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Language and writing in academe.

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English and Its Undeserved Good Luck

By  Geoffrey K. Pullum
December 3, 2015
englangmap
Countries where English is an official or de facto official language

In my post last week I cited a few ways in which English is unsuitable as a global language, and mentioned that its being one anyway is attributable at least in part to undeserved luck.

Of course, it wasn’t

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englangmap
Countries where English is an official or de facto official language

In my post last week I cited a few ways in which English is unsuitable as a global language, and mentioned that its being one anyway is attributable at least in part to undeserved luck.

Of course, it wasn’t all luck. British imperialism and the African slave trade laid the foundations. Even today, with the empire gone, English has about 400 million native speakers, on all seven continents, and about a billion and a half use it for some purposes. The heir to the empire, the Commonwealth of Nations, accounts for about a third of the planet’s population. Scores of countries — from small Caribbean states peopled by descendants of slaves to nations as large and populous as India and Nigeria — use English as an official language of government (see map here).

But it was pure dumb luck for English that the British empire arose so quickly and so late. Other great human settlements of new territory — like the Bantu expansion through sub-Saharan Africa or the Polynesian settlement of Oceania — extended over millennia, permitting the evolution of large families of distinct and mutually unintelligible languages like Niger-Congo or Malayo-Polynesian. The British imperial adventure spanned less than 400 years (roughly 1600 to 1950), far too short a time for its language to fragment into separate tongues.

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Moreover, the empire arose in technologically modern times. Britain’s “imperial century” (1815-1914) saw the birth of many technologies to keep the world’s English speakers connected, either physically (continental-scale railways; efficient steamships; the Suez Canal), or linguistically through a steady progression of new communication tools: the telegraph, the telephone, and (by the 1920s) radio.

Some of the biggest influences on the success of English came from literature, film, and broadcasting. English introduced the world to its most-performed dramatist (Shakespeare); the biggest-selling novelist in history (Agatha Christie, with a billion book sales); the most successful living novelist (J.K. Rowling’s books have sold more than 400 million copies and built a brand worth $15 billion); and most of the most famous fictional characters in human storytelling history (Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Dr. Who, Jason Bourne, Harry Potter, Jack Reacher, [your_favorite_here]).

Technological developments like cinematography, sound recording, radio, television, videotape, and the Internet amplified this influence. Only one place on the planet regularly allocates movie budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars: Hollywood, where every soundtrack is in English. And in popular music, all the artists who have ever attained more than 100 million certified sales, even those from nonanglophone countries, sing primarily in English.

Within higher education the dominance of English is inescapable. Hardly any non-English-medium institutions figure near the top in world university rankings. The names that predominate come from Massachusetts (Harvard, MIT), California (Stanford, Caltech), and locations in southern England (Cambridge, Oxford, London). In this recent ranking only one institution in a non-Anglophone country makes the top 10: ETHZ (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. And in what language does ETHZ teach most of its masters and doctoral courses? English.*

Let me state very clearly that I don’t intend any of this in triumphalist spirit. I don’t see English as particularly worthy, and I don’t even see it as an especially good thing that it has become the closest thing we have to global language (useful though it may be for the world to have one). In some respects it saddens me. Like most linguists, I mourn the many languages that have already become extinct as English takes over from indigenous tongues in places like Australia and the Americas. And I grieve at the thought that thousands more will soon follow them into extinction.

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I also feel that my life is poorer because I have never become truly fluent in a foreign language, and I know that being a native speaker of the most important language in the world, the one that everyone wants to learn and use, has acted as a huge disincentive to foreign-language-learning efforts in my case. (To my shame, I never even learned German.)

The confluence of undeserved smiles from fortune that helped English to its present dominant role would have clinched it for almost any language, fit for purpose or not. And the situation probably will not change for a century or so. Advocates of Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto, and other also-rans will just have to accept it: The race for global language has been run, and like it or not, we have a winner.


* For discussion of the worldwide dominance of English in much greater detail, see David Crystal’s excellent book English as a Global Language.

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