the future of englishes - blackwellpublishing.com the future of englishes the emergence of english...

1

The Future of Englishes

The emergence of English as a genuine world language isthe earliest of the three trends which achieved especialprominence during the 1990s. The word ‘genuine’ is cru-cial. The possibility that English might evolve a global rolehad been recognized as early as the eighteenth century. In1780 the future US president John Adams said: ‘English isdestined to be in the next and succeeding centuries moregenerally the language of the world than Latin was in thelast or French is in the present age.’1 But it took nearly 200years before he was proved right. Only a relatively shorttime ago the prospect of English becoming a truly globallanguage was uncertain. Indeed, it was only in the 1990sthat the issue really came to the fore, with surveys, booksand conferences trying to explain how it is that a languagecan become truly global, what the consequences are whenit happens, and why English has become the prime candi-date.2 But, in order to speculate about the future of Eng-lish – or, as I shall explain below, Englishes – we must firstunderstand where we are now, and how the present situ-ation has arisen.

Crystal/The Language Revolution Final Proof 8.12.2003 11:48am page 6

The present

A characterization, to begin with; then some statistics. Alanguage does not achieve a genuinely global status until itdevelops a special role that is recognized in every country.This role will be most obvious in countries where largenumbers of the people speak it as a first language – in thecase of English, this would mean the USA, Canada, Brit-ain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, severalCaribbean 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, somother-tongue use by itself cannot give a language globalstatus. To achieve such a status, a language has to be takenup by other countries around the world. They must decideto give it a special place within their communities, eventhough they may have few (or no) mother-tonguespeakers.There are two main ways in which this can be done.

First, the language can be made the official (or semi-official) language of a country, to be used as a medium ofcommunication in such domains as government, the lawcourts, the media and the educational system. To get on insuch societies, it is essential to master the official languageas early in life as possible. This role is well illustrated byEnglish, which as a result of British or American historynow has some kind of special administrative status in overseventy countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singa-pore and Vanuatu. This is far more than the statusachieved by any other language (French being closest).Second, the language can be made a priority in a country’sforeign-language teaching. It becomes the language whichchildren are most likely to be taught when they arrive in


The Future of Englishes 7

school, and the one most available to adults who – forwhatever reason – never learned it, or learned it badly, intheir early educational years. Over 100 countries treatEnglish as just such a foreign language; and in most ofthese it is now recognized as the chief foreign language tobe 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 cometo be used by more people than any other language. Eng-lish has now reached this stage. Those who have learned itas a first language are estimated to be around 400 million –though estimates vary greatly, because few countries keepstatistics about numbers of speakers. Those who havelearned it as a second language are also difficult to esti-mate, for now we must take into account the levels offluency achieved. If we take a basic level of conversationalability as the criterion – enough to make yourself under-stood, though by no means free of errors, and with littlecommand of specialized vocabulary – the figure is alsosome 400 million. The significance of these two figuresshould not be missed: as many people now use English as asecond language as use it as a mother-tongue. And be-cause the population growth in areas where English is asecond language is about three times that in areas where itis a first language, second-language speakers of Englishwill soon hugely exceed first-language speakers – a situ-ation without precedent for an international language.When the number of people who speak English as a for-eign language is taken into account, this contrast becomeseven more dramatic. Here too estimates are uncertain –no-one knows, for example, how many people are learningEnglish in China – but the British Council has estimatedthat roughly a billion people are learning English aroundthe world at any one time. Excluding the complete begin-


8 The Future of Englishes

ners, it would seem reasonable to take two-thirds of theseas a guess at the number of foreign learners with whom itwould be possible to hold a reasonable conversation inEnglish – 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 orso who use it as a second language, and the 600 millionor so who use it as a foreign language – we will end up witha grand total of about 1,400 million. This in round terms isa quarter of the world’s population (just over 6,000 millionin 2000). No other language is used so extensively – eithernumerically, or with such geographical reach. Even Chi-nese, found in eight different spoken languages, but uni-fied by a common writing system, is known to ‘only’ some1,100 million, and most of these are mother-tonguespeakers in a few territories. Of course, we must not over-state the situation. If one in four of the world’s populationspeaks English, three out of four do not. We do not have totravel far into the hinterland of a country – away from thetourist spots, the airports, the hotels, the restaurants – toencounter this reality. But even so, one in four is impres-sive, and unprecedented. And we must ask: Why? It is notso much the total, as the speed with which this expansionhas taken place, very largely since the 1950s. What canaccount for it?An obvious factor, of course, is the need for a common

language, or lingua franca – a concept probably as old aslanguage itself. But the prospect that a lingua franca mightbe needed for the whole world is something which hasemerged strongly only in the twentieth century, and sincethe 1950s in particular. The chief international forum forpolitical communication – the United Nations – dates onlyfrom 1945, and then it had only fifty-one member states.By 1960 this had risen to over eighty members. But theindependence movements which began at that time led to



a massive increase in the number of new nations duringthe next decade, and this process continued steadily intothe 1990s. In 2003 there were 191 members in the UN –nearly four times as many as there were fifty years ago. Theneed for lingua francas is obvious, and pressure to find asingle lingua franca is a consequence, the alternative beingexpensive and often impracticable multi-way translationfacilities.

The past

But why English? There is of course nothing intrinsicallywonderful about the English language that it should havespread in this way. Its pronunciation is not simpler thanthat of many other languages, its grammar is no simpler –what it lacks in morphology (in cases and genders) itcertainly makes up for in syntax (in word-order patterns)– and its spelling certainly isn’t simpler. A language be-comes a world language for one reason only – the power ofthe people who speak it. But power means differentthings: it can mean political (military) power, techno-logical power, economic power and cultural power. Eachof these influenced the growth of English at differenttimes. Political power emerged in the form of the colonial-ism that brought English around the world from the six-teenth century, so that by the nineteenth century, thelanguage was one ‘on which the sun never sets’. Techno-logical power is associated with the Industrial Revolutionof the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when overhalf of the scientists and technologists who made thatrevolution worked through the medium of English, andpeople who travelled to Britain (and later America) tolearn about the new technologies inevitably had to do so



through English. The nineteenth century saw the growthin the economic power of the United States, rapidly over-taking Britain as its population hugely grew, and addinggreatly to the number of world English speakers. The pointwas recognized by Bismarck as early as 1898: asked by ajournalist what he considered to be the decisive factor inmodern history, he is said to have replied, ‘The fact thatthe North Americans speak English.’3 And in the twenti-eth century, we indeed saw the fourth kind of power,cultural power, manifesting itself in virtually every walkof 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 hasbecome pre-eminent.

