Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [306]
But in the modern era language spread has been effected above all by mass production of language texts, and later the means to disseminate them instantly over any distance. First came printing, already starting up in Europe in the fifteenth century. It played a cardinal role in western Europe’s encounter with many unknown languages, as well as in spreading its own.* Then, four hundred years later, came electronic links, first point-to-point and then broadcast. The effects on language spread have been profound. Language communities have become sustainable despite physical separation.† This may have an effect—as yet unknown—on the development of the languages themselves: electronic technology, if it becomes totally pervasive, might even bring about not only the widely announced ‘death of distance’ but even ‘the death of dialect’. But it has had indirect effects already. The withdrawal of the European imperial powers in the quarter-century after the Second World War, especially from Africa, was above all a policy response to a new globally sensed politics, the ‘Wind of Change’ famously detected by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1960: ‘The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’3
The foreign elites were departing, in deference to the voices of the world’s many, among them the people they governed. Those voices had become audible through those same elites’ own mass media, indeed now speaking in their own languages.
Way to go
We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.
Henry Gibson, song entitled ‘200 Years’4
We have yet to consider what future may await English.
The past four hundred years have been almost absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples, as political, military and cultural victories have succeeded one another. The language community has expanded overseas from England, first by stealth in tiny crevices, then by imperial assertion over ever vaster domains, and finally, after the demise of arrant colonialism, to apparent acclaim in a single world marketplace. It is a creature first of the human social faculty for creating a language among disparate groups who share a single territory, then the ability discovered by that one island community to use its naval strength to spread its citizens and its political influence wherever it found points of weakness all over the world, and most recently of being the language most readily to hand when Europe, North America and then the world discovered how to profit from fossil fuels, science and mass markets. This tremendous run of luck has created an enormous reserve of prestige, reflected in the global enthusiasm for English-language popular culture. As the French language showed five hundred years ago, association with wealth and power is highly attractive.
But English can hardly expect that its linguistic vogue will continue for ever. The presence of a single language for communication worldwide is stabilising, giving it the appearance almost of being a neutral part of the world order, as much beyond the control of great powers as it is of any one society. Likewise the Latin language, lasting almost a millennium after the demise of the Roman empire in the west, gave western Europe at least, in its long separate development, good reason to believe that it had become the permanent and pure language of thought and reality. But the printing press, longdistance navigation and the rise of global empires changed all that. The world remains a highly dynamic place. For languages, as for any human institution, when you are on top, sooner or later there is only one way to go.
The current status of English has three main pillars