19
LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS
In 1620 a group of English settlers, known today as the Pilgrims, arrived on the shores of North America. They’d been at sea for more than two months—an arduous voyage that killed two of their number.
That was, it turned out, the easy part. The settlers landed in an unfamiliar place where they had no friends. They tried to grow food but failed badly. In the first winter, more than half died from disease and starvation. A group of Indians, the Pauquunaukit Wampanoag, watched them flail from afar. Finally, in the spring, after many of the colonists had perished, the Pauquunaukit sent over an emissary, a man named Samoset.
He greeted them in English.
Samoset, it turned out, had learned some “broken English” (as one colonist described it) from fishermen plying the Maine coast. A few days later, Samoset returned with a Patuxet man who spoke the language even better: Tisquantum, better known as Squanto. Not only did Squanto speak English, he’d lived in London. Seven years before meeting the Plymouth colonists, he had been kidnapped by an English captain and taken to Europe. He’d sailed across the Atlantic four times—once after being captured, once back and forth on a journey to Newfoundland, and back again with another expedition to his homeland of Patuxet—i.e., southern New England.
For the colonists, who had crossed the Atlantic only once, this was a near-inconceivable stroke of luck. A small, nomadic band of Europeans far out of their element had somehow managed to run into one of the few individuals from the vast North American continent who had actually spent time in their home country. Squanto was, in the eyes of the colonists, a “special instrument sent of God.” He translated for them, brokered key diplomatic alliances with Native polities, and taught them the tricks of local agriculture. Quite likely he was the difference between their survival and their death.
Today, four centuries later, the society those Pilgrims founded enjoys a similar good fortune. Its inhabitants can travel to nearly any spot on the map, confident that someone within hailing distance will speak their language. Yet unlike the Pilgrims, they don’t need luck. English has spread like an invasive weed, implanting itself in nearly every habitat. It has created a world full of people ready and able to assist English speakers, wherever they may roam. A world almost designed for the convenience of the United States.
A world of Squantos.
Languages are standards, just like stop signs and screw threads, but they run much deeper. Languages shape thought, making some ideas more readily thinkable and others less so. At the same time, they shape societies. Which languages you speak affects which communities you join, which books you read, which places you feel at home. That a single language has become the dominant tongue on the planet, spoken to a degree by nearly all educated and powerful people, is thus an occurrence of profound consequence.
It is particularly astonishing because there is no historical precedent for it. Scholars had used Latin widely in Western Europe, but it never achieved the universality sometimes attributed to it. Other languages from Spanish to Swahili have also knit regions together, but none has done more than that. The norm in history has been linguistic difference, not sameness.
That was certainly true of the United States at its start: a polyglot crazy quilt of Native American, African, and European tongues. Even Ben Franklin, restricting himself to the European languages, felt it necessary to master French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin along with his native English. He published a newspaper in German, Die Philadelphische Zeitung, and suspected that German might displace English in Pennsylvania.
Franklin was right to wonder. There were serious questions about whether English would hold throughout the new United States. There’d never been a native language that stretched over such a large distance as the expanding United States without splitting apart. That it worked—that Virginians spoke the same language as Californians—can be credited to the settlement boom, which swiftly propelled a fairly homogeneous population over a vast expanse. The same wagons and trains that carried the settlers carried the language, too, which survived the long journey with only minor mutations.
Outside of the settler population, though, enforcing English as a national language proved to be a more violent undertaking. Slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language. Those caught speaking their home languages could face serious punishment; there are reports of some having their tongues cut out. The result was total linguistic annihilation. Although traces of African idioms can be found in today’s black speech, not a single African language made it over on the slave ships and survived.
Indigenous languages were sites of conflict, too. Starting in the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed tens of thousands of Native American children into white-run boarding schools. There, cut off from their families and communities, the students studied English. “We shall break up all the Indian there is in them in a very short time,” promised the founder of one such school. Students caught speaking indigenous languages were routinely beaten or had their mouths washed with soap and lye. Not surprisingly, Indian parents were rarely enthusiastic about this, but governmental officials and school administrators used bribes, threats, the withholding of rations, and outright force—essentially kidnapping the children—to fill the schools.
