The property
essential for language spread in the Americas had been the propensity for
speakers to settle and raise large families, so displacing local peoples, who
were thinly spread and technically less developed. Something else must have
proved telling in southern Asia, which is home to massive populations long used
to foreign traders, and where few of the incomers would ever settle
permanently. Especially to the British, India and their other Asian colonies
were always places for careers, not lives-for postings, not family homes. More
than other conquerors, they remained reserved and distant in their control.
What unites English
with Portuguese early on is that each of the two enjoyed a wide and permanent
spread as an everyday language of colonists in the Americas. But around
southern Asia each language also expanded, ultimately used more among the local
population than by the relatively few sailors, merchants and soldiers who came
there from Europe. Paradoxically, the British left their mark on these mark on
these parts of Asia in their language, far more indelibly, as it now appears,
than any known previous invader.
The parallel with
Portuguese breaks down when the role of the languages in trade is considered.
When the English East India Company acquired its crucial bases in India-Madras
(1654), Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690)-the effective lingua franca was still
very much Portuguese, `the language that most Europeans learn first to qualify
them for general converse with one another, as well as with different
inhabitants of India'. (In the 1990s these first centres
of government for British India, have been renamed: as Chennai, Mumbai and
Kolkata.)
The company stocked
two hundred Portuguese dictionaries, and every branch office, or `factory', had
a Portuguese linguist, even if the directors in London wrote to Bombay
requiring local translation of paperwork because `the Portuguese spoken in
India differed so much from that spoken in Portugal 1.40 More informally,
much-business was done in what the Indians called Feringhee, an informal pidgin
of European languages: by the end of the seventeenth century, Portuguese,
Danish, French, Dutch and English all had factories within a radius of 10 miles
in Bengal. English was at this time usable only among the company's own agents,
and never became a lingua franca for trade. In practice, business was usually
done through the mediation of a bilingual Indian trader, known as banyan in
Calcutta and Bombay, dubash in Madras.
It is also clear that
until the nineteenth century higher-level dealings with Indian authorities,
above all the Mughal government, were conducted in Persian.The
Mughals had brought Persian to India in the sixteenth century as their language
of culture, although their ordinary sipâhi ('sepoy')
spoke Turkic. There is something strangely analogous to the Norman conquest of
England here, with Persian in the role of French, and Delhi's vernacular, developing
into `Urdit' under Persian influence, in the role of
English. In this sense Urdu, literally 'language of the camp', was the
distinctive linguistic creation of the Mughals in India. And it was this, not
English, which was to become the major language of the British Indian Army.
Company agents could
become fluent in it, although they retained the services of a munshi, a
combined interpreter, translator, secretary and language tutor. A paragon of
such expertise was Antoine-Louis Henri Polier, a
Frenchman in the English company's service and a friend of Warren Hastings, who
published his Persian correspondence in the late eighteenth century. This shows
him highly accomplished, too, in the courtly style that went with the language.
Characteristically, the work is called I jaz-i Arsalani, the 'wonderment of Arsalân',
alluding to the author's own Persianate title, Arsalan-i-Jang,
`lion of battle', bestowed by the Mughal emperor Shah Alam
himself. In their Introduction, p. 70, the modem translators point out Polier's classic approach to a dispute between his two
Indian wives, threatening one mother-in-law while appealing to her sense of
shame for her daughter. Polier went on to marry a
third wife after his return to France in 1788.
On this basis the
real question is: how did English ever spread in India at all beyond the
transplanted society of the `writers' (i.e. clerks) of the East India Company,
and British regiments serving in the country? The situation, after all, was
almost identical with that of the contemporary Dutch in the East Indies, with
Persian cast in the role of Malay, Urdu as Javanese, and Portuguese as its very
own self. And as we have seen, after a first half-hearted attempt to teach
their own language, the Dutch had contented themselves with the linguistic status
quo: Dutch never became the language of any but the colonial rulers in the
Dutch East Indies. If this pattern had been followed, Persian would have
remained the preferred common language of India to the present day.
And there was an
extra motive in the back of British minds which drained any enthusiasm for
wider use of their native language in India. As a member of the British
Parliament put it in 1793: “We have lost our colonies in America by imparting
our education there; we need not do so in India too”( S. N. Mukherjee, History
of Education in India, 1961, p. 30).
This loss was very
fresh in memories in the late eighteenth century: Lord Cornwallis, the very
general who had delivered the British surrender to George Washington in 1781,
went on to become governor-general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Settler
communities of Europeans, if they became well established, might follow the
American example, and look for independence on their own terms. On this
reasoning, India must remain a foreign country, albeit one kept open reliably
for British business; it should not be a new British home. Richard Wellesley,
governor-general from 1797, wrote to the chairman of the Board of Control in
1799:
... with relation to
powers of banishing Europeans from the British possessions in India ... those
powers appear to me still to be too limited. The number of persons not in the
company's service resident in these provinces, as well as in all parts of the
British empire in India, increases daily. Among these are to be found many
characters, desperate from distress, or from the infamy of their conduct in
Europe. Their occupations are principally ... at Calcutta, the lowest branches
of the law, the establishment of shops and taverns, or of the places of public
entertainment, or the superintendepce of newspapers
... Amongst all these persons, but particularly the tribe of editors of
newspapers, the strongest and boldest spirit of Jacobinism prevailed...
In Madras, the evil
resulting from Europeans not in the Company's service is still greater. The
advisers of the nabob of the Carnatic, as well as the principal instruments of
his opposition to the British government, and of his oppressions over his own
subjects, are almost exclusively to be found among that class of Europeans.
British settlement in
India, then, apart from activities directly sponsored by the company, was not
even seen as desirable by the British authorities. From 1757 to 1856, Kampani Sahib, as it was known, proceeded to expand its
financial, political and military control first across Bengal to Delhi, then
across the Deccan, and finally to most of what is now India, Pakistan, Sri
Lanka and Burma. The one thing the company hardly spread at all was a body of
speakers of its own directors' language.
