Is Chinglish the savior of English spelling?

July 8, 2008 in geekiness, thought

In Wired today there is a delightful little article by Michael Erard which suggests that the future of English may very well lie in the often-humorous misuse of English by non-native speakers in China and other Asian countries. Due to a lack of native-English-speaking teachers and a lack of spoken practice, Chinglish is a sort of English “happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us” and may already be well on its way to being a real, bona-fide dialect of English. Chinglish features exactly what you (or your favorite linguist) might expect: “correct” pronunciations of English words are re-interpreted to conform to the often very different sound patterns (phonology) of whatever sort of Chinese is spoken locally, resulting in non-reduced vowels (“har-moh-nee” vs. “har-muh-nee” for harmony, to use one of Erard’s examples) and the loss of the three-way /t-f-th/ distinction (as in the near-minimal triple ten-fen-then), with /f/ and /th/ replaced by the far-easier /t/. Grammatical peculiarities of English are lost, and grammatical peculiarities of Chinese are adopted.

More interesting, at least to me, is the fact that, having learned the language primarily in written form, phonetic distinctions lost in speech but preserved in spelling might be restored or at least reinterpreted. As an example, many of the english words that are spelled with an -eo- were once pronounced with an “ey-oh” sound, a diphthong (or glide between two vowels, like in boy “bo-ee” or how “ha-oh”), but modern English no longer uses the “eo” diphthong so a word like theory is pronounce “thee-ree”, with a monophthong (or “pure vowel”). But, as Erard points out, “In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), theories is [pronounced] ‘tee-oh-rees’”, restoring a diphthong of sorts. So, in other words, English spelling is so hard in part because it long ago stopped accurately representing English pronunciation, and it makes sense that someone learning English primarily from spelling would learn English pronunciations somewhere in between the “correct” ones and those preserved in spelling.

I have no idea if this is a real feature of Chinglish as a whole, since I’m basing my observation on a single pronunciation, but it’s interesting to imagine a dialect of English that is derived by a historical process of a fundamentally different sort than normal. That is, separate dialects develop from random drift in pronunciation or grammar preserved by geographic isolation (among other things), and if the isolation is extreme enough or the drift fast enough, speakers of one dialect can’t understand speakers of another dialect, and you are well on your way to having two entirely separate languages. Hence, the most striking linguistic diversity is generally found in places with the most strikingly isolated populations, like New Guinea.

However, with all the super-connectivity that we have today these old rules often don’t apply, and it’s not surprising that we might begin to see real dialects of English spring up in bizarre places with bizarre features (like tonal grammatical particles, another feature of Chinglish), discontinuities in the normally smooth linguistic drift that, with a few exceptions, generally characterizes the development of languages.