An indication of the ever increasing globalisation of the world we live in today is not only that it seems everyone on the planet takes an interest in American politics, TV programs and movies but also that we all share a global language – English. It seems sometimes that most Scandinavians speak English better than many of my friends in this country, friends who possess it as a first language. Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed that English is the only language I really know but then New Zealand is very far removed from other countries. Unlike Brits, New Zealanders can't take a short train trip under the English Channel to France and immerse themselves in a foreign culture. It is perhaps a pity. There is research that suggests bi-lingual folk are generally smarter than people who only possess the one language, perhaps because these people often undertake the complex mental task of translating concepts between different tongues, and New Zealanders like myself who only speak one language perhaps miss out.
Yet, if are to have a global language, we could do worse than English. English has two qualities, I understand, that make it unusual and make it suitable for being a global language. First, it is grammatically much simpler than most other languages – English doesn't have nearly as much in the way of complex declensions and conjugations as a language like German does. Second, English has an enormous lexicon, much larger than most other languages. English speakers have at their disposal an enormous smorgasbord of possible locutions, a multitude of synonyms for any one particular concept, often stolen from other languages, and this enables writers in English to enrich the texture of their prose by continually substituting one word for another. This variation in word-choice is even considered a marker of good style.
But English is far from perfect and one of its problems is to do with pronouns, a problem that is the main subject of this post.
Consider the sentence, "If a person wants to go to Heaven, he should try to be good." What's wrong with the sentence? The solecism it commits is that seems to imply that all people are male, a gendering of language that could be construed as sexist. But it is a problem not easy to fix because English lacks a gender-neutral third-person pronoun applicable to people. You could use the word "it" as in "If a person wants to go to Heaven, it should try to be good" but this obviously doesn't work because, in English, the word "it" is reserved for inanimate objects and animals we don't like. One could say "one" as in "If one wants to go to heaven, one should try to be good" but this pronoun is equally unsuitable in many situations and, even when it can be used, it can make one sound as hopelessly old-fashioned and affected as if one were trying to emulate the Queen of England.
When this issue of gendered language first became salient, in the 'eighties I think, many academics, both male and female, rushed to the other extreme, seeking to display their progressive politics prominently by employing female pronouns in such situations, by saying things like "If a person wants to go to Heaven, she should try to good". But this practice is equally frowned upon in academia today, has also been abandoned, and the preferred convention currently is to use the word "they", as in "If a person wants to go to Heaven, they should try to be good". I don't like this manoeuvre either: the subject abruptly changing from singular to plural in mid-sentence offends my sense of good grammar. I think noun and pronoun should agree in number. It is an issue hard to resolve. In this blog I have tried to overcome the problem of gendered language by saying "he or she" as in "If a person wants to go to Heaven, he or she should try to be good" but this is very cumbersome and I have not always done so consistently.
I have been interested in this problem for a long time. When I was twenty I wrote an essay about Kathy Acker (I think) in which I talked about the relationship between writer and reader; throughout I employed the pronoun "she" for writers and "he" for readers. Part way through the essay, when changing role from a reader of Acker to a person writing an essay about her, I started using the pronoun "she" to describe myself. It seemed to me a playful way to tackle issues of sexism and language, to have the essay perform its argument, but it may possibly have got me into trouble. Language and sexual politics are both mine-fields and you have to careful when navigating either.
Another pronominal issue in English is that the second-person pronoun "you" is both singular and plural. Once upon a time English distinguished between singular and plural forms of this pronoun – we had "thee" and "thou" as well as "you". "Thee" was singular and "you" was plural. Over time, however, "thee" and "thou" vanished for good, an impoverishment of the language in my opinion. Now here in New Zealand an interesting phenomenon that in some way redresses this devolution of the language has arisen: in Maori and Pacific Island communities, people distinguish between singular and plural forms by saying not only "you" but also "yous". For instance, in South Auckland, it is not uncommon to hear sentences like "If yous kids don't get a move on, yous'll be late for school!". I don't know how this fantastic linguistic innovation originated – but I really like it. I once considered writing a novel that uses "you" and "yous" throughout but I suspect I could only get away with such a novel if I set it in Mangere; it wouldn't work if I set it in Denver, Colorado.
English is in very many ways imperfect. To move from pronouns to adjectives, if I say a movie is "terrible", am I saying I didn't enjoy it or am I using an older meaning of the word, saying that it is 'terror-inducing'? Sometimes I feel that the language has deteriorated over the last hundred years, that semantic drift has reduced it, and wish we could return to the English used in the nineteenth century at a time when people actually read books. And so many political issues involve language and could be clarified if we could establish common terms and common meanings. Should we talk of ISIS as Trump and much of the media do, or should we follow Barack Obama and Al Jazeera and speak of ISIL? Consider the word "liberal". I often use this word in this blog and, when I do so, have in mind the meaning it has in much current American discourse. Here in New Zealand though, people tend more to assert political allegiance by saying which party they support, Labour or National or the Greens or whatever; the terms Right and Left are less frequently used and the word "liberal" is almost unknown, is as rare as hens' teeth – although people have certainly heard of "libertarians" and "Neo-Liberals" even when they are not quite sure what these names designate. There is considerable uncertainty here about whether 'libereralism' is a movement of the Right or the Left. I wrote something like an article once in which I described myself as a liberal and this is something else that may have got me into trouble.
Whether we are talking about the absence of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in English, the use of the word "yous" among Pacific Islanders in South Auckland, or the precise meaning of the word 'liberal', one thing is clear. Language is political. Political Correctness is predicated on the notion that we can regulate social attitudes by regulating language. I don't know if this is right or desirable but, certainly, if we need to debate something, all parties need to agree on the meanings of the words they use. And this is a never-ending process.
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