English as a global language

Indeed, such a scenario would not be so different from that al-ready found in English. There are over 350 living languages given as vocabulary sources in the files of the Oxford English dictionary. And, for example, there are already over 250 words with Malay as part of their etymology in the OED. So the foundation is already laid. The contact-language words of the future will of course in¬clude more alternative rather than supplementary expressions - localized words for everyday notions, such as tables and chairs, rather than for regionally restricted notions, such as fauna and flora - but the notion of a lexical mosaic as such is not new. It has always been part of the language.

3.6 An English family of languages?

The future of world English is likely to be one of increasing mul- tidialectism; but could this become multilingualism? Is English going to fragment into mutually unintelligible varieties, just as Vulgar Latin did a millennium ago? The forces of the past fifty years, which have led to so many New Englishes, suggest this outcome. If such significant change can be noticed within a rela¬tively short period of time, must not these varieties become even more differentiated over the next century, so that we end up, as McArthur argues, with an English 'family of languages'?

Prophets have been predicting such an outcome for some time. In 1877, the British philologist Henry Sweet (the probable model for Shaw's Henry Higgins in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady) thought that a century later 'England, America, and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, owing to their inde¬pendent changes of pronunciation'.61 The same point had been made nearly a century before by Noah Webster, in his Disserta¬tions (1789). Webster thought that such a development would be 'necessary and unavoidable', and would result in 'a language in North America, as different from the future language ofEngland, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another'. From Webster's pro-American point of view, of course, that would not have been such a bad thing.

Neither of these scholars proved to be accurate prophets. And indeed, it is plain that the question of fragmentation does not have a single simple answer. The history of language suggests that such a course of events has been a frequent phenomenon (as in the well-known case of Latin); but the history oflanguage is no longer a guide. Today, we live in the proverbial global village, where we have immediate access to other languages and varieties of English in ways that have come to be available but recently; and this is having a strong centripetal effect. With a whole range of fresh auditory models becoming routinely available, chiefly through satellite television, it is easy to see how any New English could move in different directions at the same time. The pull imposed by the need for identity, which has been making New Englishes increasingly dissimilar from British English, could be balanced by a pull imposed by the need for intelligibility, on a world scale, which will make them increasingly similar, through the continued use of Standard English. At the former level, there may well be increasing mutual unintelligibility; but at the latter level, there would not.

None of this disallows the possible emergence of a family of English languages in a sociolinguistic sense; but mutual unin- telligibility will not be the basis of such a notion in the case of New Englishes, any more than it has been in relation to intrana- tional accents and dialects. Although there are several well-known instances of dialect unintelligibility among people from differ¬ent regional backgrounds, especially when encountered at rapid conversational speed - in Britain, Cockney (London), Geordie (Newcastle), Scouse (Liverpool) and Glaswegian (Glasgow) are among the most commonly cited cases - the problems largely resolve when a speaker slows down, or they reduce to difficulties over isolated lexical items. This makes regional varieties of English no more problematic for linguistic theory than, say, occupational varieties such as legal or scientific. It is no more illuminating to call

Cockney or Scouse 'different English languages' than it would be to call Legal or Scientific by such a name, and anyone who chooses to extend the application of the term 'language' in this way finds a slippery slope which eventually leads to the blurring of the poten-tially useful distinctions between 'language', 'variety' and 'dialect'.

The intelligibility criterion has traditionally provided little sup-port for an English 'language family'. But we have learned from sociolinguistics in recent decades that this criterion is by no means an adequate explanation for the language nomenclature of the world, as it leaves out of consideration linguistic attitudes, and in particular the criterion of identity. It is this which allows us to say that people from Norway, Sweden and Denmark speak different languages, notwithstanding the considerable amount of intelligi-bility which exists between them. It seems that if a community wishes its way of speaking to be considered a 'language', and if they have the political power to support their decision, there is nothing which can stop them doing so. The present-day ethos is to allow communities to deal with their own internal policies them¬selves, as long as these are not perceived as being a threat to others. However, to promote an autonomous language policy, two crite¬ria need to be satisfied. The first is to have a community with a single mind about the matter, and the second is to have a commu¬nity which has enough political-economic 'clout' to make its de¬cision be respected by outsiders with whom it is in regular contact. When these criteria are lacking, any such movement is doomed.

