The Language Revolution

David Crystal

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745637976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

We are living through the consequences of a linguistic revolution. Dramatic linguistic change has left us at the beginning of a new era in the evolution of human language, with repercussions for many individual languages.

In this book, David Crystal, one of the world's authorities on language, brings together for the first time the three major trends which he argues have fundamentally altered the world's linguistic ecology: first, the emergence of English as the world's first truly global language; second, the crisis facing huge numbers of languages which are currently endangered or dying; and, third, the radical effect on language of the arrival of Internet technology.

Examining the interrelationships between these topics, Crystal encounters a vision of a linguistic future which is radically different from what has existed in the past, and which will make us revise many cherished concepts relating to the way we think about and work with languages. Everyone is affected by this linguistic revolution.

The Language Revolution will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication in the twenty-first century.

1

The Future of Englishes

The emergence of English as a genuine world language is the earliest of the three trends which achieved especial prominence during the 1990s. The word ‘genuine’ is crucial. The possibility that English might evolve a global role had been recognized as early as the eighteenth century. In 1780 the future US president John Adams said: ‘English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.’¹ But it took nearly 200 years before he was proved right. Only a relatively short time ago the prospect of English becoming a truly global language was uncertain. Indeed, it was only in the 1990s that the issue really came to the fore, with surveys, books and conferences trying to explain how it is that a language can become truly global, what the consequences are when it happens, and why English has become the prime candidate.² But, in order to speculate about the future of English – or, as I shall explain below, Englishes – we must first understand where we are now, and how the present situation has arisen.

The present

A characterization, to begin with; then some statistics. A language does not achieve a genuinely global status until it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. This role will be most obvious in countries where large numbers of the people speak it as a first language – in the case of English, this would mean the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, several Caribbean countries and a scattering of other territories. However, no language has ever been spoken by a mother-tongue majority in more than a dozen or so countries, so mother-tongue use by itself cannot give a language global status. To achieve such a status, a language has to be taken up by other countries around the world. They must decide to give it a special place within their communities, even though they may have few (or no) mother-tongue speakers.

There are two main ways in which this can be done. First, the language can be made the official (or semiofficial) language of a country, to be used as a medium of communication in such domains as government, the law courts, the media and the educational system. To get on in such societies, it is essential to master the official language as early in life as possible. This role is well illustrated by English, which as a result of British or American history now has some kind of special administrative status in over seventy countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singapore and Vanuatu. This is far more than the status achieved by any other language (French being closest). Second, the language can be made a priority in a country’s foreign-language teaching. It becomes the language which children are most likely to be taught when they arrive in school, and the one most available to adults who – for whatever reason – never learned it, or learned it badly, in their early educational years. Over 100 countries treat English as just such a foreign language; and in most of these it is now recognized as the chief foreign language to be taught in schools.

Because of this three-pronged development – of first-language, second-language and foreign-language speakers – it is inevitable that a world language will eventually come to be used by more people than any other language. English has now reached this stage. Those who have learned it as a first language are estimated to be around 400 million – though estimates vary greatly, because few countries keep statistics about numbers of speakers. Those who have learned it as a second language are also difficult to estimate, for now we must take into account the levels of fluency achieved. If we take a basic level of conversational ability as the criterion – enough to make yourself understood, though by no means free of errors, and with little command of specialized vocabulary – the figure is also some 400 million. The significance of these two figures should not be missed: as many people now use English as a second language as use it as a mother-tongue. And because the population growth in areas where English is a second language is about three times that in areas where it is a first language, second-language speakers of English will soon hugely exceed first-language speakers – a situation without precedent for an international language. When the number of people who speak English as a foreign language is taken into account, this contrast becomes even more dramatic. Here too estimates are uncertain – no-one knows, for example, how many people are learning English in China – but the British Council has estimated that roughly a billion people are learning English around the world at any one time. Excluding the complete beginners, it would seem reasonable to take two-thirds of these as a guess at the number of foreign learners with whom it would be possible to hold a reasonable conversation in English – say 600 million.

If, now, we add the three totals – the 400 million or so who use it as a first language, plus the 400 million or so who use it as a second language, and the 600 million or so who use it as a foreign language – we will end up with a grand total of about 1,400 million. This in round terms is a quarter of the world’s population (just over 6,000 million in 2000). No other language is used so extensively – either numerically, or with such geographical reach. Even Chinese, found in eight different spoken languages, but unified by a common writing system, is known to ‘only’ some 1,100 million, and most of these are mother-tongue speakers in a few territories. Of course, we must not overstate the situation. If one in four of the world’s population speaks English, three out of four do not. We do not have to travel far into the hinterland of a country – away from the tourist spots, the airports, the hotels, the restaurants – to encounter this reality. But even so, one in four is impressive, and unprecedented. And we must ask: Why? It is not so much the total, as the speed with which this expansion has taken place, very largely since the 1950s. What can account for it?