Politics

Most pre-twentieth-century commentators would havehad no difficulty giving a single, political answer to thequestion, ‘Why world English?’ They would simply havepointed to the growth of the British Empire. This legacycarried over into the last century. The League of Nationswas the first of many modern international alliances toallocate a special place to English in its proceedings: Eng-lish was one of the two official languages (the other wasFrench), and all documents were printed in both. I havealready mentioned the UN, which replaced it. But Englishnow plays an official or working role in the proceedings ofmost other major international political gatherings, in allparts of the world. The extent to which English is used inthis way is often not appreciated. According to recentissues of the Union of International Associations’ Yearbook,there are about 12,500 international organizations in theworld. A sample showed that 85 per cent made official useof English – far more than any other language. French was



the only other to show up strongly, with 49 per cent usingit officially.

International politics operates at several levels and inmany different ways, but the presence of English is usuallynot far away. A political protest may surface in the form ofan official question to a government minister, a peacefullobby outside an embassy, a street riot or a bomb. Whenthe television cameras present the event to a world audi-ence, it is notable how often a message in English can beseen on a banner or placard as part of the occasion. What-ever the mother-tongue of the protesters, they know thattheir cause will gain maximum impact if it is expressedthrough the medium of English. A famous instance of thisoccurred a few years ago in India, where a march support-ing Hindi and opposing English was seen on world televi-sion: most of the banners were in Hindi, but one astutemarcher carried a prominent sign which enabled the voiceof his group to reach much further around the world thanwould otherwise have been possible. His sign read: ‘Deathto English.’

Economics

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain hadbecome the world’s leading industrial and trading nation.Its population of 5 million in 1700 more than doubled by1800, and during that century no country could equal itseconomic growth, with a gross national product rising, onaverage, at 2 per cent per year. By 1800, the chief growthareas, in textiles and mining, were producing a range ofmanufactured goods for export which led to Britain be-coming known as the ‘workshop of the world’. Steamtechnology revolutionized printing, generating an unpre-cedented mass of publications in English. The early nine-teenth century saw the rapid growth of the international



banking system, especially in Germany, Britain and theUSA, with London and New York becoming the world’sinvestment capitals. In 1914, Britain and the USA weretogether investing over $10 billion abroad – three times asmuch as France and almost four times as much as Ger-many. The resulting ‘economic imperialism’ brought afresh dimension to the balance of linguistic power.‘Money talks’ was the chief metaphor – and the languagein which it was talking was chiefly English.

The press

The English language has been an important medium ofthe press for nearly 400 years. The nineteenth century wasthe period of greatest progress, thanks to the introductionof new printing technology and new methods of massproduction and transportation. It also saw the develop-ment of a truly independent press, chiefly fostered in theUSA, where there were some 400 daily newspapers by1850, and nearly 2,000 by the turn of the century. Cen-sorship and other restrictions continued in ContinentalEurope during the early decades, however, which meantthat the provision of popular news in languages other thanEnglish developed much more slowly. Today, about athird of the world’s newspapers are published in countrieswhere English has special status, and the majority of thesewill be in English.The high profile given to English in the popular press

was reinforced by the way techniques of news gatheringdeveloped. The mid-nineteenth century saw the growth ofthe major news agencies, especially following the inventionof the telegraph. Paul Julius Reuter started an office inAachen, but soon moved to London, where in 1851 helaunched the agency which now bears his name. By 1870Reuters had acquired more territorial news monopolies



than any of its Continental competitors. With the emer-gence in 1856 of the New York Associated Press, themajority of the information being transmitted along thetelegraph wires of the world was in English.

Advertising

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a combinationof social and economic factors led to a dramatic increase inthe use of advertisements in publications, especially in themore industrialized countries. Mass production had in-creased the flow of goods and was fostering competition;consumer purchasing power was growing; and newprinting techniques were providing fresh display possibil-ities. In the USA, publishers realized that income fromadvertising would allow them to lower the selling price oftheir magazines, and thus hugely increase circulation.Two-thirds of a modern newspaper, especially in theUSA, may be devoted to advertising. During the nine-teenth century the advertising slogan became a feature ofthe medium, as did the famous ‘trade name’. ‘It pays toadvertise’ itself became a US slogan in the 1920s. Manyproducts which are now household names received aspecial boost in that decade, such as those produced byFord, Coca Cola, Kodak and Kellogg. The media capital-ized on the brevity with which a product could beconveyed to an audience – even if the people were passingat speed in one of the new methods of transportation.Posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs and othertechniques became part of the everyday scene. As inter-national markets grew, the ‘outdoor media’ began to travelthe world, and their prominence in virtually every townand city is now one of the most noticeable global manifest-ations of English language use. The English advertise-ments are not always more numerous in countries where



English has no special status, but they are usually the mostapparent. American English ruled: by 1972, only three ofthe 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 tosend the first radio telecommunication signals through theair, without wires. Marconi’s system, built in 1895, carriedtelegraph code signals over a distance of one mile. Sixyears later, his signals had crossed the Atlantic Ocean; by1918, they had reached Australia. English was the firstlanguage to be transmitted by radio. Within twenty-fiveyears of Marconi’s first transmission, public broadcastingbecame a reality. The first commercial radio station, inPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast its first programme inNovember 1920, and there were over 500 broadcastingstations licensed in the USA within two years. A similardramatic expansion affected public television twenty yearslater. We can only speculate about how these media devel-opments must have influenced the growth of world Eng-lish. There are no statistics on the proportion of timedevoted to English-language programmes the world over,or on how much time is spent listening to such pro-grammes. But if we look at broadcasting aimed specificallyat audiences in other countries (such as the BBC WorldService, or the Voice of America), we note significantlevels of provision – over a thousand hours a week by theformer, twice as much by the latter. Most other countriesshowed sharp increases in external broadcasting duringthe post-war years, and several launched English-languageradio programmes, such as the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan,Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. No



comparative data are available about how many peoplelisten to each of the languages provided by these services.However, if we list the languages in which these countriesbroadcast, it is noticeable that only one of these languageshas a place on each of the lists: English.

