The United States and Britain, George Bernard Shaw once remarked, are two nations separated by a common language. Today he might say much the same thing about the U.S. and the whole world. ICE CUBOS, says a sign in the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Lebanese audiences watching Rambo shout exhortations in English, and a Japanese rock-'n'-roll hit begins, "Let's dancin' people/ Hoshi-kuzu nagarete feel so good . . ."
It was the British empire, on which the sun never set, that originally spread English around the world, along with tea breaks, cuffed trousers and the stiff upper lip. But when the imperial sun finally did set after World War II, the American language followed American power into the vacuum. Key reason: the language has a rare forcefulness and flexibility. Even the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary last month incorporated such Americanisms as yuppie and zilch. Explained Editor Robert Burchfield: "Our language is changing slowly, and America is leading the way now, not Britain."
Commerce is the driving force. The ads in Italy's Corriere della Sera for just one day included the words personnel, administrator, quality audit, contract manager and know-how. Germans routinely refer to their employer as der Boss, who is expected to be a good Manager. "American English is definitely the model, not English--this is what we see looking through French advertising," says Micheline Faure, organizing secretary of a Paris group called AGULF, which was formed to resist the linguistic invasion. Japanese ads, posters and shopping bags are full of a special kind of American English, often starting with an enthusiastic "Let's," as in "Let's hiking" or "Let's sex."
Hand in hand with commerce goes technology, and the tools of technology were mostly baptized in the U.S. The French still cling to ordinateur instead of computer, but in Italy even schoolchildren call it by its American name. Also floppy disks, lasers, compact disks, software. Germans buy Tapes, not Magnetbander. In fact, they call the whole field hitec.
And the athletic life. A French magazine called Vital (pronounced Veet-al) is full of terms such as le rafting and le trekking. The Germans go in for das Joggen, while Italians turn to il body building.
And show biz. Words such as network, rock, video, new wave, hit parade, album all turn up in Swedish or, for that matter, Arabic. Show biz helps introduce the language of romance: sexy, playboy and, eventually, baby sitter. In Japan, the English names for sexual organs are considered more polite than the Japanese terms, and pink is now the Japanese word for all erotic entertainment.
This combination of money and technology, show biz and sex appeal strikes many foreigners as the epitome of the American success story, and so they adopt English words that imply success itself: super, blue chip, boom, status symbol, summit. Some of that, clearly, is just snobbery. Through U.S. television, says British Grammarian Randolph Quirk, a foreigner can pick up an Americanized vocabulary "if you want to show you're with it and talking like Americans, the most fashionable people on earth." On the other hand, some upper-class Egyptian youths think it is chic to use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words like--well, merde.