An obvious factor, of course, is the need for a common language, or lingua franca – a concept probably as old as language itself. But the prospect that a lingua franca might be needed for the whole world is something which has emerged strongly only in the twentieth century, and since the 1950s in particular. The chief international forum for political communication – the United Nations – dates only from 1945, and then it had only fifty-one member states. By 1960 this had risen to over eighty members. But the independence movements which began at that time led to a massive increase in the number of new nations during the next decade, and this process continued steadily into the 1990s. In 2003 there were 191 members in the UN – nearly four times as many as there were fifty years ago. The need for lingua francas is obvious, and pressure to find a single lingua franca is a consequence, the alternative being expensive and often impracticable multi-way translation facilities.

The past

But why English? There is of course nothing intrinsically wonderful about the English language that it should have spread in this way. Its pronunciation is not simpler than that of many other languages, its grammar is no simpler – what it lacks in morphology (in cases and genders) it certainly makes up for in syntax (in word-order patterns) – and its spelling certainly isn’t simpler. A language becomes a world language for one reason only – the power of the people who speak it. But power means different things: it can mean political (military) power, technological power, economic power and cultural power. Each of these influenced the growth of English at different times. Political power emerged in the form of the colonialism that brought English around the world from the sixteenth century, so that by the nineteenth century, the language was one ‘on which the sun never sets’. Technological power is associated with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when over half of the scientists and technologists who made that revolution worked through the medium of English, and people who travelled to Britain (and later America) to learn about the new technologies inevitably had to do so through English. The nineteenth century saw the growth in the economic power of the United States, rapidly overtaking Britain as its population hugely grew, and adding greatly to the number of world English speakers. The point was recognized by Bismarck as early as 1898: asked by a journalist what he considered to be the decisive factor in modern history, he is said to have replied, ‘The fact that the North Americans speak English.’³ And in the twentieth century, we indeed saw the fourth kind of power, cultural power, manifesting itself in virtually every walk of life through spheres of chiefly American influence.

As a result of these different manifestations of power, it is possible to recognize ten domains in which English has become pre-eminent.

Politics

Most pre-twentieth-century commentators would have had no difficulty giving a single, political answer to the question, ‘Why world English?’ They would simply have pointed to the growth of the British Empire. This legacy carried over into the last century. The League of Nations was the first of many modern international alliances to allocate a special place to English in its proceedings: English was one of the two official languages (the other was French), and all documents were printed in both. I have already mentioned the UN, which replaced it. But English now plays an official or working role in the proceedings of most other major international political gatherings, in all parts of the world. The extent to which English is used in this way is often not appreciated. According to recent issues of the Union of International Associations’ Yearbook, there are about 12,500 international organizations in the world. A sample showed that 85 per cent made official use of English – far more than any other language. French was the only other to show up strongly, with 49 per cent using it officially.

International politics operates at several levels and in many different ways, but the presence of English is usually not far away. A political protest may surface in the form of an official question to a government minister, a peaceful lobby outside an embassy, a street riot or a bomb. When the television cameras present the event to a world audience, it is notable how often a message in English can be seen on a banner or placard as part of the occasion. Whatever the mother-tongue of the protesters, they know that their cause will gain maximum impact if it is expressed through the medium of English. A famous instance of this occurred a few years ago in India, where a march supporting Hindi and opposing English was seen on world television: most of the banners were in Hindi, but one astute marcher carried a prominent sign which enabled the voice of his group to reach much further around the world than would otherwise have been possible. His sign read: ‘Death to English.’

Economics

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the world’s leading industrial and trading nation. Its population of 5 million in 1700 more than doubled by 1800, and during that century no country could equal its economic growth, with a gross national product rising, on average, at 2 per cent per year. By 1800, the chief growth areas, in textiles and mining, were producing a range of manufactured goods for export which led to Britain becoming known as the ‘workshop of the world’. Steam technology revolutionized printing, generating an unprecedented mass of publications in English. The early nineteenth century saw the rapid growth of the international banking system, especially in Germany, Britain and the USA, with London and New York becoming the world’s investment capitals. In 1914, Britain and the USA were together investing over $10 billion abroad – three times as much as France and almost four times as much as Germany. The resulting ‘economic imperialism’ brought a fresh dimension to the balance of linguistic power. ‘Money talks’ was the chief metaphor – and the language in which it was talking was chiefly English.

The press

The English language has been an important medium of the press for nearly 400 years. The nineteenth century was the period of greatest progress, thanks to the introduction of new printing technology and new methods of mass production and transportation. It also saw the development of a truly independent press, chiefly fostered in the USA, where there were some 400 daily newspapers by 1850, and nearly 2,000 by the turn of the century. Censorship and other restrictions continued in Continental Europe during the early decades, however, which meant that the provision of popular news in languages other than English developed much more slowly. Today, about a third of the world’s newspapers are published in countries where English has special status, and the majority of these will be in English.

