[lg policy] Mind your language: the fightback against global English

Fri Sep 23 15:04:29 UTC 2016

 Mind your language: the fightback against global English

Are education systems around the world placing undue emphasis on our modern
lingua franca — or merely delivering what parents want?
Read next: Get rich slow: how the west can rebuild faith in globalisation
<https://www.ft.com/content/19f4e976-78e5-11e6-a0c6-39e2633162d5> September
14, 2016
Pupils in an English class in Rwanda, where English replaced French in 2008
as the official language of instruction in schools © Tim Smith / Panos

   - *Twitter*
   <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>
   - *Facebook*
   <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>
   - *LinkedIn*
   <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>

Print this page
2 <https://www.ft.com/content/5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4#comments>
4 hours ago

by: Michael Skapinker <https://www.ft.com/work-careers/michael-skapinker>

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.
Sample the FT’s top stories for a week

You select the topic, we deliver the news.
Select topic
Enter email address

Invalid email

By signing up you confirm that you have read and agree to the terms and
conditions <http://help.ft.com/tools-services/ft-com-terms-and-conditions>,
cookie
policy
<http://help.ft.com/tools-services/how-the-ft-manages-cookies-on-its-websites>
and privacy policy
<http://help.ft.com/tools-services/financial-times-privacy-policy>.

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.”

That is the view of *Why English? Confronting the Hydra*, a collection of
essays by a group of academics and English teachers. This book follows an
earlier work, *English Language as Hydra*, but adds additional context to
that work’s national case studies, as well as adding its own. *Why English?*
begins on an apologetic, partly italicised, note. “There is, indeed, huge
irony in the fact this collection is written *in English* 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.”

People note that the elites in their societies make sure their children
speak English

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 *Why English?* 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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

But *Why English?* 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.

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.

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 *Language Policy
and Economics: The Language Question* 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 *The Linguistic Landscape of Post-Apartheid South Africa*,
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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

*Why English?
<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>
Confronting the Hydra*, edited by Pauline Bunce, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan
Rapatahana and Ruanni Tupas, *Multilingual Matters, RRP£109.95/$189.95, 312
pages*

*Language Policy and Economics
<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>:
The Language Question in Africa*, by Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu, *Palgrave
Macmillan, RRP£60/$99, 232 pages*

*The Linguistic Landscape of Post-Apartheid South Africa
<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>:
Politics and Discourse*, by Liesel Hibbert, *Multilingual Matters,
RRP£89.95/$149.95, 184 pages*

https://www.ft.com/content/5ee11a7a-7f32-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
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)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20160923/2c05d487/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list