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

What will become of all the national languages that are not English?

This is our ultimate question. And the answer depends ultimately on what each population — and the government of that population — wants to do with its language in this age of English. Theoretically, the optimal solution for a nation to survive and thrive in this age might be to turn every citizen into a bilingual. This new bilingualism would have to differ from premodern bilingualism in two essential ways. Before, only a limited number of the cultural elite were bilingual, and only the universal language was taken seriously. Now everyone would be bilingual and would take his or her own language seriously, respecting its heritage. English would be the vehicle of much scholarly writing, yet not only literature but scholarship too would flourish in the indigenous language, including translations from other languages. Citizens of such an ideal nation would also learn other foreign languages to counterbalance the hegemony of a single language as a means of international communication. Blessed would be the fate of national languages if every nation could achieve such linguistic virtuosity. In practice, however, for most nations, realizing such a goal — even imperfectly — is nearly impossible.

More likely, each nation will be conflicted between encouraging English fluency and protecting its own language. All non-Anglophone nations will be affected by this conflict, each in a different way. Moreover, the asymmetry between Western and non-Western languages will inevitably come into play as we try to picture what the future holds for various languages.

Of the Western nations, those best suited to attain the new kind of bilingualism are the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Germany — their languages being Germanic, as is English. In the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, the younger generation is already more or less bilingual because of public education systems that emphasize English acquisition from an early age. Germans as a whole straggle, Germany being a much more populous country and thus linguistically self-sufficient, but generally those who are educated are bilingual. However, linguistic affinity with English may be a mixed blessing. There is a risk that the population might eventually become more attuned to contemporary Anglophone culture than to its own heritage. Because writing in English comes easily for users of Germanic languages, more and more writers might even be tempted to write novels, poems, and plays in English with a world audience in mind. And English words and grammar could infiltrate the language with ever greater ease.

Western nations using non-Germanic languages such as Greek and the Slavic and Romance languages, for example, naturally lag far behind in bilingualism. The awkward English of the French is a century-old cliché. Nevertheless, a shared history of Greek and Latin borrowing and intertranslation makes even those languages — including non-Indo-European languages such as Hungarian and Finnish — vulnerable to the mixed blessing that haunts the Germanic languages.

The prospects for major European languages, nonetheless, are not too dismal provided people’s will to preserve their language is strong — as it actually is among the French, for one. When I think of the future prospects of these languages, I cannot help recalling my childhood experience of reading with wonderment the literature of various European countries, albeit in Japanese translation. While English will no doubt long reign supreme as the language of scholarship, and the fate of minor languages remains precarious, the world may well continue to be blessed with fine works of literature in the major languages — or, at least, I dearly hope so.

Non-European languages face predicaments that are necessarily more varied and more uncertain, however similar the underlying conflict may be. First of all, though the fact is not obvious to most people in the West, many non-Western languages do not yet function as national languages. A nation must have a strong national language (or languages) even to begin aiming at the new kind of bilingualism; yet many nations — mostly former colonies, protectorates, or mandates of European powers — do not have a functioning national language despite having earned their independence well over half a century ago. Most often, this is because numerous regional or ethnic languages are spoken in one nation. The “national” boundaries that Western powers drew in the past simply disregarded local linguistic diversity. Tension exists not just between the former colonial power’s language and the nation’s own but also among the different local languages. Nationalism impels the people in such nations to have a unifying national language. Yet because they never spoke the same language to start with, they often resist what the authorities declare to be their country’s national language. English or French thus ends up circulating as the lingua franca of government, higher education, and interregional commerce. As a result, while indigenous poetry may flourish, prose often fails to reach a level of sophistication high enough to satisfy the truly cultivated.

India’s case is well known. After more than 150 years of British rule, the independent government sought to dispose of English and gradually replace it with Hindi, making Hindi the country’s sole national language. Non-Hindi speakers resisted. Violence even erupted. The central government was forced to give more than twenty other languages official regional power while allowing the continued use of English. The current policy is confusing. The government is trying to encourage the spread of Hindi as India’s national language while remaining under obligation to strengthen regional languages as well. Moreover, all this effort at multilingualism naturally does not stop middle- and upper-class parents from sending their children — society’s future elite — to private schools where the classes are taught in English. Will the day come when Hindi becomes India’s true national language? Or will the other major regional languages — Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu — each come to function alongside Hindi as one of many national languages? Poetry will certainly continue to be written in these languages. But will Indian intellectuals ever start using them rather than English to write serious prose or to pursue scholarship?

Not all non-Western countries espouse Indian-style multilingualism. The Philippines, for one, is heading in the opposite direction. In the centuries of Spanish rule (1521–1898), Spanish was its official language. Then when the United States took over the country in 1898, both Spanish and English became official languages. The Philippines gained independence in 1946, and finally in 1973, well over a quarter of a century on, its constitution declared Filipino the country’s national language. English, which is still widely used, remains an official language alongside Filipino, but the nation’s current policy is to turn Filipino into a true national language, not just a nominal one — a policy disputed by many because “Filipino” is merely another name for Tagalog, a dialect spoken by less than one-third of the population. Moreover, owing to the English-centered public education system implemented by the United States in the past, the majority of the population still has a working knowledge of English. Given that most Filipinos can handle English fairly well and it remains the language of choice for the elite, will the government continue devoting resources to turning Filipino into a true national language in the age of English, especially if the effort means making Filipino people less attuned to English?

Most former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa face a situation even more inimical to the creation of a national language. Though saddled with a plethora of languages, they face pressing problems stemming from war and poverty that leave little room for language policy debates. That said, the spread of Swahili, initially promoted by colonial powers baffled by the multiplicity of tongues, is showing some success. Swahili is now an official language in some states and is slowly turning into the lingua franca of East Africa. It is nonetheless a second language for most people who use it and still has a long way to go before it becomes a true national language.