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Why is English the ‘International Language’?

Michael Foy, Ireland

Michael Foy is a former PKF Tax Manager, specializing in Business English and having 25 years European/Asian experience with Panasonic, Temple University and the Japanese government. He is a freelance DOS/educational consultant with Graduate Diplomas in TESOL, Teacher Training and Train the Trainer. Life long learning and teacher development are his driving forces and he is relocating to Madrid in October 2013 to seek new challenges and opportunities. E-mail: toogetooge@yahoo.co.uk

Some thoughts

“But apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order what have the Romans done for us”? (Monty Python 1979).

They civilized the world. Their laws, their culture, their language and their inventions left an imprint forever. But they pirated the Greeks who preceded them, enslaved nations and introduced decimation in their savage treatment of the vanquished. And History repeated itself with the English – the Modern Romans. Their Empire is favorably assessed overall for being innovative and benign, but they　excelled in the triangular slave trade, ethnically cleansed their colonies and cynically originated the concentration camp during the Second Boer War.

As David Crystal (1999) correctly states “A language becomes a world language for extrinsic reasons only and these all relate to the power of the people who speak it. ‘Power’, in this connection, has a variety of applications in political (military), technological, economic and cultural contexts.”

However I believe it is a linguistic oversimplification for him to contend “the English language has repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time.” I will endeavor to explain how and why English has been adopted as the ‘International language‘ and in doing so highlight the reasons Protestant English gained its dominance over Roman Catholicism and its Latin derivative languages.

Introduction

“The evolution of French from Latin illustrates a type of historical change in which a language is effectively imposed on a native population by an imperialist power and then develops its own character when the imperialist power leaves” (Cook 1997).

But why didn’t the English language fragment with the decline of the Empire? The answer lies primarily in its roots.

The origins of current English – The Great Sponge

“Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek.
We write in sand, our language grows,
And like the tide, our work o’erflows” (Waller 1606-1687).
“English has borrowed words from over 350 other languages, and over three-quarters of the English lexicon is actually Classical or Romance in origin. Plainly, the view that to borrow words leads to a language decline is absurd, given that English has borrowed more words than most” (Crystal 2003).

File: Origins of English Pie chart

The successful Norman Invasion imposed a continental governing class embodied by a hierarchic society with a feudal system of social organization. Self-preservation of their wealth and conquered lands necessitated assimilation and continuance of Anglo-Saxon administrative power. As inter-marriage amongst freemen also spread, the Norman rulers and their entourage learned to be native and French was their legacy to a receptive and absorbing Old English language.

Due to long periods of Crusading absenteeism the monarchy waned and with successfully assumed institutional government, the first indications of the future parliamentary democracy emerged.

In the Middle English period, the inflectional system of Old English broke down and the vocabulary changed significantly with tremendous borrowings from French and Latin, adding to the already existing Scandinavian loanwords from the Norsemen. Foreign words were readily accommodated and the tradition has continued to this day.

Around 1400 a series of pronunciation changes began with the Great Vowel Shift, which resulted in English moving away from continental language sounding and with William Caxton bringing the printing press to Westminster in 1476, literacy increased, books became cheaper and English became standardized.

Protestant colonialism

The Tudors laid the foundations of sea power which would establish England as a major naval force, but following centuries of Papal greed, corruption and power manipulation in Catholic Europe, a schism occurred. When Henry V111’s divorce request was denied, England and consequently English changed forever, as the island nation embarked on its anti-Catholic drive which would eventually encompass the world.

In 1606 Irish lands were confiscated from the native Gaelic speaking Celts and used for the first organized colonization in Ulster. Qualifying criteria to become a settler in Ireland was very simple - English speaking and Protestant. This was the precursor of future expansion in the New World.

“When the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the Massachusetts coast in 1620 after their eventful journey from Plymouth England, they brought with them not just a set of religious beliefs, nor only a pioneering spirit and a desire for colonization, but also their language” (Harmer 1988).

“Languages are contagious. No two can come into contact without a swift interchange between them, though the direction is controlled to some extent by rules of prestige.” Therefore English shows few traces of the Native American languages, “but on the other hand borrowings from English in the lands under British and American rule have been vast, if not devastating” (Bolinger 1968). Hence the so-called ‘linguistic imperialism’ (Phillipson 1992) was not all one-way traffic and new varieties of English are continually produced.

The British Empire from its early explorations spanned over 300 years and at its height was the largest in history, covering a population of 400-500 million people (Word iQ.com). This facilitated the spread of British technology, comparative advantage commerce and government. When the Americans declared independence from their colonial masters, trade continued and the Language remained and Britain merely used English elsewhere as a tool of power to cultivate groups of people who would identify with the cultural norms of the political elite. The indigenous inhabitants were taught English, particularly in India, as “to trade with civilized men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages” (Macaulay 1833).

