The future of English needs to be understood in the context of a dramatic change in the whole global system of languages, for at the opposite end of the scale are the languages teetering on the brink of extinction. Some countries are home to a truly remarkable variety of tongues: notably, around a sixth of the world’s living languages are spoken on the lush Oceanian island of New Guinea. Its eastern section forms the main part of Papua New Guinea, a country which, although it has a population not much above 5 million, harbours more than 820 indigenous languages. Many, such as Aruop and Matepi, are spoken by a tiny number of people; and some, such as Gorovu and Susuami, are close to dying out. In fact, by the time you read these words, they may already be gone. Other sites of exceptional linguistic diversity include Australia, India, Cameroon and Mexico. In Sudan there are currently more than 130 languages in use; in Indonesia the figure was reckoned, the last time I checked, to be 737. According to Nicholas Ostler, ‘over half the languages in the world … have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand languages have under a dozen.’4 Ninety-six per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by 4 per cent of its inhabitants, and four-fifths in only one country, with the result that their fortunes are closely tied to the politics of their governments. Languages are continually disappearing.A recent study has estimated that a language becomes extinct about once a fortnight. 5
There seems little chance of English becoming extinct or even fragile. It is the world’s most widespread language, and its global position has for some time appeared to be strengthening. Indeed, some languages survive only in so far as elements of their vocabulary have been assimilated into English. For members of smaller speech communities, the need to study foreign languages is strong, and English tops the list, as it occupies a dominant position in so many fields. Among these are diplomacy, trade, shipping, the entertainment industry and youth culture. English is the lingua franca of computing and technology, of science and medicine.6 Its position is prominent, if not dominant, in education, international business and journalism. It is the working language of the United Nations. It holds sway, too, in academia – in scholarly research and publications. English language teaching, commonly known as ELT, is less a branch of pedagogy than a fully developed industry. And there are other, less glamorous, areas of dominance: when you are on a plane, the safety instructions will always be relayed in English, and English is used right across the globe as the language of air traffic control.
There are several ways for a language to increase its number of speakers. One is reproduction – we could look, for instance, at China, whose population has increased from around 550 million in 1950 to nearly 1.4 billion today. Other means, as we have seen, include conquest and imperialism, trade, migration and the proselytizing zeal of religion. The last of these may sound improbable in the twenty-first century, but the present rise of Islam has spread knowledge of Arabic, as the Prophet’s teachings can properly be conveyed only in their original language. The continuing diffusion of English is, we can see, a consequence of capitalism and globalization, conflict and the Americanization of popular culture. English-speakers won two world wars, and in the Cold War, which spanned five decades, English was presented by the West – and widely regarded in the Communist ‘East’ – as the ‘language of freedom’.7 Once upon a time you might have learnt English so that you could read its literature, digest the heady ideas contained in its scientific volumes, or follow the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Today, however, learners of English are more concerned with commerce, fashion and the entertainment industry. It is a language of material, not spiritual, aspiration.
One field that brings together the material and spiritual impulses is popular music, and here the global appeal of English is flamboyant. In the 1960s, British and American music became associated with radicalism and protest. Since then, the foreign policies of Britain and America have failed to tarnish the image of their music: its range of styles and idioms has increased, and so have its fluidity and its allure. You will very likely have had a few curious experiences of this. I have found myself feebly trying to explain The Smiths to a melancholic student in Hiroshima, and have been waylaid by children on the streets of Lisbon whose entire knowledge of English appeared to have been picked up from the lyrics of Snoop Dogg. While an unfamiliar musical style may be quite readily appreciated, lyrics in an unfamiliar tongue can make a song baffling – yet those lyrics are picked up even if they are not understood. Some French musicians go in for what is known as chanter en yaourt (‘singing in yoghurt’), which involves composing a sort of gibberish of vaguely English-sounding lyrics at the time of writing a song: the lyrics fit the rhythms and melodies of their music, and the actual content can be improved later. In an essay on Indonesian underground rock music, the American ethnographer Jeremy Wallach explains that many young Indonesians, influenced in part by English-language music, employ English words for the purposes of romance and use English expletives, because doing so is either safer or sexier than using indigenous languages – it frees them from some of the inhibitions they would otherwise feel.8 In South Korea, young musicians use English to construct an image of menace or sexual daring, and to emphasize the contentious, uninhibited nature of their art.9
The intrusiveness of English is undeniably bound up with globalized entertainment. It is the language, for instance, of countless advertising jingles and catchphrases (‘Coke. It’s the real thing’ or McDonald’s’s ‘I’m lovin’ it’) which insinuate themselves into people’s minds. Native English-speakers are frequently embarrassed to realize which bits of their language leave the clearest imprint on other cultures. Plenty of people will smile knowingly at the words of Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate governor of Aden, who claimed that ‘when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it … [left behind] only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression “Fuck off”.’10 A less deliberately provocative view would be that, while liberal capitalism is the most powerful legacy of empire, the English language is the most conspicuous.