Authorities tried the same tactics in the overseas territories. “They beat the language out of us in school,” remembered one elderly Alaska Native. “Whenever I speak Tlingit, I can still taste the soap,” another confirmed (his language now has fewer than a thousand speakers). On Guam, the naval government prohibited the use of Chamoru on school grounds, in courts, and in governmental offices. Children caught speaking it in schools would be beaten or fined. One naval officer collected all the Chamoru dictionaries he could find and burned them.
Yet the empire was vast, and there simply weren’t enough colonial officials to wash out every offending mouth. So the government relied on other tools. It passed laws in English, demanded that civil servants use English, and, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, made English proficiency a requirement for voting. Most important, colonial authorities turned to education. Inculcating English was the “cardinal point” of the whole Philippine school system, explained the superintendent of education there. Across the empire, students were expected, at least at the higher grades, to work in English.
Committed anticolonialists, such as Emilio Aguinaldo, resisted—he died in 1964 still unable to speak English. Pedro Albizu Campos spoke the language well, but he came to regard it as an instrument of imperialism. “I am astounded that the Puerto Ricans have tolerated this mutilation of the mentality of their children,” he told his followers. “The United States wants not only to destroy our culture and disintegrate our nation, but also to destroy our language” and “force upon us their culture and language, casting out our books and substituting theirs.”
Local instructors proved less than steadfast in their dedication to the imperial tongue. A report on Philippine schools found that the students were being taught English “by teachers who themselves cannot speak English,” and a former governor complained that their accents were sliding into incomprehensibility. The governor of Puerto Rico accused local teachers of giving English lessons “with a left-handed gesture.” Teachers there organized a stubborn resistance to anglicization, even at the cost of being blacklisted and fired.
Overall, English proficiency rose, but slowly. By 1940, roughly a quarter of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos could speak the language. In Hawai‘i, a polyglot pidgin was still the language of the streets.
The wider world was no better. Among Western countries, English deferred routinely to its rivals. French was the language of diplomacy. In science, French was joined by German and (in chemistry) Russian. As late as 1932, French was allowed as an official language at 98.5 percent of international scientific conferences, whereas English was accepted only at 83.5 percent.
If English speakers wanted to talk with foreigners, they needed to master other languages. That’s what Ben Franklin had done in the eighteenth century, and that’s what his successors did in the twentieth. Teddy Roosevelt, though obsessed with the “English-speaking peoples,” spoke French and German and could follow along in Italian. Woodrow Wilson, the era’s other scholar-president, read German scholarship and contemplated moving to Europe to better learn the language. Herbert Hoover ranged even further. He had tried to learn Osage as a boy, his first publication was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining, and he and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately. The polyglot presidency was a reaction to a world teeming with languages, a world where English got you only so far.
The limits of English became painfully clear during the Second World War. “It was then,” recalled a prominent philologist, “that many of us realized that foreign languages have actual, objective reality, that there are large areas of the earth where, strange as it may seem, English is neither spoken nor understood.” The United States had built for itself a “neat little world in which everyone spoke English,” he noted. Yet “suddenly these pesky foreigners rose up before us in their own lands, doggedly refusing to understand our tongue, no matter how slowly and loudly we spoke it. It was little short of outrageous.”
The army launched a training program to give soldiers a crash course in the languages they’d need to fight a global war. Eventually it encompassed some forty languages (and it pioneered the “audio-lingual” method used in classrooms today). But training an army of millions to speak the dozens of languages its men might encounter as they hopped from continent to continent was wholly impractical.
It really would be better if the foreigners could learn English.
As Allied leaders contemplated how the world might look after the war, they thought about language. “The empires of the future are empires of the mind,” Winston Churchill announced in 1943 in a speech at Harvard. The key to that mental colonization, he believed, was linguistic. Churchill invited Harvard students to imagine the “grand convenience” that English speakers would enjoy if their language were used globally. No longer hemmed in by territorial empires, they’d be able to “move freely about the world.”
It was a stirring vision. Yet it was also, Churchill recognized, far from reality. English wasn’t a global lingua franca in 1943, and it didn’t seem likely to become one anytime soon. It had a daunting vocabulary, with its largest dictionaries containing some half a million words. Its spelling was a cruel farce. Even Albert Einstein had been brought to his knees by what he called English’s “underhanded orthography.”
Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners. The entire system—grammar and vocabulary—could be printed legibly on one side of a sheet of paper, with space left over for sample sentences.