Motion pictures

The new technologies which followed the discovery ofelectrical power fundamentally altered the nature ofhome and public entertainment, and provided fresh direc-tions for the development of the English language.The technology of this industry has many roots in Europeand America during the nineteenth century, with Englandand France providing an initial impetus to the artistic andcommercial development of the cinema from 1895. How-ever, the years preceding and during the First World Warstunted the growth of a European film industry, and dom-inance soon passed to America, which oversaw from 1915the emergence of the feature film, the star system, themovie mogul and the grand studio, all based in Holly-wood. As a result, when sound was added to the technol-ogy in the late 1920s, it was the English language whichsuddenly came to dominate the movie world. And despitethe growth of the film industry in other countries in laterdecades, English-language movies still dominate themedium, with Hollywood coming to rely increasingly ona small number of annual productions aimed at hugeaudiences. It is unusual to find a blockbuster movie pro-duced in a language other than English, and about 80 percent of all feature films given a theatrical release are inEnglish. The influence of movies on the viewing audienceis uncertain, but many observers agree with the view ofdirector Wim Wenders: ‘People increasingly believe inwhat 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 theEnglish language must surely be significant, at least in thelong term.

Popular music

The cinema was one of two new entertainment technolo-gies which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century;the other was the recording industry. Here too the Englishlanguage was early in evidence. When in 1877 Thomas A.Edison devised the phonograph, the first machine thatcould both record and reproduce sound, the first wordsto be recorded were ‘What God hath wrought’, followedby a recitation of the nursery-rhyme ‘Mary had alittle lamb’. Most of the subsequent technical develop-ments took place in the USA. All the major recordingcompanies in popular music had English-language origins,beginning with the US firm Columbia (from 1898). Radiosets around the world hourly testify to the dominance ofEnglish in the popular music scene today. Many peoplemake their first contact with English in this way. Bythe turn of the century, Tin Pan Alley (the popular namefor the Broadway-centred song-publishing industry) was areality, and was soon known worldwide as the chief sourceof US popular music. Jazz, too, had its linguistic dimen-sion, with the development of the blues and many othergenres. And by the time modern popular music arrived, itwas almost entirely an English scene. The pop stars oftwo chief English-speaking nations were soon to dominatethe recording world: Bill Haley and the Comets andElvis Presley in the USA; the Beatles and the RollingStones in the UK. Mass audiences for pop singers becamea routine feature of the world scene from the1960s. No other single source has spread the English



language around the youth of the world so rapidly and sopervasively.

International travel and safety

The reasons for travelling abroad are many and various.Each journey has immediate linguistic consequences – alanguage has to be interpreted, learned, imposed – andover time a travelling trend can develop into a major influ-ence. If there is a contemporary movement towards worldEnglish use, therefore, we would expect it to be particu-larly noticeable in this domain; and so it is. For thosewhose international travel brings them into a world ofpackage holidays, business meetings, academic confer-ences, international conventions, community rallies,sporting occasions, military occupations and other ‘offi-cial’ gatherings, the domains of transportation and accom-modation are chiefly mediated through the use of Englishas an auxiliary language. Safety instructions on inter-national flights and sailings, information about emergencyprocedures in hotels, and directions to major locations arenow routinely in English alongside local languages. Mostnotices which tell us to fasten our seatbelts, find the life-boat stations or check the location of the emergency stairsgive us an option in English.

A special aspect of safety is the way that the language hascome to be used as a means of controlling internationaltransport operations, especially on water and in the air.English has emerged as the international language of thesea, in the form of Essential English for InternationalMaritime Use – often referred to as ‘Seaspeak’. Progresshas also been made in recent years in devising systems ofunambiguous communication between organizationswhich are involved in handling emergencies on the ground– notably, the fire service, the ambulance service and the



police. There is now ‘Emergencyspeak’, trying to copewith problems of ambiguity at the two ends of the ChannelTunnel. And of course there is ‘Airspeak’, the language ofinternational aircraft control. This did not emerge untilafter the Second World War, when the International CivilAviation Organization was created. Only then was itagreed that English should be the international languageof aviation when pilots and controllers speak differentlanguages. Over 180 nations have since adopted its recom-mendations about English terminology – though it shouldbe noted that there is nothing mandatory about them.

Education

English is the medium of a great deal of the world’s know-ledge, especially in such areas as science and technology.And access to knowledge is the business of education.When we investigate why so many nations have in recentyears made English an official language or chosen it astheir chief foreign language in schools, one of the mostimportant reasons is always educational – in the broadestsense. Sridath Ramphal, writing in 1996, provides a rele-vant illustration:

Shortly after I became Secretary-General of the Common-wealth in 1975, I met Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandara-naike in Colombo and we talked of ways in which theCommonwealth Secretariat could help Sri Lanka. Herresponse was immediate and specific: ‘Send us people totrain our teachers to teach English as a foreign language.’My amazement must have showed, for the Prime Ministerwent on to explain that the policies her husband had put inplace twenty years earlier to promote Sinhalese as theofficial language had succeeded so well that in the processSri Lanka – so long the pearl of the English-speaking worldin Asia – had in fact lost English, even as a second language



save for the most educated Sri Lankans. Her concern wasfor development. Farmers in the field, she told me, couldnot read the instructions on bags of imported fertiliser –and manufacturers in the global market were not likely toprint them in Sinhalese. Sri Lanka was losing its access tothe world language of English.5

Since the 1960s, English has become the normal mediumof instruction in higher education for many countries –including several where the language has no official status.No African country uses its indigenous language in highereducation, English being used in the majority of cases. TheEnglish language teaching (ELT) business has becomeone of the major growth industries around the world inthe past thirty years.