There are very few examples of English generating varieties which are given totally different names, and even fewer where these names are rated as 'languages' (as opposed to 'dialects'). There are some cases among the English-derived pidgins and creoles around the world (e.g. Tok Pisin, Gullah), but any proposal for language status is invariably surrounded with controversy. An instance from the mid-1990s is the case of Ebonics - a blend of Ebony + phonics - proposed for the variety of English spoken by African Americans, and which had previously been called by such names as Black Vernacular English or African-American Vernac¬ular English. Although the intentions behind the proposal were noble, and attracted some support, it was denounced by people from across the political and ethnic spectrum, including such prominent individuals as Education Secretary Richard W. Riley, the black civil rights leader Revd Jesse Jackson, and writer Maya Angelou. Quite evidently the two criteria above did not obtain: the US black community did not have a single mind about the matter, and the people who had the political-economic clout to make the decision be respected also had mixed views about it.

By giving a distinct name, Ebonics, to what had previously been recognized as a variety of English, a hidden boundary in the collective unconscious seems to have been crossed. It is in fact very unusual to assign a novel name to a variety of English in this way, other than in the humorous literature, where such names as Strine (a spelling of an imagined casual Australian pronunciation of the word 'Australian') can be found. There are indeed many world English locations which have generated their regional humour book, in which the local accent or dialect is illustrated by comic 'translations' into Standard English. Exchanges of this kind, however, are part of the genre of language play, and recognized as such by author and reader. They are not serious attempts to upgrade the status of the dialect into a separate language. The notion of translation which they employ is purely figurative. Indeed, the humour depends on a tacit recognition of the fact that we are dealing with a variety which is 'non-standard', and that people can recognize what it is saying. There is no true intelligibility problem and no problem of identity status.

There is one clear case where a specific regional variety of English has acquired a new name as part of its claim to be recognized as a standard in its locality: Scots. Here is McArthur's summary of the situation:

The people of Scotland occupy a unique historical and cultural position in the English-speaking world. They use the standard language (with distinctive phonological, grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic features) in administration, law, education, the media, all national institutions, and by and large in their dealings with Anglophones elsewhere, but in their everyday lives a majority of them mix 'the King's English' with what in an earlier age was called 'the King's Scots'.

How does Scots stand in relation to the two criteria referred to above? The situation is complex, because the Scots community does not have a single mind about the matter, nor has it had enough political-economic power to make any decision be re¬spected by outsiders. In relation to the former point, the case in favour has been strongly argued by the leading scholar on Scots, Jack Aitken. After reviewing the arguments, he concludes:

All the phenomena just recounted - the distinctiveness of Scots, its still substantial presence in daily speech, the fact that it was once the national language, its identifiably distinct history, its adoption (some Gaels would call it usurpation) of the nation's name, and the massive and remarkable and still vital literature in it, mutually support one another and one fur¬ther and remarkable phenomenon - the ancient and still persistent notion that Scots is indeed 'the Scottish language'.

But the missionary tone of this quotation, along with the indication that at least one section of the Scottish community thinks differently, suggests a complex sociolinguistic situation; and at the end ofhis article even Aitken pulls back from the brink: 'I believe what I have written suggests that if Scots is not now a full "language" it is something more than a mere "dialect". A distinguished German scholar once called it a Halbsprache - a semi-language.' In relation to the second criterion, it remains to be seen whether the changing political situation in Scotland (the 1997 referendum on devolution agreeing the formation of a new Scots Assembly) will produce a stronger voice in favour of Scots. McArthur is doubtful: 'Any political change in the condition of Scotland is unlikely to have a direct influence on the shaky condi¬tion of Scots or Gaelic, because the movement for Scottish auton¬omy (within the EU) does not have a linguistic dimension to it.' If he is right, then that eliminates the strongest traditional contender for a separate identity within an English family of languages.

In all these cases of emerging linguistic status, however, the number of speakers involved has been a minority, within a much larger sociopolitical entity. We have yet to see whether the same situation will obtain in countries where the New English speakers are in a majority and hold political power, or in locations where new, supranational political relationships are being formed. For example, although several languages are co-official in the Euro¬pean Union, pragmatic linguistic realities result in English being the most widely used language in these corridors (see p. 12). But what kind of common English emerges, when Germans, French, Greeks and others come into contact, each using English with its own pattern of interference from the mother tongue? There will be the usual sociolinguistic accommodation, and the result will be a novel variety, of 'Euro-English' - a term which has been used for over a decade with reference to the distinctive vocabulary of the Union (with its Eurofighters, Eurodollars, Eurosceptics and so on), but which must now be extended to include the various hybrid accents, grammatical constructions and discourse patterns encountered there. On several occasions, I have encountered English-as-a-first-language politicians, diplo¬mats and civil servants working in Brussels commenting on how they have felt their own English being pulled in the direction of these foreign-language patterns. A common feature, evidently, is to accommodate to an increasingly syllable-timed rhythm. Others include the use of simplified sentence constructions, the avoidance of idioms and colloquial vocabulary, a slower rate of speech, and the use of clearer patterns of articulation (avoiding some ofthe assimilations and elisions which would be natural in a first-language setting). It is important to stress that this is not the 'foreigner talk' reported in an earlier ELT era. These people are not 'talking down' to their colleagues, or consciously adopting simpler expressions, for the English of their interlocutors may be as fluent as their own. It is a natural process of accommodation, which in due course could lead to new standardized forms.