It may be surprising to hear that Churchill, an undisputed virtuoso of the English language, would so readily trade his Steinway grand for a toy piano. But he wasn’t the only one. Basic’s champions, besides Churchill, included Ezra Pound, Lawrence Durrell, and George Orwell. “In Basic you cannot make a meaningless statement without it being apparent,” Orwell noted. H. G. Wells predicted that Basic would “spread like wildfire” and that by 2020 there would be “hardly anyone in the world” unable to understand it.
Britain’s most esteemed professor of literature, I. A. Richards, made Basic his calling. He had taught in China, which led him to worry about the spread of English. “The majority of Chinese students are never going to learn to understand much literary English,” he judged. Richards saw Basic as the best way to acquaint them with the “enormous number of ideas, feelings, desires, and attitudes that they can only gain through some form of Western language.”
In 1937 Richards managed the extraordinary feat of getting the Chinese government to agree to teach Basic in its schools. This was almost immediately undercut by the Japanese, who launched their full-scale invasion of China that year. Still, Richards pressed on, and the war’s end saw him in Miami using Basic to train Chinese seamen at a naval facility.
“It takes only 400 words of Basic to run a battleship,” Richards told Time. “With 850 words you can run the planet.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took note. Basic “has tremendous merit in it,” he told his secretary of state, and might allow English to dislodge French as the language of diplomacy. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm didn’t prevent him from mocking Churchill, though. He wrote the prime minister to ask how well Churchill’s famous “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech would have gone down if it had been delivered in Basic, with Churchill offering his countrymen his “blood, work, eye-water and face-water.”
“Seriously, however, we are interested,” Roosevelt hastily added.
Still, as Roosevelt had intuited, dehydrated English was surprisingly difficult to use. Native English speakers struggled mightily to restrict themselves to Basic’s 850 approved words. Foreigners, for their part, were baffled by Basic’s tortuous circumlocutions, particularly around verbs. “The Koreans, Spaniards, and Russians have a right to ask why it is easier to say ‘I went in the air by jumping’ than ‘I jumped,’” one critic aptly wrote.
In the end, Basic never truly went in the air by jumping. Speakers didn’t take to it, and its advocates lost interest. Yet slimming English down wasn’t the only way to win it a global following. By the 1940s, eager reformers had proposed dozens of schemes to tame its irregular orthography. There was Anglic (“Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on dhis kontinent a nue naeshon”), the Fonetik Crthqgrafi, the Nue Spelling, the Alfabet for the World of Tomorrow, and a curiously vowel-stingy system advertised as “1 Wrld, 1 Langwij.”
The boldest scheme came from a former senator, Robert Latham Owen. Part Cherokee (he was known as “Oconostota” among the Cherokees), Owen had been one of the leaders of the failed attempt to establish the largely Indian state of Sequoyah in 1905. After Congress rejected Sequoyah and admitted the larger (and whiter) state of Oklahoma instead, Owen got elected to the Senate. He and Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s future vice president, were the only Indians there.
Owen’s hoped-for state of Sequoyah was named after the man who had designed a non-roman script for the Cherokee language, a script that Cherokees had learned rapidly and enthusiastically. Could something like that be done for English? Owen had toyed for some time with creating a new phonetic alphabet. On December 7/8, 1941, the day of Japan’s attack, he resolved to see it through.
Owen’s “global alphabet,” as he called it, didn’t use roman letters. It looked more like Arabic or shorthand. By eschewing familiar letter forms, Owen could circumvent orthographic questions entirely. Words were spelled exactly as they sounded. This was the means, Owen insisted, “by which we can teach the English language to all the world at high speed.”
The global alphabet: Robert Latham Owen’s system
He predicted that with the global alphabet, English could be made “the conversational language of the world within two or three years.” And, he added, his system was fully compatible with Basic.
Owen’s idea made the rounds. FDR passed the scheme on to his secretary of state for consideration. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held hearings on it (“I do not think any person could contribute more to humanity than by evolving a universal method of communication,” a senator from New Mexico exclaimed). The writer George Bernard Shaw was taken by it and willed part of his estate to fund the creation and promotion of a non-roman phonetic alphabet. The cautionary note came from Eleanor Roosevelt, who feared it was too hard to learn. Still, Owen was encouraged enough to build a special typewriter for his alphabet.
