The Role of Soft Power in the Development of English as Lingua

Franca

Since the very first civilizations, the prestige a language holds and the number of

speakers have always been tied to the political landscape that the language itself is

inserted in.The rise of a language hegemony is connected to the political power held by

its native nation; the language being one of the many means of spreading its political

influence and, in reverse, the spread of the language a consequence of the rise of its

political influence. Taking all of this and modern concepts of politics into consideration,

English became the today world’s Lingua Franca, not only because of Britain’s

colonialism but also due to USA's efficient use of Soft Power as a tool in its rise in global

power after World War II.

First of all, as it is defined by Samarin (1987), Lingua Franca is a language used

as a way of communication between individuals with different native tongues - it is this

exact definition that has been applied to the phenomenon ‘English as Lingua Franca’, as

it is explained by Seidlhofer (2005) and Jenkins (2007). In the modern world, English

has reached a never seen before influence as a contact language, becoming the official

and semi-official language of over 60 countries (Clarke D, 2023), the official language of

many international organizations, such as United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty

Organization, easily verified in their official websites, and also much used in Academia,

including scientific researches and publication.

 To fully understand how this global hegemony came to be, it is necessary to

explain Hard Power and Soft Power, terms developed by Joseph S. Nye Jr. in the late

1980s. In his ‘Soft Power’ article, Nye explains that what is commonly measured as a

nation’s power is its “population, territory, natural resources, economic size, military

forces, and political stability”. As it is know from humanity’s history, until the end of the II

World War, out of these six, the most decisive one had been military strength, that is,

Hard Power. Nevertheless, the world changed, and at a time of postwar world, military

power relevance began to wane. Nations - especially the United States -, in a bid to

maintain the relevance they had at the end of World War II, had to find other ways of

exercising influence over other countries.That is when the use of Soft Power grew: the

use of culture and ideology to influence other countries.

Applying the concepts of hard and soft power to the development of English as a

language of global communication, it becomes clear how the English language became

the Lingua Franca: an inheritance from British colonialism and United States military

occupation that lined up right to the cultural and ideological fever that was the second

half of the XX century. With the advance of technology, and the invention of radio and

television, occidental countries were flooded with American and British media: the

advent of Hollywood, Broadway, singers and bands like Elvis Presley and The Beatles,

the pop musical genre, TV shows, sports and even food. It also was a time not only of

social movements and manifestations, but also the period of the Cold War, when the

United States spread its ideologies with capitalism, the ‘Self-Made Man’ and ‘The

American Dream’.
 All of this worked in making English more and more relevant, also making people

want to learn English, and, in turn, growing the relevance of English speaking countries.

Although times changed in the last decade, and the world has moved on from the

cultural-ideological hegemony that was the end of the last century in the west, it seems

that the English language gained a dimension of its own. English as Lingua Franca

became so integrated in the present world that it became a usual requirement for many

jobs and turned even English teaching institutions into an exercise in Soft Power, as

pointed out by Ribeiro (2017). All in all, it is clear the role Hard Power, and especially

Soft Power, played in today’s English’s status as the world’s Lingua Franca, and the

impossibility to separate a language’s prestige from politics.

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