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This article in Wired talks about how “Chinglish” is going to evolve and spread into a legitimate form of English, eventually working up to this final prediction: “Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.”
My initial instinct was to write it off as hyperbolic nonsense. Even after giving it further thought, I still find it unlikely, but I’m not a linguist and the guy that wrote it is. The fact that everything in this article is stated as fact particularly irks me, since it is clearly no more than a theory, with very little supporting evidence outside of conjecture, and no sources cited (one sentence begins “[a]ccording to linguists”; oh yeah, who?).
Anyway, the guy’s point is that there are 300 million Chinese that read and write English (probably a fairly conservative estimate), but not enough of them getting good quality spoken practice, leading to the errors in translation we all love to make fun of. Those mistranslations will then spread among the Chinese populace, and eventually further afield, becoming the accepted way of speaking English.
I can’t help thinking that Chinglish is decidedly under threat, rather than spreading like wildfire among the uneducated. Chinglish can be traced probably as far back as the 17th century, where it began as a pidgin developed as a trade language between the British and Chinese. Even after that long, it’s still confined mostly to China. And now there’s mass media, the web, and so on to take into account (plus, they must know we’re making fun of them), and teaching English in China can only get better, given the dire state it’s apparently in. Also, factor in the aggressive removal of Chinglish in Beijing, in preparation for the olympics, and I think I read they’re trying to improve the teaching standard too, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
Closing point: This is in Wired. Yeah, you know what I’m saying.
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Oh, by the way...