It was the first such typewriter, and it was the last—the alphabet never caught on. Yet that Owen got even this far is striking. So nervous were leaders in the United States and Britain about the prospects of normal English that they were willing to consider drastic measures to reform it. Housebroken English—reduced to eighteen verbs, written in squiggles—was a price they seriously entertained paying for Churchill’s hoped-for “empires of the mind.”
The challenges English faced went beyond the technical ones. Colonial rule, which had been one of the chief vehicles for spreading English, was visibly breaking down. Decolonization would ultimately release more than six hundred million people from rule by Britain and the United States. Would they stick with English?
Very likely not. Many complained bitterly of the havoc English had wreaked on their countries. Mohandas Gandhi regarded India’s reliance on English as a “sign of slavery.” The Kenyan author James Ngugi judged the “psychological violence of the classroom” to have been just as harmful as the “physical violence of the battlefield.” He recalled his own childhood in a mission school, when students caught speaking their native Gikuyu were beaten, fined, or made to wear signs reading I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. After decolonization, he changed his name to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and gave up writing novels in English.
Manuel Quezon complained, too. Even though few adult Filipinos spoke English fluently by the time the Philippines became a commonwealth and Quezon became its president, the looming presence of English in the schools and government had blocked local languages from taking root. The result was, after hundreds of years of colonial rule (counting Spain), the Philippines had no indigenous language spoken throughout the archipelago.
“When I travel through the provinces and talk to my people, I need an interpreter,” Quezon lamented. “Did you ever hear of anything more humiliating, more horrible than that?”
The Philippines needed “a language of her own,” he insisted. It must be indigenous to the Philippines and taught nationally. Without such a language, Quezon continued, “a national soul cannot exist.”
Having gained some autonomy from Washington with the establishment of the commonwealth in 1935, Quezon founded a national language institute. Its task was to develop a local language—it chose Manila-based Tagalog—into a national one. Turning a vernacular into an official language and promulgating it would take time (the National Council of Education suggested Basic Tagalog, patterned on Basic English, as a bridge). But Quezon hoped that it would eventually undo the anglicization of the colonial era.
As decolonization proceeded, it became clear that many countries shared that goal. At independence, India took Bharat as an official name and Hindi as its official language, demoting English to subsidiary status and promising to drop it entirely by 1965. The British colony of Singapore set Malay as its official language in 1959, when it gained self-governance. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 did the same for Sinhalese.
In 1949 the United Nations General Assembly resolved that member states should teach primary and secondary students in their native languages. That year, Mao Zedong took power in China; his Cultural Revolution would prohibit English and make English-language teachers targets of violence. In the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union sought to ban English as a “decadent” subject and to promote Russian throughout its realm.
The Organization of African Unity declared that European languages would be “only provisionally tolerated” in independent Africa and set up an Inter-African Bureau of Languages to replace them with indigenous ones.
Perhaps this could be done. In the British mandate of Palestine, Jewish settlers had revived the ancient scriptural language of Hebrew and taught it to their children as a mother tongue. They got far enough with Hebrew that in 1948, when Palestine gained independence as the State of Israel, it dropped English as an official language. A language that, in living memory, had counted no native speakers had nonetheless beaten English into retreat.
I. A. Richards watched all this with alarm. Third World nationalism, he warned, could “wreck all hopes for English.”
How did English prevail? In the forties, FDR and Churchill expected that they’d have to drastically alter English to turn it into a global language. Decolonization, by placing men like Manuel Quezon in power, only worsened English’s prospects. Yet English surmounted these obstacles and became a true world language. How?
Part of the story, some linguists have insisted, is the foreign policies of the United States and Britain. Even as Anglophone powers lost political control over much of the world, this explanation goes, they found ways to impose their language on weaker countries.
They did that in large part through education. The hundreds of thousands of foreign students streaming into U.S. universities (120,000 a year by 1969) didn’t just study math and sociology. They studied math and sociology in English. They then carried English back to their home countries, where they ranked among the most educated and powerful. Add to those students the nearly half a million foreign military trainees who studied at U.S. military academies, schools, bases, and special facilities.
