Illustration: Miguel Montaner
In May 2018, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he
heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with
immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement and telling one employee: “Your staff is speaking Spanish to
customers when they should be speaking English … This is America.” A
video of the incident quickly
went viral,
drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded
with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a
“fiesta” protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which
included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on
the way to work.
As the Trump administration intensifies its
crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken
on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if
something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump
took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist
roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a
pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred
years. It’s a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore
Roosevelt’s 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he
proclaimed that “we have room for but one language here, and that is the
English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our
people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in
a polyglot boardinghouse”.
As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost
perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to
dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its
position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet 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” .
For Mizumura, what makes it universal is not that it has many native
speakers – Mandarin and Spanish have more – but that it is “used by the
greatest number of non-native speakers in the world”. She compares it to
a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a
critical mass and it becomes a world currency. The literary critic
Jonathan Arac is even more blunt, noting, in a critique of what he calls
“Anglo-Globalism”, that “English in culture, like the dollar in
economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be
translated from the local to the global.”
In the last few decades, as globalisation has
accelerated and the US has remained the world’s most powerful country,
the advance of English has taken on a new momentum. In 2008, Rwanda
switched its education system from French to English, having already
made English an official language in 14 years earlier. Officially, this
was part of the government’s effort to make Rwanda the tech hub of
Africa. Unofficially, it’s widely believed to be an expression of
disgust at France’s role in propping-up the pre-1994 Hutu-dominant
government, as well as a reflection that the country’s ruling elite
mostly speaks English, having grown up as exiles in anglophone east
Africa. When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it made English its
official language despite having very few resources or qualified
personnel with which to teach it in schools. The Minister of higher
education at the time justified the move as being aimed at making the
country “different and modern”, while the news director of South Sudan
Radio added that with English, South Sudan could “become one nation” and
“communicate with the rest of the world” – understandable goals in a
country home to more than 50 local languages.
The situation in east Asia is no less dramatic.
China currently has more speakers of English as a second language than
any other country. Some prominent English teachers have become
celebrities, conducting mass lessons in stadiums seating thousands. In
South Korea, meanwhile, according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung-Yul
Park, English is a “national religion”. Korean employers expect
proficiency in English, even in positions where it offers no obvious
advantage.
The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung
or “English frenzy”. Although mostly confined to a mania for
instruction and immersion, occasionally this “frenzy” spills over into
medical intervention. As Sung-Yul Park relates: “An increasing number of
parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery
that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay
for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak
English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce
the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to
be particularly difficult for Koreans.”
There is no evidence to suggest that this
surgery in any way improves English pronunciation. The willingness to
engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me, though, as a
potent metaphor for English’s peculiar status in the modern world. It is
no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks, as
it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission
for Air Navigation. It is now seen as the access code to the global
elite. If you want your children to get ahead, then they better have
English in their toolkit.
Is the conquest of English really so bad? In the not-too-distant future,
thanks to English, the curse of Babel will be undone and the children of
men may come together once again, united with the aid of a common
tongue. Certainly, that’s what English’s boosters would have you
believe. After all, what a work is English, how copious in its
vocabulary, how noble in expression, how sinuous in its constructions,
and yet how plain in its basic principles. A language, in short, with a
word for almost everything, capable of an infinite gradation of
meanings, equally suited to describing the essential rights of mankind
as to ornamenting a packet of crisps, whose only defect, as far as I
know, is that it makes everyone who speaks it sound like a duck
Well, not really. (OK, maybe a little – English,
while not an ugly language, isn’t exactly pretty either). Mostly, I’m
speaking out of bitterness – one that is old, and until recently, lay
dormant. My first language was Polish. I learned it from my parents at
home. English followed shortly, at school in Pennsylvania. I learned to
speak it fluently, but with an accent, which took years of teasing – and
some speech therapy, kindly provided by the state – to wear away. That,
combined with the experience of watching the widespread condescension
towards those who take their time learning English, left me a lifelong
English-sceptic. (I admit, also, that a strain of linguistic megalomania
runs through many Polish speakers, one best summed up by the novelist
Joseph Conrad, who, when asked why he didn’t write in his native
language, replied: “I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to
introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities
are just sufficient.”)
