Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Between 1760 and 1830, the United Kingdom was responsible for around ‘two-thirds of Europe’s industrial growth of output’ (— P. Bairoch 1982 ), and its share of world manufacturing production leapt from 1.9% to 9.5%; in the next thirty years, British industrial expansion pushed that figure to 19.9%, despite the spread of the new technology to other countries in the West … ‘With 2% of the world’s population and 10% of Europe’s, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45% of the world’s potential, and 55-60% of that in Europe’ (— F. Crouset 1982). Its energy consumption from modern sources (coal, lignite, oil) in 1860 was 5 times that of either the United States or Prussia/Germany, 6 times that of France, and 155 times that of Russia! It alone was responsible for one-fifth of the world’s commerce, but for two-fifths of the trade in manufactured goods. [713]

Bathed in the aura of such a stunning reality—even if the full statistics were not then available—it is hardly surprising that Indian students had usually been more impressed by the material benefits of British methods than the imperishable rewards promised by the Protestant missionaries. The prestige of English in the nineteenth century was elevated to the skies through the same process that had made French the leading language of European culture throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. At root, the thought was: ‘if you’re so rich, how can you not be smart?’

France had had a good natural endowment of fertile farmland and abundant labour on which to found this, but Britain had had quite a modest starting capital. In the early seventeenth century, when the British had first turned up in the East Indies, and tried to get involved in the spice trade, their main problem had been the lack of goods for which there was any local demand. But now, after over two centuries of trading, finagling, shipbuilding and warring, their capital and influence gave them access to pretty much anything they might desire: as the economist Stanley Jevons crowed in 1865:

The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies… [714]

Britain, as a power, was going to find that some of these other powers, especially one in North America, would have a tendency to shift the terms of trade against it; but this was no loss to the English-language community; if anything it was a net gain when the English-speaking inhabitants of America began to look beyond their own domain, and use their resources, in fertile fields, in productive mines, and in a highly educated and massive population, for schemes of their own devising.

Amid the general splurge of galloping wealth creation, there was a particular surge in the power and speed of communications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed progress that was unheard of, first in inventing, and then in speedily applying, all over the world, systems for transport of people and merchandise. Perhaps even more impressive is the parallel progress made, largely using electronics, in systems to transmit and store all sorts of information. A hundred and fifty years from 1830 takes us from the first railway engine through the steamboat to mass-market air transport, and from telegraph through the telephone to global broadcasts of radio and television, as well as the first approaches to effective computer networks. In the same period, means were found to store, and to access at will, all kinds of sounds, including speech and music, visual scenes and pictures, and views of events and actions as they took place. Any one of these would have had the potential to transform the world in an earlier age; but in this age, when humanity’s dreams of magical powers came true, they all came together.

Almost every one of these new technologies was invented by a speaker of English—Stephenson, Fulton, Wright, Bell, Baird, Edison—or by a speaker perhaps of another language who had to work in the English-speaking world, as Marconi and Reuter had. And even when they were not—think of Benz’s German internal combustion engine, or the French photograph and motion picture, due to pioneers such as Daguerre and Lumière—it was English-speaking developers, such as Henry Ford or the film-makers of Hollywood, who first demonstrated what could be done with the new media on a truly vast scale. This inevitably meant that the key talk about these achievements, how to replicate them and what was to be done with them, took place above all in English. For scientists and engineers, but crucially for businessmen, English has been the language in which the world’s know-how is set out. Never since cuneiform writing set up Akkadian as the diplomatic language of the Near and Middle East has technology been so effective in spreading a language. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58.)

These triumphs in what is called ‘communications’ all tend to reduce the time-taking and effort-costing effects of distances in the world. But they also tend to reduce the differences between the world as it is presented to distant people. Quite literally, they make certain descriptions of experience ‘common’ to more and more people. They make regional and international business routine, allow international contacts to involve the highest level of personnel, turn far-distant destinations into sites for brief visits, even holidays. But they also standardise the images and phrases that people carry in their memories, from advertising through entertainment to education; nowadays there are not only classic texts and works of art that we are taught to appreciate, but classic jingles, classic ads, classic kitsch, which we can’t get out of our heads from one end of the country or one end of the world to another: and quite likely the words we remember will be in English, even if we are Hungarian, Balinese, South African or Mongolian.

The new technologies of communication have made possible new institutions too, institutions that exist above all to spin words, to decorate them and transmit them. Newspapers, magazines, film studios, cinemas, song-sheet publishers and recording companies, radio stations, television production companies, website designers: the list will no doubt continue long into the future. And within every medium, advertising—the supreme meta-product of the language media, acting as a kind of fertiliser or growth hormone, promoting distribution and sales of all these language-based products through its explicit content, even as its payments for space on the channels enable the communications media to cut their prices and reach farther; and at the same time, a major producer of language material in its own right. None of these new institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is restricted to English—but they all became available first in English, and English has remained the biggest producer.

As the Portuguese found when they first gained a reputation for trade in the Indian Ocean, a national language need not remain restricted to its own nationals. Portuguese became the lingua franca of international trade—and indeed the Christian Church—in South and South-East Asia for ten generations and more, long after Portugal itself had yielded in influence to the Dutch and British. The same thing has happened to English, but on a global, rather than an oceanic, scale. So many people in different parts of the world were finding that they needed to deal with English speakers that their dealings began to overlap: non-natives, and even those without any direct connection to the English-speaking world, started using English among themselves, purely for their own convenience. In the words of the English proverb, ‘nothing succeeds like success’, and the spread of a language is no exception. In the twentieth century English replaced French as the usual language for international conferences. The language of air traffic has always been (a restricted form of) English—unsurprising, perhaps, since aviation is a US invention; but English has anyway become the world’s interlingua of choice. For 1996 it was estimated that 85 per cent of international associations made official use of English, and 33 per cent used nothing else. In Asia and the Pacific, 90 per cent of international organisations work only in English. [715]