characterized this linguistic hegemony as “the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism.”) With all due respect to the Franks, the modern lingua franca is English.

For, in the end, a language is influential to the degree that its speakers enjoy cultural and geopolitical power.

If there is a cause for fear, it is not that the Gulliver of English will be rendered helpless by the Lilliputians of Spanish and other less popular tongues. It is, instead, that the rich variety of the world’s languages will eventually go the way of wildlife in the Serengeti, depriving the world of the individual nuance and peculiar beauty that each language/culture embodies.

Bruce MacDonald is a retired educator who worked as a university and public school teacher, a school administrator, and principal of Weston High School for 12 years.



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