Fait accompli

Every so often someone makes the headlines by complaining that too many foreign words are making their way into English, and this has to stop. They give the impression that if this tendency goes on, there won't be any English language left. It will have been replaced by all the foreignisms.

American imports get a lot of the blame - words like cookie, closet, movie, apartment, campus, fries, soccer, mailbox. But other languages have given us plenty of words as well. Croissant from French. Delicatessen from German. Glitch from Yiddish. Macho from Spanish. Karaoke from Japanese. Gung-ho from Chinese. Moped from Swedish. Paparazzi from Italian. In other words, English is being infiltrated by other languages non-stop.

So why is this a problem? There seems to be some idea of linguistic purity - some mysterious essence of English - which is being corrupted by all these foreign intruders. They're turning our rich and sophisticated language into some second-rate and polluted language that's embarrassing to use.

What a load of nonsense. Words derived from other languages are constantly enriching and enhancing English. Without them our language would be static and stale and would gradually wither. New and unfamiliar words are fun to decipher and adapt to. And of course they're fun to try out on people who've never heard them.

In any case, what about all those English words that find their way into other countries' languages? I daresay those people who object to the pollution of English are quite happy to pollute other languages with our own linguistic migrants.

I suspect that the wholesale invasion of English by other languages is not a faux pas but simply a fait accompli.

Unwanted words

Some people get very hot under the collar about their language being "corrupted" by words from other languages. They think it's the thin end of the wedge, that if it goes on it'll lead to a tsunami of alien words and their whole language will vanish down the plughole.

Italians love English words and use hundreds of them (il weekend, il snack bar, il taxi). We Brits love foreign words and sprinkle them everywhere to show how cosmopolitan and well-travelled we are.

But the French aren't so welcoming. They turn up their noses at dubious unFrench interlopers and try to stamp them out le plus tôt possible. They regularly round up the nasty little intruders and find respectable, upstanding French words to replace them.

The Académie Française has just run another competition to create substitutes for such ghastly arrivals as "le buzz" (an internet craze), "le tuning" (hotting up a car) and "le newsletter". They eventually decided on "le ramdam", "le bolidage" and "l'infolettre". Phew, that's more of the pesky little critturs wiped out.

Personally I don't know why they're so fussed. Foreign words add variety to a language, they enrich and refresh it. Every language is choc-a-bloc with foreign words that were introduced by travellers, translators and traders. Usually the words change naturally into something more like the host language, so eventually they seem like the real thing anyway (medicine, anyone?)

What are these language purists so afraid of? It's like cooking a meal and rejecting any foreign ingredients as polluting the taste. But all our languages have been polluted and contaminated by other languages from the start, that's what gives them their unique flavour and texture. The more foreign muck the better, I say.