Is English king?

Mon Dec 13 15:21:37 UTC 2004

http://www.science-spirit.org/

The Tongue Who Would Be King

There are those who believe English could achieve what no other language
has: global domination. But our linguistic history shows preeminence leads
to resistance, then ruin--which means English should be looking over its
shoulder.

by Dennis Baron

At every stage of its history, English has been a borrowing tongue. It
adapted the Latin of Irish monks, the Norse of Viking raiders, and the
French of Normans bent on regime change. During the Renaissance, English
went on a word-coining rampage and swelled its hoard with terms from Greek
and Italian. Modern English has absorbed words from just about every
language its speakers have encountered: Arabic, Hebrew, Navajo, Yiddish,
Polish, Hindi, Bantu, and Japanese, to name but a few.

English also affects the languages it touches, and the fact that English
is now an exporter causes fear and resentment in some quarters. In the
1930s and 1940s, Germany sought to purify its language along with its
population and banned English words. More recently, the French,
historically one of Englishs biggest suppliers, enacted a law to protect
their language from the inroads of English, particularly in the areas of
commerce and technology, where English is so dominant. During World War
II, Japan also tried to purify its tongue, but contemporary Japanese
continues to absorb massive amounts of English without much fuss,
nativizing the words it borrows, sometimes to the point where English
speakers no longer recognize them.

Japan has nego, for negotiation; kono, for connection; and sekuhara, for
sexual harassment. Most cars in the country have English model names that
are easily understood, like Toyotas classic sedan, the Toyopet, or the
Daihatsu Naked, a far-from-daring minivan. The car names are written in
English too, even though Japanese has three writing systems--including one,
katakana, designed especially for foreign words. Sing at a karaoke bar in
Tokyo, and native patrons will swoon over English smoothly and properly
pronounced. And its not just Japan; around the world, more people are
signing up for English lessons than ever before. Travel almost anywhere
and you'll find English on signs, on T-shirts, on tips of tongues.

Historically, however, the reception of English on the world stage has
been mixed. If Shakespeare and the King James Bible solidified the power
of English at home, it took the age of exploration and colonization to
move English across the border. It was then that the real line was drawn:
If you were a colonizer, bringing trade to the impoverished and
civilization to the unwashed, English was the language of capital and
enlightenment; if you were being colonized, English simply appeared as the
language of oppression. While the first protests against English took the
form of Brits out, today the ugly American still inspires strident
graffiti of the Yanqui go home variety.

In the eighteenth century, John Adams predicted it would be America, not
England, that would catapult English to world-class status, but it wasn't
until the twentieth century, after two world wars and the rise of American
political and economic influence, that English finally took steps in that
direction. Its success has led some to hope, and others to fear, that
English may one day be the only language the world will need.

Humans are hardwired to learn language, but we don't all learn the same
language, and many of us learn more than one. Bilingualism is a fact of
life for threequarters of the world. One Renaissance commentator, a Swede,
even insisted that Eden was a polyglot paradise where God spoke to Adam in
Swedish, Adam replied in Danish, and the serpent tempted Eve in French.
And at least one contemporary theorist, French sociolinguist Louis-Jean
Calvet, supports the view that humans are naturally bilingual animals and
have been from the start.

Still, at the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans considered
non-English speakers to be less than human. According to a story recounted
by the English language specialist Daniel Shanahan, a railroad president
told a 1904 congressional hearing on the mistreatment of immigrant
workers, These workers don't suffer--they don't even speak English.

Such opposition to non-anglophones and bilinguals has never quite gone
away. In June 1995, for example, a district court judge in Amarillo,
Texas, accused a mother of child abuse for speaking Spanish to her
five-year-old daughter, who would enter kindergarten that year. English,
the judge ruled, was necessary to do well in school and without English,
he warned, the girl would be condemned to life as a maid.

In response to a national outcry over the cruelty of his decision, the
judge sensed that some fence-mending was in order and apologized--to maids.
He held resolutely to his English-only order, one that many well-meaning
people might find appropriate. After all, ninety-seven percent of U.S.
residents speak English, and non-English immigrants are picking up English
faster than earlier generations did. The Amarillo mother spoke Spanish to
her daughter because she knew that as soon as the child entered
kindergarten, the girl would lose whatever Spanish she had acquired, and
switch entirely to English.

