The World’s Linguistic Vacuum Cleaner Makes a Wall-to-Wall Sweep

Morning, and the marquee items at Burnside Donuts are fresh and warm--58 varieties, from glazed to pudding-filled to chocolate-covered, at just 35 cents apiece. Lara Dailey, 2 1/2, goes straight for the old-fashioned kind--spongy and golden brown, dredged in powdered sugar.

Then, seriousness radiating from her saucer blue eyes, she reaches for her milk and does what doughnut diners do. “She’s a dunker,” says her mother, Daina Savage. “She loves to dunk.”

Dunk. A perfectly respectable English word, except that it entered the language via someplace else--Pennsylvania German, the native tongue of the Amish and Mennonites who settled and cultivated this region of southeastern Pennsylvania farmland.

This is English at its most colorful--a language that contains multitudes, able and willing to assimilate any words it finds useful.

“It’s always been a vacuum cleaner of a language. It sucks in words from everywhere,” says David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

A Bizarre--Even Meshuggena--Mix

Places, peoples, tongues from around the world: All are hidden in the folds of English’s lexicon, coexisting in a polyglot that makes its vocabulary more malleable and gives a sense of belonging to those who speak it as a second or foreign language.

Consider this unlikely but perfectly serviceable sentence: “You’ve got some chutzpah taking the ketchup I was going to use on my barbecued hamburger, you skunk!”

Flawless English. But “chutzpah” is Yiddish, “ketchup” originally Chinese, “barbecue” Caribbean, “hamburger” German and “skunk” Native American. All folded into English.

From all corners they come, these words. From Swedish (ombudsman and dynamite) and Basque (bizarre). From Yiddish (meshuggena and kibitzing) and Spanish (siesta, coyote). From Finnish (sauna), Russian (apparatchik), Hindi (juggernaut), Sri Lankan Sinhala (anaconda) and Malay (amok). From Japanese (judo), Filipino Tagalog (boondocks) and Arabic via Swahili (safari). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, English contains words from more than 350 living languages.

“English is a free market,” says Allan Metcalf, author of “The World in So Many Words,” a freewheeling exploration of English’s imports. “Other languages are homogeneous enough that you can notice foreign words coming in and say, ‘That’s a terrible thing; keep them out.’ But English is multicultural.”

Though Viking languages contributed words and grammar to Old English in England’s earliest days, linguists trace the real dawn of importation to 1066, when King William, a Norman from what is now France, conquered England. That meant English speakers were being ruled by French speakers, and the subjugated language had to adjust.

Words and Phrases Imported Wholesale

The conquerors considered themselves more genteel than the low-country Anglo-Saxons, a class distinction that English preserves today. Animal words--cow, pig, sheep--are out-in-the-barn Anglo-Saxon. Food words for the same beasts--beef, pork, mutton--come from dress-up-for-dinner Norman.

By Chaucer’s time, 300 years later, Middle English had swelled with French terms like “reign,” “jurisprudence” and “reason,” setting a precedent: New words could be foreign and still “sound” English.

During the Renaissance, words flowed in from Latin--not that different from French--and Greek. The Age of Exploration introduced novel terms from all corners. English was becoming a polyglot.

And America changed everything. Here was an English-speaking land molded by successive generations of immigrants, each bringing new ideas and new expressions. Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Latinos, Africans, Asians--all changed English in ways minuscule and momentous.

Today, entire phrases and sayings are imported. Troubled by life? Shrug it off with “c’est la vie.” Carefree? You’re living “la dolce vita.” Welcoming a guest? “Mi casa es su casa,” you might say--if, that is, you have good “feng shui.” Are these English? Not quite yet. But they’re getting there.

“The tides come in, and you never know what new word is going to show up,” says Anne H. Soukhanov, U.S. general editor of Microsoft’s Encarta World English Dictionary.

Former Regionalisms Now in the Mainstream

Mass culture makes this easier. Today a family of Norwegian descent in Minot, N.D., can watch “Seinfeld” and understand its New York-style Yiddish references. Words like “shtick,” “pastrami” and “bagel” are no longer Eastern European Jewish regionalisms; they’ve gone mainstream.

“Dunk” owes its origin to German immigrants who belonged to the 18th century Brethren movement and moved to Pennsylvania to escape religious persecution. They practiced full-immersion Baptism and were known as “tunker,” from the German word “tunken,” meaning “to immerse.” The “T” evolved into a “D” in Pennsylvania.

Then there are words invented, retooled or given new meanings when English needs them--what comedian Rich Hall calls “sniglets.” Some--”e-mail,” “blurb,” “fax,” “graveyard shift,” “lip sync”--enter the mainstream. Others, like “netizen,” have an uphill battle. Crystal, the global English expert, has high hopes for “bagonize,” the feeling you get when your suitcase doesn’t appear on the luggage carousel.

Language cannot be separated from culture, of course, and importation depends upon the situation --and whether the word remains useful beyond its moment in time. Few English speakers in the post-Gorbachev era still deploy “glasnost” and “perestroika.” Technology updated “icebox” into “refrigerator,” and the Old West term “chuck wagon” has been relegated to the dog-food counter.

Linguists predict foreign words will flow into English even faster as more nonnative speakers reach global leadership positions. The pace will increase, but it will still be English--willing to accept words into its mosaic because of a stubborn legacy of pragmatism nearly 1,000 years old.

It’s why Americans can talk about head honchos, top bananas and big kahunas. It’s why college students can gulp down cocktails called kamikazes, why J.J. from “Good Times” can say “dy-no-mite,” why a Protestant kid from Indiana named David Letterman can put a talk-show guest in his place with a Yiddish insult.

And it’s why, at a doughnut-shop counter in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, Lara Dailey, her face covered with powdered sugar, can happily dunk on.