The world’s most popular YouTuber is probably PewDiePie. Ostensibly, his videos offer his thoughts on video games, but they also provide a philosophy of life in perfect vernacular youth English: “Don’t be a salad. Be the best goddamn broccoli you could ever be.” His 59.3 million subscribers (or “Bros”, as he calls them) have mostly stayed loyal even after Disney dropped him last year for posting anti-Semitic videos. He said he’d only been joking.
全球最知名的Youtube网红可能就数PewDiePie了。表面上，他的视频是表达他对视频游戏的看法，但这些视频也通过最地道的年青人口头英语表达了他的生活哲学：“不要做一盘沙拉，尽力做一棵最棒的该死的西兰花!”他有5930万订阅者(他把这些订阅者称为“兄弟”)。虽然去年他因上传反犹太人视频(他说他只是在开玩笑)而遭迪斯尼(Disney)解约，但大部分订阅者仍在继续关注他。
PewDiePie lives in Brighton but — as the faint accent in his videos reveals — he is a Swede called Felix Kjellberg. Born in 1989, he represents the first global generation in which tens of millions of people from outside the English-speaking world speak perfect English. That shift is ominous for the US and UK. Thanks to English, these countries have dominated the global conversation. Their entertainment, media, university and tech sectors bestraddle the world. But now the PewDiePie generation, machine translation, Brexit and Trump are combining to threaten their dominance.
PewDiePie住在英国的布莱顿(Brighton)，但是——正如他视频中不太明显的口音所暴露出的——他是瑞典人，真名叫费利克斯•谢尔贝里(Felix Kjellberg)。他出生于1989年，属于第一个“全球世代”，这个世代的许多非英语国家的人也能说一口完美英语。对美国和英国来说，这种转变是个不祥的征兆。拜英语所赐，这两个国家主导了全球的话题。他们的娱乐、媒体、大学和科技行业均傲视全球。但现如今，在PewDiePie一代、机器翻译、英国脱欧和特朗普(Trump)的共同作用下，美英两国的主导地位受到了威胁。
A few non-native speakers have always managed to sneak into the global English conversation. In music, for instance, think of PewDiePie’s fellow Nordics Abba and Björk. But most ambitious foreigners were held back because they spoke not English, but Globish: a simple, dull, idiom-free, cripplingly accented version of English with a small vocabulary. So they rarely sounded as fun, clever or cool in English as native speakers.
一直以来，都有一些非母语人士成功混入了全球英语话题中。比如，在音乐界，有PewDiePie的北欧同胞——瑞典的阿巴乐团(Abba)和冰岛女歌手比约克(Björk)。但是，大多数雄心勃勃的外国人壮志难酬的原因是，他们讲的不是英语，而是“全球语”(Globish)： 一种用词简单、乏味、没有习语、口音很重且词汇量极少的英语。 所以，他们讲英语时很难像以英语为母语的人一样风趣、智慧和酷炫。
This had fateful consequences. “What is well articulated in English on the internet becomes ‘truth,’” says Japanese writer Minae Mizumura in The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Perfect English is not only heard more, but also taken more seriously than what’s said in other languages, she argues. Note the mystical reverence among the global elite for The Economist, or the spread of Trump’s jibe “fake news” among autocrats worldwide. By contrast, it’s said in the Netherlands that if Jesus returned to earth, and a Dutch newspaper reported the news, the world would never find out.
这种情况产生了十分严重的后果。日本作家水村美苗(Minae Mizumura)在《英语时代的语言沦陷》(The Fall of Language in the Age of English)一书中说，“在互联网上，用英语阐述的观点成为了‘真理’。”她指出，较之用其它语言所做的表达，完美英语不仅听的人更多，而且更加受重视。试看全球精英阶层对《经济学人》(The Economist)的那种神秘的崇敬，。相反，荷兰流传着这样一种说法：如果耶稣重返人间，而一家荷兰报纸报道了这个消息，全世界可能永远不会注意到。
But now, just as populists are trying to roll back globalisation, along comes the first global generation shaped by the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of China. This generation always knew that Globish wasn’t enough. Emmanuel Macron, born in 1977, records a video in English called “Make the Planet Great Again”, and it impacts the global conversation.
Russian social-media trolls influence elections in English. India, for the first time ever, has a new generation of urbanites whose mother tongue is English. They no longer use such Hinglish formulations as “Head is paining”. In Egypt, some children at private English-language schools now struggle to speak Arabic, reports anthropologist Noha Roushdy. These kids are being trained to be heard abroad.
