Professional Documents
Culture Documents
English as a World
Language
Oavid Crystal debates the future of the
English language
4 CONCORDJ A N U A RY 2 000
WORLD LANGUAGE
CONCORD J A N U A RY 2 000 5
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
settlement was in place, in Jamestown, ond -language, and foreign -language English introduced will be applied to
Virginia, in 1607. Loan words from speakers alike. Language is an immense- new settings and take on different sens-
Indian languages into the English spo- ly democratising institution. To have es. Tlus has often happened in the lan-
ken there - which as a result started to learned a language is immediately to guage's history; for example, in the
turn into American English - become a have rights in it. You may add to it, mod- Anglo-Sa;xon period Christian missionar-
significant feaurre of contemporary writ- ify it, play with it, create in it, ignore bits ies took over pagan words (such as heav-
ing virtually immediately. Captain John of it, as you will. And it is just as likely en, hell, God, and Eastel') and gave them
Smith, writing in 1608, describes a that the future course of English is going new mealUngs. Today we see it in tl1e
vacoon; totem is found in 1609; cavibou to be influenced by those who speak it as way, for example, a biological species in
and opossum are mentioned in 1610; a second or foreign language as by those tl1e new country sin1ilarin appearance to
moccasin in 1612; moose in 1613. who speak it as a mother-tongue. one found in tl1e old will often keep tl1e
Reference is soon being made to the dis- Fashions com1t, in language, as any- old name, even tl10ugh it is not the san1e
tinctive sound of the American accent. where else. And fashions are a nll1ction entity - pheasant in South Africa is usu-
As for literamre, 1582 was also a sig- of numbers. It is perfectly possible for a ally found for certain species offrancolin.
nificant year, as it "vasthe year in which a linguistic fashion to be started by a Secondly, words will be taken over
young man in Stratford, Warwickshire, group of second- or foreign-language ("borrowed") from the local setting -
fell in love - not with Gwyneth Paltrow learners, or by those who speak a creole usually, words from tl1e indigenous lan-
(that came later) - but with Anne or pidgin variety, which then catches on guage or languages spoken in tl1e coun-
Hathaway. Soon after - we do not know among mother-tongue speakers. try. An example fi'om tl1e South African
how or when - he moved to London, Rapping is a case in point. And as num- Sunday Times: "Diplomatic indabas only
and by 1592 was already being talked bers grow, and second/foreign-language rarely produce neatly wrapped solutions
about as a writer. Within 20 years, speakers gain in national and interna- to problems." lndaba, from the Ngmu
English literature would never be the tional prestige, usages which were previ- group of languages, was originally a trib-
same agam. ously criticised as "foreign" can become al conference, but has now been extend-
Si-, hundred years into the history of part of the standard educated speech of a ed to mean any conference between
Latin, and we see the beginnings of its locality, and eventually appear in writing. political groups.
decline. Six hundred years into the lusto- The bulk of the new distinctiveness of How many words will grow, in tl1ese
ry of English, and we see the beginnings English is going to lie in the area of ways? It does not take long before such
of its expansion. Some 4-5 million peo- vocabulary - by which I mean not just word-lists and dictionaries reach several
ple spoke English late in the reign of new words, but new meanings of words, thousand words. There were over 3,000
Queen Elizabeth 1. This had grown to a and new idiomatic phrases. This isn't items recorded in the Branfords' first
quarter of the world's population, some surprising, when you tl1ink of the range edition of the Dictionavy of South
1.5 billion, late in the reign of Queen of domains likely to generate such vocab- Afvican English (1978). There are over
Elizabeth n. The conU-astbetween Latin ulary in parts of tl1e world where English 6,000 entries in David Grote's Bvitish
and English seems total. Or is it? is being freshly used. There is a counu'Y's English fov Amevican Readers (1992).
biogeographical muqueness, which will The Concise A~tstvalian National
generate potentially large numbers of Dictional'y (1989) has 10,000 items in
Centrifugal forces it. There are over 15,000 entries in
words for alumals, fish, birds, plants,
When a language spreads, it changes. rocks, and so on - and all tl1eissues to do Cassidy & Le Page's Dictionavy of
The simple fact that parts of the world with land management and interpreta- Jamaican English.
