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By Root 610 0

interest in de la Salle’s explorations along the Mississippi, let alone effective occupation of them, that Napoleon volunteered to sell them, sight unseen, to the USA. All the colonies that the French acquired in the nineteenth century, from Algeria to Indochina, were taken by French arms for the glory of France: la gloire remained an active motive. At the same time France was clearly still a major force in the scientific civilisation that it promoted, so that use of French could be presented as a channel to modernity. Settlers did move into Algeria, but elsewhere the force that made the French colonies a reality—and so spread the use of French—was the central government. Apart from in Algeria and lndo-China, this centralised approach meant that withdrawal of French control, when it came in the 1960s, was surprisingly speedy and painless. What often remained was an affection for the French language, a symbol of la civilisation française, rational in aspiration, national in sentiment.

Given that Russian was spread over three centuries rather nakedly as a mark of the power of the Tsar’s empire—of limited appeal to those not accepted as Russian—and that the twentieth-century attempt to convert it, after the fact, into a vernacular for ‘Scientific Socialism’ collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian language has something of an image problem. The heavy-handedness with which its materialism was asserted contrasted with the lighter touch of French rationalism, and the even-handedness of British pragmatism, and the open-handedness of American consumerism. Russian’s associations with group effort and economic austerity are almost the converse of English’s conjuring up of initiative and ingenuity by individuals, leading to wealth through enterprise.

English, as a quintessentially ‘worldly’ tongue, can also be set against the atmospheres of world languages from a more distant past. Chinese and Egyptian, and indeed Greek and Latin in the ancient world, were all vehicles of civilisations that emphasised the value of the here and now, and at their best were able to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, as well as a degree of peace and security. Arabic and Sanskrit, by contrast, like Latin and Greek in the Christian era, were and are promoted by much more otherworldly cultures, focusing their speakers’ aspirations on spiritual aims, and seeing their degree of visible success or gratification in daily life as only a small part of what is really important.*

This difference of language culture is in our age very evident. In the early twenty-first century, the aspiration to learn English or Arabic has become distinctive for many young people all over the world. In the countries of western Asia and North Africa, Arabic Language Teaching has become a service industry seeking foreign customers, just like ELT in so many other parts of the world. English and Arabic are in some ways remarkably similar: both have a written history of about one and a half thousand years, have been spread around the world by speakers who often knew no other language, and have bodies of literature that freight them with associations many centuries old. But rare is the young person who strives to learn Arabic for Avicenna’s philosophy, the stories of the Thousand and One Nights or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz; even rarer is one who struggles with English hoping to read the King James Bible, or the Book of Common Prayer. In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the Koran, English the language of modern business and global popular culture.

* Old English ‘Be happy’; ‘stay healthy’; ‘let it come’ (i.e. the loving-cup passed around); ‘drink lustily’ ‘drink backwards’; ‘drink to me’ ‘drink half; ‘drink to the dregs’. These are all English toasts and drinking boasts to be heard as the English caroused the night away before the crucial battle of Hastings. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing c.1140, says “… to this day the tradition has endured in Britain that at a banquet the one who drinks to another says “waesseil”, and he who receives