In the third section of the latest programme, Colleen Jolly of the 24-hour Company talks about her first business trip to Australia. In particular, she remembers the very first seminar she attended.
It was designed to introduce newcomers to the country, but it didn’t focus on:
• Language
• Culture or
• Business.
Oh no! It was all about the many and various ways Australia can kill you – the animals, of all shapes and sizes, which can really ruin a visit by:
• Stinging
• Biting or
• squashing
the unsuspecting foreigner.
As Colleen puts it:
‘Even the cute, fuzzy ones can crush your hand when you’re not looking!’
She says the presentation was delivered with a kind of ‘dark humour’ – and she talks about it with plenty of the less dark kind!; but there is a serious point here. It brings us back to the subject of the show – how culture divides a common language.
She says it was generally easier to deal with the transition from American to Australian English than from American to British English.
So what is it that unites the US and Ausie forms of the language and divides them both from the UK?
The answer to that question – appropriately in this series – is distance, in all three dimentions:
• Physical
• Temporal and
• Human.
Language is a living thing, so it evolves or dies. In its original, natural habitat, it grows and develops over time, influenced by interaction with other human cultures etc. When its users move away from their physical roots, some of the elements they take with them stop developing at that point, while others adapt to the new environment, evolving to meet new physical challenges and absorbing the influences of other languages and cultures. Over time, the result is a whole new branch sprouting from the original root – related, but quite different..
English was first exported, from Essex and Kent to James Town, Northern Virginia, in 1607. In 1778, it made its first trip to New South Wales, with the first transported convicts.
The form of English spoken in Britain in the early seventeenth century is now known as ’early modern’. By the late eighteenth century, it was well on the way to ‘late modern’ English – the form we speak today – although vocabulary, dialects and so on, have gone on changing over the last two hundred years – and will go on changing over the next two hundred.
So those two groups of early settlers took with them basically the same form of the language, albeit at different stages of its development.
At the end of their journey, they both found themselves in very alien environments – and they both came into contact with native populations, with their own languages.
Both were later joined by newcomers from other parts of Europe and the rest of the world.
Over time, each generation absorbed more and more of these environmental and human influences and became less ‘British’ and more ‘Australian’ or ‘American’.
The kind of English they took across the globe didn’t follow the same line of development as the British kind. Some words and phrases were preserved in their original seventeenth or eighteenth century forms, but many more were added, from other languages and cultures – or they were invented to deal with entirely new challenges.
Britain’s former colonies around the world are all quite different, but there are at least two things they all have in common – a strong sense of:
• Independence and
• Identity.
Both are reflected in how they speak this rich, varied language we all call ‘English’ – which (as we’ll hear in Programme 7) is fast becoming the international language of business.
Far from ‘home’, migrant populations had to learn to stand on their own feet and deal with whatever came their way – whether it was a member of the native population, angry at having their homeland invaded, or a ‘cute, fuzzy’ creature, out to crush their hands!
As a result, in the US, Australia, New Zealand etc, there’s what we might term:
• a ’can-do’ attitude
• a healthy view of risk and
• An openness to the idea of importing expertise, as well as more tangible products.
I’d say that’s a pretty good combination for successful business and other collaborations, wouldn’t you?
Those of us who speak ’British English’ need to remember two things:
1 some of what we think of as ’Americanisms’ (which certain people complain are ’ruining our language’) have just been on a four-hundred-year round trip – they started here; and
2 British English itself started life as an import – from across the North Sea.
In the last section of this show, Colleen and I share our tips for:
• Bridging the language gaps and
• Making the most of the resulting opportunities for collaboration.
I’ll talk about those here next time. In the meantime, as always, if you have any:
• Questions
• Comments or
• Other communication issues you’d like to chat through
Come and talk to me – in any form of English you like! All the details are on the website.
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