Scarica Riassunto English as a Global Language, Crystal, David, 2003, Cambridge e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
English as a global language
A language becomes a global language when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. A global language is often described as a “second language” and can be used in the media, the educational system and for communication in general. There are many reasons for choosing a particular language as a favoured foreign language: historical traditions, desire for commercial, cultural or technological contact. The consequence of a language becoming a global language it is that nobody owns it anymore, or maybe, everyone who has learned it owns it. English is now the language most widely taught as a foreign language in over 100 countries. Nowadays about a quarter of the world’s population is fluent in English. The reason why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of speakers; it has much more to do with who those speakers are: Latin became an international language throughout the Roman empire not because the Romans were more numerous than the people they subjugated, but because they were more powerful. Many say that English became the global language because it has less grammar and it’s easier to learn, but truth is that even Latin was once an international language, despite its complexity in grammar. So, ease of learning has nothing to do with it. Children of all cultures, in fact, learn to talk over more or less the same period of time, regardless of the complexity of their languages. A language becomes an international language for one chief reason: the power of the people who speak it; especially their political and military power. By the beginning of the 19 th^ century, Britain had become the most important industrial and trading country and its political imperialism had sent English around the globe. During the 20 th^ century this presence was maintained and promoted by the economic supremacy of the American superpower. Although translation has played a central role in human interaction for thousands of years, there are limits to what can be done through translation. This problem has been solved by finding a common language, a so-called “lingua franca”. It is possible that the presence of a global language will make people lazy about learning other languages or will make all the other languages unnecessary, but the process of language domination and loss has been known throughout linguistic history, and exists independently of the emergence of a global language. Thousands of languages died because of assimilation of their ethnic group within a more dominant society; and this situation continues today, even though movements for language rights have played an important part in several countries, such as in relation to the Maori in New Zealand, the Aboriginal languages in Australia, the Indian languages of Canada and USA and so on. Human society has shown two main needs: The need for mutual intelligibility and the need for identity. It is perfectly possible to create a situation in which intelligibility and identity happily co-exist: this is called bilingualism; a bilingualism where one of the languages is the global language, the access to the world community, and the other one is the regional language, providing access to a local community. Could anything stop a language, once it achieves a global status? Yes, a revolution in the balance of global power could have consequences for the choice of the global language. A plausible scenario is that an alternative method of communication – for example machine translation - could emerge which would eliminate the need for a global language. The process of becoming a global language for the English language began with the pioneering voyages to the Americas, Asia, and the Antipodes. English arrived in England from northern Europe, in the fifth century, and it began to spread around the British Isles. The first expedition from England to the New World was led by Walter Raleigh in 1584 : A group of explorers landed near Roanoke island and established a small settlement, but conflict with the native people followed and a ship returned to England for help and supplies. By the time these arrived, in 1590, none of the original settlers could be found. The first permanent English settlement dates from 1607, when the colonist arrived in Chesapeake Bay and called their settlement Jamestown (after James I) and the area Virginia (after the “Virgin Queen”, Elizabeth). During the 17 th century, new ships of immigrants brought an increasing variety of linguistic backgrounds into the country; in the 18 th^ century there was a vast wave of immigrants from northern Ireland. North America was also occupied by the Spanish (in the south-west), the French (in the north), the Dutch were in New York (originally New Amsterdam); in addition, there were many Africans entering the south, as a result of slave trading. An within two generations of arrivals, a massive growth in mother-tongue use of English took place.
The first English-language contact with Canada took place in 1497, when John Cabot reached Newfoundland a hundred years before the great English migration along the Atlantic coast. There was an ongoing conflict with the French, but this came to an end when the French surrendered during the 18 th century. By that time thousands of French settlers were deported and were replaced by English settlers from New England.
During the early years of American settlement, the English language was also spreading in the south. As a consequence of the importation of African slaves to work on the sugar plantations – a practice started by the Spanish in 1517 – a distinctive kind of speech spoken by the black population emerged. From the early 17 th century, ships from Europe travelled to the West African coast, where they exchanged cheap goods for black slaves. The slaves were then shipped to the Caribbean and the American coast. The first twenty African slaves arrived in Virginia on a Dutch ship in 1619. The policy of the slave-traders forced people of different language to communicate. The result was the birth of several pidgin form of communication, especially between the slaves and the sailors, many of whom spoke English. This pidgin continued to be used between the blacks themselves. And when their children were born, the pidgin gradually began to be used as a mother tongue, producing the first black Creole speech in the region. There were also Creole forms of French, Spanish and Portuguese. The interaction between Creole forms and the standard English gave birth to a vast range of varieties of English.
Australia was first visited by James Cook in 1770, and within twenty years Britain had established its first penal colony at Sydney, in order to resolve the problem of the overcrowded prisons in England. Many of the convicts came from London and Ireland, that’s why features on the Cockney and Irish accent can be traced in the speech patterns in Australia. Numerous are the expressions which have originated in Australia too.
The story of English in New Zealand started in the late 18 th^ century: James Cook landed there in 1770, and European traders began to settle twenty years later. New Zealand has always had a stronger sense of historical relationship with Britain, and a greater sympathy for British values and institutions. The British influence is strong in the accent too. Secondly, New Zealand has always had a sense of national identity, an emphasis on the difference between New Zealand and Australia. Thirdly, New Zealand inhabitants has always been protecting the rights and the needs of the Maori people; this caused and increased use of Maori words in New Zealand English.
