The following originates with the research of the British scholar Nicholas Ostler. His most recent book is Passwords to Paradise published by Bloomsbury UK.

Human nature may not change much, but the spread of languages have, particularly  Chinese commerce with South-East Asia that briefly expanded to take in the whole Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century ; the Arab, Persian and Indian traders who had taken the Indian Ocean for their domain in the early first millennium AD; the much earlier Polynesian mariners of the Pacific in their outrigger canoes, who island by island reached every habitable landmass there; indeed, the primeval navigators who many thousands of years ago made their way through the East Indies and across the Torres Straits to Australia. But none of these forerunners succeeded in mapping the whole world once and for all, providing the complete inventory of what lands there were to be discovered, and where they lay. In the sixteenth century, the world shrank from an open system to a closed and definite sphere, still dangerous but now for the first time manageable. Now it became conceivable that fellow-speakers could set up home on the other side of an ocean, indeed many oceans away: they might be hard to reach, but their address would be known. Though they were scattered across the world, contact could be maintained.

Once this network of discontinuous communities had been established, maintainable through regular sea traffic, the scope of inter-communal relations changed too. In the Americas, the onset of epidemic disease very quickly readjusted the relative size of resident and incomer communities, and in Latin America extensive interbreeding soon blurred the borders, linguistic and cultural, between them. As a result, the settler communities largely replaced, by incorporation or by simple displacement, the previous resident populations. Everywhere the situation was complicated by the simultaneous surge in the use of third parties, mostly black Africans, as slaves; to an extent they, or a mix of them and the indigenous population, became the representatives of a new minority community, with the immigrants now the majority. But this slave-associated minority was never divided by language from the majority community, since they had become a community themselves only by adopting some version of the slave-owners language.

Nothing new there, except for the continental scale of what was happening; something analogous must have happened, for example, when the Romans invaded Gaul, or the Saxons took over England. But in India and the East Indies, the indigenous community was not vulnerable to disease brought by the immigrants: on the contrary, the diseases endemic there kept the immigrant population small. The result was a persistently small minority community of outsiders, the Europeans, living on the edge of the resident population, but increasingly influential within it. This was a new situation and the response to it, the spread of a language by re-education, was new too.

Effectively, the outsider minority passed its prestige language on to the elite of the majority, not as a lingua franca, but as a symbol of a kind of cultural recruitment. The novelty of this development is underlined by the fact that it happened in British India, but not in the highly similar Dutch East Indies. Both the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie and the English East India Company had brought a Germanic language to a long-standing commercial market in South Asia; both had succeeded in displacing European competitors, the Portuguese or the French; both had attracted Protestant missionary camp-followers who were keen to spread their spiritual worldview to the local population. But the Dutch were content always to use the local lingua franca, Malay, as the language for their religion, and their administration. The mijnheers' own world was separate from that of their local suppliers, employees and (ultimately) subjects, and so it would remain.

Only the British provided the means to switch to their own language, English. When they did this, they were yielding certainly to pressure from their own missionaries, but also from their home population and many elite Indians. The emerging new attitude to the colony demanded nothing less, seeing it not just as a place in which to make a profit, but as British India, to be developed as a part of Greater Britain.

This step turned out to open the way to English as a world language, available to any who wanted to take part in the Industrial Revolution, wherever they might live. The motives at the time may recall those of Archbishop Lorenzana, calling in the eighteenth century for the use of Spanish throughout Spain's empire, not least as a duty to the education of the Indians.  Bat he was really calling for the' use of Spanish to be imposed, not conceded; and so it ultimately was, largely through neglect of education in other languages. The case of English in India did involve some symbolic withdrawal of government support for Sanskrit and Arabic; and the generalised use of English which followed has contributed to the closing of English-speaking minds, where foreign languages are concerned. ('After all, they all speak English, don't they?') But this spread of the language, ultimately worldwide, through what we have called re-education, was never an imposition; English remained the language of a small minority, and even among Indian nationalists its acquisition felt more like the development of an opportunity. It was a new and significant development in the history of language spread, and was later taken up as a deliberate policy by at least one other power, the French, in their empire's conceived mission civilisatrice.

Another important innovation in language spread over the past five hundred years, and especially the last two hundred, was the growing role of technology. Civilisations are, by their nature, technology-driven; indeed, by one definition a civilisation is just a distinctive accumulation of technical innova­tions. And the spread of language had been advanced by technology before: recall how Akkadian's availability in cuneiform writing on clay made it the diplomatic lingua franca of ancient West Asia, and how the alphabetic system invented by Phoenicians had provided the basis not just for a new elite role for Aramaic speakers as scribes in Assyria and Babylon, but in the end for administration and education throughout the world from Iceland to the East Indies.

