The Importance of English

In numbers of speakers as well as in its uses for international communication and in other less quantifiable measures, English is one of the most important languages of the world. Spoken by more than 380 million people in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former British Empire, it is the largest of the Western languages. English, however, is not the most widely used native language in the world. Chinese, in its eight spoken varieties, is known to 1.3 billion people in China alone. Some of the European languages are comparable to English in reflecting the forces of history, especially with regard to European expansion since the sixteenth century. Spanish, next in size to English, is spoken by about 330 million people, Portuguese by 180 million, Russian by 175 million, German by 110 million, French by 80 million native speakers (and a large number of second-language speakers), Italian by 65 million. A language may be important as a lingua franca in a country or region whose diverse populations would otherwise be unable to communicate. This is especially true in the former colonies of England and France whose colonial languages have remained indispensable even after independence and often in spite of outright hostility to the political and cultural values that the European languages represent.

French and English are both languages of wider communication, and yet the changing positions of the two languages in international affairs during the past century illustrate the extent to which the status of a language depends on extralinguistic factors. It has been said that English is recurringly associated with practical and powerful pursuits. Joshua A.Fishman writes: “In the Third World (excluding former anglophone and francophone colonies) French is considered more suitable than English for only one function: opera. It is considered the equal of English for reading good novels or poetry and for personal prayer (the local integrative language being widely viewed as superior to both English and French in this connection). But outside the realm of aesthetics, the Ugly Duckling reigns supreme.”

The ascendancy of English as measured by numbers of speakers in various activities does not depend on nostalgic attitudes toward the originally Englishspeaking people or toward the language itself. Fishman makes the point that English is less loved but more used; French is more loved but less used. And in a world where “econo-technical superiority” is what counts, “the real ‘powerhouse’ is still English. It doesn’t have to worry about being loved because, loved or not, it works. It makes the world go round, and few indeed can afford to ‘knock it.’”

 If “econo-technical superiority” is what counts, we might wonder about the relative status of English and Japanese. Although spoken by 125 million people in Japan, a country that has risen to economic and technical dominance since World War II, the Japanese language has yet few of the roles in international affairs that are played by English or French. The reasons are rooted in the histories of these languages. Natural languages are not like programming languages such as Fortran or LISP, which have gained or lost international currency over a period of a decade or two. Japan went through a two-century period of isolation from the West (between 1640 and 1854) during which time several European languages were establishing the base of their subsequent expansion.