English is the weird one
This Franken-language is not the baseline
Ciao,
The word ‘anglocentric’ could mean practically anything. That’s not a flaw of the term itself. It’s because English is so creepingly ubiquitous that there are countless incursions it could legitimately describe.
One specific aspect I’ve been considering lately is the tendency of anglophones to assume English as the ‘normal’ linguistic baseline. To some extent, everyone does that when learning their first foreign language. But with anglophones it’s particularly rife.
Among the bilingual Irish people I know, the ones who learned Irish first are not nearly as weirdly mystical about English as the other camp can sometimes be about Irish. Even very proficient second-language speakers of Irish will sometimes frame it as a bizarre anomaly that, for instance, we rarely use the verb ‘to love’.
Actually this places Irish closer than English to many European languages. In French, German, Italian and Spanish, you use the verb more often than in Irish but far less often than in English. Je t’aime is a relatively serious declaration; you’d want to hold your horses by adding a bien a lot of the time, shading it into an I-like-you. In German, Ich hab’ dich lieb — ‘I have love for you’ — is orders of magnitude more common than Ich liebe dich. In both Italian and Spanish, wanting/wishing is more everyday fare than loving: ti voglio bene, te quiero. (I don’t know why Italians wish you well, while Spaniards just want you. I suppose it aligns with cultural levels of theatricality.)
The above paragraph betrays the limits of translation, because all these phrases do actually mean ‘I love you’ for the mild-to-moderate end of the spectrum it covers in English. If I claimed without clarification or nuance that Germans more often say ‘I have love for you’ than ‘I love you’, I would be committing — you guessed it — anglocentrism. What registers communicatively to anglophones in the milder use-cases of ‘I love you’ is the same message that Germans receive with Ich hab’ dich lieb. To use Ich liebe dich in those cases would sound like saying ‘I cherish you eternally’ to your dog. (Which I’ll allow some people probably do.)
On that note, the claim that Irish doesn’t say ‘I love you’ is … well, more anglocentrism. First of all, contrary to popular belief, we do have a verb: gráigh. You’re just unlikely to encounter it outside poetry. The more common ways we express the concept are not hugely different from any of the widely spoken languages above.
Essentially, I think English native speakers should be legally required to learn a third language before they’re permitted to claim the second is the weird one. Probably it’s us, guys! English is a Franken-language stitched together through Germanic dispersal, Norman invasion and random phrases purloined by the British Empire along with land and spices.
That is not to say English is always the outlier. Of all the languages I speak, Irish is the only one that has no direct word for yes or no. Instead you answer with the verb:
An rachaidh tú? (Will you go?)
-> rachaidh/ní rachaidh (-> will go/won’t go)
This tendency to use verbs more clearly and directly is also why, in Irish English, people say ‘Will you have a drink?’, not ‘Would you like a drink? I knew about this before I moved to England because I am the sort of person who reads academic monographs about Irish English for fun, but a frequent communicative hurdle for recent emigrants with less perverse hobbies than my own is the asking of questions. ‘Will I open the window?’ you say, meaning: do you think it’s a good idea for me to. ‘Why are you asking me to predict your behaviour?’ thinks your English interlocutor.
Only momentarily. They get it in half a second, usually. But those little gaps are interesting to me — almost more so than dramatic language barriers.
There is a widespread delusion that speaking English gives one automatic comprehension of Ireland. That’s categorically untrue of all the Irish life still happening through our own language. Even within English, the understanding is not so instant or complete as it might seem. We are largely descended from ESL speakers who switched language in order to survive, and so — in the same way continental Europeans whose English is overall excellent might still say occasionally things like ‘I’ve been doing it since two years’ — certain variations got fossilised. That’s a good thing. A uniform language is a dead language. (That is not to say that it would cause me pain if English did die. It’s the only language I hate, although inconveniently it is also the one in which I have the most refined aesthetic judgement.)
One thing I find interesting is the life that Irish English takes on in its own right. For instance, our greater use of reflexive pronouns in English (myself etc.) is a direct translation of the emphatic forms in Irish: mé féin, mise, or mise féin if you really want to go to town. These translate tonally as pretty much: me, me, ME. (That’s my own instinct, anyway, as a non-native speaker.) Constructions like ‘Do you want to come with myself?’ came into Irish English originally to express the same emphatic nuance from Gaeilge: do you want to come with me, as opposed to someone else.
But in Irish English, the ‘-self’ can have an opposite softening impact; ‘myself’ can be a hedge compared to ‘me’, a gentle reminder that it’s okay to say no. That’s not because of anything it’s doing morphologically; it’s just the bare fact that the person is using Irish English in the first place, which makes everything looser and friendlier automatically. Nowadays most Irish people have had heavy exposure to American and British English — enough to discern on some level when their interlocutor is saying something only Irish people do. It mightn’t hit them consciously. They mightn’t explicitly note it. But it sinks into them that in-group language has been used.
Like many autistic women, I am an expert code-switcher — not because I ever set out to be, but as a necessary defence mechanism. When I use Irish English, it’s therefore a choice. One of two things is happening in my brain:
1. I want to align myself with this fellow Irish person, or
2. I want to be more emotionally available to this person who might not even be Irish in any way.
Anyway.
It’s not actually true that I hate English. I detest what it stands for, but I am incapable of actually hating any language. So when I say English is the weird one, it’s not necessarily a bad thing: learning other languages has given me a specific, delineated appreciation of my first language’s unique quirks. If that’s not love — or having love for, or wishing well — then what is?
Le meas,
N
I just have to tell you that your brain is fucking amazing. I know that's a weird thing to say. But the way you write is so sharp and original and your vocabulary is kind of stunning.