It’s not that English is bad. It’s fine! A
perfectly nice language, capable of expressing a great many things – and
with scores of fascinating regional variants, from Scots to Singapore
English. But it is so prevalent. And so hard to escape. And so freighted
with buffoonish puffery written on its behalf: “our magnificent bastard
tongue”; “the language that connects the world”. Please. There is no
reason for any particular language to be worshipped around the world
like a golden idol. There is a pervasive mismatch between the grand
claims made on English’s behalf, and its limitations as means of
communication (limitations, to be fair, that it shares with all other
languages).
Is English oppressive? When its pervasive
influence silences other languages, or discourages parents from passing
on their native languages to their children, I think it can be. When you
do know another language, it’s merely constricting, like wearing
trousers that are too tight. That’s because while English is good for a
great many things, it is not good for everything. To me, family
intimacies long to be expressed in Polish. So does anything concerning
the seasons, forest products and catastrophic sorrows. Poetry naturally
sounds better in Polish. I’ve always spoken it to cats and dogs on the
assumption that they understand, being simultaneously convinced that
raccoons and lesser animals only respond to shouts.
This isn’t quite as idiosyncratic as it sounds.
Aneta Pavlenko, an applied linguist at Temple University in
Pennsylvania, who has spent her career studying the psychology of
bilingual and multilingual speakers, has found that speakers of multiple
languages frequently believe that each language conveys a “different
self”. Languages, according to her respondents, come in a kaleidoscopic
range of emotional tones. “I would inevitably talk to babies and animals
in Welsh,” reports a Welsh-speaker. An informant from Finland counters:
“Finnish emotions are rarely stated explicitly. Therefore it is easier
to tell my children that I love them in English.” Several Japanese
speakers say that it’s easier to express anger in English, especially by
swearing.
Intuitive though it might be to some, the idea
that different languages capture and construct different realities has
been a subject of academic controversy for at least 200 years. The
German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was among the first to articulate
it in a complex form. After studying Amerindian languages in the New
World, he came to the conclusion that every language “draws a circle”
around its speakers, creating a distinct worldview through its grammar
as well as in its vocabulary. In the 20th century, the American
linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated this idea into a
broader vision of how language structures thought. Both drew
inspiration for their work from their study of North American languages
such as Nootka, Shawnee and Hopi.
This idea – now usually known as the linguistic
relativity hypothesis, or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had a checkered
history in academia. At different times, it has been hailed by it
proponents as foundational insight for modern anthropology and literary
theory, and blamed by its detractors as the source of the worst excesses
of postmodern philosophy. In recent decades, sociolinguists have
arrived at a few startlingly suggestive findings concerning the
influence of language on colour perception, orientation and verbs of
motion – but in general, the more expansive notion that different
languages inculcate fundamentally different ways of thinking has not
been proven.
Nonetheless, some version of this idea continues
to find supporters, not least among writers familiar with shifting
between languages. Here is the memoirist Eva Hoffman on the experience
of learning English in Vancouver while simultaneously feeling cut off
from the Polish she had grown up speaking as a teenager in Kraków: “This
radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy,
draining the world not only of significance but of its colours,
striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living
connection.” The Chinese writer
Xiaolu Guo
described something similar in her recent memoir, writing about how
uncomfortable she felt, at first, with the way the English language
encouraged speakers to use the first-person singular, rather than
plural. “After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective
society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? … But
here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person
singular – urgently.”
In the 1970s, Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who
found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish
academia, stood the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on its head. Instead of
trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter-gatherers, she
turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones. For
Wierzbicka, English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other
language. It’s just that in an anglophone world, that invisible baggage
is harder to discern. In a series of books culminating in 2013’s
evocatively named Imprisoned in English, she has attempted to analyse
various assumptions – social, spatial, emotional and otherwise – latent
in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK.
Reading Wierzbicka’s work is like peeking
through a magic mirror that inverts the old “how natives think” school
of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves. Her English-speakers are
a pragmatic people, cautious in their pronouncements and prone to
downplaying their emotions. They endlessly qualify their remarks
according to their stance towards what is being said. Hence their
endless use of expressions such as “I think”, “I believe”, “I suppose”,
“I understand”, “I suspect”. They prefer fact over theories, savour
“control” and “space”, and cherish autonomy over intimacy. Their moral
lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture-specific
concepts called “right” and “wrong”, which they mysteriously believe to
be universal.
