Eurotongue

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Driving through southern Spain in May 2000, I was struck by the frequency
with which English words and phrases were used in local advertising
signs--without English translations for the benefit of the locals: a few
examples that I jotted down are "double hamburger," "camping—open," "beach
club," "jet ski for rent," "garden center," and the brand names (painted on
the sides of trucks) "Family Frost" and "Healthcare." Granted that some of
these words and phrases were used in part for their appeal to tourists and
expatriates, a healthy percentage of the tourists and expatriates in southern
Spain are NOT native speakers of English--the advertisers thus assumed that
English would be a second language for visiting Swedes, Germans, and
Russians. Almost no other languages were used in this way--the signage even
in major tourist attractions rarely was in French or German. Moreover, the
English terms were so ingenuously displayed that I infer many would have been
intelligible to local monolinguals as well--that they are, in short,
LOANWORDS. Even more startling for one who learned his Spanish in Mexico is
the use throughout Spain of the word "parking," often abbreviated as just
"P," to indicate a place to leave one's car, rather than "estacion(arse),"
usually abbreviated as "E" in Mexico (where "P" is used instead to indicate a
"parada" 'bus stop'). Likewise, though my Spanish-English dictionary does not
say so, STOP means 'stop' in Spain--at least that is what is written on all
the the Spanish stop-signs  (in Mexico they say ALTO), despite the fact that
the initial [st-] cluster is not even pronounceable in Spanish. Moroccan stop
signs also say STOP (together with the equivalent Arabic word) and (I am
told) are normally referred to as [stap] signs by Moroccans, whatever
language they are speaking. In short, though we live on a polylingual planet,
humans are increasingly becoming bilingual in (1) their home language and (2)
English. All the old candidates for standard auxiliary language--French and
Russian for example--are increasingly being outstripped by English as the key
to access in science, politics, and economic intercourse.