Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [288]
The levels persisting in ex-British colonies range between 2 per cent and 5 per cent, but are usually estimated to amount in total to around 200 million speakers. Other recent estimates put the rate much higher, as much as 20 per cent in India and Pakistan, 10 per cent in Bangladesh.69 If these are correct, the total should already stand at 395 million. Contrast Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, where knowledge of English is clearly growing, but where Graddol estimates current percentages as no more than 1 per cent of the population (73 million, 43 million). In the very few parts of the world with significant use of English directly due to US influence, the proportions of people knowing it are 50 per cent in the Philippines (36 million), and 85 per cent in Liberia (2 million—although this last represents speakers of English creole). All in all, these English-speaking regions of non-British origin may represent a total of 152 million.
Already in this second-language-speaking part of the English world, then, it seems that the growth of British-origin English remains more significant than the radical effects of the US influence. But this leaves out of account what may currently be the fastest-growing area of second-language English, namely Europe.* It is purely a matter of definition whether European English should be considered as part of the foreign-language or the second-language domain, but it is clear that it has become the major working language of the European Union, as well as being widely used in commerce, industry and academia in northern European countries, particularly Scandinavia. Graddol’s analysis of the European Union’s Eurobarometer surveys from 1990 to 1998 suggests that English competence in Europe was high, but fairly static, until 1980, at under 20 per cent; it then perked up and since 1990 has begun to take off meteorically. It now stands at over 100 million, approaching a third of the European Union’s population.*
English among its peers
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us.
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion.
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us
An’ ev’n Devotion.
Robert Burns, ‘To a Louse’, 1798
A language that links together a speech community, even a vast one like the global multitude who think and speak in English, is given its character not so much by its phonetics and phrasings as by the patterns of associations that have piled up on its words as they are transmitted down the generations. A language bespeaks a history—the history, of course, of those who have spoken it—and this is the main creator of its reputation abroad, as it is of its attractions to those who may want to learn the language, and so join its community. This is one reason why study of a language has long emphasised its literature, ‘the best that has been said and thought’† using that language, as selected by its own tradition. But not all the experiences in a language’s long memory may have been hallowed by good writing.
Looking back on the history of English as formative of its present character and reputation, memory can afford to be quite selective: the past before the sixteenth century of the Reformation and the beginnings of colonial expansion seems to have left only the very faintest of traces. But from that era on, the kinds of adventures that spread English, and which were prized most highly by many of its speakers, do have a certain consistency. English is associated with the quest to get rich, the deliberate acquisition of wealth, often by quite unprecedented and imaginative schemes. This quest has sometimes had to struggle with religious and civic conscience, and the glories of patriotism, but has largely been able to enlist them on its side. In general, it has been the ally, rather than the rival, of freedom of the individual.