Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [308]
Second, English is not seen everywhere as a neutral medium of access to wealth and global culture. Some policy-makers, typically in ex-British or ex-American colonies, have ‘seen too much of it’, and resist it, often combining historic associations with domestic power politics. In 1948, Ceylon (now Śri Lanka) excluded English as an official language, partly because it was believed that its continued use would benefit the (predominantly middle-class) Tamil minority; the sequel, including the establishment of Sinhala as the only official language in 1956, has not been happy, and much use of English continues. In 1967, English was stripped of its status as an official language in Tanzania and Malaysia, and in 1974 in Kenya; in 1987, the Philippines promoted Tagalog to equal status with it, ‘until otherwise provided by the law’. This resistance may fade in later generations, along with memories of colonial history;7 but global interventions by the USA, sometimes in alliance with other English-speaking powers, show no sign of diminishing in the twenty-first century. They will do much to preserve an easy depiction of English in some quarters as the global bully’s language of choice.
Lastly, even if English persists worldwide, there is no guarantee that it will stay united as a language. Although the world in the early third millennium AD is a very different place from western Europe in the early first, English could well follow the example of Latin, and reshape itself in different ways in different dialect areas, ultimately—say within a few centuries—becoming a language family. This is particularly likely wherever the language has established itself as a vernacular, as in Jamaica or Singapore, or where most of a population becomes bilingual, so that code-switching is an attractive mode of conversation, as for example it is today among educated Indians. Evidently this is less likely to happen, or will at least be slowed, if the communities that speak English stay in regular two-way touch, by phone and correspondence, and receiving each other’s media. English probably still holds the best position among large languages worldwide for preserving its unity by mutual contact. As one indication, international telephone traffic is overwhelmingly dominated by conversations in English.* But not all English-speaking communities may play a full part in the global conversation; and long-term rifts and rivalries may come to dominate—as Spain and France contested for influence in Renaissance Italy, a mere millennium after they had all been provinces of a single empire.
It is possible to outline a variety of scenarios for a turn in the fortunes of English, drawing inspiration from the later years of many dominant languages of the past. Both as a first language of large populations, and as a world lingua franca, English may find that the seeds of its decline have already been planted.
As a first language, English has already peaked demographically.* In this it is no different from most of the other imperial languages from Europe. Its native speakers are still growing in numbers, but at a far slower rate than those of some other major languages. As a result, according to one intelligent estimate,8 English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish and Arabic should just about be on a par in the year 2050, with Chinese still exceeding each of them by a factor of 2.5. This is a time when world population