Sudoku, panini, hakuna matata. Linguistic justice for foreign words in English!

In 1994 the Disney film the Lion King introduced the Western world to a Swahili phrase with which we are now all familiar. And yet, almost 18 years later, although most people would be able to tell you what hakuna matata means, very few of us use it in our everyday lives. This is an utter tragedy, and a terrible waste of a ‘wonderful phrase’, which didn’t even make it to the level of ‘passing craze’. But what makes it such a dreadful linguistic injustice is the proliferation of pathetic, pointless and pretentious words introduced into the English language, which have somehow managed to flourish. It just seems so unfair.

Hakuna matata? Photo: Flikr/William Warby

The English language’s capacity to absorb foreign vocabulary is one of its strengths, and I would be the last person to object to loan words per se. In many cases, they are simply the most efficient way of conveying a meaning which finds no easy expression in English. Try to express the meaning of dejà vu using only two Anglo-Saxon words and you will surely struggle.

Many more recent additions to our language, like vuvuzela, jihad and the phenomenally, inexplicably popular sudoku, are severely limited in application, while others, especially from Italian cuisine, are irredeemably superfluous and pretentious. So we have:

• The barista, someone who operates a largely automated coffee machine in a coffee shop, not to be confused with a barrister;
• The ubiquitous and perpetually pluralised panini, which might in a more innocent age have been called a sandwich or a toastie;
• And biscotti, which used to be known as ‘biscuits’. The irony in the fact that ‘biscuit’ is itself a loanword from French is no doubt entirely lost on the marketers of the miniscule, individually wrapped biscotti.

That these trendy words suddenly take off and become an unavoidable part of life is a small irritation that I have learnt to live with. That the Italian words always seem to arrive on our shores in their plural form, leaving people confused as to how to pluralise them in English (the OED recognises 'paninis' as an acceptable plural noun, although my MS Word spell-checker bizarrely thinks 'Panini' is a proper noun!) is something I can shrug off.

I am not going to piss into the wind by trying to start a futile campaign against them.

Instead, this is an invitation to everyone to incorporate really useful and uplifting vocabulary into their everyday speech from wherever they find it. You never know, it might catch on, which is a reward in itself. And the next time someone offers me ‘a biscotti’, I will just think to myself, ‘Ah well, hakuna matata’.