Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

There is a hierarchy among languages.

At the very bottom are the languages that have only a limited number of users and circulate only within a small tribe. Above those are the languages that circulate within an ethnic group, and farther above are languages that circulate within a nation. And on top are the languages that traverse a wide region of ethnic groups and nations.

Today the rapid increase in communication among different people is bringing about two extraordinary changes in the linguistic landscape. The first concerns the languages at the bottom of the hierarchy. These languages, most of whose names are not known to the rest of the world, are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. Of the approximately six thousand languages on Earth, it is often predicted that more than 80 percent may disappear by the end of this century. In the course of history, many languages have come into being and disappeared, but today languages are dying at an unprecedented rate, just like the plant and animal species affected by environmental change. The second change in the global linguistic landscape concerns, of course, the rise of the English language. There has never before been a universal language of this scale, a language that is not confined to any one geographical location, however vast, but sits atop all other languages and circulates throughout the entire world. This change could not leave other languages unaffected.

What exactly is a universal language? Some predict that Mandarin Chinese will become the most powerful language of the twenty-first century because it has the largest number of native speakers. Indeed, learning Mandarin has become a worldwide fad. Such a prediction, however, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. What makes a language “universal” has nothing to do with how many native speakers there are, and everything to do with how many people use it as their second language. It is high time we stop confusing the two figures. To be sure, changes in the world economy and population will likely make not only Chinese but also Spanish and Arabic more important than they already are today. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that any of those languages will ever dethrone English and be used among people of diverse nations. Certainly, Americans will not be using Chinese to trade with Russia or India — another country with a fast-growing economy and a mind-boggling population — anytime soon. (In fact, the rise of India, a former British colony, will only strengthen the dominance of English.) Spanish has the second largest number of native speakers, and the number is growing, but it’s also unlikely to replace English. With the third largest number of native speakers, English is a big language in its own right; but that is not what matters. What matters is that English is already used and will continue to be used by the greatest number of non native speakers in the world.

The rise of English as the singular universal language resulted from an accumulation of historical coincidences. There is nothing intrinsic in the English language that made it attain such prominence. It is far from easy to learn. (A recent study found that it takes much longer for an infant to learn English than, for example, Spanish; the world would indeed have been better off if Spanish had become the universal language.) Unlike Latin or Classical Chinese, universal languages of the past, it did not develop primarily as a written language. With Old Norse and Norman French mixed into what was originally a West Germanic language, the grammar is messy, the vocabulary daunting, and the spelling cockeyed. And, for many nonnative speakers, English pronunciation is a nightmare.

Nonetheless, once a language comes to circulate widely, its circulation accelerates at a snowballing pace regardless of its intrinsic characteristics. The more people use it, the more new users it gains. Indeed, an analogy can be made between language and currency. A currency that many people use in transactions comes to be used by even more until the process reaches a critical point and that becomes the world currency. This principle of self-generating propagation — which, at some point, operates independently of how the initial process began — guarantees that the American dollar will continue to circulate as world currency for quite some time even after the relative decline of the American economy. The principle applies to a greater extent to language, a far more self-sustaining entity than currency.

And there is more. Today the added technology of the Internet is accelerating the spread of English. This universal language can now easily leap over the man-made walls of national borders as well as natural walls like the Himalayas, the Sahara, and the Pacific. Apart from political, economic, or legal barriers, there is nothing the new technology cannot cross. Just how long human civilization as we know it may last is more uncertain than ever in today’s world. Yet there is a strong likelihood that English will continue to grow as the universal language, with more and more nonnative speakers using it for at least a few centuries into the future — or even for as long as human civilization as we know it persists.

What will be the fate of written languages other than English one hundred or two hundred years on? Some populations will be cherishing their own language even more than before. Others will witness their language’s fall — a fall that begins innocuously but all too soon becomes irrevocable.

Many linguists would dismiss such pronouncements as nothing but the idle talk of a layperson. The main current of linguistics today as I understand it is to grasp the structures of language based on phonetics. That means treating languages with and without writing as of equal value. Such a framework allows no room for the idea that written languages may fall. For linguists, languages cannot fall; they merely change. For them, a language dies only when its final speaker (or, more accurately, its final listener) disappears. When I talk of a language “falling” or “dying,” I’m referring only to the possible fate of written languages, especially those that once achieved greatness by capturing and celebrating life — and at the same time celebrating themselves for performing such a wondrous task, each in its own way. What a loss it would be if such languages were reduced to mere shadows of their former glory. Just as civilizations fall, so can languages, too.

Perhaps because writers tend to be night owls, the minds of my fellow IWP writers seemed to become sharper at night. When I occasionally came across them in the hallway late in the evening, they didn’t look as though they were going to unwind after a day’s work; rather, they had the alertness of a soldier on the way to the battlefield — or the fierceness of a nocturnal animal on the hunt for prey. Their minds apparently occupied with their writing, they barely uttered a greeting before going in their rooms and shutting the door. Left alone in the hallway, I pictured them sitting in front of the computer screen and starting to move their fingers across the keyboard, already absorbed in the world they were creating with their words.

To a writer, the fall of one’s own language means nothing less than the fall of one’s national literature, of which every writer is a bearer. Did the others ever think about the future of their national literature? Did they ever consider the possibility that, having come into existence at a particular point in history, their national literature may have already peaked and be on its way to a fall? What would they say if I suggested that in a century or two, many national literatures may no longer be what they once were? What did they think of the significance of English becoming the universal language? Did they ever stop to ponder such things as I did?