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ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE
DAVID CRYSTAL
Why a Global language?
English is a global language, they would say. You hear it on television spoken by politicians from all over the world. Wherever you travel, you see English signs and advertisements. Whenever you enter a hotel or restaurant in a foreign city, they will understand English, and there will be an English menu. So how does a language come to achieve global status? A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. – in the case of English, this would mean the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, several Caribbean countries and a sprinkling of other territories. mother-tongue use by itself cannot give a language global status. To achieve such a status, a language has to be taken up by other countries around the world. Firstly, a language can be made the official language of a country, to be used as a medium of communication in such domains as government, the law courts, the media, and the educational system. The role of an official language is today best illustrated by English, which now has some kind of special status in over seventy countries. New political decisions on the matter continue to be made: for example, Rwanda gave English official status in 1996. Secondly, a language can be made a priority in a country’s foreign-language teaching, even though this language has no official status. It becomes the language which children are most likely to be taught when they arrive in school. English is now the language most widely taught as a foreign language – in over 100 countries, such as China, Russia, Germany, Spain, Egypt and Brazil – and in most of these countries it is emerging as the chief foreign language to be encountered in schools, often displacing another language in the process. In 1996, for example, English replaced French as the chief foreign language in schools in Algeria (a former French colony). there are several ways in which a language can be official. It may be the sole official language of a country, or it may share this status with other languages. And it may have a ‘semi-official’ status, being used only in certain domains. Similarly, there is great variation in the reasons for choosing a particular language as a favoured foreign language: they include historical tradition, political expediency, and the desire for commercial, cultural or technological contact. Also, even when chosen, the ‘presence’ of the language can vary greatly, depending on the extent to which a government or foreign-aid agency is prepared to give adequate financial support to a language-teaching policy. In a well-supported environment, resources will be devoted to helping people have access to the language and learn it, through the media, libraries, schools, and institutes of higher education.
Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it. It is much more to do with who those speakers are. Latin became an international language throughout the Roman Empire, but this was not because the Romans were more numerous than the peoples they subjugated. They were simply more powerful. There is the closest of links between language dominance and economic, technological, and cultural power. Language has no independent existence, living in some sort of mystical space apart from the people who speak it. Language exists only in the brains and mouths and ears and hands and eyes of its users. When they succeed, on the international stage, their language succeeds. When they fail, their language fails. A language does not become a global language because of its intrinsic structural properties, or because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been a vehicle of a great literature in the past, or because it was once associated with a great culture or religion. These are all factors which can motivate someone to learn a language, of course, but none of them alone, or in combination, can ensure a language’s world spread. Indeed, such factors cannot even guarantee survival as a living language – as is clear from the case of Latin, learned today as a classical language by only a scholarly and religious few. Why did Arabic come to be spoken so widely across northern Africa and the Middle East? Follow the spread of Islam, carried along by the force of the Moorish armies from the eighth century. The history of a global language can be traced through the successful expeditions of its soldier/sailor speakers. And English, as we shall see in chapter 2, has been no exception. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the world’s leading industrial and trading country. By the end of the century, the population of the USA (then approaching 100 million) was larger than that of any of the countries of western Europe, and its economy was the most productive and the fastest growing in the world. British political imperialism had sent English around the globe, during the nineteenth century, so that it was a language ‘on which the sun never sets’.6 During the twentieth century, this world presence was maintained and promoted almost single-handedly through the economic supremacy of the new American superpower. Economics replaced politics as the chief driving force. And the language behind the US dollar was English. In communities where only two or three languages are in contact, bilingualism (or trilingualism) is a possible solution, for most young children can acquire more than one language with unselfconscious ease. But in communities where there are many languages in contact, as in much of Africa and South-east Asia, such a natural solution does not readily apply. The problem has traditionally been solved by finding a language to act as a lingua franca , or ‘common language’. The geographical extent to which a lingua franca can be used is entirely governed by political factors. Many lingua francas extend over quite small domains. By contrast, Latin was a lingua franca throughout the whole of the Roman Empire at least, at the level of government.
Linguistic complaiency Will a global language eliminate the motivation for adults to learn other languages? ‘I’m no good at languages’ is probably the most widely heard apology for not making any effort at all to acquire even a basic knowledge of a new language. These days, there are clear signs of growing awareness, within English- speaking communities, of the need to break away from the traditional monolingual bias. Language attitudes are changing all the time, and more and more people are discovering, to their great delight, that they are not at all bad at picking up a foreign language. Linguistic death Will the emergence of a global language hasten the disappearance of minority languages and cause widespread language death? When a language dies, so much is lost. Especially in languages which have never been written down, or which have been written down only recently, language is the repository of the history of a people. It is their identity. Movements for language rights (alongside civil rights in general) have played an important part in several countries, such as in relation to the Maori in New Zealand, the Aboriginal languages of Australia, the Indian languages of Canada and the USA, and some of the Celtic languages. The existence of vigorous movements in support of linguistic minorities, commonly associated with nationalism, illustrates an important truth about the nature of language in general. The relationship between the global spread of English and its impact on other languages attracted increasing debate during the 1990s. ‘Could anything stop a language, once it achieves a global status?’ The short answer must be ‘yes’. If language dominance is a matter of political and especially economic influence, then a revolution in the balance of global power could have consequences for the choice of global language. Despite the remarkable growth in the use of English, at least two-thirds of the world population do not yet use it. In certain parts of the world (most of the states of the former Soviet Union, for example), English has still a very limited presence. And in some countries, increased resources are being devoted to maintaining the role of other languages (such as the use of French in several countries of Africa). Why English? The cultural legacy The first steps in the political consolidation of English were taken during the decision- making which followed the First World War, in 1919. The growth of linguistic influence through political expansion was already on the wane. Far more important for the English language, in the post-war world, was the way in which the cultural legacies of the colonial era and the technological revolution were being felt on an international scale. English was now emerging as a medium of communication in growth areas which would gradually shape the character of twentieth-century domestic and professional life.
The League of Nations was the first of many modern international alliances to allocate a special place to English in its proceedings: The UN now consists of over fifty distinct organs, programmes, and specialized agencies, as well as many regional and functional commissions, standing committees, expert bodies, and other organizations. English is one of the official languages within all of these structures. The language plays an official or working role in the proceedings of most other major international political gatherings, in all parts of the world. French was the only other language to show up strongly, with 49 per cent (245) using it officially. Of particular significance is the number of organizations in this sample which use only English to carry on their affairs: 169 – a third. This reliance is especially noticeable in Asia and the Pacific, where about 90 per cent of international bodies carry on their proceedings entirely in English. Many scientific organizations (such as the African Association of Science Editors, the Cairo Demographic Centre and Baltic Marine Biologists) are also English-only. The reliance on English is by no means restricted to science, however. Several international sporting organizations work only in English. In Europe, too, organizations which work only in English are surprisingly common, especially in science. The European Academy of Anaesthesiology and the European Academy of Facial Surgery use only English in their proceedings, as do the European Association of Cancer Research and the European Association of Fish Pathology. A different kind of role for English is encountered at meetings where a large number of nations each has the right to participate using its own language. Several solutions to this problem have been proposed, such as the use of a ‘relay’ system. If there is no Finnish/Greek translator available, for instance, English might be used as an intermediary language – or ‘interlingua’, as it is sometimes called. These days, any consideration of politics leads inevitably to a consideration of the role of the media. Indeed, if the erstwhile anonymous author of the novel Primary colours is to be believed, successful access to the media is the guarantor of political achievement, and much of a campaign staff member’s time is devoted to ensuring that this will happen. The media are at the centre of everyone’s life – the press, radio, advertising, and especially television. The nineteenth century was the period of greatest progress, thanks to the introduction of new printing technology and new methods of mass production and transportation. Massive circulations were achieved by such papers as the New York Herald (1833) and New York Tribune (1841). By the end of the century, popular journalism, in the form of The Daily Mail (1896), brought Britain into line with America. Newspapers are not solely international media: they play an important role in the identity of a local community. Most papers are for home circulation, and are published in a home language. It is therefore impossible to gain an impression of the power of English from the bare statistics of newspaper production and circulation.
influence on popular trends – much more so, it is thought, than the French and German cabarets and operettas of the period. During the early twentieth century, European light opera (typified by Strauss and Offenbach) developed an English-language dimension. Several major composers were immigrants to the USA. Jazz, too, influenced so much by the folk blues of black plantation workers, had its linguistic dimension. When modern popular music arrived, it was almost entirely an English scene. The pop groups of two chief English-speaking nations were soon to dominate the recording world: Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley in the USA; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the UK. In the 2000s, the English-language character of the international pop music world is extraordinary. The mother tongue of the singers was apparently irrelevant. The entire international career of ABBA, the Swedish group with over twenty hit records in the 1970s, was in English. other commentators have drawn attention to the way popular music in the English language has had a profound and positive impact on the nature of modern popular culture in general. As the lyrics (as distinct from the tunes) of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Joan Baez and others spread around the world, during the 1960s and 1970s, English for the younger generation in many countries became a symbol of freedom, rebellion and modernism. And the language has continued to play this role, being the medium of such international projects as ‘Live Aid’. Each journey has immediate linguistic consequences. If there is a contemporary movement towards world English use, therefore, we would expect it to be particularly noticeable in this domain. And so it is. Restaurant menus tend to have a parallel version in English. Credit card facilities, such as American Express and Mastercard, are most noticeably in English.