Communications

If a language is a truly international medium, it is going tobe most apparent in those services which deal directly withthe task of communication – the postal and telephonesystems and the electronic networks. Information aboutthe use of English in these domains is not easy to come by,however. It is thought that three-quarters of the world’smail is in English. But as no-one monitors the language inwhich we write our letters, such statistics are highly specu-lative. Only on the Internet, where messages and data canbe left for indefinite periods of time, is it possible todevelop an idea of how much of the world’s everydaycommunications (at least, between computer-owners) isactually in English. This domain will receive separate dis-cussion in chapter 3, but the relevant point can be antici-pated here. The Internet began life as an English-languagemedium, and English has retained its dominance. Itstarted out as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Pro-



jects Agency network, in the late 1960s, conceived as adecentralized national network, its aim being to link im-portant American academic and government institutionsin a way which would survive local damage in the event ofa major war. Its language was, accordingly, English; andwhen people in other countries began to form links withthis network, it proved essential for them to use English.The dominance of this language was then reinforced whenthe service was opened up in the 1980s to private andcommercial organizations, most of which were (for thereasons already given) already communicating chiefly inEnglish. There was also a technical reason underpinningthe position of the language at this time. The first proto-cols devised to carry data on the Net were developed forthe English alphabet, and even today no browser is able tohandle all aspects of multilingual data presentation. How-ever, the number of non-English-language users on theInternet is growing all the time, and now exceeds thenumber of new English-speaking users. The consequencesof this for minority languages are explored in chapter 3.

The future

When a language becomes a world language, whathappens to it, and what happens to other languages as aconsequence? There are no precedents, because no lan-guage has ever been spoken by so many people in so manycountries before. But several major trends can already beseen, and each of them is going to play a significant rolein forming the new linguistic climate of the twenty-firstcentury.However, before considering the case of English in

greater detail, we should ask: is English going to continue



in its present position, or is its global status likely to bechallenged by other languages? History teaches us onething: there are never grounds for complacency in con-sidering a language’s position. A thousand years ago, theposition of Latin would have seemed unassailable. Whoknows what the position of any language will be in athousand years’ time? Language status, as we have seen,is intimately bound up with political, military, economicand cultural power, and as these variables alter, so lan-guages rise and fall. Futurologists do not find it difficult toenvisage scenarios in which, for example, Arabic, Chineseor Spanish becomes the next world language. Spanish is infact the world’s fastest-growing mother-tongue at present.But for the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that anotherlanguage is going to replace English in its global role. Thefactors which brought English to its present position arestill very largely in place. English has achieved a presenceand momentum which will be extremely difficult to dis-lodge. People continue to learn English in increasingnumbers all over the world. Whatever the attitude towardsthe cultures who use it, the value of the language as afunctional tool is widely accepted. Even those who aremost opposed to it find themselves having to use it, ifonly to achieve a universal audience for their opposition.There is no real sign of this position weakening within thefirst decade of the new millennium.

English may be relatively stable in its world status, but itis certainly not stable in its linguistic character. Indeed, thelanguage is currently changing more rapidly than at anytime since the Renaissance. Several factors are involved,but the chief one is undoubtedly the change in the lan-guage’s centre of gravity. It is a point often forgotten,especially by native speakers, that a language which hascome to be spoken by so many people has ceased to beowned by any of its constituent communities – not the



British, with whom the language began 1,500 years ago,nor the Americans, who now comprise its largest mother-tongue community. The total number of mother-tonguespeakers in the world, some 400 million, as seen above, isactually falling, as a proportion of world English users,because of the differential in population growth betweenfirst-language countries and those where English is asecond or foreign language. Three out of four Englishspeakers are now non-native.All these users have a share in the future of English.

Language is an immensely democratizing institution. Tohave learned a language is immediately to have rights in it.You may add to it, modify it, play with it, create in it,ignore bits of it, as you will. And it is just as likely thatthe future course of English is going to be influenced bythose who speak it as a second or foreign language asby those who speak it as a mother-tongue. Fashionscount, in language, as anywhere else; and fashions are afunction of numbers. It is perfectly possible for a linguisticfashion to be started by a group of second-language orforeign-language learners, or by those who speak anonstandard variety, which then catches on amongmother-tongue speakers. Rapping is a recent case inpoint. And as numbers grow, and second/foreign-languagespeakers gain in national and international prestige, usageswhich were previously criticized as ‘foreign’ – such as threeperson, he be running, many informations – can become partof the standard educated speech of a locality, and eventu-ally appear in writing. An example is Welcome in Egypt,which has come to be widely used in that country, andnow appears in English textbooks there. The biggest thingthat native speakers of English are going to have to getused to, in the twenty-first century, is that they are nolonger in charge of language trends. The English languageas spoken in Britain is now a minority dialect of World



English – amounting to some 4 per cent of the globalEnglish-speaking population. Even speakers of English inthe USA only amount to some 15 per cent of the worldtotal. In India, there are probably now more speakersof English than in the whole of Britain and the USAcombined.

What happens when large numbers of people adoptEnglish in a country? They develop an English of theirown. There are now many new varieties of spoken Englishdeveloping around the world, in such countries as India,Singapore and Ghana. They have been called ‘New Eng-lishes’. Why have they arisen? Because of the need toexpress national identity. Imagine the situation in one ofthe newly independent nations of the 1950s and 1960s.With newfound independence comes an urge to manifestidentity in the eyes of the world. And one of the mostimportant ways of manifesting this identity is through themedium of the language. So, which language will you use?Many of the new countries, such as Ghana and Nigeria,found that they had no alternative but to continue usingEnglish – the alternative was to make an impossible choicebetween the many competing local ethnic languages – over400, in the case of Nigeria. However, we can also appreci-ate the widely held feeling that to continue with Englishwould be an unacceptable link with the colonial past. Sohow could this dilemma be resolved? The solution was fora country to continue with English, but to shape the lan-guage to meet its own ends – in particular, by adding localvocabulary, focusing on local cultural variations, anddevelopingnewformsofpronunciation. It is a largelyuncon-sciousprocess, of course, but promoted by local initiatives,such as regional dictionary surveys. It is not difficult toquickly accumulate several thousand local words, in coun-tries which have a wide range of local fauna and flora,diverse ethnic customs and regular daily contacts with



different languages. The emerging literatures of the Com-monwealth countries – the novels from West Africa, Indiaor South-east Asia, the poetry from the countries of theCaribbean – illustrate how quickly new identities canemerge. The term ‘New Englishes’ reflects these identities.When a language spreads, it changes. The simple fact