But in the modern era language spread has been effected above all by mass production of language texts, and later the means to disseminate them instantly over any distance. First came printing, already starting up in Europe in the fifteenth century. It played a cardinal role in western Europe's encounter with many unknown languages, as well as in spreading its own. A little-noted spin-off of this was the first use of printed books as language tutors, initially of Latin. This in turn led to the development of missionary linguistics, originally as an aid to preaching in exotic places.

Then, four hundred years later, came electronic links, first point-to-point and then broadcast. The effects on language spread have been profound. Language communities have become sustainable despite physical separation. This can be expected soon to benefit small language communities, as well as the great languages listed underneath.

This may have an effect as yet unknown-on the development of the languages themselves: electronic technology, if it becomes totally pervasive, might even bring about not only the widely announced `death of distance but even `the death of dialect. But it has had indirect effects already. The withdrawal of the European imperial powers in the quarter-century after the Second World War, especially from Africa, was above all a policy response to a new globally sensed politics, the `Wind of Change' famously detected by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1960: `The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

The foreign elites were departing, in deference to the voices of the world's many, among them the people they governed. Those voices had become audible through those same elites' own mass media, indeed now speaking in their own languages.

The past four hundred years have been almost absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples, as political, military and cultural victories have succeeded one another. The language community has expanded overseas from England, first by stealth in tiny crevices, then by imperial assertion over ever vaster domains, and finally, after the demise of arrant colonialism, to ap­parent acclaim in a single world marketplace. It is a creature first of the hu­man social faculty for creating a language among disparate groups who share a single territory, then the ability discovered by that one island community to use its naval strength to spread its citizens and its political influence wherever it found points of weakness all over the world, and most recently of being the language most readily to hand when Europe, North America and then the world discovered how to profit from fossil fuels, science and mass markets. This tremendous run of luck has created an enormous reserve of prestige, reflected in the global enthusiasm for English-language popular culture. As the French language showed five hundred years ago, association with wealth and power is highly attractive.

But English can hardly expect that its linguistic vogue will continue for ever. The presence of a single language for communication worldwide is stabilising, giving it the appearance almost of being a neutral part of the world order, as much beyond the control of great powers as it is of any one society. Likewise the Latin language, lasting almost a millennium after the demise of the Roman empire in the west, gave western Europe at least, in its long sep­arate development, good reason to believe that it had become the permanent and pure language of thought and reality. But the printing press, long distance navigation and the rise of global empires changed all that. The world remains a highly dynamic place. For languages, as for any human institution, when you are on top, sooner or later there is only one way to go.

The current status of English has three main pillars that support it: population, position and prestige.

First of all, English has as many speakers as any other language. When its 375 million native speakers are added to the equal number of second-language speakers and the three-quarters of a billion people who have learnt it at school or in other classes, it is reasonable to claim that a quarter of mankind is familiar with English. The only comparable language is Chinese, when• all those educated in Mandarin are added together; but the average in­come, status and global location of the English speakers give English very much the edge. Learning English is a majority school subject in the People's Republic of China; Chinese, by contrast, remains off the syllabus in all English-speaking countries' schools.

Second, there is now no language to match English for global coverage. English has a special status in countries on every continent, a status it shares only with French. But there are four first- or second-language speakers of English for every one of French. The complacency of English speakers speaks for itself: while English speakers still predominate in all measures of commercial and scientific achievement, it remains the norm in every English-speaking country for those completing compulsory education to be monolin­gual in English. Effective competence in any foreign language continues to elude the vast majority of those who are made competent in the technical basis of modem civilisation. And this is how they stay throughout their lives. But it is not just that the majority of English speakers are complacent. It is more that the world has as yet exacted no price for this; if anything, it has re­warded English speakers for not swerving from their own traditions and sources of wisdom.

Finally, English is consciously associated with technical progress and popular culture in every part of the world. This kind of high prestige associated with the language seems particularly well founded because it is based not on a spiritual revelation-revelations are always local, even if they claim universal validity-nor on yearning for a particular regime, which would guarantee freedom or social justice. It is based on the perception of wealth, as it may be made to flow from scientific advance, and its rational application.

