Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [307]
First of all, English has as many speakers as any other language. When its 375 million native speakers are added to the equal number of second-language speakers and the three-quarters of a billion people who have learnt it at school or in other classes, it is reasonable to claim that a quarter of mankind is familiar with English. The only comparable language is Chinese, when all those educated in Mandarin are added together; but the average income, status and global location of the English speakers give English very much the edge. Learning English is a majority school subject in the People’s Republic of China; Chinese, by contrast, remains off the syllabus in all English-speaking countries’ schools.
Second, there is now no language to match English for global coverage. English has a special status in countries on every continent, a status it shares only with French. But there are four first- or second-language speakers of English for every one of French. The complacency of English speakers speaks for itself: while English speakers still predominate in all measures of commercial and scientific achievement, it remains the norm in every English-speaking country for those completing compulsory education to be monolingual in English. Effective competence in any foreign language continues to elude the vast majority of those who are made competent in the technical basis of modern civilisation. And this is how they stay throughout their lives. But it is not just that the majority of English speakers are complacent. It is more that the world has as yet exacted no price for this; if anything, it has rewarded English speakers for not swerving from their own traditions and sources of wisdom.
Finally, English is consciously associated with technical progress and popular culture in every part of the world. This kind of high prestige associated with the language seems particularly well founded because it is based not on a spiritual revelation—revelations are always local, even if they claim universal validity—nor on yearning for a particular regime, which would guarantee freedom or social justice. It is based on the perception of wealth, as it may be made to flow from scientific advance, and its rational application. Since this has been the recent experience of all the richest countries in the world today, in some sense it has objective truth on its side.
Practical human beings are notoriously short sighted, so the ‘smart money’ (itself a very English concept) is naturally backing the belief that the recent course of English, and hence its present status, will continue indefinitely. Just as the bien pensants of the 1990s could be brought to believe briefly in ‘The End of History’, the ultimate victory of liberalism and markets,5 so many today argue that the progress of English may have passed some key global point in the development of world communications, permanently outdistancing any possible competitor, and providing all language-learners with a one-way bet. David Crystal is a highly knowledgeable and perceptive commentator on languages in the modern world; and at the end of his book English as a Global Language he has reviewed the factors that might endanger its position, notably foreign negative reactions, the changing balance of populations, and the prospects of dialect fission. But even he can only speculate in the end that ‘it may be that English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever’.6
Our background study of five millennia of world language makes the eternity of this prospect seem unlikely. The modern global language situation is unprecedented, but the constituents of modern language communities are still people. And, above all, people use language to socialise. Human societies have always had a way of multiplying languages.
First of all, most people in the world are still bilingual; this points to the fact that global languages have seldom established themselves as anything more than second languages, useful as a lingua