Before the British control establishment in 1806, South Africa had been occupied by Dutch colonists from 1652 to 1795. In 1822 English became the official language of law, education and most aspects of the public life. Further British settlements followed in the 1840s and 1850s. The speech of the London area was prominent in the Cape, northern British speech was prominent in Natal. At the same time, English was being used as a second language by the Afrikaans speakers. Although English was – and still is - considered as a means of international communication, it has always been a minority language in South Africa, and it is currently spoken only by 4 million in a population of 44 million. Afrikaans was the first language of the majority of whites and the coloured population.
In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent overtakes the combined total of speakers in the USA and UK. The Indian varieties of English are referred to as South Asian English. The first regular British contact with the subcontinent took place in 1600 with the formation of the British East India Company, a group of Londoners who were granted a trading monopoly in the area by Elizabeth I. The British sovereignty (the Raj) started in 1765 and lasted until 1947. When the universities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were established in 1857, English became the primary medium of instruction. In India, the conflict between the supporters of English, Hindi, and regional languages led in the 1960s to a “three language formula”, in which English was introduced as the chief alternative to the local state language. English is now
- Hong Kong English use has always been limited to government, law, business and the media, because Chinese (Cantonese) is the mother- tongue of over 98% of the population;
- Papua New Guinea was first visited by British sailors in 1793 and achieved independence in 1975. About half the people speak Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin, as a second language.
The present-day status of English is the result of two factors: The expansion of British colonial power, which peaked at the end of the 19 th^ century and the emergence of the USA as the leading economic power of the 20 th^ century. The USA has almost 70% of all English mother-tongue speakers in the world. The US linguist Braj Kachru has suggested that we think of the spread of English around the world as three concentric circles, representing different ways in which the language has been acquired and is used:
- The Inner Circle refers to the traditional bases of English, where it is the primary language: UK, USA, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand;
- The Outer or Extended Circle, which includes those countries where the language plays an important second language role in a multilingual setting, such as Singapore, India, Malawi and many others;
- The Expanding or Extending Circle, which includes those nations which recognize the importance of English as an international language, though they do not have a history of colonization by members of the inner circle, such as China, Japan, Greece, Poland and other countries in which English is taught as a foreign language. There is much more use of English in some of these countries (as in Scandinavia and The Netherlands) than in some of the countries of the outer circle.
The total of 400 million mother-tongue English speakers also includes the speakers of the various English- derived pidgins and creoles. We now have a situation where there are more people speaking English as a second language. No other language has spread around the globe so extensively, but what’s really impressive is the speed with which this expansion has been taking place since the 1950s. During the 19 th^ century Britain became the world’s leading industrial and trading nation and no country could equal its economic growth. Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution were of British origin, like the harnessing of coal, water and steam to drive heavy machinery, the development of new materials, the emergence of new means of transportation. So, the linguistic consequences of this achievement were very far-reaching. Tens of thousands of scientific and technological words were added to the English lexicon. Britain attracted several inventors from the whole continent, such as the French Marc Brunel, the Prussian William Siemens and the Italian Guglielmo Marconi. Similar developments were taking place in America which, by the end of the century, had become the new fastest growing economy, with figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. Gradually, America became a magnet for European scholars. Many progresses were made in transportation during the first half of the 19 th^ century, the growth of new transportation systems, especially the steamship and the railway, began the process of bringing people closer together. During the second half, the growth of new communication systems, especially the telegraph and the telephone, made contact between people virtually instantaneous. The early 19 th^ century also had seen the growth of the international banking system, especially in Germany, Britain and the USA; these banking systems supported the developing industrial companies and that’s why London and New York ended up being the investment capitals of the world.
The League of Nations (which was replaced by the United Nations in 1945) was the first modern international alliance to give a special role to English in its proceedings: English was in fact one of the two official languages – the other one was French – and all the documents were printed in both. Gradually, the importance of a lingua franca, with such an extended membership, became even more critical and obvious and English gradually became this lingua franca. English has been an important medium of the press for nearly 400 years; even though several European countries were publishing rudimentary newspapers, during the 17 th^ century, progress in Britain was much greater; there were so many newspaper: “The weekly news”, “The London Gazette” and later “The Spectator”, “The Tatler”, “The Times” and so on. America started developing a little later, in the 18 th^ century: “Boston news-letter”, “The New York Gazette”. English language also was massively used in Advertising, especially in the more industrialized countries.
Additionally English was the first language to be transmitted by radio, when US physicist Fessenden broadcasted music, and a short talk to Atlantic shipping from Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve 1906. Although the roots of the film industry lie in Europe, the years preceding and during the First World War delayed the growth of the European film industry, and the dominance soon passed to America. As q consequence the English came to – and still does – dominate the movie world. The English was in evidence in the recording industry too, because most of the technical developments took place in the USA; when modern pop music arrived, it was almost an entirely English scene: the groups from the two chief English- speaking nations (Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) dominated the recording world. Nowadays English is still the medium of a great part of the world’s knowledge, especially in science and technology, and since the 1960s English became the normal medium of instruction in higher education for many countries. In conclusion, we can say that English emerged as a first-rank language because, during the late 19 th^ and the early 20th^ century, it was the language of the leading economic power, the language spoken in those countries whose progresses affected all the other societies, with the press, advertising, motion pictures, sound recording, transport and communication.
It is not easy to foresee the future of the English language as a global language. But we now know that the USA still has the most powerful economy and the most powerful armed forces in the world, and, since a language becomes an international language for the power of the people who speak it, the future status of English is bound up with the future of that country.
Since English reached many different countries and cultures, as many mixed English-based varieties are now found everywhere, such as Franglais, Chinglish, Japlish, Singlish, Spanglish and many more.