In the end, the wider
spread of English was begun not by the East India Company, but by British
Protestant missionaries. Comparing this with the role of missions in the spread
of Spanish points up another irony. The Church's solution was a “The lenguas generales”, the Spanish
missions had served to retard the spread of Spanish, while the state was
inclined to encourage it. In Brazil, something similar had occurred. But in
British India, the effects of Church and state-or state monopoly-were the
reverse of this.
The company was in
general suspicious of missionary involvement in its domains, on much the same
grounds-and with better evidence-as those on which they shunned other
Europeans. The bloody mutiny of their Indian troops in Vellore, near Madras, in
1806 was associated with rants by one Claudius Buchanan on Hindu indifference
to Christianity, demanding `every means of coercing this contemptuous spirit
of our native subjects'; in 1808 the company had speedily to suppress a tract
put out by the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore
(Srirampur), near Calcutta, `Addressed to Hindus and Mahomedans'.44 India has
long been a dangerous place for pressing a religious point, and the company was
sensitive to this hazard, which could be highly damaging to trade.
Nevertheless, there
had been churchmen at the company's settlements from the earliest days. Early
on, they had had to work in Portuguese, like everyone else, a requirement made
explicit in the company's renewed charter of 1698; “All Ministers shall be
obliged to learn within one year after their arrival the Portuguese language
and shall apply themselves to learn the native language of the country where
they shall reside, the better to enable them to instruct the Gentoos that shall
be the servants or the slaves of the company, or of their agents, in the
Protestant Religion” (J. W. Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company,
1853, p. 626).
But soon they began
to found English-language schools, primarily for children-often orphans-of
company employees and servants: at Madras in 1715, Bombay in 1719, and Calcutta
in 1731. The schools grew in attendance, then multiplied, and became centres of access to English, with attached printing
presses and libraries. It was clear to anyone that English influence and power
were growing massively throughout the eighteenth century: not surprisingly,
ambitious Indian parents increasingly tried to obtain for their children
knowledge of English, to share in this growth. Around 1780 the raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) sent his
own son to Schwartz's missionary school at Tanjore (Thanjavur), south of
Madras.
As the actions of the
East India Company were more and more subjected to scrutiny and control in
London, patronizing attitudes-often shared by such influential reformers as
Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and James Mill-were becoming the motive
force of policy. In 1813 the House of Commons resolved that `it is the duty of
this Country to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants
of the British dominions in India, and that measures ought to be introduced as
may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge, and of religious
and moral improvement(Parliament Debate 1813 , 26: 562-3.)
In the nineteenth
century, as British political control expanded and hardened in India, the old
laissez-faire business ethic in dealing with the natives, which had entailed a
robust mutual respect, was increasingly replaced by an unashamed belief in
European superiority, coupled with a duteous endeavour
to bring up `the dark race' to the moral and intellectual level of the Godearing Briton.
The company's Charter
Act of 1813 included the provision that `a sum of not less than a lac ,100,000,
of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and
improvement of literature and the encouragement of learned natives of India,
and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the
inhabitants of the British territories in India...' But at this stage the
company's traditional distrust of missionary priorities was still effective:
the funding was explicitly aimed at `fostering both Oriental and Occidental
science ... a reliable counterpoise, a protecting backwater against the
threatened deluge of missionary enterprises (Selections from Educational Records
I ,H. Sharp, 1920, p. 22) The decision on how this small sum was to be applied
turned out to be crucial for the language history of the subcontinent.
The missionaries'
wish to give priority to the English language was all the time gathering
support from the home government, and at last from the Indians themselves. In
the late eighteenth century the company, following popular urging, had founded
a number of prestige colleges for the acquisition of Indian learning: for
Muslims the Calcutta Madrassa in 1781, for Hindus the Benares Sanskrit College
in 1791, and for incoming civil administrators from Britain the Fort William
College in Calcutta in 1800. All of these had some classes conducted in
English; and Fort William had little else. In the early nineteenth century
spontaneous foundations were also made by eminent citizens, notably in 1817 the
Hindu College of Calcutta, for `the cultivation of the Bengalee
and English languages in particular; next, the Hindustanee
tongue ... ; and then the Persian, if desired, as ornamental general duty to God'.Ram Mohan Roy, who is considered its presiding genius,
was a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic, but vociferous in his appeals for greater
access to English.
... we understand
that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be
annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian subjects. We were filled with
Sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen
of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics,
natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the
natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them
above the inhabitants of other parts of the world... We now find that the
Government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindoo pundits to impart
such knowledge as is clearly current in India. (Ram Mohan Roy's letter to Lord
Amherst, 11 Dec. 1823).
Several new
government colleges were also founded, often in oriental disciplines, but
under pressure from London the oriental ones were offered various inducements
to improve their English-language instruction. Then in the early 1830s came
catastrophic falls in the enrolments for all non-English subijects,
and corresponding surges for English. A public meeting in 1834 protested
against patronage of the classical languages, and in favour
of English and the vernaculars. (Samachar Darpan, 23 April 1834)
In this context, the
General Committee of Public Instruction made its longdelayed
decision on how to spend the company's annual lakh of rupees to promote
literature and knowledge. Reversing their previous preference, which had
followed the hints in the charter, for native learning (and the translation of
European scientific texts into Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian), they decided on 7
March 1835 that “the great object of the British Government ought to be the
promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and
that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education, would be best
employed on English education alone” (Alexander Duff New Era of the English
Language and Literature in India, Edinburgh,1837: 3)
This decision,
although still controversial at the time, proved fateful. This was the very
period when British academic studies of India's history were making giant
strides: between 1835 and 1837 James Prinsep, Assay
Master at the mint, and secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, succeeded
in deciphering the Brahmi writing of the emperor Asoka's third-century uc inscriptions, and so unlocked the central story of the
Maurya dynasty. (See: sanskrit.html) James's brother Henry Thoby,
then Chief Secretary to the government, had spoken out eloquently against
Macaulay's minute, possibly even leaking it and so providing the basis for a
petition from eight thousand Muslims and another from Hindus. James, in an
editorial in the Asiatic Society's Journal, condemned “a measure which has in
the face of all India withdrawn the countenance of the Government from the
learned natives of the country, and pronounced a verdict of condemnation and
abandonment on its literature” (Quoted in Charles Allen, The Buddha and the
Sahibs, 2002: 166-7).