Since this has been the recent experience of all the richest countries in the world today, in some sense it has objective truth on its side. Practical human beings are notoriously short sighted, so the `smart money (itself a very English concept) is naturally backing the belief that the recent course of English, and hence its present status, will continue indefinitely. Just as the bien pensants of the 1990s could be brought to believe briefly in `The End of History', the ultimate victory of liberalism and markets, so many today argue that the progress of English may have passed some key global point in the development of world communications, permanently outdistancing any possible competitor, and providing all language-learners with a one-way bet. David Crystal is a highly knowledgeable and perceptive commentator languages in the modem world; and at the end of his book English as a Global Language he has reviewed the factors that might endanger its position, notably foreign negative reactions, the changing balance of populations, and the prospects of dialect fission. But even he can only speculate in the end that `it may be that English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever.

Our background study of five millennia of world language makes the eternity of this prospect seem unlikely. The modem global language situation is unprecedented, but the constituents of modern language communities are still people. And, above all, people use language to socialise. Human societies have always had a way of multiplying languages.

First of all, most people in the world are still bilingual; this points to the fact that global languages have seldom established themselves as anything more than second languages, useful as a lingua franca where long-distance communication is important, but not particularly commanding as vehicles for everyone's daily life. The major exceptions to this have been the grass-roots spread of Latin over Gaulish and the Iberian languages in western Europe, and Chinese over East Asia, where literate language communities have spread over contiguous areas, without necessarily filling them up with native speaker settlers. English, starting on an island and without a European bridgehead,  enjoyed this kind of contiguous spread; and its main mode of spread today, via education, the electronic media and literate contact, does not lead to it’ replacing home community languages. However, the nature of the home community is changing, partly under the influence of English. Ris­ing levels of female education, more and more including English, and the prevalence of domestic media such as radio and television, mean that the 'mother-tongue' situation for learning a first language in the home will increasingly include English.

Second, English is not seen everywhere as a neutral medium of access to wealth and global culture. Some policy-makers, typically in ex-British or ex-American colonies, have `seen too much of it', and resist it, often combining historic associations with domestic power politics. In 1948, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) excluded English as an official language, partly because it was believed that its continued use would benefit the (predominantly middle-class) Tamil minority; the sequel, including the establishment of Sinhala as the only official language in 1956, has not been happy, and much use of English continues. In 1967, English was stripped of its status as an official language in Tanzania and Malaysia, and in 1974 in Kenya; in 1987, the Philippines promoted Tagalog to equal status with it, `until otherwise provided by the law'. This resistance may fade in later generations, along with memories of colonial history;' but global interventions by the USA, sometimes in alliance with other English-speaking powers, show no sign of diminishing in the twenty-first century. They will do much to preserve an easy depiction of English in some quarters as the global bully's language of choice.

Lastly, even if English persists worldwide, there is no guarantee that it will stay united as a language. Although the world in the early third millennium AD is a very different place from western Europe in the early first, English could well follow the example of Latin, and reshape itself in different ways in different dialect areas, ultimately-say within a few centuries-becoming a language family. This is particularly likely wherever the language has established itself as a vernacular, as in Jamaica or Singapore, or where most of a population becomes bilingual, so that code-switching is an attractive mode of conversation, as for example it is today among educated Indians. Evidently this is less likely to happen, or will at least be slowed, if the communities that speak English stay in regular two-way touch, by phone and correspondence, and receiving each other's media. English probably still holds the best posi­tion among large languages worldwide for preserving its unity by mutual contact. As one indication, international telephone traffic is overwhelmingly dominated by conversations in English. Of the forty-eight most heavily used intercontinental flows of telephone calls in 1994, 46.9 percent (53 billion minutes) were between English speakers. Another 50.4 per cent (57 billion) were between English speakers and countries of other languages (figures from TeleGeography Inc.).

But not all English-speaking communities may play a full part in the global conversation; and long-term rifts and rivalries may come to dominate-as Spain and France contested for influence in Renaissance Italy, a mere millennium after they had all been provinces of a single empire.

It is possible to outline a variety of scenarios for a turn in the fortunes of  English, drawing inspiration from the later years of many dominant languages of the past. Both as a first language of large populations, and as a world lingua franca, English may find that the seeds of its decline have already been planted.