that parts of the world differ from each other so muchphysically and culturally means that speakers have innu-merable opportunities to adapt the language to meet theircommunicative needs and to achieve fresh identities. Thebulk of the adaptation will be in vocabulary – not just newwords, but new meanings of words, and new idiomaticphrases – as this is the area whichmost closely reflects livingconditions and ways of thinking. There is a country’s bio-geographical uniqueness, which will generate potentiallylarge numbers of words for animals, fish, birds, plants,rocks, and so on – and all the issues to do with land man-agement and interpretation. There will be words for food-stuffs, drinks, medicines, drugs and the practices associatedwith eating, health-care, disease and death. The country’smythology and religion, and practices in astronomy andastrology, will bring forth new names for personalities,beliefs and rituals. Oral and perhaps also written literaturewill give rise to distinctive names in sagas, poems, oratoryand folktales. There will be a body of local laws andcustoms, with their own terminology. The culture willhave its own technology which will have its technicalterms – such as for vehicles, house-building, weapons,clothing, ornaments and musical instruments. The worldof leisure and the arts will have a linguistic dimension –names of dances, musical styles, games, sports – as willdistinctiveness in body appearance – such as hair styles,tattoos, decoration. Virtually any aspect of social structurecan generate complex naming systems – local government,family relationships, clubs and societies, and so on.



So, when a community adopts a new language, andstarts to use it in relation to all areas of life, there is inevit-ably going to be a great deal of lexical adaptation. It onlytakes a year or so for the process to begin. The firstpermanent English settlement in North America was inJamestown, Virginia, in 1607; and loan words from NativeAmerican languages were introduced into contemporarywriting virtually immediately. Captain John Smith, writingin 1608, describes a racoon; totem is found in 1609; caribouand opossum are mentioned in 1610. Here is a recentexample from an edition of the South African SundayTimes in the 1990s: ‘Diplomatic indabas only rarely pro-duce neatly wrapped solutions to problems.’ Indaba, fromNguni, was originally a tribal conference, but has nowbeen extended to mean any conference between politicalgroups. These are examples of words being borrowed fromlocal indigenous languages. In addition, some words willchange their meaning, as they come to be applied to newsettings and take on different senses. This has oftenhappened in the language’s history: for example, in theAnglo-Saxon period Christian missionaries took overpagan words (such as heaven, hell, God and Easter) andgave them new meanings. Today we see it in the way abiological species in the new country similar in appearanceto one found in the old will often keep the old name, eventhough it is not the same entity – pheasant in South Africais usually found for certain species of francolin. Every areaof society is affected. Robot is the South African term fortraffic-light.

How many words will grow in these ways? It does nottake long before word-lists and dictionaries contain severalthousand entries. There were over 3,000 items recorded inthe first edition of A Dictionary of South African English(1978). The Concise Australian National Dictionary (1989)has 10,000 items in it. There are over 15,000 entries in the



Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967).6 English speakershave always adopted an inclusive attitude towards loanwords. English is a vacuum-cleaner of a language, readilysucking in words from whichever other languages it meets– well over 350 of them in the history of British English.Because of this, although English is historically a Ger-manic language, the bulk of its vocabulary is not – it islargely Classical and Romance in origin, with Greek, Latinand French loans especially important. And its diversifiedlexical character is especially increasing in parts of theworld where there are many contact languages. In Nigeria,where over 400 source languages are available, the even-tual lexical distinctiveness of Nigerian English is bound tobe considerable.The totals are small compared with the size of English

vocabulary as a whole, which is well over a million words;but the effect of even fairly small numbers of localizedwords can be great. The new words are likely to be fre-quently used within the local community, precisely becausethey relate to distinctive notions there. Also, these wordstend not to occur in isolation: if a conversation is about, say,local politics, then several political terms are likely to cometogether, making it impenetrable to outsiders. ‘Blairite MPin New Labour Sleaze Trap, say Tories’ might be a Britishnewspaper example. Six words with British political mean-ings or overtones are found in quick succession, and thesentence will not be immediately interpretable to anyoneunfamiliar with the world of British political discourse.Exactly the same kind of piling up of alien expressions canbe found in areaswhereNewEnglishes are emerging. In thisexample from the South African Sunday Times, all the localwords are Afrikaans in origin: ‘It is interesting to recall thatsome verkrampteNationalists, who pose now as super Afri-kaners, were once bittereinder bloedsappe’ [verkramp, big-oted; bittereinder, die-hard; bloedsappe, staunch member of



the United Party, formerly the South African Party, orSAP].

It is easy to see how things might develop further. Itwasn’t just an Afrikaans noun which was distinctive in thislast example; it was a noun phrase – a combination ofadjective and noun. So, if a phrase, why not somethingbigger than a phrase? Add a verb on, perhaps, or make it awhole clause – in much the same way as in English wemight borrow a whole sentence from French and say Je nesais quoi or c’est la vie. Parts of an originally English sen-tence can easily come to contain large chunks of borrowedlanguage. And in many parts of the world, where English isa second or foreign language, it is precisely this processwhich has been used with unprecedented frequency.People using English, even at a fairly advanced level,become stuck for a word, phrase or sentence; or, althoughusing English as a lingua franca, find that a particularutterance in their mother-tongue suits better what theywant to say. If they are talking to someone from theirown language background, there is no problem in switch-ing into the other language to solve the communicationproblem. A dialogue may move out of English, then backin again, several times in quick succession. The samesituation obtains the other way round, too: people beginin their mother-tongue, then switch into English whenthey find their first language does not allow them to saywhat they want. This often happens when they get onto asubject-matter which they have learned only in English,such as computing – or even having a baby. I know aFrench-speaking mother who had a baby while living inBritain for a year. Back in France, she found herselfswitching into English every time she wanted to talkabout the experience – much to the confusion of herFrench friends, whose baby-bearing experience had beenresolutely francophone.



