How English Became the Global Language

D. Northrup

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137303073
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Linguistics

In this book, the first written about the globalization of the English language by a professional historian, the exploration of English's global ascendancy receives its proper historical due. This brief, accessible volume breaks new ground in its organization, emphasis on causation, and conclusions.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Disciplines, Perspectives, Debates, and Overview

One cannot travel far these days without being struck by the pervasiveness of English as the world’s second language. Signage in the Seoul subway is in English as well as Korean. Along Venice’s Grand Canal the vaporetto stops are announced in Italian and English. Announcements in airports everywhere and on planes are routinely in English, and, less obvious to passengers, English is used exclusively for communication between cockpits and control towers. At international meetings English is often the default language or even the only language. In many fields of knowledge publication is primarily in English. Other languages continue to be vital locally, nationally, and regionally, but for the first time in history a single language has become the global lingua franca.

Explaining how English became the first global language is an exercise in world history, not just because it includes most parts of the world but even more because the story of the English language’s spread intersects with so many other themes of world history. Before examining the chronology and causation of English’s march to globalism, this study will highlight here in this chapter some of the larger themes and controversies linked to global English. Three topics are examined: how a historian’s treatment of English differs from other professions’ approaches, how the rise of global English has gotten mixed up with debates about the origins of the modern world, and what the story of English has in common with the spread of other languages.

How Different Disciplines Tell the History of English

Accounts of the spread of English differ widely, as do the disciplines their authors come from. On the shelves of a good library there is no shortage of volumes offering histories of English, but even a casual examination of their contents reveals great differences in their approaches and emphases. One of the most familiar approaches is the survey of English literature. Traditionally academic English departments have been less concerned with how common folk spoke than with the development of a literary canon and “good English usage.” An introductory literature survey might begin with a nod to the Old English of Beowulf and the Middle English of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales before settling into the Modern English of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and the King James Bible. The course is likely to give considerable attention to the subsequent development of poetry, plays, and the novel. Most surveys include examples of American literature, and, of late, it has become common for such courses to include at least a passing nod to literary works written in English by Asian, African, and perhaps Caribbean authors. Even if it acknowledges that literature in English has recently become global, the survey’s central emphasis would still be on the development of British and American writers. Nor does the recent tendency to include writers whose voices are more vernacular than literary substantially alter the survey’s emphasis on identifying an essentially hierarchical structure of literary achievement, though who deserves to be where in the canon is hotly debated. The many tensions in the traditional survey have led some to prefer national approaches in English and to adopt subnational selection criteria, including gender, that are more inclusive and less judgmental. Of course, such partitioning comes at the expense of a sense of the unity and continuity of a literary tradition.¹

In contrast, professional linguists are inclined to concentrate on spoken English rather than on proper usage and literature. They analyze regional and class variations within the language, recounting movements overseas and the divergence of the mother tongue into distinct “Englishes.” Other scholars of language, whose training may not be exclusively in linguistics, share this emphasis on diversity. For example, a recent collection of studies on English as an International Language (EIL) begins with the observation:

A major part of the literature concerned with English as a world language is characterized, in dealing with its subject matter, by tensions between opposites—unity vs diversity, monocentrism vs pluricentrism, native speaker vs non-native speaker, description vs perception, centre vs periphery, and so on. The present volume is no exception.²

The standard texts on the history of English tend to share this approach. For example, a recent text, English—One Tongue, Many Voices, traces the growth, spread, and variations of English, with an emphasis on native speakers in Britain, the United States, and individual British settler colonies. Part of the final chapter examines “world English” and globalization but also gives great attention to the diversity of “Englishes.”³

Studying the diversity of English has many virtues, but explaining the astonishing linguistic unity that is at the basis of the global spread of English is not well served by the approaches cited above, even in those works attempting to balance the themes of linguistic unity and diversity. Unlike Latin, which evolved into a family of distinct and mutually incomprehensible languages, English has remained a single language even as it has spread throughout the British Isles, across the Atlantic, and around the world. As chapter 2 recounts, this outcome would have surprised some language specialists in the early United States who expected the American language would diverge from British English to the point of mutual incomprehension within a century. Instead of following the pattern exemplified by Latin’s divergence into a family of Romance languages, English not only kept great uniformity as it spread but also, in recent years, the differences between British and American English seem to be diminishing. The high degree of literacy among North Americans seems to account for the changes in their spoken language from affecting their familiarity with the ancestral language. The recent convergent trend seems to be partly the result of greater travel and even more because broadcast media have made stay-at-home English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic more familiar with each other’s usages and pronunciations. As a result, the variations in the speech of native English speakers today are smaller than they were within the British Isles at the time of Chaucer or Shakespeare.

