DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
11 April 2008
Change Is Gonna Do Ya Good
This article appeared in the August 2007 edition of eJournal USA.
By Ilan Stavans
Language, by its nature, is a living, ever-changing force in society. The author celebrates that fact and discusses some of the influences that have contributed to the dynamism of the English language in particular. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His books include Dictionary Days (Graywolf) and Love and Language (Yale University Press).
How many words are there in the English language? According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a total of more than 600,000. Each of us, of course, has the capacity to remember but a fraction. How many exactly? Depends on whom you ask. A person's vocabulary goes through dramatic transformation in life: from a handful of words by a babbling baby and the jargon-driven repertoire of the teenager, to the displays used by adults in different settings (home, work, friends, etc.). In truth, the inventory of words is never set. It isn't only that as individuals we are in constant change but language as such isn't static. The OED, as a historical lexicon, keeps on growing. It includes more entries today than ever. But a vast number of entries — they are called "voices" — are archaic, barely used today.
All of which points out two opposing forces constantly at work on our language: ephemerality and durability. Only dead languages are static. Think of Aramaic, for example. Its use today is generally limited to scholars of history or religion. Hence, there's no need to come up with equivalents for "fax," "soft money," and "steroids." Its lexicon is stable. On the other hand, many modern languages (for example Mandarin, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Arabic) are in flux. To survive, they are constantly reaching out, importing foreign terms while, at the same time, exporting their database to other tongues. The large waves of migration of the modern world, along with the instant technology we've devised (television, radio, movies, the Internet), encourage verbal cross-fertilization. How many Germanic words does the English language contain? And how many Anglicisms are accepted in Spanish? The answer, again: a lot. The tension between the ephemeral and the enduring is the key to life: A language cannot be altered so much as to erase its core; but the core alone doesn't make the language vibrant.
Needless to say, some tongues are more versatile than others. I was born in Mexico. Soon after immigrating to the United States in 1985 (to New York City, to be precise), I was struck by the resourcefulness of American English. A simple ride on the subway would bring me into contact with dozens of different tongues. The common element was everyone's desire to master English. Yet that desire clashed with the ubiquity of the languages people brought with them from their places of origin. The result was a mishmash, a Babel-like mix. In other words, no matter where I went, the English I heard was impure, contaminated, always interacting with other codes of communication. Like me, millions of immigrants learn English on the street. Some might have access to more formal training, but even they are shaped by the pervasiveness of popular culture. And pop culture doesn't adhere to strict rules. It enjoys being jazzy, unpredictable, chaotic. Hence, to understand how the language works through that means is to appreciate its freedom.
In my personal library I have a large collection of dictionaries. The majority are monolingual. A few are historical. I have some defined by national and geographic coordinates: a lexicon of Argentine Spanish, another one of English in the Southwest, and a third of French in Quebec. I have dictionaries shaped around a discipline: medical, sports, and advertising lexicons. Plus, I have bilingual and even multilingual ones, such as my two-volume Hebrew-Greek-Latin. Having them next to me serves as inspiration. The building blocks of all the poetry ever composed — from the Bible, Homer, and Dante, to Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, and Derek Walcott — is included in them, in scrambled fashion, obviously. For me poets are "discoverers" of language: They make sense by bringing order to language, a new order, unlike any that came before.
Dictionaries are an essential tool for keeping a language in cohesive form. They are manuals of usage and receptacles of wisdom. They are also memory boxes containing the way past speakers utilized words. They can also be instruments of coercion. In times of political repression, tyrannical regimes use them as proof that rebels are misusing terms, i.e., misappropriating the collective heritage. What I find most endearing, and frustrating, in dictionaries, is their inefficacy. By nature, their ambition is always defeated. The moment a new hard-bound edition of the OED is released, its content is already dated. The thousands of words coined by people since the manuscript went to press aren't in it. Hence, as in the myth of Sisyphus, its makers have to get at it again, immediately, incessantly, endlessly. But they'll never fully succeed, for they are attempting the impossible: to contain language, to make it manageable. By its very nature, a living language is boisterous, its energy never-ending.
In an earlier paragraph I mentioned immigration. When it comes to American English — as the American journalist H.L. Mencken understood perfectly — its resourcefulness depends on the invigorating presence of immigrants arriving to the nation from every corner of the world. If the country performs its functions properly, those immigrants, in a relatively short period of time, will acquire enough English-language skills to become part of the social mosaic. But their assimilation is never a one-way street. As immigrants become Americans, the United States is altered too by their presence. This interchange is particularly recognizable at the level of language. Just as the Irish, Scandinavian, and Jewish newcomers became fluent speakers, so did the nation's tongue incorporate voices, expressions, syntactical patterns, and other verbal dexterities they brought along with them. And the rest of the population embraced those elements.
I'm hardly surprised to find out, as I often do, that a generous portion of lexicographers come from immigrant families. Their parents are the ones who learned English. Consequently, in the domestic realm, words were frequently contested. Why is this term spelled in such a way? What about its pronunciation? What are its roots? I know it from experience: Immigrants are converts. Having come to a language from outside, they embrace it with conviction, studying its rules with a zeal native speakers seldom share.
So to the question of how many words are there in the English language, my recommended answer is: not enough, ever.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
