PPI's Trade Fact of the Week: Most globalized language: English

PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: Most globalized language: English

April 13, 2022
Ed Gresser

FACT:

Most globalized language: English

THE NUMBERS:

Continents and regions contributing words to the English language: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, North America, Arabia, South Pacific, Caribbean.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Coca-cola, bubble gum, bikinis, digital media tycoons, hamburgers, frozen mocha, and blue jeans: Do we live in a boringly homogenized New-York-and-California-ish world? Not really. These are not American or even “English” words, but (barring “bubble,” “digital media,” and “blue”) imports from baroque Europe, the Incan empire, the South Pacific, pre-colonial Africa, 19th-century German immigrant communities, Tokugawa Japan and classical Arabia:

The trademark name Coca-Cola combines the Quechua word for the coca plant and the Malinke name for a West African nut once used to flavor the drink.
Gum seems to be a survivor of the ancient Egyptian language, brought into English via Greek. It bested a logical competitor — the Aztec word “tzictli” or “chicle,” referring to the actual gum base — which holds out mainly in the candy trademark “Chiclets.”
Bikini is the name of the unfortunate coral atoll in the Marshall Islands used to test nuclear bombs in 1946. (“Coral” is Greek and “atoll” comes from Divehi, a language spoken in the Maldives Islands southwest of India.)
Tycoon is the Japanese title — itself based on a Chinese phrase meaning “great prince” — of a high Edo-era official. Commodore Perry brought it back from Tokyo in the 1850s, and young White House staffers using it as a nickname for President Lincoln stuck it firmly in English.
Hamburger, obvious north German origin.
Mocha is the Yemeni port from which coffee (an Arabic word) was first exported in the 12th century.

What about blue jeans? The Academie Francaise resentfully accepts “blue-jean” as a “mot d’origine anglo-americaine” now permanently implanted in the French language. Mais non! The term “jeans” is French, originally Marseille dockside slang for denim-wearing Italian sailors from Genoa (“genes” in French) and brought to English sometime in the 16th century. “Denim” is French, too, literally meaning fabric “from Nimes.”

Ancient Egyptian: gum, oasis, ibis, basalt, ebony, ivory, pharaoh
Japan then: haiku, samurai, zen, geisha, tycoon
Japan now: manga, anime, karoshi, salaryman, sushi, karaoke
Persia then: chess, apricot, magic, jasmine, julep, caravan, tambourine
Iran now: chador, ayatollah, fatwa
Aztecs: chili, chocolate, coyote, mescal, tomato, guacamole
Vikings: berserk, fjord, iceberg, reindeer, saga, ski, Viking, walrus
Malay: bamboo, gong, paddy, java, orangutan, amok, gecko, bantam

BBC’s “Vocabularist” notes that “pyramid” was originally a Greek word, meaning a kind of layer-pastry, like baklava. The actual Egyptians apparently called a pyramid a “mer.”

And two language/linguistics sources

How many words are there, actually? Some blathering and hand-waving from the Oxford English Dictionary editors, who term this good question “a distraction”:

“The question ‘How many words are there in the English language?’ cannot be answered by recourse to a dictionary.”

What?! They’re supposed to know! It’s their job! OED editors try to climb out of self-dug hole.

OED’s most recent update, for March 2022, has “nearly 700” newly classified words: first gentleman, burner phone, gender-critical, trigger warning, ydraw (died out in the 1400s), decarbonize, etc. A look at the March updates.

And how many languages? The Summer Institute of Linguistics, originally an evangelical group dedicated to Bible translations, lists 7,151 known languages around the world, from A-Pucikwar (sadly vanished, Andaman Islands, no known relationship to others, said to use only the numbers “one,” “two,” plus some variants of “more”) to Zuni (9,500 speakers, New Mexico) by country and language family.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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