A language divided

I’ve written a lot thus far on various aspects of living in Japan, from the living accommodations, to the food (especially the food), the local customs, and the like. But as I’ve mentioned previously, I am employed here teaching English. It’s a lot of fun – working in the educational system, and with kids, gives a certain insight into what makes Japanese people who they are – and not a lot of money. The upshot of this, however, is that my daily life is infused not only with the study of Japanese and its various idiosyncrasies, but also with taking a magnifying glass to my own native tongue. So, please bear with me this week while I take a momentary break from talk about Japan proper, and turn my gaze instead to the other elephant in the proverbial room: the English language.

At first glance, English seems quite straightforward: it is, after all, the language that you and I speak (or at least I would assume you speak, since you’re reading this article, aren’t you?), and the idiom in which we spend our days conversing, gossiping, vituperating, writing, and otherwise communicating. And while we may hold a certain disdain for, say, marking the plural with an apostrophe, or using “your” for “you’re” – to say nothing of the language’s daily slaughter on the Internet – we can at least be confident that there is a “proper English” that we all learned in school and can rely on to make ourselves understood. Right?

…Not exactly.

One of the joys of working in English-language education is sorting out the English you actually speak from the English you teach your students, because as it turns out, there is absolutely tremendous variance in what’s considered “proper English”. The language has no central governing body akin to the Académie française for French or the Real Academia Española for Spanish, as the insanity of our spelling system can attest to. Instead, tradition is what rules the day. We as Anglophones just so happen to have 400 years of such divergent tradition, and as you can imagine, America and Great Britain (not to mention the disparate parts thereof) disagree on what counts as “proper English” on a frightening scale.

George Bernard Shaw – the English playwright who gave us what would become My Fair Lady, and he himself essentially Henry Higgins incarnate – was absolutely correct when he described the UK and the US as “two countries separated by a common language”. I should know: two of the other native English teachers in Matsubara are from England and Wales, respectively. We have butted heads time and again on aspects of the language I once thought so utterly incontestable that I scarcely stopped to think about them. Now I look at every word and turn of phrase as if for the first time, wondering just how universal it really is.

Now, perhaps you disagree with me here. After all, you’ve probably read a British book or several in your lifetime (ones concerning a certain bespectacled boy being the most likely candidates at the time of this writing), and British TV broadcasts and movies that make it overseas are still understandable to the American viewing public. But don’t be fooled: part of this is self-selection at work, since generally only titles “international” enough find any traction overseas, and even then they get meddled with. The aforementioned Harry Potter series was actually “translated” into American English by US publisher Scholastic, with some of the more confounding Britishisms – jumper for sweater, trainers for sneakers, and vest for T-shirt, for starters – changed to terms more readily identifiable to American children. They even went so far as to change the first book’s title, Philosopher’s Stone – the “Holy Grail” to alchemists, from which they hoped to make the Elixir of Life – to Sorcerer’s Stone, in order (as one Internet denizen put it) “to make it more obvious to religious fundamentalists that the book is about magic and therefore dangerous”. So sometimes, the British English you’ve actually seen wasn’t really.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the biweekly ALT meeting at Matsubara City Hall, where the two British teachers regularly air their grievances on this point. I should explain first that the English textbooks in Japan use American spelling and grammatical conventions, and that most of the Japanese English teachers have been educated in the same. So not only are the Brits incensed at having to teach “trash” instead of “rubbish”, “forty” and “color” without the “u”, and “soccer” for the sport whose true name has been “stolen” by “rugby for pansies”, they also have to deal with teachers constantly “correcting” their English, which is “not wrong, just different”.

While I mostly have no problem on these counts, one thing in particular rubs me the wrong way. One of the characters in the textbooks is from Canada, and in the second year, there is a section about Toronto, her hometown. However, the Air Canada Centre is referred to as the “Air Canada Center” so as not to confuse the students. Being the hockey fan that I am, there is no way I couldn’t be annoyed by that – it’s where you go to watch the Maple Leafs lose, for crying out loud! You just don’t do that to a hallowed institution like hockey.

So I feel for them, I really do. But then again, that “not wrong, just different” quote was originally more strident and contained a juxtaposition of “Yank” and an expletive (which I’ll spare your delicate sensibilities), so I also take a certain devilish glee in undercutting their pretensions to linguistic superiority. For example, did you know that the “-ize” ending in words like “realize” and “summarize” comes with a recommendation from no less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary, which denounces the “-ise” spelling so beloved in Britain as a non-standard variant? It’s true.

And so it goes, with them ribbing the two Americans over our pronouncing “latter” and “ladder” the same, and us coming back with their pronunciation of the letter “r” (or “ah”, in their case), them getting us on our fondness for “transportation” where “transport” will do, and on and on. On a separate occasion, the Welsh ALT labeled my pronunciation as “degenerate” for being unable to distinguish between “no” and “know”, or “choose” and “chews”. As it turns out, both pairs of words are members of lexical sets that only Welsh people can readily tell apart, so really his declaration about my English was just his provincial dialect peeking through the cracks of his studied Received Pronunciation. We all had a good laugh (or at least I laughed at him) about that one.

At the very least, both sides can agree to be perplexed at the Japanese idea of English, which includes such bizarre coinages as “symbol mark” for “logo”, “hello work” for “employment office”, and “my car” for “[one’s own] car” (i.e. “Leave your ‘my car’ at home and take the train!”). It just goes to show that whatever linguistic barriers we may face on our opposing sides of the Atlantic, we’re still far more similar than we are different. That, and Japan really needs to employ native English speakers in areas other than teaching the language.