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

And the English-speaking world, with its characteristic eye for a business opportunity, has converted this too into a paying proposition: English Language Teaching (ELT) has become not only a field of education, but—as in those early days in Bengal—a commercial service industry in its own right. Now it flourishes in almost every country of the world: if the ambient language is English, it must be a good place for the students to get plenty of practice; and if it is not, English must be an eminently desirable skill to learn. The influential philosopher James Mill (1773-1836) had once remarked that the imperial civil service was little more than ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ of Great Britain: ELT could be seen as a new answer to the same problem, though now the qualifications in background and nationality are a little less demanding than they were then.

This spread of English is harder to map geographically than the expansion of British colonies. In spirit, it follows in direct descent from the re-education policy that the British introduced in India. But the mechanism is almost pure diffusion, since—unlike in India—the language has travelled with very little presence of its native speakers. It is probably the best example of a language spread by the sheer prestige of the culture associated with it. Our previous examples have shown the possibility in principle, as when the Egyptian and Hittite courts of the fourteenth century BC corresponded in Akkadian, when the Cambodians and Javanese of the fifth century AD chose to inscribe their temples with literary Sanskrit, or when the Mughals, sweeping down into India from Afghanistan in the sixteenth century, preferred Persian to their native Turkic as their court language. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century vogue for French in eastern Europe, too, should be seen in this light. But the spread of English was the first time that a language and culture had simultaneously made themselves desirable to peoples all over the world, truly a unique event.

In one way, our account of this process has differed from the usual one. This is in our lack of emphasis on the role of the USA.

The worldwide take-up of English in the twentieth century, and particularly in its latter half after the Second World War, is mostly set down to the influence of the USA, its globally stationed armies and fleets, its outreaching commercial enterprises, and above all its ubiquitous films, pop music, TV shows, news media and computer software. Certainly, all these things have been significant, and mass enthusiasm for English-language culture is now focused on the products of the USA. Among the native speakers of English, the USA’s 231 million are clearly the largest single group, four times the size of the UK’s 60 million, and alone make up two-thirds of the global total. [716]And arguably, the preferred brand of English now—to judge from accents fashionable outside their own regions—is General American, verging to African American Vernacular English; by contrast, the UK’s current broadcast favourite of ‘Estuary English’, a London-oriented alternative to the traditional Oxbridge ‘Received Pronunciation’, is very much a local taste. [212]

But our concern in this book has always been the spread of language communities, bodies of people who can understand one another through a given language. In this sense, distinctions of accent are irrelevant until they threaten mutual understanding. And looked at historically, it is quite evident that the springboard from which English made its jump to global status was built far less on the recent exploits of Uncle Sam than on the adventures over the previous 350 years of John Bull.

We have to consider the growth of second-language speakers, since it is they who have dominated expansion of English use in the twentieth century: by the 1950s, all sizeable countries whose first language was English had already slowed the growth in their populations. For second-language speakers, a good estimate, or range of estimates, is provided by David Graddol’s 1999 essay ‘The decline of the native speaker’. He identifies recent growth in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, growth that will almost certainly lead on to second-language speakers outnumbering native speakers within the next fifty years, if they don’t already.

The levels persisting in ex-British colonies range between 2 per cent and 5 per cent, but are usually estimated to amount in total to around 200 million speakers. Other recent estimates put the rate much higher, as much as 20 per cent in India and Pakistan, 10 per cent in Bangladesh. [717]If these are correct, the total should already stand at 395 million. Contrast Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, where knowledge of English is clearly growing, but where Graddol estimates current percentages as no more than 1 per cent of the population (73 million, 43 million). In the very few parts of the world with significant use of English directly due to US influence, the proportions of people knowing it are 50 per cent in the Philippines (36 million), and 85 per cent in Liberia (2 million—although this last represents speakers of English creole). All in all, these English-speaking regions of non-British origin may represent a total of 152 million.

Already in this second-language-speaking part of the English world, then, it seems that the growth of British-origin English remains more significant than the radical effects of the US influence. But this leaves out of account what may currently be the fastest-growing area of second-language English, namely Europe. [213]It is purely a matter of definition whether European English should be considered as part of the foreign-language or the second-language domain, but it is clear that it has become the major working language of the European Union, as well as being widely used in commerce, industry and academia in northern European countries, particularly Scandinavia. Graddol’s analysis of the European Union’s Eurobarometer surveys from 1990 to 1998 suggests that English competence in Europe was high, but fairly static, until 1980, at under 20 per cent; it then perked up and since 1990 has begun to take off meteorically. It now stands at over 100 million, approaching a third of the European Union’s population. [214]

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us.

It wad frae monie a blunder free us

An’ foolish notion.

What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us

An’ ev’n Devotion.

Robert Burns, ‘To a Louse’, 1798

A language that links together a speech community, even a vast one like the global multitude who think and speak in English, is given its character not so much by its phonetics and phrasings as by the patterns of associations that have piled up on its words as they are transmitted down the generations. A language bespeaks a history—the history, of course, of those who have spoken it—and this is the main creator of its reputation abroad, as it is of its attractions to those who may want to learn the language, and so join its community. This is one reason why study of a language has long emphasised its literature, ‘the best that has been said and thought’ [215]using that language, as selected by its own tradition. But not all the experiences in a language’s long memory may have been hallowed by good writing.

Looking back on the history of English as formative of its present character and reputation, memory can afford to be quite selective: the past before the sixteenth century of the Reformation and the beginnings of colonial expansion seems to have left only the very faintest of traces. But from that era on, the kinds of adventures that spread English, and which were prized most highly by many of its speakers, do have a certain consistency. English is associated with the quest to get rich, the deliberate acquisition of wealth, often by quite unprecedented and imaginative schemes. This quest has sometimes had to struggle with religious and civic conscience, and the glories of patriotism, but has largely been able to enlist them on its side. In general, it has been the ally, rather than the rival, of freedom of the individual. English has been, above all, a worldly language. [718]