From a global perspective, it
is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is
threatened by English
Behemoth, bully, loudmouth,
thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From
inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has
grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as
their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an
official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of
dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned
a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the
worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s
misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the
language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar
navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail
of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.
One straightforward way to
trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has
infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a
great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi,
Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the
dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net
exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the
dizzying number of regional variants of English – he is the author of the
collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More
Englishes – published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers
together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most
prevalent include “last-minute”, “fitness”, “group sex”, and a number of terms
related to seagoing and train travel.
In some countries, such as
France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades
to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little
avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted:
“Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are
going to trade out ‘sexting’ for texto pornographique?”) Thanks to the
internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.
The gravitational pull that
English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction.
The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are
increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular,
shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or
grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss
German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more
insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be
easily digestible in an anglophone context.
Yet the influence of English
now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at
the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian
syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in
the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the
frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also
increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence
has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.
Within the anglophone world,
that English should be the key to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s
places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be
invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone
world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a
supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day
English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more
bland.
Until recently, the story of
English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread
through a combination of conquest, trade and colonisation. (Some languages,
such as Arabic and Sanskrit, also caught on through their status as sacred
tongues.) But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and
the start of the new millenium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount
of talk about it as a “lingua franca” or “global language” truly captures. It
transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de
Swaan calls a “hypercentral” one.
De Swaan divides languages
into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the “peripheral languages”,
which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind.
These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are
the “central languages”, though a more apt term might be “national languages”.
These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its
own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for
Guarani, and so on.
Following these are the 12
“supercentral languages”: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi,
Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili – each of which
(except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages
you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly
spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their
parent nation’s colonial past.
Then, finally, we come to the
top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There
is only one: English, which De Swaan calls “the hypercentral language that
holds the entire world language system together”. The Japanese novelist Minae
Mizumura similarly describes English as a “universal language”
