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

This step turned out to open the way to English as a world language, available to any who wanted to take part in the Industrial Revolution, wherever they might live. The motives at the time may recall those of Archbishop Lorenzana, calling in the eighteenth century for the use of Spanish throughout Spain’s empire, not least as a duty to the education of the Indians. (See Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 373.) But he was really calling for the use of Spanish to be imposed, not conceded; and so it ultimately was, largely through neglect of education in other languages. The case of English in India did involve some symbolic withdrawal of government support for Sanskrit and Arabic; and the generalised use of English which followed has contributed to the closing of English-speaking minds, where foreign languages are concerned. (’After all, they all speak English, don’t they?’) But this spread of the language, ultimately worldwide, through what we have called re-education, was never an imposition; English remained the language of a small minority, and even among Indian nationalists its acquisition felt more like the development of an opportunity. It was a new and significant development in the history of language spread, and was later taken up as a deliberate policy by at least one other power, the French, in their empire’s conceived mission civilisatrice. (See Chapter 11, ‘The second empire’, p. 416.)

Another important innovation in language spread over the past five hundred years, and especially the last two hundred, was the growing role of technology. Civilisations are, by their nature, technology-driven; indeed, by one definition a civilisation is just a distinctive accumulation of technical innovations. And the spread of language had been advanced by technology before: recall how Akkadian’s availability in cuneiform writing on clay made it the diplomatic lingua franca of ancient West Asia (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58), and how the alphabetic system invented by Phoenicians had provided the basis not just for a new elite role for Aramaic speakers as scribes in Assyria and Babylon, but in the end for administration and education throughout the world from Iceland to the East Indies.

But in the modern era language spread has been effected above all by mass production of language texts, and later the means to disseminate them instantly over any distance. First came printing, already starting up in Europe in the fifteenth century. It played a cardinal role in western Europe’s encounter with many unknown languages, as well as in spreading its own. [222]Then, four hundred years later, came electronic links, first point-to-point and then broadcast. The effects on language spread have been profound. Language communities have become sustainable despite physical separation.† This may have an effect—as yet unknown—on the development of the languages themselves: electronic technology, if it becomes totally pervasive, might even bring about not only the widely announced ‘death of distance’ but even ‘the death of dialect’. But it has had indirect effects already. The withdrawal of the European imperial powers in the quarter-century after the Second World War, especially from Africa, was above all a policy response to a new globally sensed politics, the ‘Wind of Change’ famously detected by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1960: ‘The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’ [736]

The foreign elites were departing, in deference to the voices of the world’s many, among them the people they governed. Those voices had become audible through those same elites’ own mass media, indeed now speaking in their own languages.

We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.

Henry Gibson, song entitled ‘200 Years’ [737]

We have yet to consider what future may await English.

The past four hundred years have been almost absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples, as political, military and cultural victories have succeeded one another. The language community has expanded overseas from England, first by stealth in tiny crevices, then by imperial assertion over ever vaster domains, and finally, after the demise of arrant colonialism, to apparent acclaim in a single world marketplace. It is a creature first of the human social faculty for creating a language among disparate groups who share a single territory, then the ability discovered by that one island community to use its naval strength to spread its citizens and its political influence wherever it found points of weakness all over the world, and most recently of being the language most readily to hand when Europe, North America and then the world discovered how to profit from fossil fuels, science and mass markets. This tremendous run of luck has created an enormous reserve of prestige, reflected in the global enthusiasm for English-language popular culture. As the French language showed five hundred years ago, association with wealth and power is highly attractive.

But English can hardly expect that its linguistic vogue will continue for ever. The presence of a single language for communication worldwide is stabilising, giving it the appearance almost of being a neutral part of the world order, as much beyond the control of great powers as it is of any one society. Likewise the Latin language, lasting almost a millennium after the demise of the Roman empire in the west, gave western Europe at least, in its long separate development, good reason to believe that it had become the permanent and pure language of thought and reality. But the printing press, longdistance navigation and the rise of global empires changed all that. The world remains a highly dynamic place. For languages, as for any human institution, when you are on top, sooner or later there is only one way to go.

The current status of English has three main pillars that support it: population, position and prestige.

First of all, English has as many speakers as any other language. When its 375 million native speakers are added to the equal number of second-language speakers and the three-quarters of a billion people who have learnt it at school or in other classes, it is reasonable to claim that a quarter of mankind is familiar with English. The only comparable language is Chinese, when all those educated in Mandarin are added together; but the average income, status and global location of the English speakers give English very much the edge. Learning English is a majority school subject in the People’s Republic of China; Chinese, by contrast, remains off the syllabus in all English-speaking countries’ schools.

Second, there is now no language to match English for global coverage. English has a special status in countries on every continent, a status it shares only with French. But there are four first- or second-language speakers of English for every one of French. The complacency of English speakers speaks for itself: while English speakers still predominate in all measures of commercial and scientific achievement, it remains the norm in every English-speaking country for those completing compulsory education to be monolingual in English. Effective competence in any foreign language continues to elude the vast majority of those who are made competent in the technical basis of modern civilisation. And this is how they stay throughout their lives. But it is not just that the majority of English speakers are complacent. It is more that the world has as yet exacted no price for this; if anything, it has rewarded English speakers for not swerving from their own traditions and sources of wisdom.