• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 559 0

eye for a business opportunity, has converted this too into a paying proposition: English Language Teaching (ELT) has become not only a field of education, but—as in those early days in Bengal—a commercial service industry in its own right. Now it flourishes in almost every country of the world: if the ambient language is English, it must be a good place for the students to get plenty of practice; and if it is not, English must be an eminently desirable skill to learn. The influential philosopher James Mill (1773-1836) had once remarked that the imperial civil service was little more than ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ of Great Britain: ELT could be seen as a new answer to the same problem, though now the qualifications in background and nationality are a little less demanding than they were then.

This spread of English is harder to map geographically than the expansion of British colonies. In spirit, it follows in direct descent from the re-education policy that the British introduced in India. But the mechanism is almost pure diffusion, since—unlike in India—the language has travelled with very little presence of its native speakers. It is probably the best example of a language spread by the sheer prestige of the culture associated with it. Our previous examples have shown the possibility in principle, as when the Egyptian and Hittite courts of the fourteenth century BC corresponded in Akkadian, when the Cambodians and Javanese of the fifth century AD chose to inscribe their temples with literary Sanskrit, or when the Mughals, sweeping down into India from Afghanistan in the sixteenth century, preferred Persian to their native Turkic as their court language. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century vogue for French in eastern Europe, too, should be seen in this light. But the spread of English was the first time that a language and culture had simultaneously made themselves desirable to peoples all over the world, truly a unique event.

In one way, our account of this process has differed from the usual one. This is in our lack of emphasis on the role of the USA.

The worldwide take-up of English in the twentieth century, and particularly in its latter half after the Second World War, is mostly set down to the influence of the USA, its globally stationed armies and fleets, its outreaching commercial enterprises, and above all its ubiquitous films, pop music, TV shows, news media and computer software. Certainly, all these things have been significant, and mass enthusiasm for English-language culture is now focused on the products of the USA. Among the native speakers of English, the USA’s 231 million are clearly the largest single group, four times the size of the UK’s 60 million, and alone make up two-thirds of the global total.68 And arguably, the preferred brand of English now—to judge from accents fashionable outside their own regions—is General American, verging to African American Vernacular English; by contrast, the UK’s current broadcast favourite of ‘Estuary English’, a London-oriented alternative to the traditional Oxbridge ‘Received Pronunciation’, is very much a local taste.*

But our concern in this book has always been the spread of language communities, bodies of people who can understand one another through a given language. In this sense, distinctions of accent are irrelevant until they threaten mutual understanding. And looked at historically, it is quite evident that the springboard from which English made its jump to global status was built far less on the recent exploits of Uncle Sam than on the adventures over the previous 350 years of John Bull.

We have to consider the growth of second-language speakers, since it is they who have dominated expansion of English use in the twentieth century: by the 1950s, all sizeable countries whose first language was English had already slowed the growth in their populations. For second-language speakers, a good estimate, or range of estimates, is provided by David Graddol’s 1999 essay ‘The decline of the native speaker’. He identifies