Language Dance Act Three: English
Just after I broke into fluency - at least according to TOEFL - English made me very tired. It was a bizarre feeling. I could wake up, order breakfast, sit through lectures, take part in discussions. I had enough words and turns of phrase to understand and communicate basically anything I needed, but my resource for that was limited. After 6pm, I could not parse, could not comprehend spoken language anymore, English or otherwise. Thankfully there were multiple supportive people around me who were willing to listen to my rants. Rants require quite a bit of language ability. With practice, 6pm became 7pm, then 8pm, then extended to the whole day.
I know that first language learners (also known as toddlers) go through an explosive transition to fluency. They first utter individual words, then short phrases, then learn which words are similar by pronunciation or meaning, and suddenly are able to speak! When we learn our second language, we can already rely on the first one to explain formal grammar rules or translate vocabulary. Subjectively, accumulation of pieces of the second language also felt like an abrupt transition into fluency. I remember well how it felt to live right before the transition, when I was struggling to find words to explain new things. I remember how it felt right after, when I was already able to rant but my language battery drained as if it short-circuited.
Fluency is a collective transition, property of many words and rules gelling into a connected, traversable structure. Can you predict the transition like they predict the cherry blossom at Wuhan University campus? What is the control parameter for the fluency transition? Can't be just time as any "four years of French in high school" can tell you. I've been learning English for about six years less than I've been alive. I've been fluent for less than half of those years. I remember vividly how every school year they would give us a few more tenses, from present to past to future, from continuous to passive to perfect. I was looking forward to the advanced grammar forms used in the movies, words like "gonna" and "wanna". They never came.
After the eighth grade, I transferred from a language-focused school to a physics-focused one. We switched to a more basic English textbook series, one look at which convinced me that I am not going to learn any more of English in class. I started binging American TV shows, printed out my first non-translated Heinlein novel, published a dorky webcomic, and texted in English with like-minded friends. It was not even a sincere attempt to learn a foreign language to apply for university abroad. Sitting on my little island of expired socialism, I just wanted to get in touch with the cosmopolitan world.
Skipping a few years ahead, I was translating the syllabi of my classes into English to get transfer credit, and thus re-learning all the science terminology. From then on, the vast majority of science I learned was in English. A bit later I started doing original research, also in English. I got dedicated training in writing for both science and generic college essays, something notably lacking in my high school and first years of university.
The English language has successfully won the struggle for the world language of science; this might have something to do with the political outcomes of World War II and the Cold War, I'm not sure. But if today you want to be a scientist plugged into the international circuits, English is more or less required. In many countries, when promotions are concerned, scientists have separate counters of publications in English vs the local language. Writing in English is typically privileged, as hard as it might be. For non-native speakers, having to write in English is like having a bad hair day, as one of Helen Sword's interviewees said.
English is quite close to WEIRDness. This argument of the non-representative quality of many research samples in behavioral sciences was advanced in the famous 2010 paper. While the original manuscript was written by just three researchers, it was published along with 28 (twenty eight!) commentaries, and authors' response to those. The excessive focus on the Western research subjects, by Western researchers, with questions posed in English (or, in rare glimpses of alternativeness, Dutch or German), runs the risk of conflating observed responses with universal human nature. Equipped with the general social capital of science-producing countries, the universal claims become canonized.
At international events, I need to consciously code switch from American to International English. This is the version of language spoken in majority-nonnative speaker communities that don't share a different language. You switch your "college" to "university", you think twice about how to pronounce "schedule", you clean up your fancy grammar tenses. You slow down. You remember that not everyone you meet speaks English daily. You remember the struggle you used to have.
In my own chase for exoticism, when I want to leave the American cultural bubble, I don't just go to the British one, however good their baking shows get. I have no moral obligations to familiarize myself with Victorian literature or to embellish my slides with the finest metaphorical poetry on the nature of dancing fleeting thoughts. I can keep learning and refining my English to produce the most clear communication and to make the best allusions and homages to what I think is interesting. If my homage is not an English one, I have no excuses.
English won the culture war, as much as you can win a war. Shall we praise those who happened to be on the winning side? In the modern world, is it luck or luxury to speak English natively? Is it the language of those who strive for cross-culture understanding, the language of cosmopolitanism, or the language of those who don't know any others? How many talented scientists got the boilerplate advice to "ask a native speaker to proofread your paper"? Is it a luxury to live in a place where family life, street interactions, and science work all happen in the same language? Or maybe the luxury is to know many languages and to march across the contexts?