The number of the
government's English-language schools more than doubled within three years of
the English Education Act (Duff ,1837: App., p. 2) This was just the beginning.
When in 1857 universities were founded in the classic three British cities,
Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, English would be their language. of instruction.
And this educational preference was simultaneously reinforced in 1835 by a
regulation that English was to replace Persian as the official state language
and the medium of the higher courts of law, with lower courts using the local
vernacular. Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had hitherto kept a half-practical
value, comparable to the survival of Latin into early modem Europe: henceforth,
like Latin after the Enlightenment, they would be consigned to purely classic
status, symbols of heritage rather than vehicles of learning and research. And
English, which had been little more than the mark of a foreign ruling caste,
was now going to serve as the means for opening the whole subcontinent to
foreign traditions of culture.
The basic language
balance had been struck, and it persisted in India through to independence in
1947. And in practice, although English is now classed as an Associate Official
language of India, theoretically inferior to the eighteen official vernaculars,
it has persisted right up to the present day. English is universal in South
Asia as the lingua franca of the educated: how many actually know it is harder
to say, with estimates over the past twenty years rising from 3 per cent to 30
per cent of Indians, but fewer in the other states of the region .See David
Crystal, English as a Global Language (2nd edn),
Cambridge University Press. 2003: 46.
In his summary of
world English-speaking populations, Crystal plumps for about 19 per cent of
Indians in 2001 (200 million), but 12 per cent of Pakistanis (17 million), 10
per cent of Sri Lankans (1.9 million), and barely 3 per cent of Bangladeshis
(3.5 million). He also offers some surprising estimates for some of the other
countries, suggesting that 45 per cent of Nigerians, and 84 per cent of
Liberians, speak English. These may well reflect the number who have received
some English-language education, since the literacy levels in these countries
are rather high. But Crystal's explicit reason is the prevalence of
English-based pidgins and creoles.
Another long-term
influence that favoured English, especially in the
south, was the absence of any other useful lingua franca: Britain's domain had
always included the south of the country, and went on to encompass the whole
subcontinent; but Persian or Hindi-Urdu were never acceptable south of the old
Mughal boundary. If India, especially a democratic India, is to stay united, it
needs a common language that seems neutral, or at least equally oppressive to
all.
Thus two means to the
spread of English-what we may call American sweep-aside and Indian
re-education-were to be applied, one or the other, across the whole British
empire as it expanded to cover a quarter of the earth. Revealingly, the choice
was correlated as much with climate as population: the typical-and ultimately
most influential-settler is a farmer, and European farmers only really know
temperate-zone crops. In temperate colonies, above all Australia and New
Zealand, British long-term settlers became a majority of the population, and so
English became the principal language. But in the tropics, where British
activities were restricted to government, trade and commercial exploitation,
the spread of English was more superficial, affecting local elites, and those
in contact with British power centres, through school
education and gradual recruitment of the locals into British government and
enterprise: this was the pattern in most of the Asian colonies Burma, Hong
Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah.
In the sweep-aside
countries (English law, especially as applied in Australia, has a revealing
quasi-synonym for this: terra nullius, literally `land belonging to nobody'),
the action was concentrated in the nineteenth century. Australia is estimated
to have accommodated 300,000 people (speaking two hundred languages) when the
British began arriving in the 1790s; by 1890 they were down to 50,000 (with 150
languages left). Their population had always been concentrated in the
south-east, just as the English speakers are today: that is where there is
water. In the same period, English speakers went from nil to 400,000 by 1850,
and nearly 4 million by 1900. As in the Americas, after the first few years no
serious effort was made to accommodate the Aboriginals, let alone learn any of
their languages; even the missionaries were rather unsuccessful in making
non-destructive contact.
In New Zealand,
although the British found it in 1770 held by a single people speaking a
single language, Maori, a similar story ultimately
played out. After the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was struck between the Maori and Britain, British immigration took off, growing
twelvefold in the following decade, from 2000 to 25,000 by 1850. In the next
half-century, their population grew thirtyfold again, now boosted by big
families, as well as an unceasing flood of hopeful new settlers: by 1900 it had
reached 750,000. In the same nineteenth century, Maori
numbers sank from well over 100,000 to 42,000. They may have had the advantage
of knowing the country for a millennium before the British arrived; but they
could not contend with European diseases, and above all the productivity of
European farm animals, cattle and sheep, evolved to thrive on temperate
grasslands. They put up a bitter fight, but like the Australian Aboriginals,
they were swept aside.
Both Australian
Aboriginal and Maori populations have rebounded in
the late twentieth century, but their proportions in their own countries remain
tiny: 170,000 a little less than 1 per cent Australians are now reckoned to be
of Aboriginal descent (47,000 0.03 per cent-with some knowledge of an
Aboriginal language), and there are now over 310,000 Maori-8 per cent of New
Zealanders-of whom some 70,000 speak the language, 1.8 per cent. They are
simply engulfed by the modem English-speaking nations of Australia (18.5
million) and New Zealand (3.8 million) in which they still struggle to survive.
Farther north,
English speakers came in earnest to South-East Asia only in 1786, when the
English East India Company acquired Penang, a small island just off Kedah,
largely as a base for naval refitting.The company had
attempted early on ,1612-22, to set up agencies for spice trading at Patani (in Halmahera, the far east of Indonesia) and
Ayutthaya, then capital of Siam, and in 1669 for tin at Kedah in the Malay
peninsula, but they had always been expelled by the Dutch.
