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 English Conquered the World
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