If the NHS were a person, he’d be an amazing polyglot. It speaks and writes every conceivable language, including some I’ve never even heard of, and I have a degree in languages. (Whether this disparity in our linguistic attainment says more about the NHS or me is a matter of opinion.)
Obviously, if the NHS were a person, he’d be paid a lot for this linguistic expertise. But we don’t have to anthropomorphise it, for the NHS is indeed paid a lot, by us: £23 million a year to provide interpreting services for Her Majesty’s subjects who haven’t bothered to learn Her Majesty’s language. And, I suspect, much more than that to translate and print thousands of meaningless forms, questionnaires and leaflets, each easily outscoring the United Nations in the number of official languages.
Now add those millions together, multiply them by the number of the sharing-and-caring government departments, and you’ll come up with a staggering amount. I’d happily do the sums for you, but I can’t quite count so high. Whatever the sum is, it would be worth paying just to revert to English as the sole, unifying language in which the UK’s official business is transacted. Anything else is distinctly non-U. You know, ‘U’, as in ‘United’.
One of the first punishments visited by God upon mankind was to ‘…confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ In that sense our government is doing God’s work, punishing us for staying meek in the face of this multi-culti terrorism. For relegating English to the status of merely one language among many relegates England to the status of a faceless, barbaric wad of humanity — a body-strewn battleground of social engineering.
Ultimately, this multi-culti Babel will destroy our culture, what’s left of it. It’ll rip to shreds our social fabric, already riddled with holes. And it’ll do fatal damage to our wonderful language. For, if many British subjects can’t adapt enough to speak at least rudimentary English, English will have to adapt to them. That will create a myriad jargons vaguely based on English, with government translators plugging the ensuing communication gaps when push comes to shove.
And English is already suffering greviously from having become the lingua franca of the world. Many (too many) Englishmen travel abroad, confidently expecting the natives to speak English. Then they come back triumphant: ‘Everybody in Holland [Sweden, Germany, Belgium, you name it] speaks English!’ Well, I think the statement ‘Nobody in those places speaks English,’ while not exactly true, is much nearer the truth.
There’s more to a person than his skeleton; there’s more to a language than its bare bones. Using English solely as a means of communicating practical information rips its heart out. Gone are its wit, its style, its layers of meaning, its precision, its cultural references — its beauty. What remains is a brief glossary at the end of a hotel guide for the whole family.
Every lingua franca the world has ever known (Latin springs to mind) has collapsed under such an onslaught. But, as the NHS so kindly reminds us, English is under attack not only externally but also internally. If this goes on much longer, the tower of Babel will come tumbling down, burying us all under its cultural rubble.
When I lived in Texas many years ago, debates were raging on about introducing bilingual education in the state schools (just two languages, not the dozens in the NHS lexicon). Bills to that effect were passed by the legislature every year, with the governor always vetoing them. His explanation was simple: ‘If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.’
The good governor might not have been a biblical scholar, or indeed a scholar of any kind. He probably had small Aramaic and less Greek, but he had a firm grip on sociocultural realities in the West. One nation, one language. Many languages, no nation. ‘Every city or house divided against itself shall not stand’ — just as the good book says. In English.