Lord Cornwallis was
still governor-general at the time, as keen as ever to avoid settlement, and
above all any political involvement. But one thing led to another; the British
kindly stewarded the Dutch empire from 1795 to 1814, while its metropolis was
occupied by the French, and in the meantime Penang gained a mercantile life of
its own, eclipsing the ancient entrepôt of Malacca. The British lieutenantgovernor, Sir Stamford Raffles, who had opposed
return of the Dutch colonies, felt that Penang, lying outside the Straits, was
not quite right to protect the burgeoning trade (largely in opium) between
India and China. Through an act of diplomatic legerdemain, installing there a
Malay sultan who had been slighted by the Dutch, he was able to acquire
Singapore for Britain in 1819. It was then a fairly small settlement, but the
population instantly went up to five thousand, and began to develop as the new
major entrepôt.
Subsequent intrigues
and wars, always undertaken by the British with an eye to the commercial main
chance, resulted in British political control being extended to the whole of
Burma (1853-86), Malaya (1883-95) and the northern region of Borneo (1888). As
icing on the cake, Britain also acquired its own base in China, Hong Kong
(1848, enlarged in 1860 and 1898). The linguistic effect was extension of
English for law and administration, all over these parts of South-East and East
Asia. Others soon saw which way the language wind was blowing: the Straits
Times of Singapore began publication in 1845 (current circulation 386,000, for
a national population of 3 million), and the South China Morning Post of Hong
Kong in 1903 (circulation 200,000, for a population of 6 million).
Nowadays, knowledge
of English is still a mark of the elite in all the successor states of the
British colonies. It is often difficult to know what proportion of the people
speak it. Its status has become politically controversial in Malaysia since
independence in 1957; there is an active policy to 'standardise'
on Malay in education, but as in India, English is popular with the large
minorities, here Chinese- and Tamil-speaking, who feel threatened by this. In
Burma (or, to use its more ancient name, Myanmar) use of English is nowadays
not readily admitted by government sources. Its future in Hong Kong, since 1997
returned to mainland China, is obscure, but a survey in 1992 suggested that
over 25 per cent had some competence in it. In Singapore, a 1975 survey put
competence among the over-forties at 27 per cent, but among fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds at over 87 per cent (Crystal,2003: 57).
In Africa, there were
no major European settlements until the nineteenth century, except for those of
the Portuguese and Dutch. But when the scramble for colonies had exhausted the
available territory, the spread of English in British possessions followed the
re-education pattern as against sweep-aside. The temperate parts of South
Africa did attract large numbers of white settlers, but they tailed off as
British territory extended northward; the Bantu population, who were fairly
recent arrivals themselves, held their ground well. As a result we find 3.5
million English speakers in South Africa, 9.1 per cent of the population, but
even grouping together the English and Afrikaans speakers, a million of them mutually
bilingual, they amount only to 22 per cent. Farther north, the percentage of
native English speakers-essentially white citizens-is far less, 3 per cent in
Zimbabwe, 0.5 per cent in Zambia. English is a more significant secondary
language in East Africa; there are ew native
speakers, but 5 per cent of Tanzanians, Kenyans and Ugandans use it, despite
the availability of Swahili as an alternative lingua franca. This, of course,
is a figure very comparable to countries of Asia that accepted reeducation; and
in all these countries, as in so many Asian ones, English remains as an
official language.
The other major area
of old British colonies in Africa is the west, from Cameroon out out along the coast to Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the
Gambia. In this area also is Liberia, another country with English-speaking
links, but in this case through its foundation as a preserve for freed slaves
from the United States of America. They all have different histories; but they
share the fact that their climate has always discouraged white settlement. All
define English as an official language, but it appears that only a smallish minority
of their populations, again in the region of 5 per cent, are actually speakers.
Since all the countries are highly multilingual, another widespread means for
communication is the use of English-based creoles, such as Nigerian Pidgin in
Nigeria, Krio in Ghana, Liberian English in Liberia (Crystal,2003: 62-5).
The last major area
for expansion of English was into the islands dotted across the Pacific.
British colonisation of this area came rather later
than the French: Fiji in 1874, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892, the
Solomons in 1893, Tonga in 1900. New Guinea's western half was reserved by the
Dutch, but Germany and Australia claimed the rest in 1884. Like many German
colonies in Africa, this one fell into British hands after the German defeat in
the First World War, but in this case the hands were specifically Australian.
At the same time, the German (western) half of Samoa was assigned to New
Zealand. In the New Hebrides, British missionaries and French planters shared
control from 1887.
None of these
territories was of great interest to British imperial strategists, except in
some notional competition with French influence; the islanders in general were
left to the shifting mercies of whale and sea-slug hunters, sandalwood cutters,
the cultivators of sugar cane, cotton and coconut, and of course missionaries.
One result was the temporary recruitment of large gangs of South Sea Islanders
to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where they learnt to
communicate in pidgin English. Another was a vast infusion of Indians into Fiji
to engage in sugar planting and processing, so that now close to half its
population speak a form of Hindi. But as a long-term result of all those
indentured workers, the South Pacific has become a prime area for English-based
creoles, and two of them are now accepted as official languages: Tok Pisin is
the language of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, and Bislama of
Vanuatu (once the New Hebrides), independent since 1980. These creoles are very
different from the English spread by missionaries. Anyway, the communities that
speak this English are all very small minorities in their countries, as one
would expect where the language has been spread by re-education.
English was also
coming to the Pacific islands from the opposite direction. Since the early
nineteenth century Hawaii had been a winter harbour
for whalers, and from 1820 it became the focus of interest for fifteen
companies of missionaries from New England. US businessmen were also
increasingly active, perhaps looking for a new frontier after the fulfilment of
their country's `Manifest Destiny'; they were the main beneficiaries of a land
division organised in 1848-50. For a short time,
Hawaiian independence survived, balanced among the contending interests of
Britain, France and the USA. But American pressure was unabating: a special
treaty of reciprocity was struck in 1875, the Hawaiian monarchy was deposed in
1893, and in 1898 the whole archipelago was annexed to the USA.
