<div dir="ltr"><h1 class="gmail-article-headline">
<span class="gmail-article-classifier__gap">Mind your language: the fightback against global English</span>
</h1>
<div class="gmail-article__header-secondary">
<p class="gmail-article__stand-first">Are education systems around
the world placing undue emphasis on our modern lingua franca — or merely
delivering what parents want?</p>
</div>
<aside class="gmail-article__aside gmail-o-grid-remove-gutters--XL">
<div class="gmail-next-up gmail-next-up__header">
<h3 class="gmail-next-up__intro gmail-next-up__intro__header">Read next:</h3>
<article>
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/19f4e976-78e5-11e6-a0c6-39e2633162d5" class="gmail-next-up__headline">
<span class="gmail-card__classifier-gap">
<span class="gmail-next-up__headline-text">Get rich slow: how the west can rebuild faith in globalisation</span>
</span>
</a>
<time title="September 14, 2016 7:03 am" class="gmail-next-up__timestamp gmail-o-date" datetime="2016-09-14T11:03:44Z">September 14, 2016</time>
</article>
</div>
</aside>
<div class="gmail-article__wrapper">
<div class="gmail-o-grid-container">
<div class="gmail-article__main gmail-o-grid-row">
<div>
<figure class="gmail-n-content-image gmail-n-content-image--center" style="width:600px;max-width:100%"><div class="gmail-n-image-wrapper gmail-n-image-wrapper--placeholder" style="padding-bottom:66.5%"><img class="gmail-n-image"></div><figcaption class="gmail-n-content-image__caption">Pupils
in an English class in Rwanda, where English replaced French in 2008 as
the official language of instruction in schools © Tim Smith / Panos</figcaption></figure>
<div>
<div class="gmail-article__share gmail-article__share--top gmail-n-util-clearfix">
<div class="gmail-o-share">
<ul><li class="gmail-o-share__action gmail-o-share__action--twitter">
<a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4&text=Mind%20your%20language%3A%20the%20fightback%20against%20global%20English&via=FT"><i>Twitter</i></a>
</li><li class="gmail-o-share__action gmail-o-share__action--facebook">
<a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4&t=Mind%20your%20language%3A%20the%20fightback%20against%20global%20English"><i>Facebook</i></a>
</li><li class="gmail-o-share__action gmail-o-share__action--linkedin">
<a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4&title=Mind%20your%20language%3A%20the%20fightback%20against%20global%20English&source=Financial+Times"><i>LinkedIn</i></a>
</li></ul>
</div>
<div class="gmail-article__save">
<a class="gmail-article__share__print">
<span class="gmail-n-util-visually-hidden">Print this page</span>
</a>
<form class="gmail-n-myft-ui gmail-n-myft-ui--save" method="POST" action="/__myft/api/core/saved/content/5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4?method=put">
</form></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><div class="gmail-article__share gmail-article__share--top gmail-n-util-clearfix">
<a style="visibility: visible;" class="gmail-article__share__comments" href="https://www.ft.com/content/5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4#comments">2</a></div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-article__time-byline">
<time title="September 23, 2016 6:55 am" class="gmail-article__timestamp gmail-o-date" datetime="2016-09-23T10:55:02Z">4 hours ago</time>
<p class="gmail-article__byline">by: <a class="gmail-n-content-tag" href="https://www.ft.com/work-careers/michael-skapinker">Michael Skapinker</a></p>
</div>
<div class="gmail-article__body gmail-n-content-body">
<p>English is the language of business and science. The
government in Rwanda, and many people in Tunisia, prefer it to French.