There is no denying that quite distinct class and regional variations of English exist, such as Cockney or Brooklynese, but these variations are minor in importance and are being eradicated by educators’ efforts to teach children standard English. However interesting the variations in English can be, the uniformity and mutual intelligibility of English across its major variations is the far more remarkable phenomenon. The globalization of English has reinforced the trend toward uniformity, countering natural tendencies pulling in the opposite direction. Some fields, such as communication, business, and science, have long used specialized vocabularies to sustain intelligibility in English (a topic discussed in chapter 4). Schools where English is most people’s first language attempt to teach a national version; those promoting English as a second language are likely to adopt an international standard.

Another reality is that many native speakers and some nonnative speakers of English are readily able to move between different registers of English. For example, West Indians seeking to communicate outside their own communities would not normally use the Caribbean English Creole they speak at home, since other English speakers could not easily understand them. They might do better using Caribbean English, a more standard version, but a Jamaican trying to publish a scientific paper, close a deal with a South Asian colleague, or speak at the United Nations would most likely use the standard English taught in Jamaican schools, even though only a small proportion of the population of Jamaica or other parts of the Commonwealth Caribbean use it as their normal spoken language.⁴

Global English, as the term is used in this study, therefore, is not the sum of all the different forms of English spoken on Earth. Rather it is the more standardized form of English used for global communication. Variations within global English certainly exist, but they are constrained by the need to be intelligible. A polished Jamaican or Nigerian diplomat addressing the UN General Assembly may have a distinctive accent but not one that others find difficult to understand. Written global English is even more standardized, since pronunciation doesn’t affect it, except in novels trying to capture local speech patterns. Who speaks global English? It seems reasonable to say that most native speakers do, even if some of them (as in Jamaica) might have to make a special effort to do so. American, British, Canadian, and Australian English, as used by reasonable well-educated people, are not the same, but they function efficiently as part of global English. Global English, most commonly in its American or British form, is what students throughout the world are struggling to master, even if some are more successful than others. Some champions of vernacular speech will find this an undemocratic definition of global and they will be right. The key point is not that everyone needs to speak English with an Oxford or Ivy-League accent, but that, as a practical matter a global language needs to be fairly standard to be understood. At this stage in the process, there are good historical reasons why British and American usages greatly influence the global standard for intelligibility. That may change, for global English is an ongoing and self-corrective process. Even as the diversity of accents in English grows, the quality of English spoken and written by nonnative speakers is greatly improving.

How would a historian approach the history of English? The answer must be speculative because, to a very large extent, professional historians leave language histories to other specialists, much as they leave art history to art departments, and music history to music departments. As a result, histories of English have been written by people trained in other disciplines.⁵ In venturing into a field so neglected by historians, I have naturally learned much from these other disciplines. At the same time, I have found it necessary to reconceptualize their visions, question some of their conclusions, and draw upon a lifetime of professional and personal experience. I have had to venture into many new subjects (such as the history of education, science, and business, as well as of language), while at the same time drawing upon many things I have learned as a peripatetic student of history. As an undergraduate I studied history in the United States and in France. My graduate training started in medieval European history, and then moved on to the new field of African history, which included considerable interdisciplinary training. Because of Africa’s connections to the rest of the world, in the course of my teaching and research I was drawn to expand my perspective to include African connections across the Atlantic, with Europe, and in the Indian Ocean. In time, my interest in intercontinental relations led me into another new field, world history. I have written other monographs with international scopes, coauthored a college textbook in world history, and served as president of the World History Association.

I cannot speak for all historians, but this historian brings three perspectives to this topic: global, historical, and objective.

