Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase

The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase

Language Log 2024-08-08

Xinyi Ye came upon this post on Zhīhū 知乎 ("Did you know?"), a Chinese social media site that is comparable to Quora:

Rúhé kàndài huíguó rénshì shuōhuà jiádài Yīngwén?

如何看待回国人士说话夹带英文？

"How should we view / treat people returning to China [from abroad] who mix English in their speech?"

The author is Ren Zeyu, who seems to be an anime artist, based on the bio of his account.

He begins by questioning whether what they are adding to their speech is English or whether it has already become bona fide Chinese.

He takes the well-known example of "cool" (I'll summarize what he says here).  Before the year 2000, if somebody mentioned in a praiseworthy way that something was "kù 酷", which at that time literally meant "cruel; ruthless; brutal; oppressive; savage", people would consider that he was mixing English "coo[l]" in his Chinese speech, because at that time English "cool" was still in the early stages of being absorbed into Chinese.  Standard dictionaries listed only the negative, pejorative meanings of "kù 酷"; there was not a trace of the positive meaning of "neat; nifty" and so forth.  However, with the passage of time and with more and more saying "coo[l]" in a positive, approbatory sense, it gradually became a Chinese word.  Now, if you say that someone or something is "kù 酷" (i.e., "cool"), no one would think that you're mixing English in your speech.  The positive meanings "cool; neat; nifty" have now become the primary definitions for "kù 酷".

The author then proceeds briefly to discuss other early borrowings that are polysyllabic transcriptions, such as those for "sofa", "media", and "hysteria". Here is where he moves on to new territory, and I believe that this is where the situation has become enormously important, because people are no longer feeling the need to syllabize, much less hanziize, English words.  They just say them flat out, and nobody blinks an eye that they are English words in Chinese.  They have already instantly become Chinese terms — at least in speech.  Nobody has cared to figure out how they should be written in hanzi.  Even if you write them, you write them with roman letters, and this takes us back to the old point that Mark Hansell made decades ago (see "Selected readings" below):  the roman alphabet has become an integral part of the Chinese writing system, just as romaji is in the Japanese writing system.

Ren makes the very interesting point that, even if you are planning to study abroad in Germany, you wouldn't say "ná dàole Zulassung 拿到了Zulassung" ("got a Zulassung"), you would still say "ná dàole offer 拿到了offer" ("got an offer"), because "offer" has become a Chinese word and that is the correct way to say what you want to express in Chinese".

There are hundreds of such words in current Chinese discourse, and they are at diverse stages of absorption into Chinese, e.g., "app", "logo", and "Ptú P图" (lit. "P picture/image").  Though I don't know for certain exactly what English expression this ("Ptú P图") is supposed to correspond to, it is very widely used.  If you do a Google search on "P图", you will get lots and lots of suggestions, and they all seem to have to do with Photoshop.  I have a feeling that some of the English origin expressions were coined by Chinese, sort of like "Handy" in German for "mobile / cell phone".

When it starts to look like this, it's easy for me to get lost:

Nǐ zhīdào nàgè B zhàn up zhǔ ma?

你知道那个B站up主吗?

Tāde nèiróng hǎo low ò!

它的内容好low哦!

Since that's insider's Chinese, I'm not going to render it into English.  In bold type, Ren insists that it's "quán Zhōngwén 全中文" ("completely Chinese").  But, if an outsider to that group comes up and says, "Tài wǎnle, wǒ yào go jiāle 太晚了，我要go家了" ("I'm too late,  I'd better go home"), the people of the original group would think his speech is weird for the way it has mixed in an English word.

The reasons why I think these developments are so significant are the following:

1. their speech and writing are so longer restricted to syllables and sinographs

2. they do not think they are code switching; they think they are speaking pure Chinese.

3. they are not bound by Mandarin or other topolectal phonotactics (twenty-thirty years ago, by and large they still strictly adhered to Sinitic phonotactics).

Many of the above phenomena may be attributed to the way English is being taught and learned by Chinese in China and abroad.  Very successfully!  I'm often astonished by how good my PRC students' spoken English is.  The sheer scope, scale, and numbers of individuals studying English are enormous — 400,000,000 in the PRC alone, and millions outside of China.  Plus the impact of popular culture, scholarship, science and technology, business being conducted in the global language can hardly be overstated.  But that's the subject for another post.

 

Selected readings