While students rushed in, English oozed out. By the 1960s, at least forty U.S. government agencies sponsored English teaching abroad, most notably the Peace Corps (an instrument of “Western psychological warfare,” charged the president of Ghana). The radio stations, too, beamed English into foreign countries. In 1959 the Voice of America adopted a limited-vocabulary “Special English,” reminiscent of Basic, for some broadcasts. Textbooks, comics, and movies all poured from the Anglophone countries into the rest of the world, sometimes with governmental subsidies.
But was that enough? It couldn’t have been. English had muscle behind it, yes, but non-Anglophone countries had formidable defenses. They set curricula in their schools, granted languages other than English official status, and broadcast their own radio programs. With children learning Swahili or Sinhala in school, what could a hundred Peace Corps volunteers do?
What is more, the Anglophone governments didn’t ultimately place much priority on language export. Though agencies like the Voice of America and the Peace Corps promoted English, that wasn’t their main mission. It wasn’t until 1965 that the U.S. government even set the promulgation of English as a foreign policy objective.
It’s helpful to look in the other direction. Global English isn’t really, in the end, the product of a few big decisions made in Washington or London. It’s the product of a billion or so smaller ones made all around the world. Those billions of decisions have been, to be sure, profoundly influenced by the predominant position of the United States in the world. But ultimately the language wasn’t imposed from the top down. It emerged from the bottom up.
That’s the thing about standards; they work differently from other kinds of power. Governments can tax, enlist, and imprison their subjects. They do those things all the time. But standards are harder to impose, languages especially so. Colonial authorities spent fifty years trying to drum the English language into Puerto Ricans’ heads yet managed to get only a quarter of the population even conversant in it. They had such a hard time because, in the streets and in the home, Puerto Ricans still spoke Spanish.
Standards reflect power, but the real compulsion rarely comes from the state. It comes, rather, from the community. Take a textbook case of standard setting: the rival formats for videocassette recorders. In 1975 Sony put out the first consumer VCR, which used a tape format called Betamax. The next year, Sony’s rival JVC began selling VCRs that used a different format, VHS. Each had virtues—Betamax offered better image and sound quality, VHS tapes played longer. In 1980, consumers might have had good reason for choosing either.
But not in 1990. By then, something had happened. Enough people had chosen VHS for it to acquire a critical mass. Rental stores stopped stocking Betamax; new movies came out only on VHS. Sony itself reluctantly decided to start making VHS-compatible hardware. “Speaking frankly, we didn’t want to manufacture VHS,” its deputy president confessed. “However, you don’t conduct business according to your feelings.”
Sony hadn’t been compelled to give up on Betamax, exactly. It’s just that the cost of sticking with it had become prohibitively high. Too many people had already chosen VHS.
Something similar has happened in language. As distant cultures have come into closer contact, the need for common tongues has grown. Yet which language to use hasn’t exactly been a free choice for everyone. You pick the language others have chosen, the language you think will get you the furthest. And once a critical mass has been reached, that choice becomes practically mandatory.
Different people have undergone this process at different paces. The international communities on globalization’s leading edge were the first to feel the need for a uniform language. They latched on to English early, and as each one adopted it, the language’s momentum grew, eventually dragging whole countries along for the ride.
The first group to fully go in for English was the air traffic controllers. Aviation, being technically complex and profoundly international, is an area where standards are vital. A common language is especially so, given the paramount importance of clear communication in the skies. In the 1950s a Soviet plane carrying the USSR’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to London twice overshot Heathrow Airport and nearly crashed because the pilot struggled to understand the control tower’s instructions.
Yet such misunderstandings are happily rare, for when the rules of the international aviation system were agreed upon in 1944, a standard language was chosen for international flights. It was, not surprisingly, English. This wasn’t a choice made because of a desire to turn the world Anglophone. It was made from necessity: there had to be one language, and the United States at that point was responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles.
Non-English speakers chafed at this. In the 1970s, Francophones in Quebec sought to use French in the air for local flights when convenient. They weren’t demanding that French be the main language of the skies, just that it be an option. Yet pilots and air traffic controllers fought back. They were generally of a global ilk and had adapted themselves to English. They went on strike, crippling aviation in Canada for nine days until the government agreed to prohibit French in the air.
The world community of pilots has grown dramatically more diverse over the subsequent decades, but English has stuck. Korean, German, Brazilian, and Algerian pilots all speak it. In large single-language regions, such as Latin America, they might bend the rules and switch to their native tongues. But they must snap back to English when Anglophones are present.