As a first language, English has already peaked demographically.* In this it is no different from most of the other imperial languages from Europe. Its native speakers are still growing in numbers, but at a far slower rate than those of some other major languages. As a result, according to one intelligent estimate,' English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish and Arabic should just about be on a par in the year 2050, with Chinese still exceeding each of them by a factor of 2.5. This is a time when world population is predicted to level off, but the heritage of the different past growth rates will be a massive difference among the average ages of the speakers of the various languages. English and Chi­nese will then be predominantly languages of older people, Arabic of the young, with Spanish and Hindi-Urdu somewhere in between. This is not to predict the average wealth of the different communities, which may be an im­portant determinant of the evolving power relations among them, and also­as we have seen in the careers of French and English-of the attractiveness of their languages to outsiders. English may still have the greatest global spread of a language, and its speakers even the highest average income; but it will no longer have its current positional advantage, at least as to numbers of native speakers. If the English-speaking economies come to seem less dy­namic, it is entirely possible that linguistic leadership too will shift away.

And even in the big native-speaker countries, the language may increas­ingly have to accommodate the presence of other large language communi­ties-in the USA Spanish, in the UK perhaps some of the major southern Asian languages, and in Canada, as ever, French, but perhaps also Inuktitut. The different varieties of English will be under very different local pressures; bilingualism with different languages may become significant, and the dia­lects may progressively move apart. Like the Aryan language of India in the first millennium BC, diversifying into Prakrits and then separate languages, even while Sagslirit was preserved as an interlingua, or like the fate of Latin in Europe in the first millennium AD, English could find itself splitting into a variety of local versions among native speakers, while the world goes on using a common version as a lingua franca.

But as a lingua franca too, English could still face difficulties. Witness the fate of Sogdian, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries AD the merchant and missionary language of the Silk Road from China to Samarkand; or the fate of Phoenician, the mercantile jargon of the whole Mediterranean throughout the first millennium BC, and eminent spreader of literacy. Both are today non-existent. A language associated with business is soon abandoned when the basis of trade, or the sources of wealth, move on; businessmen are notoriously unsentimental. And it is hardly rational to expect that the extreme imbalance in the world's distribution of wealth is going to continue in the anglophone favour indefinitely into the future. One day, the terms of trade will be very different, and soon after that day comes, the position of English will seem a highly archaic anomaly.

Likewise the association of English with world science may fail to save it. Dispassionate enquiry has never been an activity that appeals to a majority, however widely education is made available. Serious research remains a mi­nority activity, which because it is disinterested will always need patronage from others who have accumulated power or wealth. But those political, mil­itary, business or religious elites cannot be trusted, especially if it seems that the results of enquiry are telling against their own power, or failing to buttress it: they will then often adjudicate in favour of tradition, or popular ignorance. It is easy to forget how much the ongoing popularity of science depends on its continuing to offer new golden eggs, or new golden bombs. When the flow of goodies slackens, as one day it may, the pursuit of science will be widely seen as an expensive indulgence by its paymasters, in industry and government.

In the same way, when the many themselves enjoy market power, as they did to some extent in the print revolution of the Reformation, and as they often do now in the anglophone world, they will use their money to demand what they can understand, and think they need. That is the way of markets. But their judgement will be heavily coloured by tradition. We can already see creationism, and an oracular approach to some of Christianity's ancient texts, flourishing at the heart of the richest, and most technically developed, country in the English-speaking world. If powers within the USA, now the provider of the world's greatest sources of information and learning, were to start to bear down on its freer thinkers, one could imagine other parts of the world beginning to guard their own learning behind the cloak of their own languages.

In fact, academic traditions too have a fairly poor record, even on their own account, for sustaining interest in genuine open-mindedness; there is always the temptation to appeal to authority, and the accepted canon of `normal science': recall how the sképsis and theôria of third- and fourth-century Greece hardened into later linguistic conservatism and scholasticism, how the lively disputations underlying Sanskrit grammar and Buddhist logic congealed and ceased to develop in medieval India, and how the Abbasid golden age of research in Arabic petered out with Averroës in the twelfth century. There is plenty of scope for the worldwide scientific community to go into at least a temporary eclipse; and if global scientific exchange falters, English too will lose out. The second death of Latin shows vividly how such a thing can, and did, happen on an international scale.