Around the physical and virtual world, English is spreading rapidly, which
leads many to worry that other languages will decline. Clearly, English is
the most powerful and successful language on Earth--synonymous with profit,
multinational commerce, international relations, science, rock n roll, and
most recently, the Internet. It makes sense that knowing English might
facilitate fuller participation in society, might better enable a person
to enter into the governmental, economic, academic, and scientific
mainstreams.

But even though about three-quarters of the world speaks more than one
language, getting everybody to speak the same language--even with the best
of intentions--proves problematic. Think back to any high school language
class and remember how difficult it is to get large groups of people to
learn a new tongue. Most people who willingly study English don't ever
achieve fluency. Even in India, where English has official status, only
five percent of the people actually speak the language. Then there are the
psychological effects: Enforcing English on the national or global level
sends a negative message, making non-English speakers feel both inferior
and unwelcome. And finally, establishing English as the only language
would mean deciding that the natural condition of the world is not
bilingualism or multilingualism, but rather one language, for one and all.

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel laid the groundwork, at least in
the West, for the belief that a single language equals a united humanity,
and that a reunified humanity might once again reach the heavens. While
the search for a Proto- World language, the ancestor of all todays
languages, has occupied philologists and theologians for centuries, it
remains elusive. Perhaps there wasn't one single language that kicked
things off for the human species, and its not clear that we should end up
with a single world language either--English, or otherwise.

English started as an obscure language on a small island off the coast of
Europe. The nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey once sniffed that
in its earliest form, English had a vocabulary of only 800 words, most of
them having to do with wara nasty and brutish assessment, but a believable
one to anybody who has slogged through Beowulf.

Currently, however, English has the largest vocabulary of any
language--close to half a million words. The number of English speakers is
strong and growing. According to one estimate, 514 million people speak
English as their first language. Yes, there are more than a billion
speakers of Mandarin Chinese and another half billion who use either Hindi
or Urdu, but none of those languages has the international reach of
English, which enjoys widespread acceptance as a second or auxiliary
language. English has official status in former British colonies like
India and Nigeria, and all around the globe its the most common lingua
franca, a third language to be used when two people who don't share a
common first language need to communicate.

About 400 million people speak reasonably fluent English as their second
language, and as many as another billion have learned some English as a
foreign language. In contrast, French, which not that long ago was the
preferred language of diplomacy, war, and high society, not to mention
haute cuisine, has only 129 million speakers today. There are fewer
speakers of French in the world than of Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, or
even Bengali. But real evidence of the decline of French is the fact that
its orbit has shrunk: French remains a second language in some former
colonies, but it has lost its clat in the councils of power, in the
foreign language classroom, and even on the menu.

Now English is the foreign language everyone must learn if they want to
communicate beyond their borders, beyond their neighborhoods, or beyond
their labs. Scientists around the world who don't read and publish in
English risk becoming marginalized: They will be unable to take advantage
of the latest findings in their fields, and their own work will go unread
and unrecognized by the international scientific community. Writers in
non-anglophone countries agonize over their own literary dilemma: whether
to publish in their national or local language to reach their compatriots
and keep their culture vital and productive, or to write in English to
secure an international audience and the stature that may come along with
it.

For some, the fact that English is the international language of science
is reason enough to promote it globally; the further advance of the
language would be a natural and rational process. Agree or not, is it even
possible for English to become the only language people learn, eventually
displacing the other 6,800 languages currently being used and turning the
planet into a monolingual Brave New World? By virtue of its global sway,
could English push all other languages to the brink, much in the way that
Wal-Mart drives out mom-and-pop stores?

Using history as a guide, we know that every language that has so far
qualified as universal has not been able to make the leap to world
domination; rather, all of these languages have receded or disappeared.
Latin, which came from a few dusty Italian farms and cities, was the
language of politics and government, of law and education, of science and
religion, from the time of the Roman Empire through the Renaissance. As
late as the eighteenth century, to be literate meant to know Latin. If
your universe was Western Europe, Latin was the universal language so much
so that we still honor it on our money. We just don't speak it anymore.