The next group to go in for English was the scientists. Modern science has always been international, and scientists were accustomed to having to learn one another’s languages to read the latest research. In the twentieth century, they seriously considered adopting invented languages to speed their work. They were particularly interested in a postwar bridge language called Interlingua, designed especially for science. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association printed abstracts in it (“Velocitates de conduction esseva determinate in 126 patientes qui presentava con disordines neurologic”). A journal of molecular spectroscopy appeared entirely in the language.
Such internationalist ambition, though laudable, couldn’t overcome the gravitational force of the United States. In the first decade and a half following the Second World War, 55 percent of the Nobel Prizes in science went to scholars at U.S. universities, and 76 percent of laureates were at Anglophone ones. By the 1960s, more than half of publications on natural science in the world were in English.
Again, a tipping point was reached. With half of the publications in English and more than half of the Nobel laureates speaking it, what were the odds that Interlingua or any other language could hold out? Scientists from non-Anglophone countries had to learn English to read cutting-edge scholarship in their field. Increasingly, they had to write in it, too. The proportion of scientific publications in English shot up as more and more non-Anglophone scientists made the switch. Today it is well over 90 percent.
In Israel, scientists joke that God himself couldn’t get tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—he only has one publication, and it’s not in English. They’re not wrong. Of the 1,921 research publications listed on the websites of the faculty members at Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics, every one is in English.
Air traffic control and scientific research turned out to be mere preludes. The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet. It has promoted international communication, but it has set English proficiency as the price. The web was invented in the United States and has been disproportionately Anglophone ever since. In 1997 a survey of language distribution found that 82.3 percent of randomly chosen websites, from all over the world, were in English.
It’s not just that English users dominate the internet. The medium itself favors English. Its programming languages are derived from English, so anyone seeking to master Python, C++, or Java—to name three popular coding languages—will have a much easier time if they speak English.
Residing at a deeper level are the encoding schemes that translate bits (ones and zeroes) into characters. The encoding most frequently used in the early days of the internet was ASCII, a scheme designed to support English. ASCII makes no provision for non-roman languages such as Arabic and Hindi. It can’t even handle frequently used symbols in European languages, such as ø, ü, ß, or ñ. ASCII nudges everything toward English.
Today there are more accommodating encodings, covering languages from Cherokee to Cuneiform, but they aren’t universally supported. That means there’s no guarantee that a non-English email or text will display correctly. Web addresses are still nearly all in ASCII, which is why the most popular website in China is accessed by typing baidu.com, not 百度.中文网. And even if it did have a Chinese web address, users would still have to use QWERTY keyboards—the global standard, designed in New York around the English alphabet—to type it.
Roman characters are featured first on the search engine Baidu, the most visited web page in China.
The dominance of English on the internet is, in a way, the result of free choices. No government commanded it, no army enforces it. Yet many who have chosen to work in English have done so reluctantly, in the way a Betamax fan might bow to inevitability and purchase a VHS system. They use English because there is no other viable choice.
“It is the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism,” sighed the director of an internet provider in Russia. “The product comes from America so we must either adapt to English or stop using it. That is the right of business. But if you are talking about a technology that is supposed to open the world to hundreds of millions of people you are joking. This just makes the world into new sorts of haves and have nots.”
The president of France, Jacques Chirac, deemed the English-dominant internet “a major risk for humanity.”
Air traffic controllers, then scientists, then internet users. As each increasingly large technical community adopted English, the momentum grew. Whole countries—some containing hundreds of millions of people who have never attended a scientific conference and may not even use the internet often—were dragged into the vortex.
This process now appears inexorable, but it took a while to become so. In 1969 a prominent linguist at Columbia University noted that a world language was probably inevitable. Yet even at that late date he wasn’t sure English would be it. Yes, some 60 percent of the world’s radio and television broadcasts were in English. But resistance to the language was strong enough that he earnestly considered the possibility that the artificial language of Esperanto, which was easier to learn and had little of English’s cultural baggage, might prevail.
Betamax, in other words, was still an option.
Yet the period of choice lasted only so long, and 1969 was pretty near to the end. The following decades saw country after country succumbing to English. Even as they tried to escape from it, they fell into its growing gravity well.