This indoctrination favored a bilingual educational system so that generations grew up to take their places in government and passed on their Britishness to the lower classes through legislation and influence. In this manner English not only spread as a second language throughout the world, but it grew itself as vocabulary from foreign cultures was added to the lexicon.

Technological power

From 1688 to 1815, Britain switched from an agricultural base to an industrial one, with the population expanding from 5 to 12 million. “Trade and Empire went hand in hand, with a symbiotic relationship to each other” (Morgan 2009).

Beginning with the development of precision instruments which were vital to exploration and sea warfare (Sir Issac Newton, Edmond Halley), the harnessing of steam power (James Watt, Matthew Boulton), the building of a railway network (Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel), and the development of the electric telegraph (Charles Cooke and William Fothergill Wheatstone), mass communication was successfully exploited with English at its forefront.

There was substantial demographic growth aided by falling mortality, which was partly due to widespread smallpox inoculation in the early nineteenth century. In addition there was a rise in marital fertility, as women married earlier and maximized childbearing years due to improved material circumstances in the ‘workshop of the world’. Between 1815 and 1870, Britain was the world’s sole industrialized power, producing finished manufactures so efficiently and cheaply that they could undersell comparable locally produced goods in foreign markets. They utilized free trade without having to resort to formal rule.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries British and in particular Scottish inventiveness peaked with the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), radio signaling (David Hughes), television (John Logie Baird), radar (Sir Robert Watson-Watt), the fax machine (Alexander Bain), the computer (Charles Babbage) and the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee). The communications revolution was in essence an English-speaking phenomenon.

The American contribution

The Declaration of Independence in 1776 primarily addressed white English speaking Protestants, but millions flocked to America hoping to experience the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Following the Civil War the government deemed it necessary to create a cultural standard and therefore the 1906 Naturalisation Act required all immigrants to speak English in order to become US citizens. In 1914 the Ford motor company introduced English classes to spread proficiency in the language and dilute the ethnic ghetto mentality amongst workers and this was a forerunner of many such programmes throughout the States.

In 1945 American English had the prestige of hailing from the liberating nation and being the language of civilization and freedom, it enjoyed similar status in countries under Soviet control. In the twentieth century the USA was at the cutting edge of technical progress and scientific research and neologisms grew with economic expansion.

After the Cold War, America was the only superpower and English embraced the world as globalization intensified trade relations between countries. The English cultural tsunami engulfed the world mainly through American influence with press, advertising, broadcasting, music, movies, science, technology and international travel all playing their part.

So too the electronic revolution is American dominated and its continued position as the main world power ensures that the medium of communication and the culture and identity it conveys is English.

But why did the English successfully become and remain ‘international’?

“There is of course nothing intrinsically wonderful about English that it should have spread so widely” (Crystal), but it evolved with the times and was accommodating. It was not fixed with rigid rules that did not adapt naturally, nor was it stifled and neutered by an organization such as the French Academy, keeping their language as endogenous as possible.
Historical events determined its outcome too:-
1. The Tudors created and developed England as a maritime power.
2. Henry V111 did not have a male heir and thus ceased to be Defender of the Faith, heralding the English Reformation.
3. The Founding Fathers did not enshrine English in their constitution, but they rejected German as a possible alternative medium for legislation and the language of the government and the people was plain English.
4. The English were able to successfully surpass the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Belgian Empires through superior weaponry and communication systems, skilled mercantilism in the exploitation of land for farming new crops and mineral resources and technological and industrial superiority.
5. The desired change in Church and Monarchy which was fundamental to England’s transition ensured that Danish, French, Dutch and even non English speaking German ascendants to the throne such as George 1 in 1714 did not alter its final direction and goal (Houses of Denmark, Normandy, Plantagenet, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg Gotha/Windsor). The Bill of Rights of 1689 states that anybody who “shall profess the Popish religion, or shall marry a Papist, shall be excluded and be forever incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the Crown.” The Protestant ascendancy remains secure in law even today.
6. “The ability of the British government to raise taxes and loans to support aggressive military policies by Hanoverian governments, and the superiority of the Royal Navy over other European navies, both played a part in creating the conditions through which trade and empire could flourish” (Morgan). Other Empires basically squandered their spoils, or did not maximize the Protestant work ethic as effectively as the British i.e. the Dutch.
7. Following the accession of William of Orange, Dutch banking techniques were adopted and the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of an international banking system with London and New York eventually becoming the leading investment capitals of the world.
8. Under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the Empire acquired 13 million new subjects and as it was drafted in English and French, it now guaranteed the British diplomatic status.
9. In 1922 Britain did not opt to renew the Japanese Alliance of 1902 and instead joined with the USA. This would effectively put the two sides on a collision course for war.
10. The British governed rather than annihilated. The Spanish slaughtered the Aztecs and Incas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Belgians and Portuguese Empires were renowned for their incompetence and brutality. But almost all of the former colonies chose to join the Commonwealth, which replaced the Empire. Political independence did not lead to language decline in comparison to the other empirical powers.
11. The British had a total disregard for national and racial identities which left a legacy of partition and inter-communal difficulties in Ireland, India, Fiji, Guyana and Zimbabwe, but they allowed other languages to co-exist with English e.g. Hindi. This is to be contrasted with the Japanese who not only cruelly imposed their language but also moral education in Korea, in order to produce loyal subjects for their divine Emperor.
12. The scale of the expansion of the United Nation since 1945 has ensured the demand for a lingua franca.
13. In the 1950’s and 1960’s Britain manipulated immigration policies to sustain full employment in the UK, thus creating their multi-racial society and hence new generations of English speakers.
14. Britain joined the European Common Market (now EU) in 1973. In the course of time English became the dominant tongue in Europe and with the aid of Scandinavian fellow Protestants completed its “sweet revenge” on the French, as Melvyn Bragg terms it. English is also the official language of the European Central Bank, though the UK is not a member of the European Monetary Union.
15. The struggle for colonial domination between the world powers finally emerged as a confrontation between capitalism, fascism and communism. But the temporal gains of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century were short-lived and the English speaking democracies prevailed.