Singapore makes sure every child is fluent in it. It is the world’s
lingua franca, the key to success for every ambitious parent and a
central part of the curriculum of every sensible school.</p><div class="gmail-p402_hide"><div class="gmail-article__light-signup gmail-o-email-only-signup gmail-o-email-only-signup--inline gmail-o-email-only-signup--coloured-background">
<div class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__inner" id="gmail-o-email-only-signup-content">
<h3 class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__heading">Sample the FT’s top stories for a week</h3>
<p class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__text">You select the topic, we deliver the news.</p>
<div class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__secondary">
<form class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__form">
<div class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__form-group">
<label for="topics" class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__visually-hidden">Select topic</label>
</div></form></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__form-group">
<label for="email" class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__visually-hidden">Enter email address</label>
<input id="email" name="email" class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__email" type="text">
<p class="gmail-o-forms-errortext gmail-o-email-only-signup__email-error-msg gmail-o-email-only-signup__visually-hidden">Invalid email</p>
</div>
<div class="gmail-p402_hide"><div class="gmail-article__light-signup gmail-o-email-only-signup gmail-o-email-only-signup--inline gmail-o-email-only-signup--coloured-background"><div class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__inner" id="gmail-o-email-only-signup-content"><div class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__secondary"><form class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__form">
<p class="gmail-o-email-only-signup__no-spam">By signing up you confirm that you have read and agree to the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="http://help.ft.com/tools-services/ft-com-terms-and-conditions">terms and conditions</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="http://help.ft.com/tools-services/how-the-ft-manages-cookies-on-its-websites">cookie policy</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="http://help.ft.com/tools-services/financial-times-privacy-policy">privacy policy</a>.</p>
</form>
</div>
</div>
</div></div><p>That is one way of looking at it. The other is
that English is a “bully, juggernaut, nemesis”, an “unnerving border
crosser, criminal and intruder”, an international conspiracy run by the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade
Organisation, Nato, the British Council and the massed ranks of
Anglo-American capitalism. The worldwide spread of English reflects the
“Washington linguistic consensus”, which is the “aggressive promotion of
English to serve Western political and economic interests”. The
supposed benefits of English to ordinary people around the world —
better jobs, higher salaries, access to new technologies — have been
vastly oversold. Only national elites and their foreign sponsors benefit
from the penetration of English. For the vast majority, “English
promises much but delivers little.”</p><p>That is the view of <em>Why English? Confronting the Hydra</em>, a collection of essays by a group of academics and English teachers. This book follows an earlier work, <em>English Language as Hydra</em>, but adds additional context to that work’s national case studies, as well as adding its own. <em>Why English?</em> begins on an apologetic, partly italicised, note. “There is, indeed, huge irony in the fact this collection is written <em>in English</em>
and published in the United Kingdom. Such is the power of the global
publishing industry and the pervasiveness of English-language hegemony
that this critique needs to emanate from within its very realm.”</p><blockquote class="gmail-n-content-pullquote"><div class="gmail-n-content-pullquote__content"><p>People note that the elites in their societies make sure their children speak English</p></div></blockquote><p>The
authors would doubtlessly view any irritation at the stridently
polemical tone of this book as exactly what one would expect from the
Financial Times, a prominent participant in the anglophone ascendancy.
So we should say at once that <em>Why English?</em> has much to
recommend it. With schools and universities in Latin America,
continental Europe and Asia rushing to embrace English, it is
appropriate to ask whether they are going about it in the right way and
for the right reasons. A number of authors of this collection have
taught English and have classroom experience of what is and isn’t
working.</p><p>The
writers repeatedly stress that they are not opposed to students
learning English. Indeed, they welcome it. But they object to the
practice, particularly common in African countries, of attempting to
teach children in English from early on. They cite repeated research
showing that children learn more effectively if they start their
schooling in their mother tongue. They not only acquire greater facility
in subjects such as mathematics and science; they also end up learning
better English if it is introduced as a foreign language and slowly
integrated into their lives.</p><p>The problem for the writers, which
they acknowledge, is that many parents around the world refuse to accept
this. They demand English early. One of several examples they cite is a
school in Islamabad that taught in Urdu in the early years, while
devoting 15 per cent of classroom time to English. The school planned to
increase the proportion of English teaching gradually until the
children were thoroughly bilingual. The school said its mission was “to
reclaim and create our own agenda instead of selling out to alien
cultures”. It had to close. Its founder said: “The bulk of people did
not want what we were offering.”</p><figure class="gmail-n-content-image gmail-n-content-image--inline gmail-p402_hide" style="width:300px;max-width:100%"><div class="gmail-n-image-wrapper gmail-n-image-wrapper--placeholder" style="padding-bottom:151%"><img class="gmail-n-image"></div></figure><p>People
note that the elites in their societies make sure their children speak
English and understandably ask: if it is right for their kids, why not
for ours?</p><p>Is there any substance to the authors’ view that this
popular passion for English is the result of an Anglo-American
conspiracy? The colonial roots of world English are incontestable. The
vastness of the British empire, followed by America’s cultural,
commercial and technological dominance, meant that when companies,
scientists and academics, increasingly trading and working together,
needed a language to communicate in, English was widely available.</p><p>But <em>Why English?</em>
greatly overstates the power of English language publishers and
English-as-a-foreign-language schools. These are fragmented, not
particularly profitable, businesses bobbing on the global English wave.