Wierzbicka’s description of English’s
subconscious system of values hardly holds true for the billion or more
speakers of this most global of tongues. But it is also a reminder that,
despite its influence, English is not truly universal. Its horizons are
just as limited as those of any other language, whether Chinese or Hopi
or Dalabon.
For if language connects people socially, it
also connects them to a place. The linguist Nicholas Evans has described
how Kayardild, a language spoken in northern Australia, requires a
speaker to continually orient themselves according to the cardinal
directions. Where an English speaker would orient things according to
their own perception – my left, my right, my front, my back – a speaker
of Kayardild thinks in terms of north, south, east and west. As a
consequence, speakers of Kayardild (and those of several other languages
that share this feature) possess “absolute reckoning”, or a kind of
“perfect pitch” for direction. It also means removing one’s self as the
main reference point for thinking about space. As Evans writes of his
own experiences learning the language, “one aspect of speaking
Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and
objective than you are. Kayardild grammar literally puts everyone in
their place.”
Kayardild and its kin are truly local languages,
with few speakers, and modes of expression that are hard to separate
from the places in which they are spoken. But that should not lead us to
think that they are lesser. The world is made up of places, not
universals. To speak only English, in spite of its vast vocabulary and
countless varieties, is still to dwell in a rather small pool. It draws
the same circle Humboldt described around its speakers as each of the
other 6,000 human languages. The difference is that we have mistaken
that circle for the world.
Because English is increasingly the currency of the universal, it is difficult
to express any opposition to its hegemony that doesn’t appear to be
tainted by either nationalism or snobbery. When Minae Mizumura published
the Fall of
Language
in the Age of English, in 2008, it was a surprise commercial success in
Japan. But it provoked a storm of criticism, as Mizumura was accused of
elitism, nationalism and being a “hopeless reactionary”. One
representative online comment read: “Who does she think she is, a
privileged bilingual preaching to the rest of us Japanese!” (Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Mizumura’s broader argument, about the gradual erosion
of Japanese literature – and especially, the legacy of the Japanese
modernist novel – got lost in the scuffle.).
Those of us troubled by the hyperdominance of
English should also remember the role it has played in some societies –
especially multi-ethnic ones – as a bridge to the wider world and
counterweight to other nationalisms. This was especially keenly felt in
South Africa, where Afrikaans was widely associated with the policy of
apartheid. When the government announced that Afrikaans would be used as
a language of instruction in schools on par with English in 1974, the
decision led in 1976 to a mass demonstration by black students known as
the Soweto uprising. Its brutal suppression resulted in hundreds of
deaths, and is considered a turning point in the anti-apartheid
struggle. Similar protests have periodically racked southern India since
the 1940s over attempts to enforce official use of Hindi in place of
English.
In other parts of the world though, English
still carries the full weight of its colonialist past. Since the 1960s,
the celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has advocated on behalf
of African languages and against the prevalence of English-language
education in postcolonial countries. In his landmark 1986 book
Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature,
he describes the corrosive effect of English language instruction,
comparing it to a form of “spiritual subjugation”. Colonial education,
in which pupils were physically punished for speaking their native
languages while at school (something also done to the Welsh into the
early 20th century) was necessarily, and deliberately, alienating, “like
separating the mind from the body”.
Since publishing Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ
has worked to put its dictates into practice. He renounced his baptismal
name, James, and with it Christianity, and ceased to write fiction in
English. Since the 1980s, he has written all his novels and plays in his
native Gikuyu, only using English (and occasionally Kiswahili) for
essays and polemics. This last decision is one that many people still
question. As he said in
a recent interview:
“If I meet an English person, and he says, ‘I write in English,’ I
don’t ask him, ‘Why are you writing in English?’ If I meet a French
writer, I don’t ask him, ‘Why don’t you write in Vietnamese?’ But I am
asked over and over again, ‘Why do you write in Gikuyu?’ For Africans,
the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African
language.”
Part of the paradox of Ngũgĩ’s situation is that
while he may be the world’s foremost advocate for writing literature in
African languages, his novels have won acclaim and gained international
recognition through the medium of English. The hegemony of English is
now such that, in order to be recognised, any opposition to English has
to formulated in English in order to be heard.
Today it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks.
Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world’s 6,000 or
so languages will go extinct in the coming century. For even a fraction
of these to survive, we’re going to have to start thinking of smaller
languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth
learning..
