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

Not that the growing dominance of the English language continued to escape his attention as the years went by. In 2005, more than a decade after the second, enlarged edition of Imagined Communities was published in 1991, Anderson delivered two lectures in English at Waseda University in Tokyo. The lectures were published in a book in Japanese the same year. With a gentle, self-deprecating tone that comes through in the translation, he reflects on issues that he should have included but did not, even in the second edition of his book. English as today’s universal language is not among them. And yet his lecture concludes with a strongly worded message that English alone will not do — an indication that he is quite aware of the language’s growing dominance. Here are his final comments to the Japanese audience:

Before I conclude, I just want to emphasize the following.

In those days of “early globalization,” and I think it’s still true, there was an enormous amount of energy going into people learning to speak other languages, read other languages, to pass on information, pass on use, pass on thinking, pass on feelings, from one language to another.

What is really impressive, if you look at, for example, the correspondence of Filipino nationalists at the end of the 19th century, is that they were writing in Spanish, writing in English to Japanese, writing in French to French comrades, writing in German to scholars who were supporting the cause. They were making every effort to reach out across the globe, and certainly this was true of Chinese, Japanese, and many other people. That is, they were not interested in simply acquiring some master language for business. They were interested in entering into the mental world — getting emotional affiliation with people of other linguistic groups. And this is still extraordinarily important. That is, people who think that there are only two languages in the world worth learning, Japanese and English, are fooling themselves. There are many important and beautiful languages. Real international understanding can only come from this kind of inter-linguistic communication. English can’t do it. I promise you. Thank you very much. 2

One can almost hear the Japanese audience breaking into spontaneous and enthusiastic applause upon Anderson’s reassurance: “I promise you.” Well, the audience may have been reassured by his words and applauded wildly at that moment, but how many among them, on coming home and resuming their everyday life, would follow his advice and start studying Spanish, French, German, or Indonesian, for that matter? How many would decide that their children need not learn English?

Anderson’s awareness of the dominance of the English language becomes even more manifest in the third edition of Imagined Communities , published in 2006, which includes a new concluding chapter. The new chapter traces the unexpected trajectory of the book’s reception in the world through translations, scheduled to number twenty-nine by the end of 2007. Anderson then goes on to call the English language “post-clerical Latin”: “This spread has much less to do with [my book’s] qualities than with its original publication in London, in the English language, which now serves as a kind of global-hegemonic, post-clerical Latin.” How right he is in his claim that the spread of his book is directly related to its being written in English and published in London. I say this not to disparage the quality of a book that I greatly admire, but as a plain fact. (Only books written in Standard English and published in major cities in the West circulate worldwide at this stage.) How right he is, moreover, in finally equating English with Latin. And yet Anderson seemingly has no interest in making use of this equation to begin to understand the true nature of universal language. On the contrary, he uses the very spread of his book around the world in diverse languages through translation to assert the strength of national languages: “On the other hand, this proliferation of translations suggests that the force of vernacularization, which, in alliance with print capitalism, eventually destroyed the hegemony of Church Latin and was midwife to the birth of nationalism, remains strong half a millennium later.”

The reader is left wondering whether the force of vernacularization — the force of national languages — will eventually destroy the hegemony of English as well.

Anderson’s position never wavers from that of multilingualism, a typical position taken by European intellectuals; it is a position that still resonates strongly in Europe, where a rich civilization was created through tensions among many languages. The European Union actively advocates multilingualism as an ideal, and currently the union of twenty-eight member nations has twenty-four official languages; member nations strive to train their children to be polyglots. Yet it is an indisputable fact that English dominates as a de facto common language within the EU — as in most other international institutions. I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal.

Why did Anderson fail to see that English, or any other universal language, plays a unique role? I understand the inherent unfairness in posing such a question to the author of Imagined Communities , which, after all, is a book about the formation of nation-states, nationalism, and national languages (“print languages”). One cannot ask a book that treats oranges why it fails to treat apples. Yet I’m unable to resist the temptation to ask the question because Anderson’s blindness — which persists for nearly a quarter century, from the first edition of Imagined Communities to the revised — seems to typify the general blindness of those whose mother tongue is English. That Anderson was born in 1936 in Kunming, China, that he is multilingual, and that he is fluent in a relatively minor language like Indonesian does not change the fact that his mother tongue is English, that he was educated in English, and that he, quite naturally, writes in English. Those whose mother tongue is English often are unaware that when they are writing in their own language, they are in fact writing in a universal language. They are unaware of what they would be deprived of if they were writing in a nonuniversal language — beyond the sheer number of readers. To apply the phrase I used in the talk I gave in Paris, they are not condemned to reflect on language in the way the rest of us are.

Moreover, the naïveté of Anderson — who is anything but naïve as a thinker — on this topic seems almost inevitable when one takes a closer look at who he is. He is not simply someone whose mother tongue is English. Born of an Irish father and an English mother, he has kept his Irish citizenship when he could have become British or even American. We all know that the Irish are a people with strong literary talent and tradition who have produced an amazing — given the small size of the population — number of writers, including Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all of whom greatly enriched English literature. Yet not many of us are aware that Ireland’s first official language today is not English but Irish Gaelic. Hence the Irish people, while taking full advantage of their mother tongue of English, proudly claim Gaelic as their own language — a language that only about 5 percent of Ireland’s population actually use on a regular basis. In 2007, they even succeeded in registering Irish Gaelic as an official EU language. The Irish people’s proud embrace of Gaelic has its roots in the country’s centuries-long virtual colonization by Great Britain, resulting in not only the tyranny of English rule but also the forced use of the English language. Since 1949, when Ireland finally and completely won independence, the Gaelic revival has been an important part of state policy. Government documents are now routinely written in both languages, and compulsory education devotes a significant amount of time to teaching Gaelic, so the language is gaining ground. Nonetheless, Ireland’s goal is to become a bilingual nation. It has no intention of abandoning English and turning Irish Gaelic into its citizens’ mother tongue. Indeed, Ireland’s policy of protecting its own language is among the most enviable in the world; it is akin to someone who lives in a sumptuous palace putting up a shack with a thatched roof on the grounds in order to enjoy a bit of rustic life.