As for the British Council, while the bulk of its revenues come from
English teaching and examinations, supplemented by a government grant,
it struggles to break even.</p><p>When business, entertainment and
technology expanded around the globe, English happened to be in the
right place at the right time, writes Nkonko Kamwangamalu, quoting David
Crystal, a prolific writer on the language. Kamwangamalu, a linguistics
professor at Howard University in Washington DC, agrees that the US and
UK — and France — are not entirely innocent of imposing their languages
on the world. Foreign aid is sometimes tied to promoting a former
colonial tongue.</p><p>And he endorses the research that shows children
learn more, and end up speaking better English, if they are educated in
their own languages. But the merit of his elegantly written and
intelligent book <em>Language Policy and Economics: The Language Question</em>
in Africa is that he views African parents as subjects — makers of
their own decisions about their and their children’s futures — rather
than as objects manipulated by nefarious outsiders. Parents in Africa,
he says, have noticed how people get ahead in the world and have
concluded that speaking English is a big part of it.</p><p>“It does not
take long for the language consumer to realise that an education through
the medium of an African language does not ensure its recipients social
mobility and a better socio-economic life,” Kamwangamalu writes.</p><p>The
problem, he says, is that education in English has not worked in
Africa. Unesco statistics show the continent has the world’s highest
illiteracy rates. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than one in three adults
cannot read. And in spite of learning in English, many African students
leave school unable to speak, read or write in the language. In 2013,
the University of Malawi had to dismiss over 100 students because they
could barely express themselves in English. In Uganda and Nigeria, only
15 per cent of the population are functionally literate in English, in
spite of it being the official language of both countries.</p><figure class="gmail-n-content-image gmail-n-content-image--inline gmail-p402_hide" style="width:300px;max-width:100%"><div class="gmail-n-image-wrapper gmail-n-image-wrapper--placeholder" style="padding-bottom:141.33%"><img class="gmail-n-image"></div></figure><p>Kamwangamalu
points out that, Singapore aside, all developed countries school their
children in the mother tongue of the majority, teaching English as a
foreign language. Most achieve better education results, and produce
students who speak better English.</p><p>Kamwangamalu understands why
many postcolonial African countries opted for English both as an
official language and as a medium of education. The citizens of many of
these countries speak dozens of languages. English has the advantage of
being neutral. It is not tied to any ethnic group. It can be used to
promote national unity. But, he says, that doesn’t explain why
monolingual countries such as Swaziland and Lesotho have opted for
English too. The reason is that they think teaching children in English
improves their, and their countries’, prospects.</p><p>Kamwangamalu says
that if governments are to convince people that education in local
languages would be preferable, they have to show that these languages
improve children’s prospects as much as English seems to. How can this
be done? The author points to Quebec, where the provincial government
required businesses to provide goods and services in French.</p><p>African
governments could make fluency in a local language a criterion for
public sector employment, he says. But in hugely multilingual countries,
which languages should they choose? He accepts that it would be
impractical to provide education in and award jobs for every language.