Its cultural consequences can be devastating. Benedict Anderson, reflecting on the success of his book Imagined Communities, comments, ‘Had … [it] originally appeared in Tirana, in Albanian, or in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnamese, … it is unlikely to have travelled very far.’ The book’s success, in his view, owed much to ‘its original publication in London, in the English language, which now serves as a kind of global-hegemonic, post-clerical Latin’.11 We can extrapolate beyond Anderson’s argument: things that don’t happen in English are likely to be marginalized in favour of very possibly less worthy things that do happen in English.
The dominance of English is not guaranteed. Great linguistic empires have fallen before. Cultural earthquakes occur. As Ovid pointed out, there are fields of wheat where Troy once stood. Moreover, the circumstances that enable a language’s spread are not the same as those that maintain it. For political reasons, English is in some parts of the world seen in a negative light. In Iraq or the Philippines or Sri Lanka or Puerto Rico, it is perceived very differently from the way in which readers of this book will tend to view it. English is associated with shallow consumerism, big business or the so-called War on Terror. Gandhi once protested that the English language had enslaved the minds of Indians, and a Nazi critique denounced the British Council for its role in bringing Western civilization to its knees.12 Today the advance of English symbolizes for many people the erosion of their own identities and interests. It equalizes values and desires, without doing the same for opportunities. English-speakers may think the spread of their language facilitates global connections, but to many who hear the language spoken it is indicative of America, and for others it may call to mind the Christian faith or some dark colonial agenda. It is no exaggeration to argue that the status of English is now intimately dependent on the status of globalization and on international attitudes towards this phenomenon.
That said, anyone actuall
y experiencing the supposedly homogenous ‘world culture’ on the ground is likely to be less sure that we are in the throes of linguistic apocalypse. To return to music: in countries as different as Poland and Tanzania, the rhythms, politics and iconography of American hip-hop have been copied, and so have its idioms. But these do not stamp out the distinctive identities of local forms. What happens, instead, is a subtle refashioning in which the global language of the genre meshes with the authentic local sound. Performers find this invigorating; to them, even if not to those who pass judgement on their art, it marks no tragic loss of identity. In any case, the flow of influence is two-directional: the global increase in multiculturalism means that in the very communities where the identity of English seems most rooted, its character is being energetically contested and altered. As readers of this book will probably be aware, urban Britain and America are abundantly multilingual. A study in 2000 showed that children in London’s schools spoke a total of more than 300 languages.13
So what is English in the twenty-first century? The idea of ‘World English’ was first paraded in the 1920s. Now it is a reality. Today there are more people using English as a second language than there are native speakers. English is spoken, with at least some degree of fluency, by more than a billion people. In truth the figure may be closer to double that, especially if we are prepared to accept competence in lieu of expertise. The number of people actively learning English may soon reach 2 billion. This still means that there are more people who speak no English than there are people who have some command of it. But for now its life force continues to grow. And, as it does so in the future, the language will change in ways that many native English-speakers are likely to find disconcerting.
English is not monolithic. Rather, there is a family of many different Englishes, and some of this family’s members would strike most readers of this book as alien. There are more fluent speakers of English in India, where it persists as a ‘subsidiary official language’, than in Britain. In affluent Singapore, there are four official languages – English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay – and English bosses the other three, but there is also a homegrown, slangy hybrid known as Singlish. At the extreme, there is Spanglish, spoken mainly by Hispanic Americans, who also call it español pocho, ‘stunted Spanish’. We can get a sense of what it is like from utterances such as ‘No me gusta hablar con Melissa because she is too gossipy’ or ‘We would have salido si supiéramos la verdad.’14 Is this a form of English, or a form of Spanish, or both, or neither? We may think of it as a language in its own right, which permits Hispanic Americans to maintain dual identities – or which suggests the cultural limbo in which they can find themselves.
While we may disagree about what count as ‘new’ Englishes, as well as about their psychological climates, the facts of their existence and proliferation are beyond doubt, and they suggest the way the ‘Englishness’ of English is being diluted. Amid all this, native English-speakers may be at a disadvantage. Many of our elaborations and much of our cultural baggage prove confusing. Non-native speakers of English often find it easier to speak to each other than to native speakers. It seems entirely possible that in the not too distant future there will be deep rifts between forms of English that at present appear intimate.