In most of the world, it’s already too late. In
California, where I live, most of the languages that were spoken before
the arrival of Europeans are already extinct. On America’s eastern
seaboard, thanks to long proximity to Anglo settlers, the situation is
even worse. Most of what we know about many of these vanished languages
comes in the form of brief word lists compiled by European settlers and
traders before the 19th century. Stadaconan (or Laurentian) survives
only from a glossary of 220 words jotted down by Jacques Cartier when he
sailed up the St Lawrence River in Canada in 1535. Eastern Atakapa,
from Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, is known from a list of only 287, gathered
in 1802. The last fragments of Nansemond, once spoken in eastern
Virginia, were collected from the last living speaker just before his
death in 1902, by which time he could only recall six words: one, two,
three, four, five and dog.
The great Malian historian and novelist Amadou
Hampâté Bâ once said that in Africa, when an elder dies, a library
burns. Today, across the world, the libraries are still burning. In his
marvellous book, Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field
Worker, the linguist Robert MW Dixon describes travelling across
Northern Queensland in the 1960s and 70s to record indigenous languages,
many of which had already dwindled to a handful of speakers. It’s hard
to remain an oral language in an increasingly text-dependent world. All
the forces of modernity, globalisation, industrialisation, urbanisation
and the rise of the nation-state are arrayed against the small and local
as opposed to the big and shareable.
In this past century, the Earth has been
steadily losing diversity at every level of biology and culture. Few
deny this is a bad thing. Too often though, we forget that these crises
of diversity depend, to a great extent, on our own decisions. Much of
what has been done can also be undone, provided there is the will for
it. Hebrew is the most famous case of a language brought back from the
dead, but linguistic revitalisation has been proven to be possible
elsewhere as well. Czech became a viable national language thanks to the
work of literary activists in the 19th century. On a much smaller
scale, endangered languages such as Manx in the Isle of Man and
Wampanoag in the US have been successfully pulled back from the brink.
Coming face-to-face with the current onslaught
of linguicide, I find myself wanting to venture a modest proposal. What
if anglo-globalism wasn’t a one-way street? What if the pre-contact
languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools? What if
British schoolchildren learned some of the languages spoken by the
actual residents of the former empire? (This is a utopian project
obviously. But how much would it actually cost to add a linguistic
elective to larger high schools? One jet fighter? A few cruise
missiles?)
Current educational discourse is full of talk
about the need to bolster children’s cognition. In the culture at large,
experts have been trumpeting the cognitive benefits of everything from
online brain games to magic mushrooms. Why not try Hopi instead? The
point of this education wouldn’t necessarily be to acquire fluency in an
extinct or smaller language – it would be to open a door.
And think of the vistas it might open up. For
generations, a huge percentage of philosophy and social science has been
conducted in and about English speakers. Humankind, as imagined by the
academy, is mostly anglophone. This has even been true in linguistics.
Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar underpinning all languages
was based on a rather narrow empirical base. More recent research into
dozens of smaller languages, like Kayardild and Pirahã, has been
steadily whittling away at his list of supposed universals. We now know
there are languages without adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and
articles. There seems to be hardly anything that a language “needs” to
be – just thousands of natural experiments in how they might be
assembled. And most of them are about to be lost.
In some ways, the worst threat may come not from
the global onrush of modernity, but from an idea: that a single
language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is
therefore somehow “normal”. This is something that’s often assumed
reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English, but
historically speaking, monolingualism is something of an aberration.
Before the era of the nation-state, polyglot
empires were the rule, rather than the exception. Polyglot individuals
abounded, too. For most of history, people lived in small communities.
But that did not mean that they were isolated from one another.
Multilingualism must have been common. Today, we see traces of this
polyglot past in linguistic hotspots such as the Mandara mountains of
Cameroon, where children as young as 10 routinely juggle four or five
languages in daily life, and learn several others in school.
Residents of Arnhem Land in northern Australia
routinely speak half a dozen or more languages by the time they are
adults. Multilingualism, writes Nicholas Evans, “is helped by the fact
that you have to marry outside your clan, which likely means your wife
or husband speaks a different language from you. It also means that you
parents each speak a different language, and your grandparents three or
four languages between them.”
A resident of another linguistic hotspot, the
Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, once told Evans: “It wouldn’t be any
good if we talked the same; we like to know where people come from.”
It’s a vision of Babel in reverse. Instead of representing a fall from
human perfection, as in the biblical story, having many languages is a
gift. It’s something to remember before we let English swallow the
globe.
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