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PARTISAN REVIEW
title for the daily entries in his diary while living in increasingly dangerous
condi tions-wi th menacing neighbors, dwindling resources, loss of the
right to buy tobacco and sweets, to drive a car or take public transportation,
and so on. In his other book,
Lingua Tertii: The Language of the Third Reich,
he described the value of this diary as "always help[ing] me over the hump:
observe, study, impress on your memory what is happening, tomorrow it
seems different, tomorrow you already experience it differently." After I
read the German edition over two years ago-two volumes (1,690 pages)–
I praised it in these pages. But because the text was unavailable in English,
my review received scarce attention. The recent raves and commentaries in
The New York Times
and elsewhere mention only parenthetically that the
translation of the second volume is expected next year.
This exemplifies yet again that Americans receive some information
about three years after other nationals, just because they don't study for–
eign languages. By contrast, even before Daniel Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
was translated into
German, debates about it abounded in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna. Some
would argue that ultimately it doesn't matter whether or nor we remain
ignorant of esoteric literature from abroad since, after all, English has
become the world's
lingua franca,
the language spoken where it matters, in
the marketplace.
However, those who have read the winter issue of
Foreign Policy
are
bound to have second thoughts. There, the linguis t Joshua Fishman predicts
a "New Linguistic Order": he expects that English will continue being used
among diplomats, air traffic controllers and on the Internet as the "killer
language." But this very dominance of English, he goes on, creates a sort of
backlash against "the vitriol generated by grand-scale globalization," which
induces people around the world to increasingly promote their regional lan–
guages: Swahili in East Africa, Hausa in West Africa, Mandarin Chinese in
China, Spanish in the Americas, varieties of Pidgin English in Australia and
Papua New Guinea, and Arabic-the language of Islam and regional
trade-in North Africa and Southeast Asia, among others. Globalization,
Fishman explains, lacks the authenticity of local languages. They are the
symbolic functions linking peopl e to their pas t, and to those around them.
Fishman notes, also, that Navajo .children in Rough Rock, Arizona
scored higher in English reading competency than those who were first
schooled in English. Clearly, multilingual education makes for flexibility
and choice, and for the possibility of diverse people to interact, unlike
bilingualism which is said to boost self-esteem. Moreover, Fishman's study
corroborates again that fluency in a foreign language improves the mastery
of one's native tongue. In sum, Europeans as well as so-called Third World
people will be better placed to compete in the global market than