There are already new potential centres of world civilisation growing, with different language backgrounds. In East and South-East Asia, Chineselanguage communities are increasingly apparent as masters of~ ~- vestment, and look likely at last to work in concert with their their fellow Chinese in the rapidly developing People's Republic.  In the Middle East, Arabic-speaking peoples are growing in numbers with some sense of solidarity, part of the global ummah bound together by acceptance of Islam. The militant actions of radical Islamists, and the inequi­ties of income and power caused by the dominance of oil revenues in their economies, may slow their real integration. But ultimately it is hard to doubt that this very large and self-conscious group, sharing a faith and a language, and increasingly able to communicate at all levels through modem media, will make common cause, even without political leadership from one of the main states of the region.

Less prominently, too, we can note that two-thirds of the world's 147 million Turkish-speaking peoples, notably Turks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are now organised independently of foreigners for the first time since the Russian advance into central Asia. Seventeen per cent (mostly Azeris) are in Iran; 7 per cent are in China (mostly Uyghurs); and 7 per cent (made up of Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs, and a variety of tiny groups) are in Russia.

 As a total community, there are more of them than there are speakers of any of German, French or Japanese. With better communications, they will begin to consider themselves a unit, for most of their languages are mutually intelligible.

Such reorganisations will not immediately threaten, or even at first significantly diminish, the global use of English. But they may offer early signs that the equilibrium of languages used in global communication is beginning to shift in a different direction.

To foresee Chinese or Arabic as major international languages requires no imagination: it follows from extrapolation of current population trends, in combination with well-known economic and political facts. But in reality, the future language history of the world will quite likely involve surprising new developments that alter population balances. Who could have foreseen that discovery of gold in Brazil in the 1790s would suddenly spur that place to fill up with Portuguese speakers, when Portugal had already held the land for three centuries without any great linguistic effect? Sometimes a single event is enough to trigger a potential that has long been possible, but remained unrealised.

And who, even in the eleventh century, could have foreseen that the import into Europe of paper-making (twelfth century), gunpowder (fourteenth century) and printing (fifteenth century) would have first revolutionised its reli­gious life in the Reformation, and then sent its adventurers out to settle, and to dominate others all over the non-Christian world? These three were all im­ports of techniques that had been known in China since the early first millen­nium, without any noted effect in their homeland. So even in a closed system, new interactions can have revolutionary consequences.

Major events and interactions, now unforeseen, will disrupt and reroute the future too; there seems little doubt of this. Most easily predictable-but not, I hope, certain-is some kind of military holocaust, something that is nowadays technically all too easy. This could profoundly alter the balance of populations-in the world, as the Anglo-Saxon advance through North America led rapidly to the extinction or endangerment of all its indigenous lan­guages. An epidemic too could have a massive balance-tipping effect-as everywhere in the Americas when Europeans came, but as perhaps also twice in Britain, during the twilight years of Celtic British and Norman French especially in situations where there is pre-existing bilingualism. A truly horrific epidemic, even if localized, could well permanently alter the linguis­tic situation in Malaysia, or in Canada.

Not every unforeseen event need change the status quo to the detriment of English, of course. Remember the Persian emperor Darius, who decreed the use of Aramaic throughout his realm, although it was then a foreign language with nothing to recommend it but a very strong background as a vehicle of administration. It is quite possible, on that analogy, that some pragmatic government might hasten the spread of English to a part of the world hitherto without it-in the Baltic, perhaps, or central Asia. Indeed, something like this happened when Lee Kwan Yew decreed English for the largely Chinese-speaking colony of Singapore in the 1960s.

Whatever happens, any changes that do occur may have a surprisingly disturbing effect on the English speakers who remain. For three centuries now, the bounds of the language have continually expanded. Typical speakers may pride themselves on their pragmatism, and welcome the breaking down of language barriers, in the interests of wider understanding and easy communication. But when the language whose use is to be reduced is their own, expect discomfort to be registered. In 1984, some 8 per cent of the US population professed a first language other than English. This was enough for a programme of legislation to get under way in the early 1990s, to `recognize English in law as the language of the official business of the Government'. Between 1980 and 1990, the US population grew from 226,542,203 to 248,709,873 (US Census Bureau, 1980 figure revised in 1987). The quote is from a summary of Bill Emerson's English Language Empowerment Bill, presented to the US House of Representatives on 4 January 1995. No such provision has yet (as of January 2005) been adopted as law.

There is now a continuing hubbub of proposal and appeal on the topic in many states' assemblies, which remains inconclusive. We have yet to see how other English-speaking countries will react when they too can no longer easily assume that the option of communication in English is always open.

But no law and no decree anywhere has ever yet stemmed the ebbing of a language tide.

 

How Sanskrit Conquered Asia

How English Conquered the World


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