When people rely simultaneously on two or more lan-guages to communicate with each other, the phenomenonis called code-switching. We can hear it happening now allover the world, between all sorts of languages, and it is onthe increase. Because English is so widespread, it is espe-cially noticeable there, in writing as well as in speech. InThe English Languages, TomMcArthur gives an example ofa bilingual leaflet issued by the HongkongBank in 1994 forFilipino workers. The Tagalog section contains a greatdeal of English mixed in. For example:

Mg-deposito ng pera mula sa ibang HongkongBank ac-count, at any Hongkongbank ATM, using your Cash Card.Mag-transfer ng regular amountbawa’t buwan (byStandingInstruction) galang sa inyong Current o Savings Account,whether the account is with HongkongBank or not.7

This kind of language is often described using a compoundname – in this case, Taglish (for Tagalog-English). We alsohave Franglais, Tex-Mex (for the Mexican Spanish used inTexas), Japlish, Spanglish, Chinglish, Denglish (DeutschEnglish), Wenglish (Welsh English), and many more.Traditionally, these names were used as scornful appella-tions. People would sneer at Tex-Mex, and say it wasneither one language nor the other. It was ‘gutter-speak’,by people who had not learned to talk properly, or ‘lazy-speak’, by people who were letting themselves be too muchinfluenced by English. But in the new century, we aregoing to have to rethink. We can hardly call a languagelike Taglish gutter-speak when it is being used in writingby a major banking corporation! Linguists have spent a lotof time analysing these ‘mixed’ languages, and found thatthey are full of complexity and subtlety of expression – aswe would expect if people have the resources of two lan-guages to draw upon.



Mixed languages are on the increase as we travel theEnglish-speaking world; and it is important to realize theextent to which this is happening. They will probably bethe main linguistic trend of the twenty-first century. Code-switching is already a normal feature of communication inthe speech of millions who have learned English as asecond or foreign language. I live in a Welsh-speakingpart of Wales, and I hear code-switching between Welshand English around me all the time. Indeed, globally, thereare probably now more people who use English with somedegree of code-switching than people who do not. And ifthese speakers are in the majority, or at least representedby significant numbers – as in the case of India – ourtraditional view of the language has to change. It is quitewrong to think of the ‘future of World English’ as if it issimply going to be a more widely used version of BritishEnglish, or of American English. These varieties will stay,of course, but they will be supplemented by other varietieswhich, although perhaps originating in Britain or the USA,will display increasing differences from them.

The evidence of linguistic diversification – new Eng-lishes, with increased code-mixing – has been around along time, but the extent of its presence has only recentlycome to be appreciated. It is not something we usually seein print – except insofar as a novelist captures it in aconversation, or it turns up in informal writing in a news-paper. But we readily encounter it when we travel to thecountries concerned – usually in the form of a breakdownof comprehension. We speak to somebody in English, andthey reply – but we cannot understand what they aresaying, because their English is so different. And we ain’tseen nothin’ yet. All over the world, children are beingborn to parents with different first-language backgroundswho speak English as a lingua franca. Their English oftencontains a great deal of code-mixing or nonstandard usage.



If these parents choose to speak to their children in thisEnglish, as often happens, we now have the prospect ofcode-mixed and nonstandard English being learned as amother-tongue – and by millions of the world’s futurecitizens. The distinction between English as a first lan-guage and English as a foreign language ceases to besignificant in such cases.With these trends in mind, can we avoid the conclusion

that, left to itself, English is going to fragment into mutu-ally unintelligible varieties, just as Vulgar Latin did a mil-lennium ago? The forces of the past fifty years, which haveled to so many newly independent nation-states, certainlysuggest this outcome. English has come to be used, inseveral of these countries, as the expression of a socio-political identity, and received a new character as a conse-quence, conventionally given such names as NigerianEnglish and Singaporean English. And if significantchange can be noticed within a relatively short period oftime – a few decades – must not these varieties becomeeven more differentiated over the next century, so that weend up with an English ‘family of languages’? An answersuggests itself if we examine the apparent parallel withLatin.

Latin revisited?

The parallels between the situations of English and Latinare certainly striking. During the first millennium,Latin became the universal language of educated Euro-pean society – though we need to say Latins, for in Europeat that time it existed in several varieties. There was theprestige variety – the classical literary Latin writtenthroughout the Roman Empire (chiefly in the West).Then there were the everyday spoken varieties of the lan-guage, referred to now as Vulgar Latin. Even as early as the



first century BC, we find Cicero commenting on the provin-cial pronunciation heard in the Latin spoken in CisalpineGaul. By the eighth century, there is evidence of consider-able shift, so much so that the way of referring to thelanguage was changing: the ‘lingua latina’ was beingdescribed as ‘lingua romana’ or ‘rustica romana lingua’.Certainly, by c.900,whenwe find the first texts representingthe spoken language ofGaul, we can no longer talk of Latin,but must speak of Old French; and the other Romancelanguages begin to emerge at around the same time.

The situation facing Latin then was very similar to thesituation facing English now. On the one hand, there waswritten Classical Latin, apparently alive and well andbeing taught in a standard way throughout the Westerncivilized world. On the other hand, there was clear evi-dence of emerging mutual unintelligibility among commu-nities, with those who had once spoken Vulgar Latin inPortugal, Spain, France, Italy, Romania and elsewhereincreasingly diverging from each other. There may evenhave been speculation about the future of Latin, giventhese already existing trends. Would the language frag-ment totally? Would Latin remain as a world lingua franca?Would there be anyone still learning the standard form in athousand years? A millennium on, we know whathappened. The standard forms of these languages arenow indeed mutually unintelligible. Standard Latin isstill used, but only by small numbers of clerics andscholars, chiefly within the Roman Catholic Church. Abody of stalwart classicists, in universities and schools,try to maintain a tradition of Latin teaching, but do notfind it easy. Latin, for most intents and purposes, is a deadlanguage now. But its daughter-languages are very muchalive.

