Mar 4, 2011

Japanese as a Local Language and English as the Only Universal Language in the Modern World

I've finished reading Minae Mizumura's books "When Japanese Language Dies", "The Meaning of Reading in Japanese" and "The Meaning of Writing in Japanese".

She thought of the meaning of reading and writing in Japanese as a local language and in English in the modern world where English has became the universal language in these three books.

I'm quite interested in this subject, because I'm recently writing in both of Japanese and English on the internet.

I found an interesting passage in the book "The Meaning of Writing in Japanese". I'll quote it as follows.
English as a world language is the language which people, who don't have the right to use it by nature, use. People have expected that twenty-first century will be the time of English as the world language. Now the number of specialists in writing, who writes in English rather than their mother tongues, is increasing rapidly. The world, which they will write in English, will be just “the world” in itself, if the trend continues. At that time "English language literature" (not English literature) will mean just "the world literature". It will be most excellent necessarily, because the number of readers and writers is by far greatest and the language is essentially recognized as a thing coming from outside. The glory of novels written in the other languages will be gone and such novels will be peripheral. English used by Indian people had been called Anglo-Indian and divided from "true" English. But now it's natural that Indian people (and people living in the former English colonies), who have been spoken "fake" English, bear "the world literature" and became paradigmatic pioneers.
(pp12-13)
I can understand the notion of "the world language" well. In fact I often communicate with non-native English speakers in "fake" English on business and on the internet.
It's difficult for me as a native Japanese speaker to learn English, and impossible to speak as well as a native English speaker. But I'll feel at ease, if it's fine to speak in Japaenglish as one of dialects of the world language English.

Will Japanese people permit "fake" Japanese spoken by non-native speakers?

No comments:

Post a Comment