In 1896 one of the
first acts of the Hawaiian republic, formed briefly after the fall of the
monarchy, was to require English as medium of instruction for no less than half
the school day; but in practice no Hawaiian at all was allowed. In that
generation, the transmission of the language from parent to child stopped dead.
One grandmother told her granddaughter before her first day of school: Learn
well the language of the whites. Do not rely on our language, there's no value
there. One's future well-being is dependent upon mastering the language of the
foreign people. (See P. Bairoch 1982 is
`International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980', Journal of European
Economic History, 11, and F. Crouzet 1982 in The
Victorian Economy, London.)
This sounds like
particularly harsh re-education, but in fact Hawaii conforms at least as well
to the sweep-aside model: by 1996, with the population now standing at 112
million, only 18.8 per cent were ethnic Hawaiians, and half of these had les's than 50 per cent Hawaiian ancestry. Outside the one
small island of Niihau, everyone on the islands is now at least bilingual in
English, and the vast majority know no other language.
In the same year of
1898, the USA took the Philippines and Guam forcibly from Spain in a flush of
imperialist glee ; and a year later they also enforced their own solution to a
long-standing dispute over Samoa, taking the eastern half of the archipelago.
Appart
from the political there was also an economic aspect in reverse, students in
India and elsewhere, had usually been impressed by the material benefits of
British methods than the imperishable rewards promised by the Protestant
missionaries. The prestige of English in the nineteenth century was elevated to
the skies through the same process that had made French the leading language of
European culture throughout the Middle Ages and the early modem period. At
root, the thought was: `if you're so rich, how can you not be smart?'
France had had a good
natural endowment of fertile farmland and abundant labour
on which to found this, but Britain had had quite a modest starting capital. In
the early seventeenth century, when the British had first turned up in the East
Indies, and tried to get involved in the spice trade, their main problem had
been the lack of goods for which there was any local demand. But now, after
over two centuries of trading, finagling, shipbuilding and warring, their capital
and influence gave them access to pretty much anything they might desire: as
the economist Stanley Jevons crowed in 1865:
The plains of North
America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries;
Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of
North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of
South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea
for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies (W.
S. J. Jevons, The Coal Question, London: Macmillan, 1865.).
Britain, as a power,
was going to find that some of these other powers, especially one in North
America, would have a tendency to shift the terms of trade against it; but this
was no loss to the English-language community; if anything it was a net gain
when the English-speaking inhabitants of America began to look beyond their own
domain, and use their resources, in fertile fields, in productive mines, and in
a highly educated and massive population, for schemes, of their own devising.
Amid the general
splurge of galloping wealth creation, there was a particular surge in the power
and speed of communications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed
progress that was unheard of, first in inventing, and then in speedily
applying, all over the world, systems for transport of people and merchandise.
Perhaps even more impressive is the parallel progress made, largely using electronics,
in systems to transmit and store all sorts of information. A hundred and fifty
years from 1830 takes us from the first railway engine through the steamboat to
mass-market air transport, and from telegraph through the telephone to global
broadcasts of radio and television, as well as the first approaches to
effective computer networks. In the same period, means were found to store, and
to access at will, all kinds of sounds, including speech and music, visual
scenes and pictures, and views of events and actions as they took place. Any
one of these would have had the potential to transform the world in an earlier
age; but in this age, when humanity's dreams of magical powers came true, they
all came together.
Almost every one of
these new technologies was invented by a speaker of English-Stephenson, Fulton,
Wright, Bell, Baird, Edison-or by a speaker perhaps of another language who had
to work in the English-speaking world, as Marconi and Reuter had. And even when
they were not-think of Benz's German internal combustion engine, or the French
photograph and motion picture, due to pioneers such as Daguerre and Lumière-it
was English-speaking developers, such as Henry Ford or the film-makers of
Hollywood, who first demonstrated what could be done with the new media on a
truly vast scale. This inevitably meant that the key talk about these
achievements, how to replicate them and what was to be done with them, took
place above all in English. For scientists and engineers, but crucially for
businessmen, English has been the language in which the world's know-how is set
out. Never since cuneiform writing set up Akkadian as the diplomatic language
of the Near and Middle East has technology been so effective in spreading a
language.
These triumphs in
what is called `communications' all tend to reduce the time-taking and
effort-costing effects of distances in the world. But they also tend to reduce
the differences between the world as it is presented to distant people. Quite
literally, they make certain descriptions of experience 'common' to more and
more people. They make regional and international business routine, allow
international contacts to involve the highest level of personnel, turn
far-distant destinations into sites for brief visits, even holidays. But they
also standardise the images and phrases that people
carry in their memories, from advertising through entertainment to education;
nowadays there are not only classic texts and works of art that we are taught
to appreciate, but classic jingles, classic ads, classic kitsch, which we can't
get out of our heads from one end of the country or one end of the world to
another: and quite likely the words we remember will be in English, even if we
are Hungarian, Balinese, South African or Mongolian.
The new technologies
of communication have made possible new institutions too, institutions that
exist above all to spin words, to decorate them and transmit them. Newspapers,
magazines, film studios, cinemas, song-sheet publishers and recording
companies, radio stations, television production companies, website designers:
the list will no doubt continue long into the future. And within every medium,
advertising-the supreme meta-product of the language media, acting as a kind of
fertiliser or growth hormone, promoting distribution
and sales of all these language-based products through its explicit content,
even as its payments for space on the channels enable the communications media
to cut their prices and reach farther; and at the same time, a major producer of
language material in its own right. None of these new institutions of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries is restricted to English-but they all became
available first in English, and English has remained the biggest producer.