It is plain that the emergence of hybrid trends and varieties raises all kinds oftheoretical and pedagogical questions, several of which began to be addressed during the 1990s. They blur the long-standing distinctions between 'first', 'second' and 'foreign' language. They make us reconsider the notion of 'standard', especially when we find such hybrids being used confidently and fluently by groups of people who have education and influence in their own regional setting. They present the traditionally clear-cut notion of'translation' with all kinds of fresh problems, for (to go back to the Malaysian example) at what point in a conversation should we say that a notion of translation is relevant, as we move from 'understanding' to 'understanding most of the utterance precisely' to 'understanding little of the utterance precisely ("getting the drift" or "gist")' to 'understanding none of the utterance, despite its containing several features of English'? And, to move into the sociolinguistic dimension, hybrids give us new challenges in relation to language attitudes: for example, at what point would our insistence on the need for translation cause an adverse reaction from the participants, who might maintain they are 'speaking English', even though we cannot understand them?

This whole topic is so recent that it is difficult to make predictions with much confidence. Many of the new varieties have grown extremely rapidly, so that it is difficult to establish their role in their society, or how people are reacting to them. In several cases, it is known that the rise of a local English generates controversy within the community. Some writers seize on the new variety with enthusiasm, and try to make it even more distinctive. Others prefer to retain strong links with the British or American standard. Some teachers, likewise, allow the new forms into their teaching; others rule them out.

The Indian author Raja Rao, writing in 1963, was one who looked forward to the development of a new Indian English:

English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up - like Sanskrit and Persian was before - but not of our emotional make-up .. .We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American.

And a similar view comes from Salman Rushdie, in the essay re-ferred to:

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial - or is it post-colonial? - cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it. Assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its front.

To take the case of India, only because it's the one in which I'm most familiar. The debate about the appropriateness of English in post- British India has been raging ever since 1947; but today, I find, it is a debate which has meaning only for the older generation. The children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has made one ofthe clearest statements representing the middle-of-the-road position:

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds ofuse. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience ...I feel that English will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.

In the years since these remarks were made, this is precisely what has been happening - and not only in Africa, but throughout the countries of the outer circle. There is even a suggestion that some of the territories of the expanding circle - those in which English is learned as a foreign language - may be bending English to suit their purposes, as in the case of Euro-English (p. 182). Local us¬ages are emerging, and achieving standard status within a region. For example, 'Welcome in Egypt' is now so established among Egyptian speakers of English, of all educational backgrounds and social classes, that it must now be seen as a variant as standard in character as is the prepositional variation between 'quarter to' and 'quarter of' in US and UK time-telling.

If Englishes did become increasingly different, as years went by, the consequences for world English would not necessarily be fatal. A likely scenario is that our current ability to use more than one dialect would simply extend to meet the fresh demands of the international situation. A new form of English - let us think of it as 'World Standard Spoken English' (WSSE) - would almost certainly arise. Indeed, the foundation for such a development is already being laid around us.

Most people are already 'multidialectal' to a greater or lesser extent. They use one spoken dialect at home, when they are with their family or talking to other members of their local commu¬nity: this tends to be an informal variety, full of casual pronuncia¬tion, colloquial grammar, and local turns of phrase. They use an¬other spoken dialect when they are away from home, travelling to different parts of their country or interacting with others at their place of work: this tends to be a formal variety, full of careful pronunciation, conventional grammar, and standard vocabulary. Those who are literate have learned a third variety, that of writ¬ten standard English which (apart from a few minor differences, such as British vs. American spelling) currently unites the English- speaking world.

