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14 April

Here's something really fascinating. I heard it on the radio today while I was planting carrots on my allotment, but don't let this put you off. Professor Deborah Cameron is the 'Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication' at Oxford University (this Professorship, by the way, is on the shortlist for the 2004 Henry Kissinger Awards For The Most Depressing Example Of Unintentional Irony, which I've just this minute invented). Still, don't let this put you off either, because Cameron has put together a fascinating study of the use of language as a cultural tool - specifically the Americanisation of communication as a bludgeon for corporate globalisation.

Her work has studied not just the obvious spread of the US-version of the English language (if such it can be called) around the world, but also the way that the specific forms of that language have infiltrated others - how, for example, Hungarians now use US-style formulation in their own language. Much of this is the result of the pernicious influence of US-trained 'communications experts', and the method of its global spread has been the corporation, which systematically trains its workers in the use of US-style language, based on the ideological certainty that American-style communication is the way to go. She writes, for example:

"Last summer I took part in a BBC World Service programme on which I discussed this issue with a New York-based therapist. She argued that there was no place in the modern 'global village' for cultural variation in discourse styles: we must sacrifice diversity for the sake of efficiency and subordinate national differences in the cause of international understanding. She illustrated the point with reference to Japan, where she claimed that the existence of multiple levels of politeness/formality was problematic not only in communication between Japanese and foreigners, but also in communication between Japanese themselves! She seemingly did not notice that the 'sacrifice' she was advocating was essentially a matter of everyone else in the global village assimilating to the preferences of its richest and most powerful resident."

The result of all this is the homogenising not just of languages themselves, but of the way people use them - and as Orwell famously pointed out, the way language is formulated affects the way people see the world.

Posted by paul at April 14, 2004 04:44 PM

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