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English and the world’s languages

By Robert Phillipson
rp.eng@cbs.dk

I’d like to begin on a personal note, putting English into a multilingual perspective. I am a professor of English, but I use three languages every day (English, Danish and Swedish), and an additional two frequently (French and German), all of them in speech and reading, and sometimes in writing.
There is nothing exceptional about this multilingualism in many parts of the world, including continental Europe. My children are trilingual from home, and learned a fourth language (Russian or French) to a high level in the upper secondary school, while specialising in the natural sciences. The Chief Executive Officers of 200 top global corporations are similarly multilingual, unless they come from the United States and the UK (the Swedes and Dutch average more than three languages, the French and Germans nearly 3), as documented in a recent Harvard study.
But according to the recent Nuffield Languages Inquiry, 90% of British teenagers learn no foreign language after the age of 16. And the British university students (polytechnics at the time) who have come to Denmark as exchange students under EU schemes were seldom better at writing English confidently or correctly than their Danish counterparts of the same age – and these young Danes were using English as a foreign language.
Monolingual English speakers are depriving themselves of a great deal of linguistic and cultural sensitivity if they are confined to the worldview of a single language, however widespread and varied this language is. Fortunately, monolingualism is a curable disease.

I have structured my talk around six points, each of which I shall touch on as a stimulus for discussion:

1. The need for conceptual clarification when generalising about “the world” choosing English, English as “the world’s most popular means of communication”, and English being “global”.

Many claim that English is the world language. But to describe English in such terms ignores the fact that a majority of the world’s citizens do not speak English, whether as a mother tongue or as a second or foreign language.
Symptomatic of the wishful thinking of global English is the publicity marketing The International Herald Tribune (earlier New York Herald Tribune). It describes itself as ‘The world’s daily newspaper. Since 1887…. The global village has a hometown newspaper… It’s the newspaper the whole world reads’. Evidently the global village, another metaphor much used by the cheer-leaders of globalisation, is monolingual.
Strong forces are at pains to create the impression that English serves all the world’s citizens equally well, whereas this is manifestly not the case, as the gap between the global haves, many of whom are English-speaking, and have-nots, often not English-speaking, is widening relentlessly. Academics have a particular responsibility to be scrupulous, critical, and self-critical in their use of concepts, and in their scholarly methods when analysing the world’s most powerful language.

2. The myth of English as a specially flexible, superior, easily learnable language.

Grammars and dictionaries of English are being churned out by publishers, ever bigger and better, corpus-based, regional, global, all documenting the huge variety of English. One of the characteristics of the language is its multiple origins, part Romance language, part Germanic and Viking, part Celtic (often forgotten), and so on. English is eminently a contact language, emerging a thousand years ago in creolisation processes and changing ever since.
This richness makes English a difficult language to learn and use subtly. Added to which it is spoken in hugely different ways worldwide. This does not make it a flexible, superior language, quite the opposite.
If one wants a simple regular language, the optimal case is Esperanto, and there are many languages with more regular grammar than English, and languages with a closer correspondence between the written and spoken forms of the language. Learning to read is a much simpler task for children in Finland and Serbia.
English now has global and local norms, divergence confirmed in Noah Webster’s declaration of linguistic independence 2 centuries ago, continuing with Australians getting over their cultural cringe about 25 years ago, and with efforts worldwide to legitimate diversified forms of English, where Braj Kachru has played a pioneer scholarly role. These efforts represent a counterweight to hegemonic Anglo-American dominated English, and there is a strong case for referring in many contexts to the English languages in the plural.
The balance between the local and the global is, however, unequal. If WorldSpeak is a reality, it is because global English is, like globalisation, to quote Pierre Bourdieu, “a pseudo-concept that is both descriptive and prescriptive” (Contre-feux 2, 2001, 96). English is the handmaiden and medium of globalisation as a reality and a project. The globalisation of finance and the economy is relatively more complete – though immensely fragile and volatile - than globalisation in military, political and cultural domains, which powerful forces are working to achieve. If there ever is a Global Standard Spoken English, whose standards will they be, if not those of the BBC and CNN? Two competing standards globally. This sounds like Orwellian doublespeak, and the British are probably the ones who are deluding or newspeaking themselves by believing that they can compete with American English. The younger generation on all continents are in no doubt that what counts is the American variant. Globalisation is intimately connected to Americanisation, as is evident from the US military presence globally, the way the World Trade Organization and comparable bodies essentially promote the interests of transnational corporations. English interlocks with all these immensely complex ongoing processes, including those of NGOs and champions of human rights who are trying to resist and modify globalisation.

3. The myth of the universal relevance of English, for instance as the medium of education in former colonies, when the expansion of English often entails the marginalisation of (speakers of) other languages, and when the very existence of many languages is threatened.