English is creeping into vernacular Mandarin, where the Internet, which is changing the very ways in which English is taught and learnt, is known as the Interwang, and words such as cool and DVD are in common use. English has also become the language of cultivated, business-minded Europeans. As the historian Tony Judt points out, before the Second World War German was ‘in active daily use from Strasbourg to Riga’, yet this situation has since changed dramatically, and the authority of French has also declined sharply.15 A generation ago there were perhaps 60 million Continental Europeans who knew enough English to hold a conversation. Now the figure is about twice as great, and it is rising quickly. When polled, more than four-fifths of people in the Netherlands and Sweden claim to be able to speak English. The figure is around 50 per cent in Germany, Slovenia and Finland, and closer to 30 in Italy, France and the Czech Republic. 16 An interesting study has recently shown that among students in the United Arab Emirates ‘Arabic is associated with tradition, home, religion, culture, school, arts and social sciences,’ while English is ‘symbolic of modernity, work, higher education, commerce, economics and science and technology’.17
Inevitably, all such facts have implications for the future of English. Its centre of gravity has moved. Its future may well be defined in India and China, not in Britain or America – above all, by the new economies of Bangalore, Beijing and Shanghai. Outside its heartlands it is more and more a language of urban middle classes. Additionally, as technology has broken down borders, it is no longer sensible to think, as we used to, of a clearly defined association between particular languages and particular territories.
If you hear a woman speaking Italian, you can be confident that she is Italian. Sitting on the London Underground, I am able to recognize that the group of young men opposite are Poles: I hear words and phrases that are familiar to me from my travels in Poland, and I am pretty confident that only Poles speak Polish. But when we hear someone speaking English we can draw no such conclusions. It is a language nobody owns. Instead of being a badge of nationality, the ability to speak English has become a sign of aspiration – of the desire to be educated, to succeed in business or as a public official, to study science or imbibe the intoxicating creations of Hollywood. People who learn English don’t even necessarily do so in order to converse with its native users. The one medium contains many voices. Indeed, there is a long and distinguished history of people using English for anti-English ends – of writers and orators asserting in English their distance from Englishness or Britishness or Americanness. For many creative artists, imbuing English with weird flavours has been a way of reclaiming their heritage while working in a medium that has allowed them to reach a wide audience. Making English ‘different’ has proved a means of resisting norms and all that they imply.
English remains omnivorous. Today the areas in which the language is most quickly assimilating new terms are reckoned by one observer to be ‘food, martial arts, health remedies and therapies, science and plants’.18 An older perspective – succinct and accurate – is afforded by William Safire, for many years the New York Times’s arbiter of all things linguistic: ‘The new foundations of argot are the media, kids’ talk, diplomacy, and sports.’19 For all the eminence of British and American performers, music is another rich domain, as listeners seek out new sounds: do you know the difference between baile funk, which is Brazilian Portuguese, the Punjabi bhangra, and bashment, the name of which derives from Jamaican patois? Perhaps you do not think these are ‘proper’ English words, but to many they are just that – fully assimilated, fully functioning, and urgently relevant.
The new words being absorbed into the language testify, as they always have, to new experiences and priorities. Thus recent acts of terrorism in America and Europe have fomented a vocabulary about terrorism. Whereas the twentieth century was steered by achievements in physics, it seems likely that the twenty-first will be ruled by biology, and biological lexis is set to become more popular as this science proves both essential and incendiary. We can expect, over the next generation, a wave of adoptions from Arabic as the Islamic world continues to occupy a central position in global events – and as the rest of the world tries harder to get to grips with it. In the US, as I have suggested, the volume of Spanish loans stands to increase. In Britain, we can expect more gains from Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. We are seeing them already: the plaudit shabash, the revival of badmash, which seems increasingly to mean not so much a hooligan as a mischief-maker, achcha (‘all right’), and nang, another term of approval, which probably originated in Bengali, along with borrowings from South Asian English, like the verb to prepone (modelled on postpone). Acquisitions from the various Caribbean Englishes show no sign of slowing; among recent
ones are creps and bare, meaning ‘trainers’ and ‘lots of’ respectively.
Language is always changing. No living language can stand still; rather, each moves in a current of its own making. It is this vitality that ensures language is so sustaining a subject. As long as there are groups on the move, languages will change. Such groups at present include migrant labourers, students, troops and aid workers, refugees, tourists and businesspeople. Think, for a moment, of their influence: the ideas they propagate, the pleasures they share, the dramas they witness, the opportunities they create, exploit or implore.
A few visionaries have predicted a linguistic utopia in which men and women communicate by some more direct means. In the 1850s Alexander Melville Bell developed a 94-letter alphabet as part of what he hoped would be an international Visible Speech; out of his endeavours grew the more potent vision of his son Alexander Graham Bell, who imagined that his telephone might restore unity to what he saw as an increasingly divided America. In Men Like Gods (1923) H. G. Wells imagined a future where individuals could exchange thoughts by ‘direct transmission’: ‘People began to get the idea before it was clothed in words and uttered in sounds. They began to hear in their minds, as soon as the speaker had arranged his ideas and before he put them into word symbols even in his own mind. They knew what he was going to say before he said it.’ The principle is one we can just about credit, but it is part of a future most of us picture nervously, if at all. Much might be gained by direct transmission, but much, we sense, would be lost. A similar vision is presented in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), where Douglas Adams imagines the Babel fish, a creature like a leech which feeds on people’s brainwaves and excretes them into the minds of others, thus enabling speakers of different languages to communicate freely.
The Secret Life of Words Page 41