As the Portuguese
found when they first gained a reputation for trade in the Indian Ocean, a
national language need not remain restricted to its own nationals. Portuguese
became the lingua franca of international trade-and indeed the Christian
Church-in South and South-East Asia for ten generations and more, long after
Portugal itself had yielded in influence to the Dutch and British. The same
thing has happened to English, but on a global, rather than an oceanic, scale.
So many people in different parts of the world were finding that they needed to
deal with English speakers that their dealings began to overlap: non-natives,
and even those without any direct connection to the English-speaking world,
started using English among themselves, purely for their own convenience. In
the words of the English proverb, `nothing succeeds like success', and the
spread of a language is no exception. In the twentieth century English
replaced French as the usual language for international conferences. The
language of air traffic has always been (a restricted form of)
English-unsurprising, perhaps, since aviation is a US invention; but English
has anyway become the world's interlingua of choice. For 1996 it was estimated
that 85 per cent of international associations made official use of English, and
33 per cent used nothing else. In Asia and the Pacific, 90 per cent of
international organisations work only in English
(Crystal 2003: 88). French was the runner-up in official use with 49 per cent;
otherwise, only Arabic, Spanish and German achieved over 10 per cent.
And the
English-speaking world, with its characteristic eye for a business opportunity,
has converted this too into a paying proposition: English Language Teaching
(ELT) has become not only a field of education, but-as in those early days in
Bengal-a commercial service industry in its own right. Now it flourishes in
almost every country of the world: if the ambient language is English, it must
be a good place for the students to get plenty of practice; and if it is not,
English must be an eminently desirable skill to learn. The influential
philosopher James Mill (1773-1836) had once remarked that the imperial civil
service was little more than `a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper
classes' of Great Britain: ELT could be seen as a new answer to the same
problem, though now the qualifications in background and nationality are a
little less demanding than they were then.
This spread of
English is harder to map geographically than the expansion of British colonies.
In spirit, it follows in direct descent from the re-education policy that the
British introduced in India. But the mechanism is almost pure diffusion,
since-unlike in India-the language has travelled with very little presence of
its native speakers. It is probably the best example of a language spread by
the sheer prestige of the culture associated with it. Our previous examples
have shown the possibility in principle, as when the Egyptian and Hittite
courts of the fourteenth century BC corresponded in Akkadian, when the Cambodians
and Javanese of the fifth century AD chose to inscribe their temples with
literary Sanskrit, or when the Mughals, sweeping down into India from
Afghanistan in the sixteenth century, preferred Persian to their native Turkic
as their court language. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century vogue for
French in eastern Europe, too, should be seen in this light. But the spread of
English was the first time that a language and culture had simultaneously made
themselves desirable to peoples all over the world, truly a unique event.
The worldwide take-up
of English in the twentieth century, and particularly in its latter half after the
Second World War, is mostly set down to the influence of the USA, its globally
stationed armies and fleets, its outreaching commercial enterprises, and above
all its ubiquitous films, pop music, TV shows, news media and computer
software. Certainly, all these things have been significant, and mass
enthusiasm for English-language culture is now focused on the products of the
USA. Among the native speakers of English, the USA's 231 million are clearly
the largest single group, four times the size of the UK's 60 million, and alone
make up two-thirds of the global total.
Contrary to the
census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll
indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English,
although less than 20 per cent are confident of speaking it.( Cited by David Graddol, The decline of the native speaker, 1999: 64). And
arguably, the preferred brand of English now-to judge from accents fashionable
outside their own regions-is General American, verging to African American
Vernacular English; by contrast, the UK's current broadcast favourite
of `Estuary English', a London-oriented alternative to the traditional Oxbridge
`Received Pronunciation', is very much a local taste. Even today, location in
the UK provides the best medial point from which to understand speakers of
English from all over the world: US, South African, Caribbean, Indian,
Singaporean and Australian varieties are all frequently heard on the British
media, together with a range of UK regional dialects (notably Scots, Ulster,
Newcastle, Liverpool, Yorkshire, Birmingham and cockney); all are assumed to be
intelligible to a British audience. The USA, by contrast, has for over thirty
years already applied dubbing or subtitles to films in the English of Australia.
But when the concern
is the spread of language communities, bodies of people who can understand one
another through a given language. In this sense, distinctions of accent are
irrelevant until they threaten mutual understanding. And looked at historically,
it is quite evident that the springboard from which English made its jump to
global status was built far less on the recent exploits of Uncle Sam than on
the adventures over the previous 350 years of John Bull.
We have to consider
the growth of second-language speakers, since it is they who have dominated
expansion of English use in the twentieth century: by the 1950s, all sizeable
countries whose first language was English had already slowed the growth in
their populations. For second-language speakers, a good estimate, or range of
estimates, is provided by David Graddol's 1999 essay
`The decline of the native speaker'. He identifies recent growth in Latin
America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, growth that will almost certainly
lead on to second-language speakers outnumbering native speakers within the
next fifty years, if they don't already.
The levels persisting
in ex-British colonies range between 2 per cent and 5 per cent, but are usually
estimated to amount in total to around 200 million speakers. Other recent
estimates put the rate much higher, as much as 20 per cent in India and
Pakistan, 10 per cent in Bangladesh (India Today, 18 August 1997). Contrary to
the census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll
indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English,
although less than 20 per cent are confident of speaking.
If these are correct,
the total should already stand at 395 million. Contrast Latin America and sub
Saharan Africa, where knowledge of English is clearly growing, but where Graddol estimates current percentages as no more than 1 per
cent of the population (73 million, 43 million). In the very few parts of the
world with significant use of English directly due to US influence, the
proportions of people knowing it are 50 per cent in the Philippines (36
million), and 85 per cent in Liberia (2 million-although this last represents
speakers of English creole). All in all, these English-speaking regions of
non-British origin may represent a total of 152 million.
