Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [284]
In 1896 one of the first acts of the Hawaiian republic, formed briefly after the fall of the monarchy, was to require English as medium of instruction for no less than half the school day; but in practice no Hawaiian at all was allowed. In that generation, the transmission of the language from parent to child stopped dead. One grandmother told her granddaughter before her first day of school:
E pa’a pono ka ‘ōlelo a ka haole. Mai kālele i kā kākou ‘ōlelo, ‘a’ohe he pono i laila. A ia ke ola o ka noho ‘ana ma kēiamua aku i ka ‘ike pono i ka ‘ōlelo a ka po’e haole.
Learn well the language of the whites. Do not rely on our language, there’s no value there. One’s future well-being is dependent upon mastering the language of the foreign people.64
This sounds like particularly harsh re-education, but in fact Hawaii conforms at least as well to the sweep-aside model: by 1996, with the population now standing at 1.2 million, only 18.8 per cent were ethnic Hawaiians, and half of these had less than 50 per cent Hawaiian ancestry. Outside the one small island of Niihau, everyone on the islands is now at least bilingual in English, and the vast majority know no other language.
In the same year of 1898, the USA took the Philippines and Guam forcibly from Spain in a flush of imperialist glee (see Chapter 10, ‘Coda: Across the Pacific’, p. 377); and a year later they also enforced their own solution to a long-standing dispute over Samoa, taking the eastern half of the archipelago. There was then a respite for forty years, as these new territories got used to the sound of English; but on 7 December 1941 an attack on Pearl Harbor, in American Hawaii, unleashed the Pacific war with Japan. At the war’s end, having got to know a decidedly unbalmy side of the islands as battlefields, the USA found itself in possession of all the Japanese colonies in Micronesia. Though no longer colonies after the 1970s, they have all kept close ties to the USA. English has become the lingua franca of the Pacific, but outside Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand it is nowhere a majority language.
Wonder upon wonder
This chapter, like all those before it, has mainly focused so far on the political developments that have spread a language. But something else has been acting in favour of English, at least for the last two centuries, and increasingly so as decade follows decade. A glimmer of it was seen in the 1823 remark of Ram Mohan Roy, pleading for access to English education: ‘… useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world … ‘
It has not only been self-assured aggression, superiority in fire-power or unrivalled access to capital which has carried British enterprise—and so, directly or indirectly, its language—around the world. All these things have played a role, but they had flowed from, and been reinforced by, the amazing status of Britain as centre and source of the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, people all over the world avidly accepted re-education in English, Britain was evidently the richest, and the most dynamic, country in the world. To quote a historian’s pithy and overwhelming summary:
Between 1760 and 1830, the United Kingdom was responsible for around ‘two-thirds of Europe’s industrial growth of output’ (— P. Bairoch 1982), and its share of world manufacturing production leapt from 1.9% to 9.5%; in the next thirty years, British industrial expansion pushed that figure to 19.9%, despite the spread of the new technology to other countries in the West … ‘With 2% of the world’s population and 10% of Europe’s, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45% of the world’s potential, and 55-60% of that in Europe’ (— F. Crouset 1982). Its energy consumption