English's bleak future

Fri Feb 22 14:30:56 UTC 2008

English's Bleak Future

Nicholas Ostler

The status of English as an international language appears
unassailable. It is simultaneously pre-eminent in science, politics,
business and entertainment. And unlike any of its lingua franca
predecessors, it has all this on a truly worldwide scale. There is no
challenger comparable to it: Chinese has more native speakers, but
every schoolchild in China now studies English. And India, set to
overtake China in population by 2050, is avidly trading on its English
expertise.

But English is not thereby immune to the principles of language
survival. Above all, it is notable that beyond the 330 million or so
native speakers, perhaps twice as many more use it as a second
language. And this community of over 600 million second-language
speakers, who make English pre-eminent as a world language, also make
it vulnerable in the long term. In 5,000 years of recorded language
history, a few dozen languages have achieved the status of lingua
franca, a language of wider communication among people whose mother
tongues may be quite different. Spanish, French, Hindi, Russian and
English have been lingua francas in the present age, as have been
Latin, Quechua, Persian and Aramaic in the past. But this status does
not come about by some utilitarian reckoning, or democratic selection.
There is always a reason, be it conquest, trade, religious mission or
social aspiration, which has selected a language to have this wider
role, and that reason is hard to forget--and ultimately often hard to
forgive.

This is seldom clear--at first--to native speakers. They naturally see
their mother tongue as a simple blessing for the wider world. Pliny
the Elder, writing in the 1st century AD of the then widespread use of
Latin, boasted that it almost made the sky brighter; French author
Anatole France (1844-1924) thought the French language was such a
charming mistress that no one was ever tempted to be unfaithful to
her. But neither language would have spread across Western Europe if
their use had not once upon a time been imposed--by forces other than
lucidity and charm.

There was status or wealth to be gained from knowing these languages,
and in their heyday, no one believed they might one day go out of use.
After all, they seemed not only useful, but also such exceptional
languages. Latin--alone of western languages--had grammatica, an
analysis of all its rules; French was regulated by an Academy, which
would ensure the quality of its substance. Likewise, English, with its
simple sentence-structure and openness to borrowed vocabulary, is
often thought well suited to be a global medium.

But far from being disinterested aids to thought and communication,
every lingua franca continues to bear the badge of its original
spread; and this is often the cause of its ultimate undoing. This
moral is as clear--and well-established--as the recorded history of
the lingua franca phenomenon, a story as old as international trade
routes and multinational empires. Akkadian spread beyond the Assyrian
empire on the strength of its pictograph-based cuneiform writing, but
then yielded to Aramaic, a language combining widespread use with an
alphabetic script. Sogdian, once spoken by merchants and divines from
Samarkand to China, could not survive the decline of the Silk Road
trade. And in Europe, Latin in the 9th to 16th centuries and French in
the 17th to 20th centuries depended on educated elites. Wide use of
those languages declined when power passed into other hands.

Most speakers of a lingua franca speak it as their second language,
not their first. This means that their mother tongue is not usually
endangered. Only when large numbers of native speakers of the lingua
franca move into a region is there a chance that it will become the
mother tongue. So while a lingua franca heightens bilingualism, often
this is all it does. It only begins to replace a mother tongue when a
growing number of people adopt it as their first language. So, for
example, among the British colonies, North America attracted many
English-speaking settlers early on, as did Australia and New Zealand.
But large numbers of Britons never settled permanently in India,
Ceylon, Burma or Malaya. This explains the different status of English
in these places today.

Any trend to political democratization, meanwhile, will diminish the
use of English worldwide, because it downgrades the status of elites,
the prime users of non-native English. This has already happened. With
independence achieved after the Second World War, Tanzania, Sri Lanka,
Malaysia and the Philippines all downgraded their official use of
English. In India, too, English is beginning to lose its stranglehold
on enterprise and education: In February, a major business newspaper
in Hindi was launched, likely the first of many. The massive current
expansion in Indian higher education (aimed at increasing
participation from 10% to 15%) will also lessen the proportion of
citizens who are educated in English as opposed to Hindi or another
mother tongue.

An economic shift is also affecting the use of English. The language
was originally spread by the acquisitive British empire, and was
expanded in the late 20th century by the immense economic heft of
English-speaking economies. Will it seem so attractive in 2050 when
Brazil, Russia, China and India are predicted to comprise four of the
six largest economies? Some will find it hard to believe that the
world could ever abandon its common language of science. It is true
that the quasi-universal use of English in scientific publishing is a
great convenience. But Latin was once just as pre-eminent, at least in
Europe. Its fate in the 17th century shows that the language of a
scientific tradition--even one that extends over more than a
millennium--can be abandoned. Even then, it was unnecessary to settle
on a single language as a successor; how much less so now, when
ever-improving translation software is making language barriers
tumble.

English will not decline as a first language: Indeed for the
foreseeable future it will be among the five major mother tongues of
the world. Spread out worldwide, it may even change and ultimately
split into a family of languages. But it would go against the pattern
of world history if alien peoples patronized English for very much
longer than necessary. Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and
Portuguese--possibly also Russian, Malay, Persian and Arabic--have the
potential to increase within their vast regions, and perhaps even
globally. The aspirations of some of these languages are already
visible, if far from realization. China is a third of the way into its
program to establish 100 Confucius Institutes around the world to
popularize learning Chinese. They are now present in 23 countries,
part of plans to have 100 million people studying Chinese worldwide by
2010.

In sum, the world in the next few generations is likely to see greater
multilingualism and less English-backed bilingualism. We can learn the
long view from language history, but it may be a hard lesson.

Nicholas Ostler is the author of Empires of the Word: A Language
History of the World and Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, and is
chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/21/future-english-chinese-tech-cx_no_language_sp08_0221lingua.html

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