Is the reign of English as a global language ending? With over 6,000 languages spoken, written, listened to or read around the world, how are you supposed to know which ones will be important in your lifetime? Or in your children’s lifetime? What might change the influence of the English language in a globalised world?

Gideon wrote me an e-mail a couple of weeks ago which made me think it was time to start blogging about language again. I thought it would be a good idea to revise some ideas on language and keep up the routine of mixing ideas from the books I’m currently reading into my blog posts.

Languages in a Globalising World

I chose “Languages in a Globalising World” to begin with—it contains lots of interesting essays from respected linguists on language and globalisation. The first one I thought I would bring to your attention was written by William F. Mackey and is titled ‘Forecasting the fate of languages’:

“Today, an apparently unstoppable trend towards global English usage could change direction in the future as a consequence of a surprisingly minor event (Graddol, 1997, p21) or, more probably, a chain of consequences of a sequence of events affecting the evolution, modification or replacement of one language function with another.”

According to Mackey, the biggest problem we have for measuring which languages are and will be the most important is that we don’t really have a standard model for measuring who speaks which language, what ‘speaking a language’ really means and what relationship language and language speakers have with the idea of country or nation (sound familiar?).

A complete model would, he asserts, have to take into account geography, immigration, politics, technology, urbanisation, acculturation, territoriality, life style, endogamy, economic prosperity, self-esteem, emigration, disease, genocide, birth rate, exogamy, joblessnesss, schooling, poverty and language laws, whilst at the same time describing the interaction between all of these elements in terms of how they affect a language’s development.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that most language data we have come from national census surveys which see language as just one aspect of a much larger inquiry into the population’s habits.

If a country includes language related questions at all, many of them are overly simplistic: “Most census-based language statistics maintain a one person-one-language figure based on a person’s ‘main’ language…(but)…the most usual language of millions of people in many countries is not the language they first learned at home.”

If Hitler had won World War II

“If Hitler had won World War II…” is an oft-thought of idea when we think of the interplay between language, politics and history but Mackey quotes Robert Cowley and the idea of counterfactual reasoning to help him wonder what might really have changed the course of English in the past:

“If the Spanish Armada in 1588 had won the key naval battle at Graveline in the English Channel (and it was much closer than people think) the Spanish Army could have crossed the Channel to England. There was nothing to stop them from marching right to London deposing Queen Elizabeth. England would have been Catholic again. There would probably have been no British colonies in the New World, and if there are not British colonies in the New World, you have no United States.”

What do you think might change the fate of English as a global language and what does ‘speaking English’ really mean?