differ from each other in fauna and flora tion. There will be words for foodstuffs, The totals are small compared with the
means that words will come into use in minks, medicines, m'ugs, and the prac- size of English vocabulary as a whole;
one area that are unknown in another, as tices associated with eating, health-care, but the effect of even fairly small num-
we have seen in the case of American disease, and death. The country's bers of localized words can be great. The
English. But the impact of a new culture mytl1010gyand religion, and practices in new words are likely to be frequently
upon English affects far more than fauna astronomy and astrology, will bring forth used within the local commmuty, pre-
and flora alone. Think, for a moment, of new names for personalities, beliefs, and cisely because they relate to distinctive
all the culmral domains which are likely rituals. Oral and perhaps also written lit- notions there. Also, these words tend
to generate new vocabulary when erauu-e will give rise to distinctive names not to occur in isolation: if a conversa-
English comes to be used in such places in sagas, poems, oratory, and folktales. tion is about, say, local politics, tl1en sev-
as West Africa, Singapore, India, or There will be a body of local laws and eral political terms are likely to come
South Africa, and speakers find them- customs, witl1 their own terminology. together, making it impenetrable.
selves adapting the language to meet The culture will have its own technology "Blairite MP in New Labour Sleaze
their conm1unicative needs - not just which will have its technical terms - such Trap, say Tories" might be a British
native speakers, of course, but those who as for vehicles, house-building, weapons, newspaper example. Six words with
learn it as a second or foreign language clotlung, ornaments, and musical insu'u- British political meanings or overtones
as well. ments. The world of leisure and the arts tl1ere, in quick succession. Exactly the
It is a point often forgotten, especially will have a linguistic dimension - names same kind of piling up of foreign expres-
by native speakers, that a language which of dances, musical styles, games, sports - sions can be found in areas where new
has come to be spoken by as many peo- as will distinctiveness in body appearance Englishes are emerging. In tl1is example
ple as English has ceased to be owned by (such as hair styles, tattoos, decoration). fi'om the South African Sunday Times, all
any of its constituent commmuties - not Virtually any aspect of social structure the local words are Afrikaans in origin:
the British, with whom the language can generate complex naming systems - "It is interesting to recall that some
began 1500 years ago, nor the local government, £1mily relationships, verkran1pte Nationalists, who pose now
Americans, who now complise its largest clubs and societies, and so on. as super Afi'ikaners, were once bitterein-
mother-tongue commmuty. The total So, when a community adopts a new del' bloedsappe." [verkramp, bigoted;
number of mother-tongue speakers in language, and starts to use it in relation bittereinder, die-hard; bloedsappe,
the world, some 400 million, is actually to all areas of life, there is inevitably staunch member of the United Party,
falling, as a proportion of world English going to be a great deal of lexical adap- formerly the South African Party, or
users, wluch probably now total some tation. This will happen in two main SAP]
1.5 billion - a quarter of the world's ways. You can see how tl1ings nught develop
population. And they all have a share in First, some words will change their nlrther. It isn't just an Afrikaans noun
the nlture of English, first-language, sec- meaning. Words from the variety of which is distinctive; in that example it
6 CONCORDJ A N U A RY 2 000
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
was a noun phrase. So, if a phrase, why travel to the countries concerned. watch American football on TV each
not a whole clause - as in English [sic] week, and their awareness of that game's
"Je ne sais quoi" or "c'est la vie". Quite technical vocabulary increases as a result.
Centripetal forces When we reflect on tlle opportunities for
lengthy sections of an originally English
sentence might come to contain chunks Six hundred years into tlle spread of both contact these days, the chances are tllat
of borrowed language, or vice versa. And Latin and English, there was a tunling- the standard element in international
this is what we find. point. In dle case of Latin, it was the English will be strengthened. Satellite
When people rely simultaneously on onset of fragmentation. In the case of television, beaming down Americall and
two or more languages to communicate English, it was the onset of expansion. British English into homes all round the
with each other, the phenomenon is But now it looks as if tlle period of world, is a particularly significant devel-
called code-switching. We can hear it expansion contained the seeds of frag- opment. An increasingly standardized
happening now all over the world, mentation. At the beginning of the new spoken English is a likely outcome, I
between all sorts of languages. But millennium, can we avoid the conclusion believe.
because English is so widespread, it is that, left to itself, English is going to These centripetral forces were lacking
especially noticeable there, in writing as fragment into mutually unintelligible a thousand years ago. Once the Roman
well as in speech. In The English varieties, just as Latin did? The forces of Empire had begun to fragment, there
Languages, Tom McArthur gives an tlle past 50 years, which have led to so was nothing to stop the centrifugal
example of a bilingual leaflet issued by many newly independent nation-states, forces tearing spoken Latin apart. The
the HongkongBank in 1994 for Filipino and a tripling of the membership of the numbers of Standard Latin speakers
workers. The Tagalog section contains a UN, certainly suggest dlis conclusion. around Europe were small, and commu-
great deal of English mixed in. For English has come to be used, in several nication between groups was difficult.
example: of these countries, as the expression of a The whole globe now is commllllicative-
sociopolitical identity, and received a ly smaller than Europe was then. It is the
Mag-deposito ng pera mula sa ibang new character as a consequence, conven- relative isolation of people from each
HongkongBank account, at any tionally labelled Nigerian English, other that causes a formerly common
Hongkongbank ATM, using your Cash Singaporean English, and so on. And if lallguage to move in different directions.
