Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [331]
59. Flannery (1994: 326); Dixon (1980: 1); Crystal (2003: 41).
60. Flannery (1994: 338); Crystal (2003: 41).
61. Grimes (2000).
62. Crystal (2003: 57).
63. ibid.: 62-5 offers some surprising estimates for some of these countries, suggesting that 45 per cent of Nigerians, and 84 per cent of Liberians, speak English. These may well reflect the number who have received some English-language education, since the literacy levels in these countries are rather high. But Crystal’s explicit reason is the prevalence of English-based pidgins and Creoles.
64. Sarah Nākoa, Lei Momi O ‘Ewa (’Garland of Pearls Awry’), 1979, p. 19, cited in Warner (1999: 71).
65. Kennedy (1988: 151); P. Bairoch 1982 is ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European Economic History, 11, and F. Crouzet 1982 is The Victorian Economy, London.
66. W. S. J. Jevons, The Coal Question, London: Macmillan, 1865.
67. Crystal (2003: 88). French was the runner-up in official use with 49 per cent; otherwise, only Arabic, Spanish and German achieved over 10 per cent.
68. ibid.: 65.
69. India Today, 18 August 1997: ‘Contrary to the census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English, although less than 20 per cent are confident of speaking it.’ Cited in Graddol (1999: 64).
70. This ’ worldliness’ of English is a major theme of Pennycook (1994), considered especially as it shows up in Malaysia and Singapore: its overtones are seen as political, as well as economic. And Phillipson (1992) develops a view of ELT as malign, characterising it as Linguistic Imperialism.
71. Guilarte (1998: 22-3).
72. Joyce (1977 [1910]: 33, 85); Gensler (1993: 235-42); and see Chapter 7, ‘Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 290.
IV Languages Today and Tomorrow
13 The Current Top Twenty
1. Following the date given by Mario Citroni, in Hornblower and Spawforth (1999). Martial is referring, of course, not to the parts of a modern book, but to umbilici, ‘navels’, the rods around which the scroll was wound up; librarius means copyist or bookseller rather than a publisher.
2. The principal source of these figures is the fourteenth edition of Ethnologue (Grimes 2000), itself a compilation of figures from a variety of sources. The population sizes for native and secondary speakers of major languages are derived from Funk & Wagnall’s World Almanac.
3. Some consideration of how radically the true figures for English may differ from these can be found in Crystal (2003), Graddol (1997) and Graddol (1999).
4. Wilkinson (2000: 27); Norman (1988: 48-9, 187).
5. Miller (1967: 144).
6. Baugh and Cable (2002: 194).
7. Masica (1991: 27-8).
8. Entwistle and Morison (1949: 288).
9. Dalby (1998: 668).
10. Bourciez (1967: 287).
11. ibid.: 397.
12. Dalby (1998: 328); for Korean, it is impossible in practice to trace any dialectal variation earlier than the establishment of a phonetic writing system in the fifteenth century.
13. The source of population statistics is United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), The State of World Population 2000, and United Nations Department for Social Information and Policy Analysis, Population Division, World Population 1996, as reported in Wright (2000: 468-72).
14 Looking Ahead
1. Bauer (1996: 27).
2. Papal Bull of Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (3 May 1493): ‘…We, then, commending greatly to the Lord your holy and praiseworthy purpose, and desiring that the same attain the due end, and that in those regions the name of our Saviour be introduced, we exhort you with all our power in the Lord and by the reception of holy baptism by which we are obliged to obey the Apostolic commands and with the entrails of mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ we require you intently that you pursue in this manner this expedition and that with spirit imbued with zeal for the orthodox faith you will and must persuade the people who inhabit the said islands to embrace