The high profile given to English in the popular press was reinforced by the way techniques of news gathering developed. The mid-nineteenth century saw the growth of the major news agencies, especially following the invention of the telegraph. Paul Julius Reuter started an office in Aachen, but soon moved to London, where in 1851 he launched the agency which now bears his name. By 1870 Reuters had acquired more territorial news monopolies than any of its Continental competitors. With the emergence in 1856 of the New York Associated Press, the majority of the information being transmitted along the telegraph wires of the world was in English.

Advertising

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a combination of social and economic factors led to a dramatic increase in the use of advertisements in publications, especially in the more industrialized countries. Mass production had increased the flow of goods and was fostering competition; consumer purchasing power was growing; and new printing techniques were providing fresh display possibilities. In the USA, publishers realized that income from advertising would allow them to lower the selling price of their magazines, and thus hugely increase circulation. Two-thirds of a modern newspaper, especially in the USA, may be devoted to advertising. During the nineteenth century the advertising slogan became a feature of the medium, as did the famous ‘trade name’. ‘It pays to advertise’ itself became a US slogan in the 1920s. Many products which are now household names received a special boost in that decade, such as those produced by Ford, Coca Cola, Kodak and Kellogg. The media capitalized on the brevity with which a product could be conveyed to an audience – even if the people were passing at speed in one of the new methods of transportation. Posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs and other techniques became part of the everyday scene. As international markets grew, the ‘outdoor media’ began to travel the world, and their prominence in virtually every town and city is now one of the most noticeable global manifestations of English language use. The English advertisements are not always more numerous in countries where English has no special status, but they are usually the most apparent. American English ruled: by 1972, only three of the world’s top thirty advertising agencies were not US-owned.

Broadcasting

It took many decades of experimental research in physics, chiefly in Britain and America, before it was possible to send the first radio telecommunication signals through the-air, without wires. Marconi’s system, built in 1895, carried telegraph code signals over a distance of one mile. Six years later, his signals had crossed the Atlantic Ocean; by 1918, they had reached Australia. English was the first language to be transmitted by radio. Within twenty-five years of Marconi’s first transmission, public broadcasting became a reality. The first commercial radio station, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast its first programme in November 1920, and there were over 500 broadcasting stations licensed in the USA within two years. A similar dramatic expansion affected public television twenty years later. We can only speculate about how these media developments must have influenced the growth of world English. There are no statistics on the proportion of time devoted to English-language programmes the world over, or on how much time is spent listening to such programmes. But if we look at broadcasting aimed specifically at audiences in other countries (such as the BBC World Service, or the Voice of America), we note significant levels of provision – over a thousand hours a week by the former, twice as much by the latter. Most other countries showed sharp increases in external broadcasting during the post-war years, and several launched English-language radio programmes, such as the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. No comparative data are available about how many people listen to each of the languages provided by these services. However, if we list the languages in which these countries broadcast, it is noticeable that only one of these languages has a place on each of the lists: English.

Motion pictures

The new technologies which followed the discovery of electrical power fundamentally altered the nature of home and public entertainment, and provided fresh directions for the development of the English language. The technology of this industry has many roots in Europe and America during the nineteenth century, with England and France providing an initial impetus to the artistic and commercial development of the cinema from 1895. However, the years preceding and during the First World War stunted the growth of a European film industry, and dominance soon passed to America, which oversaw from 1915 the emergence of the feature film, the star system, the movie mogul and the grand studio, all based in Hollywood. As a result, when sound was added to the technology in the late 1920s, it was the English language which suddenly came to dominate the movie world. And despite the growth of the film industry in other countries in later decades, English-language movies still dominate the medium, with Hollywood coming to rely increasingly on a small number of annual productions aimed at huge audiences. It is unusual to find a blockbuster movie produced in a language other than English, and about 80 per cent of all feature films given a theatrical release are in English. The influence of movies on the viewing audience is uncertain, but many observers agree with the view of director Wim Wenders: ‘People increasingly believe in what they see and they buy what they believe in. … People use, drive, wear, eat and buy what they see in the movies.’⁴ If this is so, then the fact that most movies are made in the English language must surely be significant, at least in the long term.

Popular music

The cinema was one of two new entertainment technologies which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century; the other was the recording industry. Here too the English language was early in evidence. When in 1877 Thomas A. Edison devised the phonograph, the first machine that could both record and reproduce sound, the first words to be recorded were ‘What God hath wrought’, followed by a recitation of the nursery-rhyme ‘Mary had a little lamb’. Most of the subsequent technical developments took place in the USA. All the major recording companies in popular music had English-language origins, beginning with the US firm Columbia (from 1898). Radio sets around the world hourly testify to the dominance of English in the popular music scene today. Many people make their first contact with English in this way. By the turn of the century, Tin Pan Alley (the popular name for the Broadway-centred song-publishing industry) was a reality, and was soon known worldwide as the chief source of US popular music. Jazz, too, had its linguistic dimension, with the development of the blues and many other genres. And by the time modern popular music arr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A New Linguistic World
• 1 The Future of Englishes
• 2 The Future of Languages
• 3 The Role of the Internet
• 4 After the Revolution
• 5 Language Themes for the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Index