The future of English and its continued promotion

“English is a global language, but because it is a living language, it has inevitably changed in order to suit specific contexts or needs” (Crystal 1997). By acquiring special administrative status in many countries and becoming the number one foreign language taught in the world, English continues its growth e.g. English replaced French in Algerian schools in 1996.

Focusing on China and India the UK Prime Minister launched a new initiative for language teaching:- “English is our heritage, but it is also becoming the future of human commerce and communication. This is a great opportunity for Britain – and a measure of the greatness that lies not in empire or territory but through a language that has the power to bring this world of over 200 countries and billions of people closer together, with the versatility to evolve and adapt. We will take up with vigour the bold task of making our language the world’s common language of choice. The language that helps the world talk, laugh and communicate together” (Gordon Brown 2008).

And a tradition dating back to 1932 continues each year in Her Royal Majesty’s Christmas Message -“In many aspects of our lives, whether in sport, the environment, business or culture the Commonwealth connection remains vivid and enriching. It is, in lots of ways, the face of the future. And with continuing support and dedication, I am confident that this diverse Commonwealth of Nations can strengthen the common bond that transcends politics, religion race and economic circumstances” (Queen Elizabeth 11 2010).

Other nations leaders have followed suit but what other country in the world has its Heads of State and Government directly address the world to profligate its language?

Conclusion

Greek was the language of commerce; Latin was the vehicle of learning for the Catholic Church, philosophy and science; French the language of diplomacy; but English displaced all of them to become the new ‘international language’. English was for the literate, not just the elite e.g. the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible.

The global spread was fueled primarily by speaker migration following the virtual subjugation of the British Isles and was consciously planned. Two diasporas followed: the mother tongue speakers (including the deportation of undesirables) to North America, Australia and New Zealand and the New English colonization of Asia and Africa (Kachru 1992).

In the 1980’s the rise of Japan as an economic superpower heralded predictions of a ‘new kid on the language block’, but it was a false alarm and to date about only two million new speakers have succumbed.

The English-Spanish bilingual zone covering the entire American continent (Graddol 1997) may be facilitated immensely by the new grammar book launched to unify the Spanish language (BBC News 2009), but what of the other world languages such as Chinese, Indian and Arabic and the increase in languages other than English on the Internet?

English largely remains a unifying language in India and the expansion in outsourcing will ensure its continued preeminence. Whilst Chinese government hackers launch sophisticated cyber attacks against companies like Google political censorship remains an issue and English remains the domain of free democratic speakers.

It’s still the ‘international language’ of science, business, diplomacy, technology, banking, computing, engineering, medicine, tourism, air traffic control, sport, the media, the Internet and NATO.

It may be a moot point whether having such a language is instrumental in the death of others, but in the unlikely event that the English’s are ever replaced, they will certainly be an extremely hard act to follow.

“The English language is like a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless. No form of linguistic engineering and no amount of linguistic legislation will prevent the cycles of change that lie ahead” (Burchfield 1985).