Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [300]
For all of them except French, their most populous ex-colony now vastly outnumbers their motherland: the USA has over four times the population of the UK, Mexico almost three times that of Spain, Brazil seventeen times that of Portugal. It is extremely difficult to predict their positions among the most widespread languages of the world fifty years from now. Spanish and Portuguese should maintain their share in countries that are still growing strongly: Mexico and Brazil, for example, are expected to add some 50 per cent to their populations in this period, and the other colonies in the Americas and Africa will not be that different. Meanwhile, the USA may add a quarter to its population, although this may not benefit the English-language community—significantly, the growth is mainly among Spanish speakers.
In fact, it is for French and English that the future is hardest to predict. These are the languages that might be seen as vehicles of globalisation, each in its way a lingua franca for contact with a wider world. Their native-speaker populations tend to be in countries where the population has stabilised and may even be decreasing. This would imply that their prospects for future growth are limited. However, those same countries are the most influential in the world, economically, culturally and militarily. As a result, English and French are widely acquired as second languages by people all over the world, for business and cultural reasons that have everything to do with the prestige of the languages. In the case of French especially, the language’s status is locked in politically, since so many of France’s ex-colonies, especially in central Africa, have adopted it as their official language. (See Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 419.) As for English, the prestige has sometimes very little to do with historic links: witness the current surge of interest in learning English around the Baltic Sea, a zone that has never had dealings with Britain or America. More generally, US-centred mass culture enjoys global popularity at the moment. But the long-term linguistic effect of this, as we have seen, may be surprisingly transient. (See also Chapter 14, ‘Way to go’, p. 541.)
The future balance among languages worldwide is now very much in contention. Demographically, the role of the European languages, and especially English, could have been expected to decline, as the rest of the world grows both absolutely, and in terms of relative wealth. (One key milestone was passed recently, when English traffic on the Internet was exceeded by the total in other languages.) But as that wealth grows, there appears to be an increasing demand to learn and use these languages, for they are now seen less as symbols of colonial domination and more as crucial keys for access to the global system. In some sense, the languages’ importance in the role of lingua franca, and as symbols of commitment to a way of life that goes beyond local interests, counteracts the decline of their dominance as first languages.
This tension between inward and outward growth, between the increasing importance of a mother tongue as its speaker population grows and the concurrent popularity of a lingua franca seen as developing links to a wider world, is felt not only at this, global, level. In principle, it is nothing new: the same tension has a long history in the struggles to transcend tribal and communal frictions in order to build federated nations.
It is notable that the two largest languages in Indonesia, Javanese (75 million) and Sundanese (27 million), both spoken on the highly populated island of Java, are growing fast, and are far larger than what is promoted as the national language of the country, Bahasa Indonesia (17 million)—which is linguistically none other than Malay, the lingua franca of the East Indies, and as such spoken not only in Indonesia but also in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, with 47 million speakers in all.* For most people in Indonesia, as in the world, local life and its contacts