French, which actually grew out of Latin, had a brief turn as the world
language, but in the end it was English that took Latins place as master
of the linguistic universe. Of course, as nations continue to jockey for
political and economic power, and the linguistic influence that flows from
it, theres always the chance that English will share the fate of French
and Latin. After all, no language has been the master of the universe for
very long.

Some are prepared for such a case, having already designated a replacement
for English were it to disappear. Hawaiian has its supporters as a
candidate for the next world language, as does Finnish. The desire to
return to the pre-Babel days, when a single language was spoken and no
translation was necessary, prompted several hundred visionaries over the
years to invent languages that would be immediately understandable by
anyone who encounters them. The most famous of these artificial languages
is Esperanto, which claims about 2 million speakers worldwide. Its creator
had two goals: to produce an auxiliary language that would let people
communicate easily across cultures and to promote world peace.

The creators of languages like Volapuk, Ido, Novial, and Solresol (the
last based on the musical scale) were similarly optimistic about
furthering international accord through mutual understanding. So far as
international cooperation goes, however, the two Irelands, the two Koreas,
and India and Pakistan (India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu use different
writing systems but the spoken languages are mutually intelligible), show
us that having a common language doesn't necessarily lead to either mutual
understanding or peaceful coexistence. In any case, the small number of
speakers adopting these artificial languages isn't enough to move the world
toward peace.

If sweet reason hasn't converted the world, let alone a single nation, to
one language, neither has the use of force. For many years in America,
young speakers of Spanish, Navajo, Chinese, and other minority languages
were beaten, humiliated, or given detention if they used their first
language in the classroom or on the schoolyard. Around the same time an
Amarillo judge accused a Spanish-speaking mother of child abuse, a small
Texas insurance agency fired two women bilingual in English and Spanish,
hired for their ability to speak to Hispanic customers, because these
women spoke Spanish rather than English to each other. Knowing English is
one thing; forcing people to use it is quite another. As any student
failing a language requirement knows, you cant make a person speak a
foreign language.

If English cant be enforced at home, it certainly couldn't be required
abroad. For a good part of the twentieth century, Russia tried to force
its language on a huge expanse of Europe and Asia, and we know how that
turned out. Latin may not have fallen in a day, but with the rapid
collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian lost most of its clout almost
overnight.

The truth is that when one language begins to dominate, and its presence
is felt internationally, resistance movements stimulate a resurgence of
local language vitality. The Internet provides a perfect example of what
happens: In its first decade, Web life was almost entirely in English, and
when computer users in other countries began to log on, they found an
English monopoly. But this was only temporary; while its estimated that
over half of all Internet Web sites are still in English, the percentage
of other languages on the Web is growing as more and more countries
acquire computer technology. On the world scene, language loyalty trumps
the incursion of English every time.

So while English plays an important role in the increasingly multilingual,
globalizing world, global language is not following rapidly on the heels
of multinational corporations. Rather than imposing a standard language on
an unwilling world, English itself is going native, forming local
varieties with distinctly local forms and flavors wherever it lands.
Because of this, sociolinguists have begun speaking not of English, but of
Englishes, the plural emphasizing the increasing diversity that English
experiences as it shows up in new places and contexts.

We call Latin a dead language because there haven't been native speakers of
Latin for centuries, but the language didn't actually die. Instead, the
Latin spoken in different parts of Europe gradually differentiated to form
what we now call the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian, and Romanian being the most familiar. The process took several
centuries. With English differentiating as it spreads across the planet,
it could meet Latins fate and morph into new tongues. This kind of
language birth isn't likely to happen though--in fact it hasn't happened on
any large scale since Latin made like a noun and declined. The centripetal
force of global communications and international travel works against that
outcome. But if--or when, as some would say--the English-speaking world loses
its political and economic hegemony to Europe or the Pacific Rim, the
power of the English language will be relaxed and the worlds Englishes
will be left free to diverge from one another.

The future of English is tricky to predict. Will it unite the world and
take us back to Eden, or divide the world even further and lead us to a
new Babel? Or will it simply lose its vitality and shuffle off this mortal
coil, leaving the stage to a yet-to- be-named player? For now, though,
Finnish and Hawaiian must wait in the wings, for barring nuclear disaster,
it looks as if English will remain the 800-pound gorilla of the worlds
languages for a little while yet.

Related stories:
Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave
Lost In Translation
Something New Under the Sun