Linguists see few threats to rule of English

Wed May 16 13:32:16 UTC 2007

FYI, this article may be of interest (seen on the Boston Globe site).

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2007/04/29/as_englishs_domina
nce_continues_linguists_see_few_threats_to_its_rule/

As English's dominance continues, linguists see few threats to its rule

But new dialects and technology pose challenges

By Seth Mydans, International Herald Tribune  |  April 29, 2007

SINGAPORE -- Riding the crest of globalization and technology, English
dominates the world as no language ever has, and some linguists now say it
may never be dethroned as the king of languages.

Others see pitfalls, but the factors they cite only underscore the grip
English has on the world: such cataclysms as nuclear war or climate change
or the eventual perfection of a translation machine that would make a common
language unnecessary.

Some insist that linguistic evolution will continue to take its course over
the centuries and that English could eventually die as a common language as
Latin did, or Phoenician or Sanskrit or Sogdian before it.

"If you stay in the mind-set of 15th-century Europe, the future of Latin is
extremely bright," said Nicholas Ostler, the author of a language history
called "Empires of the Word" who is writing a history of Latin. "If you stay
in the mind-set of the 20th-century world, the future of English is
extremely bright."

That skepticism seems to be a minority view. Such specialists on the English
language as David Crystal, author of "English as a Global Language," say the
world has changed so drastically that history is no longer a guide.

"This is the first time we actually have a language spoken genuinely
globally by every country in the world," he said. "There are no precedents
to help us see what will happen."

John McWhorter, a linguist at the Manhattan Institute, a research group in
New York, and the author of a history of language called "The Power of
Babel" was more unequivocal.

"English is dominant in a way that no language has ever been before," he
said. "It is vastly unclear to me what actual mechanism could uproot English
given conditions as they are."

As a new millennium begins, scholars say that about one-fourth of the
world's population can communicate to some degree in English.

It is the common language in almost every endeavor, from science to air
traffic control to the global jihad, where it is apparently the means of
communication between speakers of Arabic and other languages.

It has consolidated its dominance as the language of the Internet, where 80
percent of the world's electronically stored information is in English,
according to David Graddol, a linguist and researcher.

There may be more native speakers of Chinese, Spanish, or Hindi, but it is
English they speak when they talk across cultures, and English they teach
their children to help them become citizens of an increasingly intertwined
world.

As English continues to spread, the linguists say, it is fragmenting, as
Latin did, into a family of dialects, and perhaps eventually fully fledged
languages, known as Englishes.

New vernaculars have emerged in such places as Singapore, Nigeria, and the
Caribbean, although widespread literacy and mass communication may be
slowing the natural process of diversification.

The pidgin of Papua New Guinea already has its own literature and
translations of Shakespeare. One enterprising scholar has translated "Don
Quixote" into Spanglish, the hybrid of English and Spanish that is spoken
along the borders of Mexico and the United States.

But unlike Latin and other former common languages, most scholars say
English seems to be too widespread and too deeply entrenched to die out.
Instead, it will probably survive in some simplified international form --
sometimes called Globish or World Standard Spoken English -- side by side
with its offspring.

As a simplified form of global English emerges, the diverging forms spoken
in Britain and America could become no more than local dialects -- two more
Englishes alongside the Singlish spoken in Singapore or the Taglish spoken
in the Philippines. A native speaker of English might need to become
bilingual in his own language to converse with other speakers of global
English.

Although Chinese and other languages are rapidly increasing their share of
Internet traffic, English is likely to remain the common language,
specialists say.

The teaching of English has become a multibillion-dollar industry, and
according to Graddol, nearly one-third of the world's population will soon
be studying English.

By the most common estimates, 400 million people speak English as a first
language, 300 million to 500 million others as a fluent second language, and
perhaps 750 million as a foreign language.

The largest English-speaking nation in the world, the United States, has
only about 20 percent of the world's English speakers.

In Asia alone, an estimated 350 million people speak English, about the same
as the combined English-speaking populations of Britain, the United States,
and Canada.

But in the end, Ostler said, the advance of technology that helped push
English into its commanding position could pull it down again.

Though it still sounds like science fiction, it seems likely that some time,
many decades from now, a machine will be perfected that can produce Urdu
when it hears someone speaking German.

"With progress, the problem of machine translation and automatic
interpreting is going to be solved," Ostler said. "And the need for a common
language is going to be technically replaced."

**************************** Disclaimer ******************************

Copyright: In accordance with Title 17, United States Code Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit for research and educational
purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material posted to this list for
purposes that go beyond "fair use," you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.

Content: The sender does not vouch for the veracity nor the accuracy of the
contents of this message, which are the sole responsibility of the copyright
owner. Also, the sender does not necessarily agree or disagree with any
opinions that are expressed in this message.

**********************************************************************

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20070516/cd87aeab/attachment.htm>