{"id":5027,"date":"2020-06-03T17:16:28","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T00:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5027"},"modified":"2020-06-03T17:16:28","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T00:16:28","slug":"los-angeles-review-of-books-what-do-they-know-of-english-who-only-english-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5027","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Review of Books: What Do They Know of English, Who Only English Know?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Until age 24 I lived, as many Americans do, without leaving my native continent. I first applied for a passport out of the humiliating need to go to no farther than Canada, whose entry process had recently become more stringent. But not long thereafter I went genuinely abroad, taking a 25th-birthday trip with my dad to New Zealand. The country appealed by being far enough away to necessitate my first long-haul flight and by not being overhyped as a destination (or at least it wasn\u2019t, before the\u00a0Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00a0films). Best of all, it was English-speaking, and not just in the sense that its waiters, station attendants, and hostel owners could communicate with twentysomething backpackers. The\u00a0de jure<\/em>\u00a0official Maori native language aside, New Zealanders speak almost nothing but English, and with a fascinating accent and slang as well. (Even as I came to understand the appeal of world travel, the allure of such exotic-sounding beverages as the \u201clong black\u201d and \u201cflat white\u201d convinced me of the appeal of coffee.)<\/p>

A decade later I write this essay in South Korea, the decidedly non-English-speaking country where I\u2019ve lived for years, motivated in no small part by an interest in its language (its\u00a0abundance of coffee and coffee shops<\/a>, so essential to the working process of the essayist, also plays a part). Not long ago I returned from a trip Taiwan, a destination also chosen out of interest in its language, or rather in its lingua franca, Mandarin Chinese (I did consider learning Taiwanese Hokkien, its most widely spoken local language, but couldn\u2019t find much in the way of study materials). Now and again, my Mandarin-learning project has brought to mind a local news segment I saw back in New Zealand. It told of the introduction of immersion Mandarin classes into certain primary schools. Interviewing a teacher, the reporter closed with a question asked out of seemingly genuine concern for the students: \u201cBut aren\u2019t you afraid their little brains will explode?\u201d<\/p>

It seems New Zealanders share with Americans and other Anglophones not only the English language, but also the perception of bilingualism as an impressive, potentially life-threatening achievement. Eddie Izzard expressed this attitude best: \u201cTwo languages in one head? No one can live at that speed.\u201d That quote appears more than once in the work of Gaston Dorren, a Dutchman who\u2019s made his name over the past 20 years writing books about languages. In his first, 1999\u2019s\u00a0Nieuwe tongen<\/em>, he examines the languages of migrants to Benelux, the politico-economic union of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and in the more recent\u00a0Vakantie in eigen taal<\/em>\u00a0he focuses on his native Dutch. 2012\u2019s\u00a0Taaltoerisme<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cLanguage Tourism\u201d), a kind of linguistic European travelogue, came out two years later in an expanded English translation as\u00a0Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages<\/em>. His latest book\u00a0Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages<\/em>\u00a0takes\u00a0Lingo<\/em>\u2019s concept global, considering the distinctive characteristics of the world\u2019s 20 most spoken languages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until age 24 I lived, as many Americans do, without leaving my native continent. I first applied for a passport out of the humiliating need to go to no farther than Canada, whose entry process had recently become more stringent. But not long thereafter I went genuinely abroad, taking a 25th-birthday trip with my dad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,72,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-language","category-los-angeles-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5029,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5027\/revisions\/5029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}