Already in this
second-language-speaking part of the English world, then, it seems that the
growth of British-origin English remains more significant than the radical
effects of the US influence. But this leaves out of account what may currently
be the fastest-growing area of second-language English, namely Europe. It is
difficult to attribute this directly either to British or US influence; English
was already widely used as a (then neutral) working language of the European
Community before UK accession in 1971. But British English remains the majority
option when English is taught in Europe.
It is purely a matter
of definition whether European English should be considered as part of the
foreign-language or the second-language domain, but it is clear that it has
become the major working language of the European Union, as well as being
widely used in commerce, industry and academia in northern European countries,
particularly Scandinavia. Graddol's analysis of the
European Union's Eurobarometer surveys from 1990 to 1998 suggests that English
competence in Europe was high, but fairly static, until 1980, at under 20 per
cent; it then perked up and since 1990 has begun to take off meteorically. It
now stands at over 100 million, approaching a third of the European Union's
population. The 42 million Continentals capable of taking part in an English
conversation in 1950 grew to 60 million (18 per cent) over the thirty years to
1980; the figure had reached 80 million (21 per cent) by 1990 and 105 million
(31 per cent) by 2000. Taking account of differing competence at different
ages-in 1994, 10 per cent of the over-fifty-fives knew some English, but 55 per
cent of those between fifteen and twenty-four--Graddol
expects the numbers of English-speaking Continentals to peak around 190 million
in 2030.
Or as Robert Bums,
wrote in,`To a Louse', 1798; O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us. It wad frae monie
a blunder free us An' foolish notion.
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us An' ev'n Devotion.
A language that links
together a speech community, even a vast one like the global multitude who
think and speak in English, is given its character not so much by its phonetics
and phrasings as by the patterns of associations that have piled up on its
words as they are transmitted down the generations. A language bespeaks a
history-the history, of course, of those who have spoken it-and this is the
main creator of its reputation abroad, as it is of its attractions to those who
may want to learn the language, and so join its community. This is one reason
why study of a language has long emphasised its
literature, `the best that has been said and thought's using that language, as
selected by its own tradition. But not all the experiences in a language's long
memory may have been hallowed by good writing.
Looking back on the
history of English as formative of its present character and reputation, memory
can afford to be quite selective: the past before the sixteenth century of the
Reformation and the beginnings of colonial expansion seems to have left only
the very faintest of traces. But from that era on, the kinds of adventures that
spread English, and which were prized most highly by many of its speakers, do
have a certain consistency. English is associated with the quest to get rich,
the deliberate acquisition of wealth, often by quite unprecedented and
imaginative schemes. This quest has sometimes had to struggle with religious
and civic conscience, and the glories of patriotism, but has largely been able
to enlist them on its side. In general, it has been the ally, rather than the
rival, of freedom of the individual. English has been, above all, a worldly
language.
There is little left
in English from the epoch before the arrival of the Germanic dialects that were
destined to fuse into Anglo-Saxon: perhaps only the name Britain itself, from a
presumably Gaulish term to describe the ancient
Britons, `the figured ones', for their custom of body painting. Even older
might be the name Albion, used in Greek c.300 BC, and still used in Gaelic to
refer to Scotland, Alba: for this the only suggested etymology is
pre-Indo-European, making it cognate with the Alps, and two ancient Roman
cities called A lba: a truly ancient word for
`highlands' ( Mario Citroni, in Simon
Hornblower and Antony Spawforth , The Oxford
Classical Dictionary, Oxford University Press.1999).
It is also just
possible that some features seen in Irish English, such as `I'm after finishing
my work' and `I saw Thomas and he sitting by the fire', imported from typical
phraseology in Irish, are features that happen to go back to the language
spoken here before the Celts even got here. Similar phraseology is after all
found in Egyptian and the Semitic languages respectively, and one hypothesis to
explain this, and much else, is that there was prehistoric trade among these
regions.
The language, once
established in Britain in the fifth century, found itself surrounded by Celtic
to the west and the north. Celts could not stand against its advance at
spear-point, but gradually forces bent on converting its speakers to
Christianity converged from the north-west and south-east, finally meeting and
ending the competition at the Synod of Whitby in 664, when King Oswy ruled in favour of the Roman
tradition. English reacted well to the sophisticated missionaries of Roman
Christianity, becoming actively literate, with translations frond Latin but
also its own poetry and prose set down in books. Overlaid by French in the
eleventh century, it suffered a setback to its literary life, but benefited
from the invaders' military prestige in that it began to expand into all the
remaining Celtic areas of both Britain and Ireland. Its life under French
domination could perhaps be compared to the early years of Aramaic, submerged
militarily by speakers of Akkadian from Assyria, but gradually replacing it as
the empire's elite faced crises that shook its power structure. For the
chivalrous romance of Norman French, the disrupting crises came as bubonic
plague, which struck repeatedly in the fourteenth century, especially in towns
and monasteries, and military severance of England and Wales from southern
France. In the new dispensation, where feudal ties were dissolved and politics was
firmly focused north of the Channel, English came into its own as the unifying
language of the kingdom.
This long period, a
full millennium, created the substance of English as we know it, but socially
it was so different from the bourgeois life that followed that it has
contributed little to the language's modem character. In the sixteenth century
England's rulers began to conceive the country as an agency independent of, and
in principle equal to, any power in Europe, secular or spiritual. In this period
the foundation was also laid for the formal union with the outlying parts of
the British Isles, Scotland and Ireland. The governance of the whole region was
firmly in London's hands. At the same time, with the advent of printed books,
the spelling and grammar of English became standardised.
England, and English, was positioned for growth.
This growth, when it
came, was based on sea power and commercial credit. Over the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the strength of the Royal Navy and the
City of London became unassailable, and both enabled English to be projected
around the world. As the language that settlers brought to North America,
English simply persisted and spread: the colonies were self-sufficient, and
grew at the expense of their neighbours. Not
surprisingly, as they became richer they also became more self-confident and
overbearing: they never had serious cause to revise their early,
self-regarding, attitudes, especially since they could hardly fail to notice
that whenever they came up against opposition, whether indigenous or from
another colonial power, they came off best. A belief in `manifest destiny'
could almost be seen as the lesson of experience.
