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

Some jockeying and rebalancing among languages in China and the Indian subcontinent is likely in the next fifty years: the fertility rate per woman in China in the period 1995-2000 has been 1.8, in Japan 1.4, whereas in India and Bangladesh it has been 3.1, in Pakistan 5.0. On these trends, India’s overall population is projected to overtake China’s by 2050; in the same period, Pakistan (majority language Panjabi, spoken by perhaps a third of the population) is set to become the third most populous country in the world (overtaking the USA), but Bangladesh (speaking Bengali) will just hold its position (as eighth most populous). Applying the population growth percentages to these languages, the main effect should be a jump in the speaker numbers for Urdu and Panjabi, while the Indian regional languages Telugu, Marathi and Tamil may overtake the regional forms of Chinese, Wu and Yue. Mandarin Chinese is so far ahead (with three speakers for every one of English, Hindi-Urdu or Spanish today) that it will still be by far the most widespread language in the world, though perhaps in fifty years only double the size of its nearest rival.

Birth rates are high across the Arabic-speaking countries, so their population may more than double in the next half-century. This should be enough to maintain Arabic’s position as the fifth-biggest language; but it will still be necessary to add together what are in effect twenty-five separate spoken languages—there is no trend towards a unified standard outside elite usage. Most of the more southerly parts of Africa are also growing far beyond the global average, so we can expect its languages to move up the league table: if they keep pace with Nigeria’s population as a whole, the two largest, Hausa and Yoruba, will treble their native-speaker populations by 2050, rising from thirty-eighth and forty-ninth positions to twenty-first and twenty-third. Even with such growth, however, the languages of sub-Saharan Africa will remain outside the top twenty for the next fifty years.

Unsurprisingly, the European languages on the list are in a much more fragile position. German and Italian have owed their large numbers to organic growth of their home populations; in terms of current fertility rates, though, these are set to fall, perhaps by as much as 10 per cent in the next fifty years. This would be enough to demote German towards the bottom of the top twenty, and relegate Italian altogether. But any decrease in either of these countries is in present conditions likely to be made up by increased immigration, effectively maintaining speaker communities through foreign recruitment.

Russian too is in decline. Augmenting its organic growth in eastern Europe, it has had a role as the lingua franca of a vast empire, which at its height took in the whole of north Asia in a gigantic crescent from the Caucasus to the Sea of Japan. At the moment, however, populations are shrinking all across the remaining parts of greater Russia; and where they are not, in the newly independent states of central Asia, people are reawakening to the fact they have a pre-existing lingua franca to use with the neighbours in their own, closely related and mutually intelligible, Turkic languages. If these do not suffice, the people are also increasingly coming to believe that their global links may be better served by adopting English rather than Russian as their language of wider communication. For all these reasons, the future does not look rosy for Russian.

The other major European languages, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, all owe their status to the colonial empires that came to dominate the earth in the second half of the second millennium AD. They are the languages of colonial populations that were able to grow massively in their new, transplanted, homes, adding the strength of immigrants to their natural increase; they were also able to spread at the expense of languages previously local to the colonised lands: in this way, languages of wider communication often ended up monopolising all the communication.

For all of them except French, their most populous ex-colony now vastly outnumbers their motherland: the USA has over four times the population of the UK, Mexico almost three times that of Spain, Brazil seventeen times that of Portugal. It is extremely difficult to predict their positions among the most widespread languages of the world fifty years from now. Spanish and Portuguese should maintain their share in countries that are still growing strongly: Mexico and Brazil, for example, are expected to add some 50 per cent to their populations in this period, and the other colonies in the Americas and Africa will not be that different. Meanwhile, the USA may add a quarter to its population, although this may not benefit the English-language community—significantly, the growth is mainly among Spanish speakers.

In fact, it is for French and English that the future is hardest to predict. These are the languages that might be seen as vehicles of globalisation, each in its way a lingua franca for contact with a wider world. Their native-speaker populations tend to be in countries where the population has stabilised and may even be decreasing. This would imply that their prospects for future growth are limited. However, those same countries are the most influential in the world, economically, culturally and militarily. As a result, English and French are widely acquired as second languages by people all over the world, for business and cultural reasons that have everything to do with the prestige of the languages. In the case of French especially, the language’s status is locked in politically, since so many of France’s ex-colonies, especially in central Africa, have adopted it as their official language. (See Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 419.) As for English, the prestige has sometimes very little to do with historic links: witness the current surge of interest in learning English around the Baltic Sea, a zone that has never had dealings with Britain or America. More generally, US-centred mass culture enjoys global popularity at the moment. But the long-term linguistic effect of this, as we have seen, may be surprisingly transient. (See also Chapter 14, ‘Way to go’, p. 541.)

The future balance among languages worldwide is now very much in contention. Demographically, the role of the European languages, and especially English, could have been expected to decline, as the rest of the world grows both absolutely, and in terms of relative wealth. (One key milestone was passed recently, when English traffic on the Internet was exceeded by the total in other languages.) But as that wealth grows, there appears to be an increasing demand to learn and use these languages, for they are now seen less as symbols of colonial domination and more as crucial keys for access to the global system. In some sense, the languages’ importance in the role of lingua franca, and as symbols of commitment to a way of life that goes beyond local interests, counteracts the decline of their dominance as first languages.

This tension between inward and outward growth, between the increasing importance of a mother tongue as its speaker population grows and the concurrent popularity of a lingua franca seen as developing links to a wider world, is felt not only at this, global, level. In principle, it is nothing new: the same tension has a long history in the struggles to transcend tribal and communal frictions in order to build federated nations.

It is notable that the two largest languages in Indonesia, Javanese (75 million) and Sundanese (27 million), both spoken on the highly populated island of Java, are growing fast, and are far larger than what is promoted as the national language of the country, Bahasa Indonesia (17 million)—which is linguistically none other than Malay, the lingua franca of the East Indies, and as such spoken not only in Indonesia but also in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, with 47 million speakers in all. [220]For most people in Indonesia, as in the world, local life and its contacts still loom far larger than national or global aspirations.