1. This is a world history, both in the scope of its coverage and in its concern with the process of global interaction that underlies the spread of the English language. It is, therefore, part of the larger history of globalization. The study argues that English became the global language quite recently, but it also argues that that improbable outcome has a long and complex history. Globalization involves standardizing some things, whether language, Internet protocols, or credit cards, yet, contrary to what some believe, it is not primarily a process of homogenization but of interaction and exchange.⁶

2. As a professional historian, I feel it necessary to see the spread of English as part of larger historical changes, including the growth and decline of languages, empires, and other interactions. Historians need to do more than relate what happened; we need to explain why things happened. Examining cause and effect includes using comparative histories to highlight patterns and divergences, as well as paying close attention to agency. How English became the first global language is a long and complicated story in which powerful forces from above were met with even more powerful agencies from below.

3. This is a pragmatic study not an ideological one. Its concern is to explain why things happen, not to score points off them. This is neither a celebration of global English and globalization nor a manifesto against their spread. It attempts to balance accounts of English as a first language and as a second language, avoiding the tendency in some circles to give native speakers ownership of the language or to poke fun at others’ accents. In examining the role of Western imperialism and hegemonies in globalizing English, this study seeks to avoid both moralizing about these events and underestimating the abilities of non-Westerners to make informed decisions about their own best interests.

The next section of this chapter situates the history of English’s spread in the larger history of language development, expansion, and decline. In becoming the first global language, English has done something unique, but in so doing it has followed many familiar paths. The final section concerns the prominent coterie of intellectuals who denounce both globalization and global English on moral grounds. Even if they had their facts straight, such critics are tilting at windmills, since they neither understand the larger processes nor the personal choices being made by individuals around the world. More fundamentally, globalization and global English are not moral options, they are facts of contemporary life.

An Introduction to Language History

Was there originally a single language? Many ancient traditions supposed so, and for a time scholars attempted to identify it. European scholars in the 1600s suspected that Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, or Chinese might be the parent language. Although few historical linguists these days believe that a primal language can be identified, if it ever existed, the story in the Hebrew Bible, that the people of Babel were punished for trying to build a tower to heaven by God creating new languages, captures the fundamental reality that languages have tended to increase in number throughout most of human history. These language changes resulted from small populations spreading across the continents and losing touch with each other rather than because of divine intervention. Over time, due to the natural changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax that all languages undergo, ancestrally linked languages became mutually unintelligible. The process of language multiplication was sped by the fact that, until recent times, human communities were small and isolated. As recently as five hundred years ago, there were perhaps 80 million humans, 1 percent of the population today. Any distance greater than could be walked in a couple of days was a huge impediment to the regular contacts that sustaining a common tongue necessitates. The continuous spread of small communities of humans to the far corners of the planet thus produced an incomprehensible babble of speech.⁷

Even though disasters, migrations, and other circumstances caused some languages to become extinct, by a thousand years ago, the number of languages in use had grown to ten or fifteen thousand. Despite the many changes since then, the linguistic footprint of the past is still clearly evident in the geographical distribution of languages. The greatest language diversity exists in regions where communities were traditionally small and isolated. Today, half of all living languages are spoken in Africa and the Pacific islands, which together contain only about 13 percent of the world’s population. The small island communities of the Pacific region developed the largest ratio of languages to population. Within that region, the greatest concentration of languages (over 800 still surviving) is on the single island of Papua New Guinea, where traditionally most people lived in small communities isolated in deep, narrow valleys. In contrast, regions that have experienced greater political and economic integration display the opposite characteristic. Asia has over 60 percent of the world’s population but is home to only a third of the Earth’s living languages. Similarly, Europe has 12 percent of the globe’s population but just 3 percent of its living languages. In both continents political and cultural amalgamation during the past several centuries has also marginalized many languages or driven them to extinction. This result can also be seen in the Americas, where European colonization, immigration, and national policies have produced a situation where 95 percent of the inhabitants speak a European language as their first language, yet nearly a thousand pre-Columbian languages are still in use.⁸

For most of human history, the multiplication of languages was part of a much larger process of cultural fragmentation and differentiation. In some places the process was countered by the rise of territorial empires, the growth of long-distant trade, and the spread of religions. Overall, however, divergent tendencies were dominant in most parts of the world until about a thousand years ago. Then, forces promoting convergence and consolidation began to overtake the forces for divergence. The expansion of long-distance trade both over land and by...