There are in fact still some 6-7000 spoken languages in the world, and perhaps equally many sign languages. The continuing existence of most languages is, however, threatened by market forces and the ideology and practice of monolingual nation-states.
As the Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o puts it, English has flourished “on the graveyard of other people’s languages”, in these islands and elsewhere. Most of the languages of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Australia will never enjoy the revival that Welsh, Scots Gaelic and other languages are currently enjoying. They have gone for good.
The World Bank is the most important source of funding for education in post-colonial contexts. The Bank endorses multilingualism in its rhetoric, but channels funding virtually exclusively to European languages. Thus the post-apartheid government of South Africa was told that funds for education would not be made available for African languages. There is in South Africa an unresolved tension between English as the language of power, and a constitutional commitment to maintain the cultural heritage and develop all the local, national languages, without which the elimination of poverty and sustainable development will never be achieved.
What is important to focus on here is that it is not a question of either English or local languages, but one of balanced multilingualism. Either/or thinking is at the heart of the Anglo-American English as a Second Language business. Until the 1960s there was virtually no expertise in this area. The massive expansion of applied linguistics and English Language Teaching dates from the phase of decolonisation, the aid business, the mythology of modernisation that has transmogrified into globalisation. I still find it counter-intuitive that the ESL/ELT profession does not require successful proof of learning a foreign language as a minimal requirement for anyone entering the teaching profession. I also constantly hear horror stories of how foreign students experience racism of all sorts in higher and further education in Britain. ELT is an important British commodity, which serves British interests, as countless pronouncements from the British Council underline. This ethnocentricity makes me query whether one can really expect leadership in a multilingual world from ethnocentric monolingual Brits and Americans. The challenge is to develop professionalism in the teaching of English that is linguistically, culturally and pedagogically appropriate in local contexts in Asia, Africa, post-communist Europe, and Britain. Such qualifications can be acquired whether you are a native speaker or not.
An American political scientist, Douglas Lummis, who went to work in Japan in 1961, was appalled by the assumption of cultural superiority of native-speaker Americans. In an article entitled ‘English conversation as ideology’, he wrote that ‘the world of English conversation is racist…. The expression ‘native speaker’ is in effect a code word for ‘white’… their real role is not language teacher but living example of the American Way of Life’. He recommends that the Japanese should start thinking of English as

the language of Asian and Third World solidarity. When English study is transformed from a form of toadying into a tool of liberation, all the famous ‘special difficulties’ which the Japanese are supposed to suffer from will probably vanish like the mist. Language schools which employ only Caucasians should be boycotted. Japanese who want to study English should form study groups with Southeast Asians, and together work out a new Asian version of English that reflects the style, culture, history, and politics of Asia. And then if the Americans who come to Asia complain that they can’t understand this new variety of English, they should be sent to language school.

This elaboration of Asian English, moderated by Asians, is in fact happening right now. I attended the Fifth Conference on English in South East Asia in Perth, Australia in December last year. Things are moving interestingly in Asia in academic circles, even though politicians are looking for panaceas, which is why in both Korea and Japan there are proposals to make English the second official language. They are deluding themselves into thinking that this will solve all their language learning problems. It is a bit like the European Union, where the current educational fad is starting foreign language learning in the primary school. I suspect that the policy-makers are more influenced by their own disastrous learning of foreign languages in school than by careful analysis of what factors need to be in place for such a proposal to succeed.

4. English as the language of the global “haves”, the comfortable 20%, and speakers of other languages as the “have-nots” and “never-to-haves”, the global 80%.

Global English is wishful thinking, the language of the global haves. The have-nots either speak no English or the wrong form of English. A small proportion of the haves is getting obscenely richer. This is ethically, ecologically and practically indefensible.
The EU and the Council of Europe have declared 2001 as European Year of Languages. The slogan is “Language opens doors”. Yes indeed, it provides access to hearts and minds, employment, success and joy. But language also closes doors to the mass of people in many postcolonial countries. What is needed therefore is to integrate language policy into broader social and ecological concerns, and work for the human rights of speakers of all languages, the maintenance of all cultures. We need to resist cultural homogenisation and the subtractive spread of English, and work for a just Ecology of Languages. There are an increasing number of bodies working on the relationships between biodiversity, and cultural and linguistic diversity, all of which are essential to the future of the planet. See for instance www.terralingua.com

5. How speakers of English can contribute to the cause of equality of communication between speakers of different languages.

Some languages are more equal than others. Many native speakers of English communicating with non-natives seem to be unaware of the lack of communicative symmetry. My impression is that even fluent users of English as a second language are becoming more articulate about their unequal communication rights, and resentful of native speaker dominance, for instance at conferences.
The EU is a test case for international collaboration that respects linguistic and cultural diversity, and accords equality to speakers of different languages. The EU is evolving as a new supra-national structure that links member states in an ever more complex web of relationships and laws, all of which will become more complicated as the EU expands.
The increasing use of English in fact represents a threat to all languages in Europe, even the demographically and economically big ones. The Swedish government recently commissioned a major survey of the position of Swedish in all key domains in Sweden, and of its use in European Union institutions. There is in fact clear evidence of English taking over from Swedish, and work is now under way to ensure that Swedish remains a ‘complete’ language.
The British still enjoy in much of continental Europe a reputation for fair play. Britain should work for the real equality of all EU official languages. There is a need for analysis of the current interpretation and translation systems, and the elaboration of scenarios that ensure efficient and equitable communication. Strengthening democracy in Europe in this way is in the interest of all groups in Europe, including Britain.

6.	How people whose mother tongue is English can be led to enjoy the benefits of multilingualism and avoid the risk of Eurocentric or America-centric monolingual myopia.

There are many international languages and countless lingua francas. Many of these languages are spoken in Britain. These assets and resources should be mainstreamed. A wide range of languages should be offered in the education system. Languages should be learned not only for instrumental purposes but for access to a diversity of cultures. We know from experience in many parts of North America and Europe, and the rich multilingualism elsewhere, how minority groups and the majority can become successfully multilingual through appropriately organised education. This experience in the formative years of schooling can strengthen the possibility of our world becoming more genuinely democratic, multicultural and multilingual. Only if the rights of speakers of all languages are respected can we expect English to build a saner world.

See:  http://babel.ruc.dk/~robert  for Robert Phillipson’s full list of publications