Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [286]
These triumphs in what is called ‘communications’ all tend to reduce the time-taking and effort-costing effects of distances in the world. But they also tend to reduce the differences between the world as it is presented to distant people. Quite literally, they make certain descriptions of experience ‘common’ to more and more people. They make regional and international business routine, allow international contacts to involve the highest level of personnel, turn far-distant destinations into sites for brief visits, even holidays. But they also standardise the images and phrases that people carry in their memories, from advertising through entertainment to education; nowadays there are not only classic texts and works of art that we are taught to appreciate, but classic jingles, classic ads, classic kitsch, which we can’t get out of our heads from one end of the country or one end of the world to another: and quite likely the words we remember will be in English, even if we are Hungarian, Balinese, South African or Mongolian.
The new technologies of communication have made possible new institutions too, institutions that exist above all to spin words, to decorate them and transmit them. Newspapers, magazines, film studios, cinemas, song-sheet publishers and recording companies, radio stations, television production companies, website designers: the list will no doubt continue long into the future. And within every medium, advertising—the supreme meta-product of the language media, acting as a kind of fertiliser or growth hormone, promoting distribution and sales of all these language-based products through its explicit content, even as its payments for space on the channels enable the communications media to cut their prices and reach farther; and at the same time, a major producer of language material in its own right. None of these new institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is restricted to English—but they all became available first in English, and English has remained the biggest producer.
As the Portuguese found when they first gained a reputation for trade in the Indian Ocean, a national language need not remain restricted to its own nationals. Portuguese became the lingua franca of international trade—and indeed the Christian Church—in South and South-East Asia for ten generations and more, long after Portugal itself had yielded in influence to the Dutch and British. The same thing has happened to English, but on a global, rather than an oceanic, scale. So many people in different parts of the world were finding that they needed to deal with English speakers that their dealings began to overlap: non-natives, and even those without any direct connection to the English-speaking world, started using English among themselves, purely for their own convenience. In the words of the English proverb, ‘nothing succeeds like success’, and the spread of a language is no exception. In the twentieth century English replaced French as the usual language for international conferences. The language of air traffic has always been (a restricted form of) English—unsurprising, perhaps, since aviation is a US invention; but English has anyway become the world’s interlingua of choice. For 1996 it was estimated that 85 per cent of international associations made official use of English, and 33 per cent used nothing else. In Asia and the Pacific, 90 per cent of international organisations work only in English.67
And the English-speaking world, with its characteristic