He suggests concentrating on national or regional lingua francas, such
as Swahili in east Africa, which, if not every child’s mother tongue, is
at least “both culturally and structurally” closer to it.</p><p>Would
that be better than educating children in English? As Kamwangamalu
observes, what someone’s mother tongue is can often be difficult to
discern in Africa, where most people speak at least two languages and
many four or five. And, particularly in cities, English is increasingly
one of the languages they speak, often inventively and creatively. This
is the principal weakness of both these books: the authors pay little
attention to how people, not just in Africa but around the world, are
reshaping English. The British Council estimates that there are close to
2bn people who speak English to a reasonable level — far outnumbering
native speakers in the US and the UK. The new English speakers are
leaving their mark on the language, investing it with new grammatical
and lexical features.</p><p>You can see this, sparklingly, in South
Africa, one of the world’s most fascinating linguistic laboratories.
Because of the prominence of South Africans in English letters — the
country has produced two Nobel literature laureates in Nadine Gordimer
and JM Coetzee — it is easy to forget that fewer than 10 per cent of the
population speak English at home.</p><figure class="gmail-n-content-image gmail-n-content-image--inline gmail-p402_hide" style="width:328px;max-width:100%"><div class="gmail-n-image-wrapper gmail-n-image-wrapper--placeholder" style="padding-bottom:152.44%"><img class="gmail-n-image"></div></figure><p>South
Africa has 11 official languages. Zulu is the home language of the
largest number — 22.7 per cent, followed by Xhosa at 16 per cent and
Afrikaans at 13.5 per cent. But English is the country’s lingua franca,
the language most widely used in business, courts and parliament. In her
fascinating book <em>The Linguistic Landscape of Post-Apartheid South Africa</em>,
Liesel Hibbert, a South African academic, explains how the country’s
recent history has speeded up the mixing of tongues, the practice of
switching between languages, often in a single sentence, and the
development of a distinctive black South African English.</p><p>Since
the advent of democracy in 1994, formal racial segregation has been
abolished, black children have begun attending formerly all-white state
schools, the lifting of cultural and economic boycotts has increased
links with the rest of the world and there has been an influx of
migrants from the rest of Africa. All of these developments have
resulted in a bubbling linguistic ferment — and new forms of English.</p><p>Hibbert
focuses on the English spoken in the country’s parliament by the newly
arrived, mostly black MPs, whose style was often informal. Frene
Ginwala, the post-apartheid parliament’s first Speaker, said: “Just as
we relaxed the dress code, we should also not force MPs into verbal
suits and ties, or gloves and hats, which would be out of character.”</p><p>Black
South African English frequently incorporates elements of both local
African languages and Afrikaans. Hibbert notes how black South African
MPs mix Afrikaans words into their English when criticising their white
opponents, which has the dual effect of both attacking and including
them, indicating that they are all part of the same country with its own
in-group linguistic references.</p><p>This book has its flaws: chapters
on present and past presidents Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki would have
been more in keeping with the theme of the book if they had investigated
their language styles rather than the intent of their political
discourse, and another chapter on the clampdown on press freedom sits
oddly. But Hibbert revels in the English she hears around her. Her
country’s, and her continent’s, education problems are serious. But that
should not detract from the way so many, particularly the young, are
making English their own.</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1783095849/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1783095849&linkCode=as2&tag=finantimes-21" target="_blank">Why English?</a> Confronting the Hydra</strong>, edited by Pauline Bunce, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana and Ruanni Tupas, <em>Multilingual Matters, RRP£109.95/$189.95, 312 pages</em></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0230251722/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0230251722&linkCode=as2&tag=finantimes-21" target="_blank">Language Policy and Economics</a>: The Language Question in Africa</strong>, by Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu, <em>Palgrave Macmillan, RRP£60/$99, 232 pages</em></p><p><strong><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1783095806/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1783095806&linkCode=as2&tag=finantimes-21" target="_blank">The Linguistic Landscape of Post-Apartheid South Africa</a>: Politics and Discourse</strong>, by Liesel Hibbert, <em>Multilingual Matters, RRP£89.95/$149.95, 184 pages</em></p><p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4">https://www.ft.com/content/5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4</a><br><em></em></p><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
</div>