Dunk This, Fred

If you watch television, you've probably seen the Dunkin' Donuts commercial with the catchy song:

Ocho half caff latte-ccino mocha due avec moi
My mouth can't form these words
My mind can't find these words
Is it French, or is it Italian?
Perhaps Fritalian?

Yes, it's clever. Yes, it's gotten stuck in my head on several occasions lately, and yes, I've caught my boyfriend whistling the tune on more than one occasion in the last five hours. This is what anyone who knows anything about marketing will tell you is a good ad campaign. But what is the commercial really saying?

You can go with the "coffee pretentiousness" angle and say that it's presenting Dunkin' Donuts as the "average joe's cup o' joe" (see, I can play the clever angle, too) without all the fancy lingo. "You order them in English," the commercial promises. That, added to the sneer with which the redhead with the cute haricut in the commercial says "French," plus the gross lumping together of French and Italian into "Fritalian," makes me kind of angry.

English is the bastard child of all languages, for starters. Or, as a sci fi reviewer named James Nicoll put it, "On occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." That's why, no matter what language you studied in high school, you probably found at least a few cognates between that language and English (like nacht in German and night in English).

My point is that words like mocha and cappuccino are English. And have been for some time. They're even in my Webster's New World Dictionary that's copyrighted 1990, the one that became somewhat worthless to me in high school when I started writing research for my science fair project. Because it's so lacking in big, fancy words. If we were to order such things in what the commercial might imply is "pure" English (which doesn't exist), we would have to say something along the lines of "steam brewed coffee mixed with steamed milk with optional toppings." Now, that's a mouthful. One of the most intriguing things about English is that it's basically a smorgasboard of languages, both presently and historically (Battle of Hastings, anyone?). The language itself doesn't always make sense because of its various origins, but that also goes hand in hand with it being the lingua franca for the world. I'm not saying that British imperialism was a good thing, but it did make for a very rich language that, a few centuries later, is the most commonly spoken second language.

Which leads me to my other major beef with the commercial. Gasp, oh, no, not French! Are people still in "freedom fry" mode or something? And what the hell is wrong with Italian? The reason this commercial is successful, other than the catchy tune, is that it plays on Americans' xenoglossophobic tendencies. For some reason, because we speak the global language natively, we think we shouldn't be lowered to learning someone else's language. But having a second language only enriches your life. It can make you a far more appealing job candidate if you speak Spanish in a place with a high immigrant Latino population. It means that if you're in a field that falls within the sciences, you can readily communicate with colleagues in other countries and further share your knowledge and ideas with each other. As Geraldo Rivera put it on a recent NPR interview, "Si tiene dos lenguas, tiene dos almas," which means, "If you have two languages, you have two souls." In many other parts of the world, especially industrialized parts of the world, children are raised speaking two languages from the start. This is known to linguists as the critical period, which is the best time to learn a language. In many areas, English is not considered a foreign language in addition to one's native tongue, and students are expected to learn a third language in school. There are bilingual schools in Canada that teach French through immersion; everything in school is conducted in French. Students probably speak English at home, but for the hours they're in school, they speak French only (also an excellent way to learn - and retain - a language). Are we stupider than Canadians? Quite possibly. But only because of the way we approach learning new things.