Americans face new threat to English: bilingual beer. How do you say 'lite' in Flemish?
Dennis Baron
debaron at illinois.edu
Mon Jul 28 05:24:23 UTC 2008
There's a new post on the Web of Language:
Americans face new threat to English: bilingual beer. How do you say
'lite' in Flemish?
The pending sale of Budweiser, “the king of beers,” to the Belgian
beer conglomerate InBev, has sparked jokey headlines like the
BaltimoreSun’s “This Bud’s pour vous,” not to mention fear among
drinkers of le roi des bières that the new owners of Anheuser Busch
might actually change the taste of their beloved Bud Light. ...
InBev (a company formed from the merger of a Belgian and a Brazilian
beer peddler, adding the threat of Portuguese to the linguistic mix)
insists that since Budweiser is already so successful, with a 48.5%
U.S. market share, they won’t tamper with the secret Budweiser recipe
– which prompted one late night comic to quip, “There’s a recipe?”
But that’s not doing much to ease the fears of loyal Bud drinkers, who
apparently fear that InBev will turn Budweiser into a bilingual
operation, like Belgium itself, more than they fear that InBev might
actually seduce Americans into drinking beer that actually tastes like
beer....
Belgian beers are multilingual, and American supporters of official
English have already begun warning about the threat that this poses to
American beer labels, which like the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution, must be understood in their original language,
English...
Budweiser is as American as apple pie, or an apple pie that you have
to be 21 to buy, but Americans fear that soon they will be told by
their new European masters to order Bud by the litre (that’s French
for liter), not the six pack, and to “press 1” to order it in English.
Or worse yet, to “press 2” or “3.” Fortunately they won’t have to
worry about converting Bud Light calories from metric to Fahrenheit,
since calories are already metric, though most Americans don’t
actually know this. . . .
Read the rest on the Web of Language
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321
http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron
read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20080728/bf4fa194/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lgpolicy-list
mailing list