In a future where there were many national Englishes, little would change. People would still have their dialects for use within their own country, but when the need came to communicate with people from other countries they would slip into WSSE. So, a multinational company might decide to hold a conference at which representatives from each of its country operations would be present. The reps from Kolkata, sharing a cab on their way to the conference, would be conversing in informal Indian English. The reps from Lagos, in their cab, would be talking in informal Nigerian English. The reps from Los Angeles would be using in¬formal American English. Any one of these groups, overhearing any other, might well find the conversation difficult to follow. But when all meet at the conference table, there would be no problem: everyone would be using WSSE.

People who attend international conferences, or who write scripts for an international audience, or who are 'talking' on the Internet have probably already felt the pull of this new variety. It takes the form, for example, of consciously avoiding a word or phrase which you know is not going to be understood outside your own country, and of finding an alternative form of expres¬sion. It can also affect your pronunciation and grammar. But it is too early to be definite about the way this variety will develop. WSSE is still in its infancy. Indeed, it has hardly yet been born.

If one happens to be in the right place at the right time, one can glimpse the birth pangs. I saw such a pang while attending an international seminar at a European university in the late 1990s. Around the table were representatives of some twenty countries. There were two people from the UK, two from the USA, and one from Australia, with the others all from countries where English was either a second (official) language or a foreign language. The lingua franca of the meeting was English, and everyone seemed to be using the language competently - even the native speakers. We were well into the discussion period following a paper which had generated a lively buzz of comment and counter-comment. Someone then made a telling remark. There was a silence round the table, which was broken by one of the US delegates observing: 'That came from out in left field.' There was another silence, and I could see some of the delegates turning to their neighbours in a surreptitious way, as one does when one does not understand what on earth is going on, and wants to check that one is not alone. But they were not pondering the telling remark. They were asking each other what 'from out in left field' meant. My neighbour asked me: as a native speaker, he felt confident I would know. I did not know. Baseball at that time was a closed book to me - and still is, very largely.

One of the braver of the delegates spoke up: 'Out where?', he asked. It took the US delegate by surprise, as plainly he had never had that idiom questioned before; but he managed to explain that it was a figure of speech from baseball, a ball coming from an unusual direction, and what he had meant was that the remark was surprising, unexpected. There were nods of relief from around the table. Then one of the UK delegates chipped in: 'You played that with a straight bat', he said. 'Huh?', said the American. 'Oh, I say, that's not cricket', I added, parodically. 'Isn't it?', asked a delegate from Asia, now totally confused. The next few minutes of the meeting were somewhat chaotic. The original theme was quite forgotten, as people energetically debated the meaning of cricket and baseball idioms with their neighbours. Those who could added their own local version of how they said things like that in their part of the world - the sports metaphors they lived by. Eventually, the chairman called everyone back to order, and the discussion of the paper continued. But my attention was blown, and I spent the remainder of the session listening not to what delegates were saying, but to how they were saying it.

What was immediately noticeable was that the native speak¬ers seemed to become much less colloquial. In particular, I did not sense any further use of national idioms. Indeed, the speakers seemed to be going out of their way to avoid them. I made a small contribution towards the end, and I remember thinking while I was doing it - 'don't use any cricket terms'. Afterwards, in the bar, others admitted to doing the same. My British colleague said he had consciously avoided using the word fortnight, replacing it by two weeks. And, as the evening wore on, people began apolo¬gizing facetiously when they noticed themselves using a national idiom, or when somebody else used one. It became something of a game - the kind that linguists love to play. There was one nice moment when the US, UK and Australian delegates were all re¬duced to incoherence because they found that they had disbarred themselves from using any of their natural expressions for 'the safe walking route at the side of a road' - pavement (UK), sidewalk (US) and footpath (Australian). In the absence of a regionally neu¬tral term, all they were left with was circumlocution (such as the one just given).

It is only an anecdote, but it is an intriguing one, as it illus¬trates one of the directions in which people can go as they move towards a WSSE. It did not have to be that direction. It would have been perfectly possible for the seminar group to have gone down another road: to have adopted 'out in left field' as an idiom, everyone adding it to their own idiolect - de-Americanizing it, as it were. That did not happen, on that occasion, though it seems to be happening a lot elsewhere. US English does seem likely to be the most influential in the development of WSSE. The direction of influence has for some time been largely one-way. Many gram¬matical issues in contemporary British usage show the influence of US forms, US spellings are increasingly widespread (especially in computer contexts), and there is a greater passive awareness of distinctively US lexicon in the UK (because of media influ¬ence) than vice versa. On the other hand, the situation will be complicated by the emergence on the world scene of new lin¬guistic features derived from the L2 varieties, which as we have seen will in due course become numerically dominant. No fea¬ture of L2 English has yet become a part of standard US or UK English; but, as the balance of speakers changes, there is no rea¬son for L2 features not to become part of WSSE. This would be especially likely if there were features which were shared by several (or all) L2 varieties - such as the use of syllable-timed rhythm, or the widespread difficulty observed in the use of th sounds.