In the other great
overseas enterprise that spread English, the English East India Company-founded
like Virginia at the beginning of the seventeenth century-business acumen was
more to the fore. This enterprise was driven not by desperate or hopeful people
committing their lives, but by rich people committing part of their capital.
But as in the American colonies, the venturesome spirit of those engaged made
it a success. Nonetheless, it did not begin seriously to spread English for the
first two centuries. It was only when a more earnest spirit began to prevail at
home, and the colonies taken for profit came to be seen as conferring a
responsibility to uplift the less fortunate, that schools were founded actively
to spread the intangible benefits of Britishness, starting with the language.
By this time a third
stream of English-based enterprise was beginning to flourish, the host of
ventures in ways to profit from fossil fuels and the sheer ingenuity that go
under the name of the Industrial Revolution. This same revolution began the
shrinking of the world, with news ever more available of achievements far away.
English was from now on identified not only with self-regarding settlers and
self-righteous governors but self-inventing and self-aggrandising
entrepreneurs too: and so it became seen as a passport to self-improvement for
ambitious people all over the world.
This progress of
English contrasts in many ways with the careers of other world languages.
Compared with its
contemporaries, the fellow European imperial languages, the advance of English
is remarkably informal. With the exception of the state's first charter of a
trading monopoly for the East India Company, and until the British parliament
began to concern itself with policy in the nineteenth century, there is a sense
of do-it-yourself. Maintenance of the Royal Navy became a state responsibility,
after the glory days of profitable Caribbean piracy were over; but the actual
activity of spreading English settlement, British business and indeed the
Anglican word of God around the world was left up to private initiative.
This contrasts
starkly with the mode of operation of Spain and Portugal, where individual
conquistadores might open the way, but state involvement 'of viceroys, and the
whole apparatus of state and Church, immediately followed; until the
revolutions of the nineteenth century, all Spain's and Portugal's colonies
were ruled by governors sent out directly from Europe. This made for strained
relations, and a lack of solidarity, between the home governments and the
criollos who had succeeded in establishing themselves abroad. The
Romance-speaking settlers were not really trusted as representatives of their
Catholic Majesties. In the early days, the allocation of land through encom ienda meant that they were
at best leaseholders from the king; and as we have seen, many settlers'
descendants in Peru adopted Quechua to emphasise
their separateness from the European establishment.
In these
circumstances, it is hard to say what the Spanish and Portuguese languages came
to represent overseas: perhaps more than anything else, the continuing link
with the Catholic Church-ironic, when we remember how the policies of the religious
orders had delayed the spread of these languages in Latin America for hundreds
of years. And for France, too, overseas expansion was under government control,
ever since King François I had sent Jacques Cartier out to seek a North-West
Passage in 1534. In the seventeenth century, Colbert had fretted over the
non-expansion of the French language; but a century later, the French colonists
on the ground had taken so little interest in de la Salle's explorations along
the Mississippi, let alone effective occupation of them, that Napoleon
volunteered to sell them, sight unseen, to the USA. All the colonies that the
French acquired in the nineteenth century, from Algeria to Indochina, were
taken by French arms for the glory of France: la gloire remained an active
motive. At the same time France was clearly still a major force in the
scientific civilisation that it promoted, so that use
of French could be presented as a channel to modernity. Settlers did move into
Algeria, but elsewhere the force that made the French colonies a reality-and so
spread the use of French-was the central government. Apart from in Algeria and
Indo-China, this centralised approach meant that
withdrawal of French control, when it came in the 1960s, was surprisingly
speedy and painless. What often remained was an affection for the French
language, a symbol of la civilisation française, rational in aspiration, national in sentiment.
Given that Russian
was spread over three centuries rather nakedly as a mark of the power of the
Tsar's empire-of limited appeal to those not accepted as Russian-and that the
twentieth-century attempt to convert it, after the fact, into a vernacular for
`Scientific Socialism' collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian
language has something of an image problem. The heavy-handedness with which its
materialism was asserted contrasted with the lighter touch of French
rationalism, and the even-handedness of British pragmatism, and the
open-handedness of American consumerism. Russian's associations with group
effort and economic austerity are almost the converse of English's conjuring up
of initiative and ingenuity by individuals, leading to wealth through
enterprise.
English, as a
quintessentially `worldly' tongue, can also be set against the atmospheres of
world languages from a more distant past. Chinese and Egyptian, and indeed
Greek and Latin in the ancient world, were all vehicles of civilisations
that emphasised the value of the here and now, and at
their best were able to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, as
well as a degree of peace and security. Arabic and Sanskrit, by contrast, like
Latin and Greek in the Christian era, were and are promoted by much more otherworldly
cultures, focusing their speakers' aspirations on spiritual aims, and seeing
their degree of visible success or gratification in daily life as only a small
part of what is really important. Phoenician and Hebrew, though neither
achieved great expansion, and both were as languages highly alike, are classic
cases of language communities on opposite sides of this divide. As for
languages such as Akkadian or Aramaic, Nahuatl or Quechua, we know too little about
their contemporary societies to place them in this framework.
This difference of
language culture is in our age very evident. In the early twenty-first century,
the aspiration to learn English or Arabic has become distinctive for many young
people all over the world. In the countries of western Asia and North Africa,
Arabic Language Teaching has become a service industry seeking foreign
customers, just like ELT in so many other parts of the world. English and
Arabic are in some ways remarkably similar: both have a written history of
about one and a half thousand years, have been spread around the world by
speakers who often knew no other language, and have bodies of literature that
freight them with associations many centuries old. But rare is the young person
who strives to learn Arabic for Avicenna's philosophy, the stories of the
Thousand and One Nights or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz; even rarer is one who
struggles with English hoping to read the King James Bible, or the Book of
Common Prayer. In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the
Koran, English the language of modem business and global popular culture.
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