但现在，正当民粹主义者试图逆转全球化进程之际，经历了互联网、柏林墙(Berlin Wall)倒塌和中国对外开放的第一个全球世代成长起来了。这一代人一直都明白，只会说“全球语”是不够的。1977年出生的法国总统埃马纽埃尔•马克龙(Emmanuel Macron)用英文录制了一个名为“让地球再次伟大”(Make the Planet Great Again)的视频，在全球引起了反响。俄罗斯喷子在社交媒体上用英语影响了别国大选。在印度，有史以来首次出现了以英语为母语的新一代都市人。他们不再说“Head is paining”(头在痛)这样的印式英语了。人类学家诺哈•鲁什迪(Noha Roushdy)在一篇报告中说，在埃及，一些在私立英语学校上学的孩子现在说阿拉伯语都很困难。这些孩子正在被训练成为能让外国人听懂自己说话的人。
And the production line of perfect English-speakers hums ever faster. More and more universities around the world offer courses in English. The Netherlands sets the pace in Europe, followed by the Scandinavians. These countries are now attracting world-class foreign academics, and that’s before the anticipated post-Brexit exodus from British universities. If Brexit and Trump hamper English-language talent industries, continental Europe should benefit. Amsterdam and Copenhagen are already effectively bilingual. Berlin and Paris aren’t far behind.
而且，培养能讲完美英语人士的生产线正在以前所未有的速度运行。全球各地越来越多的大学提供英语教学课程。荷兰是欧洲地区英语教学的领头羊，紧随其后的是北欧国家。这些国家目前正在吸引世界级的外国学者。而且在英国脱欧后，预计英国的大学会有大量人才出走。如果英国脱欧和特朗普当政对英语人才产业构成阻碍，欧洲大陆应该会受益。阿姆斯特丹和哥本哈根已经基本了实现了双语化。柏林和巴黎也紧随其后。
Next, the US and UK will lose their dominance of media. Machine translation improves by the week. In a couple of years, a top-class newspaper like Die Zeit will produce its German edition, then press “translate” and get a very decent English version in an instant. Hire a few English-language subeditors to touch up the machine’s phrasings, and suddenly you’re competing with The New York Times.
接下来，美国和英国将失去他们在媒体领域的支配地位。机器翻译的质量每周都在改善。用不了几年，德国的《时代周报》(Die Zeit)等质量上乘的报纸，将只需按一下“翻译”键，就能立即将德语版转换成很像样的英文版，再雇用几个英语编辑来润色一下机器翻译的文稿， York Times)竞争了。
This is bad news for non-English languages and literatures. Mizumura predicts that in Germany, for instance, novelists and poets will soon start writing in English. This would mean a return to the era before 1800, when European writers often used a universal language. Dante, Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and even Luther, the father of German, were fluent in Latin, notes Mizumura.
对英语以外的其他语言和非英语文学作品来说，这是个坏消息。水村美苗预测，以德国为例，小说家和诗人很快就会开始用英语写作。这将意味着欧洲将回到1800年前的时代——当时欧洲作家通常使用统一的语言写作。水村美苗指出，但丁(Dante)、笛卡尔(Descartes)、 Hobbes)、甚至德语之父路德(Luther)都能讲流利的拉丁语。
Everyone now piously preaches multilingualism, but it’s not going to happen. About 1.5 billion people are learning English, roughly 10 times more than are learning French, Chinese, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese put together, estimates the German linguist Ulrich Ammon. And the more people who speak English, the more useful English becomes. Anyway, the PewDiePie generation won’t let you learn their own languages. Try going to Sweden and speaking bad Swedish. You’ll be forced into English in seconds.
现在，人人都惟愿自己具备多语言能力，但这种情况不会发生。德国语言学家乌尔里希•阿蒙(Ulrich Ammon)估计，全球约有15亿人在学习英语，是学习法语、汉语、西班牙语、德语、意大利语和日语人数总和的10倍左右。而且讲英语的人越多，英语就会变得越有用。无论如何，PewDiePie这一代是不会让你再学习他们的母语了。你去瑞典讲蹩脚的瑞典语试试? 用不了几秒钟，你就会被迫改说英语。
From Spain to China, the aspirational classes want to upgrade from Globish to English. That should spark a boom in expat teaching jobs for native English speakers. A Briton teaching in Beijing told me in 2011 that most Chinese students he encountered had never met a native speaker before. The coming generation will have to, because Globish no longer cuts it. (Iran’s recent threat to ban English teaching in primary schools would probably just drive it underground.)
从西班牙到中国，有报负的阶层都想从把自己的“全球语”提升为英语。这应该会导致以英语为母语的外派教师的工作急增。2011年，一位在北京教英语的英国人告诉我，他遇到的大多数中国学生以前从来没有遇见过母语为英语的人。下一代必须得学好英语了，因为“全球语”已经不够用了。 (伊朗最近威胁要禁止小学教授英语，这可能只会促使英语教学转到地下)。
The next global ruling class will perceive the world chiefly in English. That will be a loss. As Mizumura says, you can only see what your language allows you to express. But when perfect English becomes standard, Brits and Americans lose their advantage.
下一代全球统治阶层将主要用英语来认识世界。那将是一个损失。正如水村美苗所说，你只能明白你的语言能表达清楚的东西。但是，当完美英语成为标准时，英国人和美国人将失去优势。
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