The development of WSSE can be predicted because it enables people, yet again, to 'have their cake and eat it'. The concept of WSSE does not replace a national dialect: it supplements it. People who can use both are in a much more powerful position than people who can use only one. They have a dialect in which they can continue to express their national identity; and they have a dialect which can guarantee international intelligibility, when they need it. The same dual tendencies can be seen on the Inter¬net, incidentally, which simultaneously presents us with a range of informal identifying personal varieties and a corpus of univer¬sally intelligible standard English. It is an interesting context for those wishing to study the forces affecting language change, with users searching for a balance between the attraction of a 'cool', idiosyncratic, but often unintelligible linguistic persona and the need to use an 'uncool' standardized form of expression in order to make oneself understood!

'Having your cake and eating it', of course, also applies to the use of completely different languages as markers of identity. It may well be that the people travelling by cab to the international conference would be speaking Hindi, Hausa, and Spanish, respec¬tively. When they all meet at the conference table, they would switch into WSSE. They do not have to give up their national linguistic identities just because they are going to an international meeting. But of course this scenario assumes that Hindi, Hausa, and Spanish are still respected, alive and well, and living in their respective home communities.

There is nothing unusual, in linguistic terms, about a com¬munity using more than one variety (or language) as alternative standards for different purposes. The situation is the familiar one of diglossia, as illustrated by the 'high' and 'low' varieties found in such languages as Greek, German and Arabic. It would seem that English at the global level is steadily moving towards becom¬ing a diglossic language. Already, in such locations as Singapore, we see two spoken varieties co-existing (albeit uncomfortably, p. 174), one being used for intelligibility (Standard British English) and the other for identity (Singlish). A similar scenario is found in the Philippines, where Standard American English co¬exists alongside Taglish. If WSSE emerges as a neutral global va¬riety in due course, it will make redundant the British/American distinction. British and American English will still exist, ofcourse, but as varieties expressing national identity in the UK and USA. For global purposes, WSSE will suffice.



Conclusion

There has never been a language so widely spread or spoken by so many people as English.The balance between the competing demands of intelligibility and identity is especially fragile, and can easily be affected by social change, such as a swing in immigrant policy, new political alliances, or a change in a country's population trends.

The emergence of English with a genuine global presence therefore has a significance which goes well beyond this particular language. Because there are no precedents for languages achieving this level of use (if we exclude Latin, which was in a sense 'global' when the world was much smaller), we do not know what happens to them in such circumstances. The investigation of world English therefore provides a fresh testing-ground for sociolinguis- tic hypotheses which previously had only regional validity, and a domain where we may encounter new kinds of phenomena which might one day motivate a global reconceptualization of that subject. What happens to a language when it is spoken by many times more people as a second or foreign language than as a mother- tongue? If English does one day go the same way as Latin and French, and have less of a global role, the next languages to rise (the potential of Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hindi/Urdu is highlighted by Graddol will doubtless be subject to the same governing factors. So far, although we have a general sense of what these factors are, we have very little understanding of how they interact, and of what happens to the structural character of a language when it achieves a global presence.

If we cannot predict the future, we can at least speculate, and there are some fascinating speculations to be made. It may well be the case, as was intimated earlier, that the English language has already grown to be independent of any form of social control. There may be a critical number or critical distribution of speakers (analogous to the notion of critical mass in nuclear physics) be¬yond which it proves impossible for any single group or alliance to stop its growth, or even influence its future. If there were to be a major social change in Britain which affected the use of English there, would this have any real effect on the world trend? It is unlikely. And, as we have seen, even the current chief player, the USA, will have decreasing influence as the years go by, because of the way world population is growing.

In 500 years' time, will it be the case that everyone will auto-matically be introduced to English as soon as they are born (or, by then, very likely, as soon as they are conceived)? If this is part of a rich multilingual experience for our future newborns, this can only be a good thing. If it is by then the only language left to be learned, it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.

If there is a critical mass, does this mean that the emergence of a global language is a unique event, in evolutionary terms? It may be that English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever.



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