Could this scenario happen to English? Certainly, thereare some noteworthy parallels. English spread around the



modern world in a time-frame not too dissimilar from thatwhich must have affected Latin. Rome became a Republicin 509 BC, and the First Punic War (264–241 BC) resultedin the acquisition of its first overseas province, Sicily.Some two centuries later, Augustus established the Empire(31 BC), which lasted in the West until AD 476. So, basic-ally, we are talking about a period of almost 1,000 years,with something like 750 years as the period of real expan-sion. Now consider English from the time of Bishop Aelf-ric – the first to put an English conversation down onpaper (in his Colloquy, written around 1000). Anotherperiod of almost 1,000 years; and signs of language changevery early on. During the eleventh century, a new variety ofEnglish began to develop in Scotland, much influenced bythe refugees who had fled north in the years following theNorman Conquest; this Middle Scots was the basis of thevery distinctive Scots English we know today. But the firstoverseas development was not until the end of the twelfthcentury, when English rule was imposed on Ireland byHenry II in 1171; the influence of Irish Gaelic on Englishmust have been heard not long after. And from then untilthe twentieth century, covering the major period of Eng-lish expansion around the world, we have – just like Latin –750 years.We can push the parallel a little further. What we con-

sider to be the ‘classics’ of Latin literature – the ‘GoldenAge’ of Augustus, with Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Livy et al. –emerged during the first century BC, some 400 years afterthe beginning of the Republic and some 200 years after theFirst Punic War. The first ‘classic’ of English literature,Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, was written some 400 yearsafter our Y1K starting-point, and some 200 years afterthe Irish expedition. Let us move on another 200 years.This was a very significant century for both languages.During the third century AD the barbarian invasions



began throughout Europe, becoming incessant in the nexthundred years, and eventually leading to the decline of theWestern Empire. Classical Latin became increasingly anelite language, and as lines of communication with Romebecame more tenuous, so speech differences on theground increased. Latin began its period of decline, as aspoken lingua franca. Another 200 years in England alsobrought a turning-point. We are now at the end of thesixteenth century. This was a time when the merits ofEnglish vs other languages, especially Latin, were beinghotly debated, and there was much talk of decline. RichardMulcaster, the headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School,was one of the strongest supporters of English, arguing forits strengths as a medium of educated expression, along-side Latin. But even he concluded that English could notcompete with Latin as an international language. Writingin 1582, he says: ‘Our English tongue is of small reach – itstretcheth no further than this island of ours – nay, notthere over all.’ And he reflects: ‘Our state is no Empire tohope to enlarge it by commanding over countries.’8 Therewas no real literature to be proud of, either, not since thetime of ‘Father Chaucer’, as people would say, 200 yearsbefore – and Chaucer’s English, because of the majorpronunciation changes which had taken place in theearly fifteenth century, had become virtually a differentlanguage.

1582. What a time to be saying such a thing. In thecourse of the next generation, things changed totally, bothin politics and in literature. Within two years, WalterRaleigh’s first expedition to America was to set sail, andalthough this was a failure, the first permanent Englishsettlement was in place, in Jamestown, Virginia, a gener-ation later. As we have seen, loan words from Indianlanguages into the English spoken there – which as a resultstarted to turn into American English – become a signifi-



cant feature of contemporary writing virtually immedi-ately, and reference is soon being made to a distinctiveAmerican accent. And as for literature, 1582 was alsosignificant, as it was the year in which a young man inStratford, Warwickshire, fell in love – not with GwynethPaltrow (that came later), but with Anne Hathaway (hismarriage licence is dated 27 November of that year). Soonafter – we do not know how or when – he moved toLondon, and not long after that was being talked aboutas a writer. Within a generation, English literature wouldnever be the same again.Six hundred years into the spread of both Latin and

English, there was a turning-point. In the case of Latin,it was the onset of fragmentation. In the case of English, itwas the onset of expansion. Some 4–5 million peoplespoke English late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Thishad grown to a quarter of the world’s population, some1.5 billion, late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Thecontrast between Latin and English at this point seemstotal. But if history is any guide, it would appear that thisperiod of expansion in English contained the seeds of itsfragmentation. We do not talk about the ‘Latin languages’,but the ‘Romance languages’. And, as we have seen, thereis a book called The English Languages. History does seemto be repeating itself.

Centrifugal vs centripetal forces

However, history may no longer be a guide to what ishappening to English today. The parallel with Latin is notperfect. One of the consequences of globalization is thatthrough the media we have immediate access to otherlanguages, and to varieties of English other than ourown, in ways that have come to be available but recently;and this is altering the manner in which people are aware



of the language. A British Council colleague told me re-cently that in India he had seen a group of people in anout-of-the-way village clustering around a television set,where they were hearing BBC News beamed down viasatellite. None of these people, he felt, would have heardany kind of English before – at least, not in any regular orfocused way – other than the Indian variety of English usedby their school-teacher. But with a whole range of freshauditory models becoming routinely available, it is easy tosee how the type of English spoken in India could move infresh directions. And satellite communication being, bydefinition, global, it is easy to see how a system of naturalchecks and balances – also well attested in the history oflanguage – could emerge in the case of World English. Inthis scenario, the pull imposed by the need for identity,which has been making Indian English increasingly dis-similar from British English, is balanced by a pull imposedby the need for intelligibility, on a world scale, which willmake Indian English increasingly similar. And this couldhappen anywhere.

Both centrifugal and centripetal forces operate on Eng-lish. Alongside the need to reflect local situations andidentities, which fosters diversity, there is the need formutual comprehensibility, which fosters standardization.People need to be able to understand each other, bothwithin a country and internationally. There has alwaysbeen a need for lingua francas. And as supra-nationalorganizations grow, the need becomes more pressing.The 191 members of the UN are there not simply toexpress their identities, but also because they want to talkto each other (at least, some of the time). And whateverlanguages are chosen by an organization as lingua francas,it is essential – if the concept is to work – for everyone tolearn the same thing, a standard form of the language. Inthe case of English, when people get together on inter-



national occasions, or read the international press, or writebooks for international publication, what they use isStandard English.In fact, Standard English isn’t identical everywhere – the

differences between British and American spelling are oneobvious point – but it is very largely the same, especially inprint. It is somewhat less established in speech, wheredifferences will frequently be heard identifying people asBritish, American, Australian, and so on. However, theseare still very few, and they may well diminish as inter-national contacts increase. It is a cliche, but the worldhas become a smaller place, and this has an obvious lin-guistic consequence – that we talk to each other more, andcome to understand each other more. British people cannow watch American football on TV each week, and theirawareness of that game’s technical vocabulary increases asa result. A series on sumo wrestling on television a fewyears ago increased my knowledge of Japanese words inEnglish tenfold. When we reflect on the opportunities forcontact these days, the chances are that the standard elem-ent in international English will be strengthened. Satellitetelevision, beaming down American and British Englishinto homes all round the world, is a particularly significantdevelopment. An increasingly standardized spoken Eng-lish is a likely outcome.That is the reason why the history of Latin is no guide to

the future of English. These centripetal forces were lackinga thousand years ago. Once the Roman Empire had begunto fragment, there was nothing to stop the centrifugalforces tearing spoken Latin apart. The numbers of Stand-ard Latin speakers around Europe were small, and com-munication between groups was difficult. The whole globenow is communicatively smaller than Europe was then. Itis the relative isolation of people from each other thatcauses a formerly common language to move in different



directions. In the Middle Ages, it was very easy for com-munities to be isolated from the rest of the world. Today itis virtually impossible.