Card. Mag-transfer ng regular amount significant change can be noticed within In the Middle Ages, it was very easy for
bawa't buwan (by Standing Instruc- a relatively short period of time - a few communities to be isolated from the rest
tion) galang sa inyong Current 0 decades - must not these varieties of the world. Today it is virtually impos-
Savings Account, vvhether the account become even more differentiated over sible.
is with HongkongBank or not. the next century or so, so that we end up
with an English family of languages "?
11
A synthesis
This kind of language is often described It is possible. But there are certain
using a compound name - Taglish (for pressures working in the opposite direc- Cenu"ifugal and centripetal forces co-
Tagalog-English). We also have tion. Not everything is centrifugal. exist, and we want both. We want to
Franglais, Tex-Mex, Japlish, Spanglish, Alongside the need to reflect local situa- express our identity through language
Wenglish, and many more. Traditionally, tions and identities, which fosters diver- and we want to communicate intelligibly
these names were used as scornful appel- sity, tllere is the need for mutual intelli- through language. We want to be differ-
lations. People would sneer at Tex-Mex, gibility, which fosters standardisation. ent and we want to be the same. And the
and say it was neither one language nor People need to be able to understand splendid thing about humans using lan-
the other. It was gutter-speak, by people each other, both within a country and guage, of course, is that this is the kind
who had not learned to talk properly. internationally. There has always been a of situation the brain handles very well,
Now we know better. We can hardly call need for lingua francas. And as supra- because it is so multifunctional. One of
a language like Taglish gutter-speak national organisations grow, the need the main insights of linguistics during
when it is being used in writing by a becomes more pressing. The 185 mem- the t\ventieth century was to demon-
major banking corporation. Linguists bers of the UN are there not simply to su"ate the exu-aordinary capacity of the
have spent a lot of time analysing these express their identities, but also because brain for language. Bilingualism, multi-
"mixed" languages, and found that they they want to talk to each other. And lingualism, is the normal human condi-
are full of complexity and subdety of whatever languages are chosen by an tion. Well over half of the people in the
expression - as we would expect, if peo- organization as lingua francas, it is essen- world, perhaps two-thirds, are bilingual.
ple have the resources of two languages tial - if dle concept is to work - for Children learn their lallguages - often
to draw upon. everyone to learn the same thing, a Stall- several languages - at extraordinary
Mixed languages are certainly on the dard form of the language. In the case of speed. Evidently, there is something in
increase, as we travel the English-speak- English, when people get together on our make-up which promotes the acqui-
ing world; and it is important to realise international occasions, or read tlle inter- sition of talk. I therefore see no intrinsic
that this is happening. It is quite wrong national press, or write books for inter- problems in the gradual emergence of a
to think of the "future of world English" national publication, what they use is tri-English world - a world, that is, in
as if it was simply going to be a more Standard English. which a home dialect - often very mixed
widely used version of British English, or In fact, it isn't totally identical every- in character - a national standard dialect,
of American English. These varieties will where - the differences between British and an international standard dialect
stay, of course, but they will be supple- alld American spelling are one obvious comfortably coexist. It is a prospect
mented by other varieties which, point - but in writing it is over 99% the which our Latin forebears would have
although perhaps originating in Britain same. It is somewhat less established in envied.
or the USA, will display increasing dif- speech, where differences will frequently
ferences from them. The signs of this be heard identifying people as British, David Crystal is Honorary Professor of
period of diversification have been American, and so on. However, these are Linguistics at the University of Wales,
around a long time, but dle extent of its still very few, and are likely to diminish as Bangor and divides his time between
presence has only recently come to be international contacts increase. It is a work on language and work on general
appreciated. It is not sometlling we usu- cliche, but dle world has become a small- reference publishing. He is the editor of
ally see in print - except insofar as a nov- er place, and this has an obvious linguis- The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the
elist captures it in a conversation, or it tic consequence - that we talk to each English Language and is a member of
turns up in informal writing in a newspa- other more, and come to understand the English Language Council of the
per. But we readily encounter it when we each other more. British people can now English-Speaking Union.
CONCORD J A N UA RY 2 000 7