India had, at its independence, temporarily allowed English to remain a “subsidiary official” language, with the understanding that the government would switch entirely to Hindi in 1965. But not only did English persist, it grew. Today, advertisements are in English, higher education is in English, and Bollywood movies feature generous helpings of English. The language remains in official use and is heard in parliamentary debates at roughly the same frequency as Hindi. The “bitter truth,” reported The New York Times recently, is that “English is the de facto national language of India.”
That is the bitter truth of many countries. Sri Lanka, which once passed a Sinhala Only Act, has restored English to its former official status (“Welcome to Official Web Portal of Government of Sri Lanka,” its home page awkwardly beams). Singapore, which had replaced English with Malay, launched a Speak Good English movement in 2000. “Investors will not come if their supervisors and managers can only guess what our workers are saying,” the prime minister explained. “Poor English reflects badly on us and makes us seem less intelligent.”
The Philippines fell, too. Despite Manuel Quezon’s quest to establish a national indigenous language to dislodge it, English remains both an official language and a constant presence. The Philippines has more call-center workers than any other country. It’s also an international center for teaching English, a place where aspiring speakers can learn the language cheaply, with a clear mainland accent.
English’s gravitational pull extends far beyond the domain where Anglophone powers promoted their language. It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia. But in 2004 its prime minister, a Harvard graduate, announced that English would replace Russian as the first foreign language in Mongolian schools. He hoped to turn Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, into a hub for call centers.
“Conquer English to make China stronger”: Li Yang, the media personality who is China’s most popular English teacher, claims to have taught millions in his campaign to turn China into a global hegemon through the mastery of English.
The most remarkable conquest by English has been China. In 1978, under the reformist premier Deng Xiaoping, China restored English as a permissible foreign language and encouraged it as part of China’s path to prosperity. Chinese television started broadcasting an English-language teaching show, Follow Me, starring a British woman and commanding an audience of tens of millions. Today the top Chinese universities offer hundreds of degree programs in subjects ranging from history to nuclear physics taught in English. Some hundred thousand native speakers of English have found work as teachers in China.
“If the Chinese … rule the world some day,” the linguist John McWhorter has written, “I suspect they will do it in English.”
English is not the language with the most native speakers today. Mandarin Chinese is, followed by Spanish. There are many people in the United States itself who struggle with English. But what’s remarkable about English is that it’s the language with the most nonnative speakers. Estimates vary widely, but it seems that roughly one in four humans on the planet can now speak it. That number appears to be growing.
For those who speak English as a foreign language, the reasons are clear. English is the language of power. Speaking it means going to better schools, getting better jobs, and moving in more elite circles. A study commissioned by the British Council of five poorer countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Rwanda) found that professionals who spoke English earned 20 to 30 percent more than those who didn’t.
In South Korea, parents alert to this dynamic have sent their young children, usually under the age of five, to clinics for lingual frenectomies, surgery to cut the thin band of tissue under the tongue. The operation ostensibly gives children nimbler tongues, making it easier for them to pronounce the difficult l and r sounds. If masters once cut slaves’ tongues out to prohibit native languages, today people do the cutting themselves. And they do it to enable English.
Lingual frenectomies, it should be said, aren’t common. Nevertheless, their mere existence speaks to a widely felt hunger for English. Even in South Korea, which has never been colonized by an Anglophone power, mastering the language is of overwhelming importance. As a professor at a Seoul university put it, “English is now becoming a means of survival.”
For the inhabitants of the United States, the anglicization of the world is, just as Churchill predicted, a “grand convenience.” It allows them to do business in any part of the world. It also helps their ideas and ambitions to resound. Films, books, shows, music, and advertisements flow easily out of the United States, so that even the remotest foreign countries feel like home.
Perhaps the most extraordinary privilege, though, is that people from the United States don’t have to struggle with foreign languages. While everyone else pays the cognitive tax of learning English, English speakers can dispense with language classes entirely. In 2013 the Modern Language Association found that college and university enrollments in foreign languages were half what they had been fifty years earlier. In other words, U.S. students have responded to globalization by learning half as many languages.
And why should they bother? If, in the early twentieth century, internationally inclined and ambitious men such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover had to learn foreign languages, their counterparts today do not. Barack Obama, despite his almost comically cosmopolitan background (a Kenyan father who met his mainland mother in a Russian class, a childhood spent in Hawai‘i and Indonesia), speaks only English.
“It’s embarrassing,” Obama has admitted. “When Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup.”