Both centrifugal and centripetal forces exist in themodern world, and we need both. We want to have ourlinguistic cake and to eat it. We want to express our iden-tity through language and we want to communicate intelli-gibly through language. We want to be different and wewant to be the same. And the splendid thing abouthumans using language, of course, is that this is perfectlypossible. It is the kind of situation the multifunctionalbrain handles very well. We can have our cake and eat it.One of the main insights of twentieth-century linguisticswas to demonstrate the extraordinary capacity of the brainfor language. One of the consequences was the observationthat bilingualism, multilingualism, is the normal humancondition. Well over half of the people in the world, per-haps two-thirds, are bilingual. Children learn their lan-guages – often several languages – at extraordinary speed.Evidently, there is something in our make-up which pro-motes the acquisition of speech. I therefore see no intrinsicproblems in the gradual emergence of a tri-English world –a world, that is, in which a home dialect (often very mixedin character), a national standard dialect and an inter-national standard dialect comfortably coexist. It is a pro-spect which our Latin forebears would have envied.

Let me illustrate the way three levels of English workfrom my own background:

. The base level, the place where we all start, is thehome, our family dialect. In my case, this was Wales,and my home dialect was a Welsh English so strongin accent that when my family moved to Liverpool,when I was 10, I was immediately dubbed Taffy, andremained so even after my accent had moved in the



direction of Liverpudlian. I am fluent today in bothWelsh English and Scouse. I have two home dialects.Everybody has at least one.

. The second level is the national variety of StandardEnglishwhichmost people learnwhen they go to school.(With a minority of people, in the UK especially inSouth-east England, the home dialect is already Stand-ard English.) Inmy case, this was British Standard Eng-lish. I learned to write it, and gradually to speak it,avoiding such features as ain’t and double negatives,and learning a different range of grammatical construc-tions andvocabulary thanwas found inmyhomedialect.

. The third level is an International Standard English –an English, in other words, which in its grammar andvocabulary is not recognizably British, American oranything else. When working abroad, many peoplebecome skilled in using a variety which lacks some ofits original Britishness, because they know they aretalking to people from outside the UK. InternationalStandard Spoken English is not a global reality yet, butit is getting nearer.

Similar distinctions are to be found in other languagesettings too. Many foreign learners of English will havean ethnic or ancestral language for level one, and anational language for level two – such as (in NorthernSpain) Basque for the first and Spanish for the second.The first two levels may also be very different forms of thesame language, such as (in Southern Italy) Neapolitan andStandard Italian, respectively.

The new revolution

The twenty-first century is likely to see most educatedfirst-language speakers of English becoming tri-dialectal –



triglossic is a term often used – whether in the UK, USA,Ghana, Singapore or anywhere that English has a signifi-cant national presence. Thanks to media exposure, thesespeakers are already tri-dialectal (at least) in their abilityto comprehend regional varieties of English; and theywill become increasingly tri-dialectal in their productiontoo. Foreign-language learners will also find themselvesneeding to cope with these variations – developing asense of international norms alongside the nationalnorms which are currently the focus of teaching. Teachersalready routinely draw attention to local lexical and gram-matical differences, such as UK pavement, US sidewalk andAustralian footpath, but the perspective is invariably fromone of these varieties towards the others. Someone teach-ing British English draws attention to American alterna-tives, or vice versa. It may not be many years before aninternational standard will be the starting-point, withBritish, American and other varieties all seen as optionallocalizations.

I do not know how long it will take for such a scenario tobecome fully established. But I do know that it will not bean easy transition, as it will involve significant changes inour methods of teaching and examining. The situation isunprecedented, with more people using English in moreplaces than at any time in the language’s history, andunpredictable, with the forces promoting linguistic iden-tity and intelligibility competing with each other in unex-pected ways. For those who have to work professionallywith English, accordingly, it is a very difficult time. Afterall, there has never been such a period of rapid and funda-mental change since the explosions of development thathit the language in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.For the first time in 400 years, we are experiencing whathappens when English goes through a period of particu-larly dramatic change. It amounts to another revolution in



the way the language is used – an exciting time to be alinguist, of course, to be in at the beginning of it, but aproblematic time to be a teacher, having to guide othersthrough it. Doubtless traditional practices in teaching lan-guage production will continue with little change for thetime being, but there are already signs of a broadening ofpractice with respect to the teaching of listening compre-hension. We are already living in a world where most of thevarieties we encounter as we travel around the world aresomething other than traditional British or American Eng-lish. Teachers do students a disservice if they let themleave their period of training unprepared for the bravenew linguistic world which awaits them.This chapter has focused on what is likely to happen to

English as it copes with the pressures of becoming a globallanguage in such a relatively short period of time. But thereis another side to the coin. When a language becomesdominant within a country, there are always implicationsfor other local languages: how do they maintain theiridentity? When a language becomes global, such implica-tions affect all languages. A different set of questions ariseas a consequence. Will the influence of English be sostrong that it will permanently change the character of allother languages? And could English kill off other lan-guages altogether? A world in which there was only onelanguage left – an ecological intellectual disaster of unpre-cedented scale – is a scenario which could in theory obtainwithin 500 years. During the 1990s, people began to thinkseriously about such a possibility as a result of becomingaware of the second dimension to the language revolution.



the future of englishes - blackwellpublishing.com the future of englishes the emergence of english...

Documents