English as a World Language

That the world is fully alive to the need for an international language is evident from the number of attempts that have been made to supply that need artificially. Between 1880 and 1907 fifty-three universal languages were proposed. Some of these enjoyed an amazing, if temporary, vogue. In 1889 Volapük claimed nearly a million adherents. Today it is all but forgotten. A few years later Esperanto experienced a similar vogue, but interest in it now is kept alive largely by local groups and organizations. Apparently the need has not been filled by any of the laboratory products so far created to fill it. And it is doubtful if it ever can be filled in this way. An artificial language might serve some of the requirements of business and travel, but no one has proved willing to make it the medium of political, historical, or scientific thought, to say nothing of literature.

The history of language policy in the twentieth century makes it unlikely that any government will turn its resources to an international linguistic solution that benefits the particular country only indirectly. Without the support of governments and the educational institutions that they control, the establishment of an artificial language for the world will be impossible. Recent history has shown language policy continuing to be a highly emotional issue, the language of a country often symbolizing its independence and nationalism.

The emotions that militate against the establishment of an artificial language work even more strongly against the establishment of a single foreign language for international communication. The official languages of the United Nations are English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Since it is not to be expected that the speakers of any of these six languages will be willing to subordinate their own language to any of the other five, the question is rather which languages will likely gain ascendancy in the natural course of events. Two centuries ago French would have appeared to have attained an undisputed claim to such ascendancy. It was then widely cultivated throughout Europe as the language of polite society, it was the diplomatic language of the world, and it enjoyed considerable popularity in literary and scientific circles. During the nineteenth century its prestige, though still great, gradually declined. The prominence of Germany in all fields of scientific and scholarly activity made German a serious competitor. Now more scientific research is probably published in English than in any other language, and the preeminence of English in commercial use is undoubted. The revolution in communications during the twentieth century has contributed to the spread of several European languages, but especially of English because of major broadcasting and motion picture industries in the United States and Great Britain. It will be the combined effect of economic and cultural forces such as these, rather than explicit legislation by national or international bodies, that will determine the world languages of the future.
Since World War II, English as an official language has claimed progressively less territory among the former colonies of the British Empire while its actual importance and number of speakers have increased rapidly.

At the time of the first edition of this history (1935), English was the official language of one-fourth of the earth’s surface, even if only a small fraction of the population in parts of that area actually knew English. As the colonies gained independence, English continued to be used alongside the vernaculars. In many of the new countries English is either the primary language or a necessary second language in the schools, the courts, and business. The extent of its use varies with regional history and current government policy, although stated policy often masks the actual complexities. In Uganda, for example, where no language is spoken as a first language by more than 16 percent of the population, English is the one official language; yet less than one percent of the population speaks it as a first language. In India, English was to serve transitional purposes only until 1965, but it continues to be used officially with Hindi and fourteen other national languages. In Tanzania, Swahili is the one official language, but English is still indispensable in the schools and the high courts. It is nowhere a question of substituting English for the native speech. Nothing is a matter of greater patriotic feeling than the mother tongue. The question simply concerns the use of English, or some other widely known idiom, for inter-national communication. Braj B.Kachru notes that it is a clear fact of history that English is in a position of unprecedented power: “Where over 650 artificial languages have failed, English has succeeded; where many other natural languages with political and economic power to back them up have failed, English has succeeded. One reason for this dominance of English is its propensity for acquiring new identities, its power of assimilation, its adaptability for ‘decolonization’ as a language, its manifestation in a range of varieties, and above all its suitability as a flexible medium for literary and other types of creativity across languages and cultures.” and other languages of the world are richer or poorer because of “the global power and hegemony of English,” and he called for a full discussion of the question.

Recent awareness of “endangered languages” and a new sensitivity to ecolinguistics have made clear that the success of English brings problems in its wake. The world is poorer when a language dies on average every two weeks. For native speakers of English as well, the status of the English language can be a mixed blessing, especially if the great majority of English speakers remain monolingual. Despite the dominance of English in the European Union, a British candidate for an international position may be at a disadvantage compared with a young EU citizen from Bonn or Milan or Lyon who is nearly fluent in English. Referring to International English as “Global,” one observer writes: “The emergence of Global is not an unqualified bonus for the British… for while we have relatively easy access to Global, so too do well-educated mainland Europeans, who have other linguistic assets besides.”

A similarly mixed story complicates any assessment of English in the burgeoning field  of information technology. During the 1990s the explosive growth of the Internet was extending English as a world language in ways that could not have been foreseen only a few years earlier. The development of the technology and software to run the Internet took place in the United States, originally as ARPANET (the Advanced Research Project Agency Network), a communication system begun in 1969 by the U.S. Department of Defense in conjunction with military contractors and universities. In 2000 English was the dominant language of the Internet, with more than half of the Internet hosts located in the United States and as many as three-fourths in the United States and other Englishspeaking countries. The protocols by which ASCII code was transmitted were developed for the English alphabet, and the writing systems for languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean presented formidable problems for use on the World Wide Web. The technology that made knowledge of English essential also facilitated online Englishlanguage instruction in countries such as China, where demand for English exceeds the available teachers. However, changes in the Internet economy are so rapid that it is impossible to predict the future of English relative to other languages in this global system. It is increasingly clear that online shoppers around the world prefer to use the Internet in their own language and that English-language sites in the United States have lost market share to local sites in other countries. In September 2000 Bill Gates predicted that English would be the language of the Web for the next ten years because accurate computerized translation would be more than a decade away. Yet four months later China announced the world’s first Chinese-English Internet browser with a reported translation accuracy of 80 percent.

by Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable