Empires Of The Word Part 34

Birth rates are high across the Arabic-speaking countries, so their population may more than double in the next half-century. This should be enough to maintain Arabic's position as the fifth-biggest language; but it will still be necessary to add together what are in effect twenty-five separate spoken languages-there is no trend towards a unified standard outside elite usage. Most of the more southerly parts of Africa are also growing far beyond the global average, so we can expect its languages to move up the league table: if they keep pace with Nigeria's population as a whole, the two largest, Hausa and Yoruba, will treble their native-speaker populations by 2050, rising from thirty-eighth and forty-ninth positions to twenty-first and twenty-third. Even with such growth, however, the languages of sub-Saharan Africa will remain outside the top twenty for the next fifty years.

Unsurprisingly, the European languages on the list are in a much more fragile position. German and Italian have owed their large numbers to organic growth of their home populations; in terms of current fertility rates, though, these are set to fall, perhaps by as much as 10 per cent in the next fifty years. This would be enough to demote German towards the bottom of the top twenty, and relegate Italian altogether. But any decrease in either of these countries is in present conditions likely to be made up by increased immigration, effectively maintaining speaker communities through foreign recruitment.

Russian too is in decline. Augmenting its organic growth in eastern Europe, it has had a role as the lingua franca of a vast empire, which at its height took in the whole of north Asia in a gigantic crescent from the Caucasus to the Sea of j.a.pan. At the moment, however, populations are shrinking all across the remaining parts of greater Russia; and where they are not, in the newly independent states of central Asia, people are reawakening to the fact they have a pre-existing lingua franca to use with the neighbours in their own, closely related and mutually intelligible, Turkic languages. If these do not suffice, the people are also increasingly coming to believe that their global links may be better served by adopting English rather than Russian as their language of wider communication. For all these reasons, the future does not look rosy for Russian.

The other major European languages, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, all owe their status to the colonial empires that came to dominate the earth in the second half of the second millennium AD. They are the languages of colonial populations that were able to grow ma.s.sively in their new, transplanted, homes, adding the strength of immigrants to their natural increase; they were also able to spread at the expense of languages previously local to the colonised lands: in this way, languages of wider communication often ended up monopolising all the communication.

For all of them except French, their most populous ex-colony now vastly outnumbers their motherland: the USA has over four times the population of the UK, Mexico almost three times that of Spain, Brazil seventeen times that of Portugal. It is extremely difficult to predict their positions among the most widespread languages of the world fifty years from now. Spanish and Portuguese should maintain their share in countries that are still growing strongly: Mexico and Brazil, for example, are expected to add some 50 per cent to their populations in this period, and the other colonies in the Americas and Africa will not be that different. Meanwhile, the USA may add a quarter to its population, although this may not benefit the English-language community-significantly, the growth is mainly among Spanish speakers.

In fact, it is for French and English that the future is hardest to predict. These are the languages that might be seen as vehicles of globalisation, each in its way a lingua franca for contact with a wider world. Their native-speaker populations tend to be in countries where the population has stabilised and may even be decreasing. This would imply that their prospects for future growth are limited. However, those same countries are the most influential in the world, economically, culturally and militarily. As a result, English and French are widely acquired as second languages by people all over the world, for business and cultural reasons that have everything to do with the prestige of the languages. In the case of French especially, the language's status is locked in politically, since so many of France's ex-colonies, especially in central Africa, have adopted it as their official language. (See Chapter 11, 'La francophonie', p. 419.) As for English, the prestige has sometimes very little to do with historic links: witness the current surge of interest in learning English around the Baltic Sea, a zone that has never had dealings with Britain or America. More generally, US-centred ma.s.s culture enjoys global popularity at the moment. But the long-term linguistic effect of this, as we have seen, may be surprisingly transient. (See also Chapter 14, 'Way to go', p. 541.) The future balance among languages worldwide is now very much in contention. Demographically, the role of the European languages, and especially English, could have been expected to decline, as the rest of the world grows both absolutely, and in terms of relative wealth. (One key milestone was pa.s.sed recently, when English traffic on the Internet was exceeded by the total in other languages.) But as that wealth grows, there appears to be an increasing demand to learn and use these languages, for they are now seen less as symbols of colonial domination and more as crucial keys for access to the global system. In some sense, the languages' importance in the role of lingua franca, and as symbols of commitment to a way of life that goes beyond local interests, counteracts the decline of their dominance as first languages.

This tension between inward and outward growth, between the increasing importance of a mother tongue as its speaker population grows and the concurrent popularity of a lingua franca seen as developing links to a wider world, is felt not only at this, global, level. In principle, it is nothing new: the same tension has a long history in the struggles to transcend tribal and communal frictions in order to build federated nations.

It is notable that the two largest languages in Indonesia, Javanese (75 million) and Sundanese (27 million), both spoken on the highly populated island of Java, are growing fast, and are far larger than what is promoted as the national language of the country, Bahasa Indonesia (17 million)-which is linguistically none other than Malay, the lingua franca of the East Indies, and as such spoken not only in Indonesia but also in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, with 47 million speakers in all.* For most people in Indonesia, as in the world, local life and its contacts still loom far larger than national or global aspirations.

Likewise, in East Africa the lingua franca is Swahili. This language, of Bantu origin but transformed through trade contact with Arabic (see Chapter 3, 'Arabic-eloquence and equality: The triumph of 'submission", p. 103), has some 30 million speakers in all, but only 5 million of them acquired it naturally as their first language. Nevertheless, it is the official language of Tanzania, and the most widely spoken language in neighbouring Kenya and many other countries in the area. Everywhere, it has fewer speakers than the countries' largest languages.

For many purposes, it is less important how many there are in a linguistic community than who those people are-and how well distributed.

* The first language of African origin is in fact Egyptian Arabic, with 46 million speakers, which ranks it no higher than twenty-third. The different 'dialects' of Arabic, of which there are over twenty-five, offer quite solid barriers to mutual intelligibility, so they are well cast in this list as distinct languages. If they are consolidated as a single hyper-language community, united by the elite's use of cla.s.sical Arabic as a lingua franca, they would amount to something over 205 million, placing them between Bengali and Portuguese. Those who know cla.s.sical Arabic number about 100 million. (The distant ancestry of Arabic, like all the Semitic languages, lies in Africa. See Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 58. The next major African language is Hausa, with 39 million native and secondary speakers.) * The first language of African origin is in fact Egyptian Arabic, with 46 million speakers, which ranks it no higher than twenty-third. The different 'dialects' of Arabic, of which there are over twenty-five, offer quite solid barriers to mutual intelligibility, so they are well cast in this list as distinct languages. If they are consolidated as a single hyper-language community, united by the elite's use of cla.s.sical Arabic as a lingua franca, they would amount to something over 205 million, placing them between Bengali and Portuguese. Those who know cla.s.sical Arabic number about 100 million. (The distant ancestry of Arabic, like all the Semitic languages, lies in Africa. See Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 58. The next major African language is Hausa, with 39 million native and secondary speakers.) They are better known in the West as Shanghainese and Cantonese.

* Nevertheless, its a.s.sociation with Indonesia was strong enough for it to be pointedly discarded as an official language in the new state of East Timor, which has nostalgically opted instead for a return to the language of the earlier colonial power, Portuguese.

14.

Looking Ahead

What is old

The most evident judgement to emerge from our global survey is that migration of peoples, the first force in history to spread languages, dominates to this day. A farmers' migration brought Chinese south to the banks of the Yangtze Kiang and beyond; nomads' and refugees' migrations brought Aramaic east from Syria and down the Euphrates to Babylon; a merchants' migration brought Punic across the Mediterranean sea from Tyre to Carthage and North Africa. Migrations organised politically as state colonies, but still attracting volunteers, seeded Latin among the Gauls of northern Italy and southern France in the second and first centuries BC, as they seeded English along the eastern sh.o.r.es of North America in the seventeenth AD, and along the sh.o.r.es of Australia in the nineteenth. Even now the quasi-spontaneous migration dynamic of Spanish speakers moving north across the Rio Grande is the greatest challenge to the complete dominance of English in the USA.

It appears that, until the interesting developments with English in India in the nineteenth century, foreign conquests led to language shift only if the conquest was followed up with substantial immigration of people who already spoke the conquerors' language. In this sense, it is migration rather than conquest which is really at root when a military conqueror apparently spreads his language into new territories.

The importance of attracting immigrants may account for a major difference that we noted between the Greek and Roman empires. Greek-speaking only superficially followed Alexander's conquests in the far-flung provinces of the Persian empire, even though Greek control was politically secure. In Persia itself, Greek was eliminated after five or six generations when Parthians rea.s.serted indigenous control; and even in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where Greek administration was taken up under the Romans and so continued for a millennium, the popular language for all that time remained Aramaic (with Egyptian in Egypt). When the Arabs took over administration in the seventh century, Greek was eliminated altogether within a couple of generations, even after a thousand years. By contrast, the Roman conquests on the continent of western Europe have proved permanent in their linguistic effects. Even where there were no explicit colonies (and we have noted how these led the way for Latin in northern Italy-see Chapter 7, 'Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts', p. 293), all over the empire the Roman army provided a continuing source of settlers, veterans often settling down and working the land where they had served.1 Likewise, the cracking early pace of English-speaking immigration into North America was influential in promoting English over all the other colonial languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (See Chapter 12, 'Westward Ho!', p. 481.) And as the exception that proves the rule, Canadian French established itself, and throve, through a deliberate policy of a.s.sisted emigration for French-speaking women. (See Chapter 11, 'La francophonie', p. 414.) The later ma.s.sive immigration to North America was an exception in a different sense: it did not diminish the now settled English-speaking tendency of the continent because immigrants did not, in general, move or settle in with others of the same language; as a result these later immigrants tended mostly to acquire English, rather than pa.s.sing their own languages on to their new neighbours. Despite many community links, this trend prevailed.

Immigration is the basic seed of language spread, but very often the propensity of newcomers to settle, and so displace older populations with different languages, is compounded and reinforced by the greater fertility of the newcomers. Finding themselves at some sort of advantage over the natives, they turn out to have larger families, and hence in a few generations are more numerous than the indigenous population. This has very likely always been a concomitant of large-scale immigration-without some sort of advantage, whether in health, wealth or even acceptance of lower wages, it is difficult to see how any immigrant population can become established over residents-but it has been particularly clear in the early history of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, where the growth was meteoric and doc.u.mented by census. In all these cases, the immigrants were introducing temperate-zone crops and livestock. One can conjecture, however, that similar factors must have played out very often in the past-for example, in favour of the first Semitic speakers in many parts of western Asia, when they first introduced arable crops into new territories that had previously known only hunters, gatherers and pastoralists. Larger families mean heightened demand for land, but also larger armies to take and defend it, and all this benefits the languages the farming immigrants speak. This is in fact nothing other than the 'natural growth' that we found responsible for so many large language communities in Chapter 13.

One factor that is often credited for language spread we have found of very little long-term effect. This is trade. Formal trade relations are of course of great antiquity, at least as old as written language. (We saw that the origin of written language in Mesopotamia seems to have been due to a reinterpretation of trading tokens (Chapter 3, 'Sumerian-the first cla.s.sical language: Life after death', p. 51).) But no community famous for specialisation in trade has pa.s.sed its language on permanently as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca, to its customers. At most such activity tends to infiltration of the language, or even diffusion, since the instances where merchants have set up permanently as immigrants into the customer community are rather rare. Carthage, which carried the merchants' language Phoenician, or Punic, into a substantial part of North Africa would be one such rare example. In general, these merchants' languages-other examples are Sogdian along the Silk Road, Arabic and later Portuguese in the Indian Ocean-do not make the jump from a restricted business use. When the market disappears, or others muscle in, the language too is dropped. So suggestions that English nowadays is benefiting from its position as the language of global business need to be received with some scepticism: English may well be today's pragmatic preference, but trade patterns change over time, and a trade connection alone will not guarantee a language community.

However, merchants do not always just bring goods on their visits to exotic locations. Sometimes they bring with them a new faith, and either act as missionaries for it themselves, or bring vocational missionaries with them. These missions can be important vehicles of a new language, if the faith has such an a.s.sociation. The Sanskrit and Pali that reached South-East Asia in the first millennium AD came with Hindu and Buddhist traders or buccaneers; a thousand years later, other traders from India were bringing in Islam, while the first European merchants, mostly Portuguese, were offering them Catholic Christianity. Of these four religions, each with an attendant language, only Christianity-the least language-conscious-seems to have projected its language as a vernacular; while Sanskrit, Pali and Arabic have remained languages confined to worship, Portuguese actually became the first language of many converts, and survives to this day in popular creolised forms from India to Malaya. And the English East India Company, which had come to India merely in search of profit, stayed long enough for missionaries to build up their strength and end up teaching the population English too.

But missionaries are not always traders with an ulterior motive. Missions may themselves offer a major motive for travel to distant parts: and such pilgrim missionaries have spread many languages, especially in Asia. In the first century AD Buddhist monks rounded the Himalayas, through Afghanistan and the Pamirs, to take the Four n.o.ble Truths to the Chinese, and with them sacred Sanskrit. In the eighth century Nestorians, coming all the way from Syria via Persia, reached the entrance of the same Silk Road, and through it brought Christianity-and at least briefly Aramaic-into the heart of China. They had already taken it to the southern tip of India. (See Chapter 3, 'Second interlude: The shield of faith', p. 88.) Muslims too had come along the same trans-Asiatic route to spread their faith, which survives, especially on the coasts of China, to this day; and Islam is unthinkable without Arabic. Just recently, in the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missions brought the first words in English into central Africa, and to most of the Pacific Islands. (See Chapter 12, 'The world taken by storm', pp. 507ff.) Sadly, missionary motives are not always so peaceable. Put another way, dominant peoples sometimes feel an urge, usually conceived as a duty, to impose their faith on foreigners they have defeated, to 'enlighten' them. In extreme cases-not rare in the second millennium AD-the duty is sharpened into a righteous aggression: the believers must attempt to defeat their neighbours simply to impose their faith on them.

This 'crusading' motive seems particularly characteristic of the faiths derived from Hebrew revelation, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has been mitigated for the Jews by the fact that they have almost always been in much smaller force than their enemies or neighbours, and hence can only endorse the doctrine nostalgically, recalling biblical tales of their early conquests. For Muslims, there was always the doctrine that ahl al-kitab, Peoples of the Book-Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians along with Muslims themselves-were owed a special tolerance, and so a certain moderation was shown to most of those they defeated. It fell to Christians to try out the full rigours of waging aggressive and imperialistic wars in the name of religion.

The doctrine was forged in the crusades against Islam of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the Christians had insufficient advantage to create long-term dominance. But in the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even more in the Americas, forces were far less even. The kings of Spain and Portugal received formal authorisation to dispossess other kings, and establish their own empires, explicitly in order to extend the domains of the Catholic faith.2 But it was one of the greater ironies of this global review to discover that all over Latin America it was the religious communities which tended to sustain use of America's indigenous languages: Europe's languages began to wipe the others out only when the special concern with and for natives lapsed. (See Chapter 10, 'The state's solution: Hispanizacion', p. 373.) Whatever the Christians' original intent, it was settlers, rather than missionaries or their crusading Faith, who spread languages.

What is new

Human nature may not change much, but in the last half-millennium-the period we have represented as Languages by Sea-some new factors have come into play which affected radically the capacity of languages to spread.

The first of these is global navigation. The motive for developing this was mercantile, a fifteenth-century European ambition to acquire Asian commodities, especially spices, more cheaply. The ambition was very soon fulfilled, but an immediate side effect was to operate in the reverse direction-the gradual establishment of speech communities of Europeans far away in Asia and the Americas, communities that very soon gained new members locally. It was no longer necessary for speech communities to be contiguous, or linked by brief cruises across familiar seas.

It is possible to quote forerunners for this breakthrough-the Chinese commerce with South-East Asia that briefly expanded to take in the whole Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century (see Chapter 4, 'Language from Huang-he to Yangtze', p. 147); the Arab, Persian and Indian traders who had taken the Indian Ocean for their domain in the early first millennium AD; the much earlier Polynesian mariners of the Pacific in their outrigger canoes, who island by island reached every habitable landma.s.s there; indeed, the primeval navigators who many thousands of years ago made their way through the East Indies and across the Torres Straits to Australia. But none of these forerunners succeeded in mapping the whole world once and for all, providing the complete inventory of what lands there were to be discovered, and where they lay. In the sixteenth century, the world shrank from an open system to a closed and definite sphere, still dangerous but now for the first time manageable. Now it became conceivable that fellow-speakers could set up home on the other side of an ocean, indeed many oceans away: they might be hard to reach, but their address would be known. Though they were scattered across the world, contact could be maintained.

Once this network of discontinuous communities had been established, maintainable through regular sea traffic, the scope of inter-communal relations changed too. In the Americas, the onset of epidemic disease very quickly readjusted the relative size of resident and incomer communities, and in Latin America extensive interbreeding soon blurred the borders, linguistic and cultural, between them. As a result, the settler communities largely replaced, by incorporation or by simple displacement, the previous resident populations.* Nothing new there, except for the continental scale of what was happening; something a.n.a.logous must have happened, for example, when the Romans invaded Gaul, or the Saxons took over England. But in India and the East Indies, the indigenous community was not vulnerable to disease brought by the immigrants: on the contrary, the diseases endemic there kept the immigrant population small. The result was a persistently small minority community of outsiders, the Europeans, living on the edge of the resident population, but increasingly influential within it. This was a new situation and the response to it, the spread of a language by re-education, was new too.

Effectively, the outsider minority pa.s.sed its prestige language on to the elite of the majority, not as a lingua franca, but as a symbol of a kind of cultural recruitment. The novelty of this development is underlined by the fact that it happened in British India, but not in the highly similar Dutch East Indies. Both the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie and the English East India Company had brought a Germanic language to a long-standing commercial market in South Asia; both had succeeded in displacing European compet.i.tors, the Portuguese or the French; both had attracted Protestant missionary camp-followers who were keen to spread their spiritual world-view to the local population. But the Dutch were content always to use the local lingua franca, Malay, as the language for their religion, and their administration. The mijnheers' own world was separate from that of their local suppliers, employees and (ultimately) subjects, and so it would remain. (See Chapter 11, 'Dutch interlopers', p. 395.) Only the British provided the means to switch to their own language, English. When they did this, they were yielding certainly to pressure from their own missionaries, but also from their home population and many elite Indians. The emerging new att.i.tude to the colony demanded nothing less, seeing it not just as a place in which to make a profit, but as British India, to be developed as a part of Greater Britain.

This step turned out to open the way to English as a world language, available to any who wanted to take part in the Industrial Revolution, wherever they might live. The motives at the time may recall those of Archbishop Lorenzana, calling in the eighteenth century for the use of Spanish throughout Spain's empire, not least as a duty to the education of the Indians. (See Chapter 10, 'The state's solution: Hispanizacion', p. 373.) But he was really calling for the use of Spanish to be imposed, not conceded; and so it ultimately was, largely through neglect of education in other languages. The case of English in India did involve some symbolic withdrawal of government support for Sanskrit and Arabic; and the generalised use of English which followed has contributed to the closing of English-speaking minds, where foreign languages are concerned. ('After all, they all speak English, don't they?') But this spread of the language, ultimately worldwide, through what we have called re-education, was never an imposition; English remained the language of a small minority, and even among Indian nationalists its acquisition felt more like the development of an opportunity. It was a new and significant development in the history of language spread, and was later taken up as a deliberate policy by at least one other power, the French, in their empire's conceived mission civilisatrice. (See Chapter 11, 'The second empire', p. 416.) Another important innovation in language spread over the past five hundred years, and especially the last two hundred, was the growing role of technology. Civilisations are, by their nature, technology-driven; indeed, by one definition a civilisation is just a distinctive acc.u.mulation of technical innovations. And the spread of language had been advanced by technology before: recall how Akkadian's availability in cuneiform writing on clay made it the diplomatic lingua franca of ancient West Asia (see Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 58), and how the alphabetic system invented by Phoenicians had provided the basis not just for a new elite role for Aramaic speakers as scribes in a.s.syria and Babylon, but in the end for administration and education throughout the world from Iceland to the East Indies.

But in the modern era language spread has been effected above all by ma.s.s production of language texts, and later the means to disseminate them instantly over any distance. First came printing, already starting up in Europe in the fifteenth century. It played a cardinal role in western Europe's encounter with many unknown languages, as well as in spreading its own.* Then, four hundred years later, came electronic links, first point-to-point and then broadcast. The effects on language spread have been profound. Language communities have become sustainable despite physical separation. This may have an effect-as yet unknown-on the development of the languages themselves: electronic technology, if it becomes totally pervasive, might even bring about not only the widely announced 'death of distance' but even 'the death of dialect'. But it has had indirect effects already. The withdrawal of the European imperial powers in the quarter-century after the Second World War, especially from Africa, was above all a policy response to a new globally sensed politics, the 'Wind of Change' famously detected by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1960: 'The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.'3 The foreign elites were departing, in deference to the voices of the world's many, among them the people they governed. Those voices had become audible through those same elites' own ma.s.s media, indeed now speaking in their own languages.

Way to go

We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.

Henry Gibson, song ent.i.tled '200 Years'4 We have yet to consider what future may await English.

The past four hundred years have been almost absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples, as political, military and cultural victories have succeeded one another. The language community has expanded overseas from England, first by stealth in tiny crevices, then by imperial a.s.sertion over ever vaster domains, and finally, after the demise of arrant colonialism, to apparent acclaim in a single world marketplace. It is a creature first of the human social faculty for creating a language among disparate groups who share a single territory, then the ability discovered by that one island community to use its naval strength to spread its citizens and its political influence wherever it found points of weakness all over the world, and most recently of being the language most readily to hand when Europe, North America and then the world discovered how to profit from fossil fuels, science and ma.s.s markets. This tremendous run of luck has created an enormous reserve of prestige, reflected in the global enthusiasm for English-language popular culture. As the French language showed five hundred years ago, a.s.sociation with wealth and power is highly attractive.

But English can hardly expect that its linguistic vogue will continue for ever. The presence of a single language for communication worldwide is stabilising, giving it the appearance almost of being a neutral part of the world order, as much beyond the control of great powers as it is of any one society. Likewise the Latin language, lasting almost a millennium after the demise of the Roman empire in the west, gave western Europe at least, in its long separate development, good reason to believe that it had become the permanent and pure language of thought and reality. But the printing press, longdistance navigation and the rise of global empires changed all that. The world remains a highly dynamic place. For languages, as for any human inst.i.tution, when you are on top, sooner or later there is only one way to go.

The current status of English has three main pillars that support it: population, position and prestige.

First of all, English has as many speakers as any other language. When its 375 million native speakers are added to the equal number of second-language speakers and the three-quarters of a billion people who have learnt it at school or in other cla.s.ses, it is reasonable to claim that a quarter of mankind is familiar with English. The only comparable language is Chinese, when all those educated in Mandarin are added together; but the average income, status and global location of the English speakers give English very much the edge. Learning English is a majority school subject in the People's Republic of China; Chinese, by contrast, remains off the syllabus in all English-speaking countries' schools.

Second, there is now no language to match English for global coverage. English has a special status in countries on every continent, a status it shares only with French. But there are four first- or second-language speakers of English for every one of French. The complacency of English speakers speaks for itself: while English speakers still predominate in all measures of commercial and scientific achievement, it remains the norm in every English-speaking country for those completing compulsory education to be monolingual in English. Effective competence in any foreign language continues to elude the vast majority of those who are made competent in the technical basis of modern civilisation. And this is how they stay throughout their lives. But it is not just that the majority of English speakers are complacent. It is more that the world has as yet exacted no price for this; if anything, it has rewarded English speakers for not swerving from their own traditions and sources of wisdom.

Finally, English is consciously a.s.sociated with technical progress and popular culture in every part of the world. This kind of high prestige a.s.sociated with the language seems particularly well founded because it is based not on a spiritual revelation-revelations are always local, even if they claim universal validity-nor on yearning for a particular regime, which would guarantee freedom or social justice. It is based on the perception of wealth, as it may be made to flow from scientific advance, and its rational application. Since this has been the recent experience of all the richest countries in the world today, in some sense it has objective truth on its side.

Practical human beings are notoriously short sighted, so the 'smart money' (itself a very English concept) is naturally backing the belief that the recent course of English, and hence its present status, will continue indefinitely. Just as the bien pensants of the 1990s could be brought to believe briefly in 'The End of History', the ultimate victory of liberalism and markets,5 so many today argue that the progress of English may have pa.s.sed some key global point in the development of world communications, permanently outdistancing any possible compet.i.tor, and providing all language-learners with a one-way bet. David Crystal is a highly knowledgeable and perceptive commentator on languages in the modern world; and at the end of his book English as a Global Language he has reviewed the factors that might endanger its position, notably foreign negative reactions, the changing balance of populations, and the prospects of dialect fission. But even he can only speculate in the end that 'it may be that English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever'.6 Our background study of five millennia of world language makes the eternity of this prospect seem unlikely. The modern global language situation is unprecedented, but the const.i.tuents of modern language communities are still people. And, above all, people use language to socialise. Human societies have always had a way of multiplying languages.

First of all, most people in the world are still bilingual; this points to the fact that global languages have seldom established themselves as anything more than second languages, useful as a lingua franca where long-distance communication is important, but not particularly commanding as vehicles for everyone's daily life. The major exceptions to this have been the gra.s.s-roots spread of Latin over Gaulish and the Iberian languages in western Europe, and Chinese over East Asia, where literate language communities have spread over contiguous areas, without necessarily filling them up with native-speaker settlers. English, starting on an island and without a European bridgehead, never enjoyed this kind of contiguous spread; and its main mode of spread today, via education, the electronic media and literate contact, does not lead to it replacing home community languages.

Second, English is not seen everywhere as a neutral medium of access to wealth and global culture. Some policy-makers, typically in ex-British or ex-American colonies, have 'seen too much of it', and resist it, often combining historic a.s.sociations with domestic power politics. In 1948, Ceylon (now ri Lanka) excluded English as an official language, partly because it was believed that its continued use would benefit the (predominantly middle-cla.s.s) Tamil minority; the sequel, including the establishment of Sinhala as the only official language in 1956, has not been happy, and much use of English continues. In 1967, English was stripped of its status as an official language in Tanzania and Malaysia, and in 1974 in Kenya; in 1987, the Philippines promoted Tagalog to equal status with it, 'until otherwise provided by the law'. This resistance may fade in later generations, along with memories of colonial history;7 but global interventions by the USA, sometimes in alliance with other English-speaking powers, show no sign of diminishing in the twenty-first century. They will do much to preserve an easy depiction of English in some quarters as the global bully's language of choice.

Lastly, even if English persists worldwide, there is no guarantee that it will stay united as a language. Although the world in the early third millennium AD is a very different place from western Europe in the early first, English could well follow the example of Latin, and reshape itself in different ways in different dialect areas, ultimately-say within a few centuries-becoming a language family. This is particularly likely wherever the language has established itself as a vernacular, as in Jamaica or Singapore, or where most of a population becomes bilingual, so that code-switching is an attractive mode of conversation, as for example it is today among educated Indians. Evidently this is less likely to happen, or will at least be slowed, if the communities that speak English stay in regular two-way touch, by phone and correspondence, and receiving each other's media. English probably still holds the best position among large languages worldwide for preserving its unity by mutual contact. As one indication, international telephone traffic is overwhelmingly dominated by conversations in English.* But not all English-speaking communities may play a full part in the global conversation; and long-term rifts and rivalries may come to dominate-as Spain and France contested for influence in Renaissance Italy, a mere millennium after they had all been provinces of a single empire.

It is possible to outline a variety of scenarios for a turn in the fortunes of English, drawing inspiration from the later years of many dominant languages of the past. Both as a first language of large populations, and as a world lingua franca, English may find that the seeds of its decline have already been planted.

As a first language, English has already peaked demographically.* In this it is no different from most of the other imperial languages from Europe. Its native speakers are still growing in numbers, but at a far slower rate than those of some other major languages. As a result, according to one intelligent estimate,8 English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish and Arabic should just about be on a par in the year 2050, with Chinese still exceeding each of them by a factor of 2.5. This is a time when world population is predicted to level off, but the heritage of the different past growth rates will be a ma.s.sive difference among the average ages of the speakers of the various languages. English and Chinese will then be predominantly languages of older people, Arabic of the young, with Spanish and Hindi-Urdu somewhere in between. This is not to predict the average wealth of the different communities, which may be an important determinant of the evolving power relations among them, and also-as we have seen in the careers of French and English-of the attractiveness of their languages to outsiders. English may still have the greatest global spread of a language, and its speakers even the highest average income; but it will no longer have its current positional advantage, at least as to numbers of native speakers. If the English-speaking economies come to seem less dynamic, it is entirely possible that linguistic leadership too will shift away.

And even in the big native-speaker countries, the language may increasingly have to accommodate the presence of other large language communities-in the USA Spanish, in the UK perhaps some of the major southern Asian languages, and in Canada, as ever, French, but perhaps also Inukt.i.tut. The different varieties of English will be under very different local pressures; bilingualism with different languages may become significant, and the dialects may progressively move apart. Like the Aryan language of India in the first millennium BC, diversifying into Prakrits and then separate languages, even while Sanskrit was preserved as an interlingua, or like the fate of Latin in Europe in the first millennium AD, English could find itself splitting into a variety of local versions among native speakers, while the world goes on using a common version as a lingua franca.

But as a lingua franca too, English could still face difficulties. Witness the fate of Sogdian, from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries AD the merchant and missionary language of the Silk Road from China to Samarkand; or the fate of Phoenician, the mercantile jargon of the whole Mediterranean throughout the first millennium BC, and eminent spreader of literacy. Both are today nonexistent. A language a.s.sociated with business is soon abandoned when the basis of trade, or the sources of wealth, move on; businessmen are notoriously unsentimental. And it is hardly rational to expect that the extreme imbalance in the world's distribution of wealth is going to continue in the anglophone favour indefinitely into the future. One day, the terms of trade will be very different, and soon after that day comes, the position of English will seem a highly archaic anomaly.

Likewise the a.s.sociation of English with world science may fail to save it. Dispa.s.sionate enquiry has never been an activity that appeals to a majority, however widely education is made available. Serious research remains a minority activity, which because it is disinterested will always need patronage from others who have acc.u.mulated power or wealth. But those political, military, business or religious elites cannot be trusted, especially if it seems that the results of enquiry are telling against their own power, or failing to b.u.t.tress it: they will then often adjudicate in favour of tradition, or popular ignorance. It is easy to forget how much the ongoing popularity of science depends on its continuing to offer new golden eggs, or new golden bombs. When the flow of goodies slackens, as one day it may, the pursuit of science will be widely seen as an expensive indulgence by its paymasters, in industry and government.

In the same way, when the many themselves enjoy market power, as they did to some extent in the print revolution of the Reformation, and as they often do now in the anglophone world, they will use their money to demand what they can understand, and think they need. That is the way of markets. But their judgement will be heavily coloured by tradition. We can already see creationism, and an oracular approach to some of Christianity's ancient texts, flourishing at the heart of the richest, and most technically developed, country in the English-speaking world. If powers within the USA, now the provider of the world's greatest sources of information and learning, were to start to bear down on its freer thinkers, one could imagine other parts of the world beginning to guard their own learning behind the cloak of their own languages.

In fact, academic traditions too have a fairly poor record, even on their own account, for sustaining interest in genuine open-mindedness; there is always the temptation to appeal to authority, and the accepted canon of 'normal science': recall how the skepsis and theoria of third- and fourth-century Greece hardened into later linguistic conservatism and scholasticism, how the lively disputations underlying Sanskrit grammar and Buddhist logic congealed and ceased to develop in medieval India, and how the Abbasid golden age of research in Arabic petered out with Averroes in the twelfth century. There is plenty of scope for the worldwide scientific community to go into at least a temporary eclipse; and if global scientific exchange falters, English too will lose out. The second death of Latin shows vividly how such a thing can, and did, happen on an international scale.

There are already new potential centres of world civilisation growing, with different language backgrounds. In East and South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are increasingly apparent as masters of investment, and look likely at last to work in concert with their fellow Chinese in the rapidly developing People's Republic. (See Chapter 4, 'Foreign relations', p. 161.) In the Middle East, Arabic-speaking peoples are growing in numbers with some sense of solidarity, part of the global ummah bound together by acceptance of Islam. The militant actions of radical Islamists, and the inequities of income and power caused by the dominance of oil revenues in their economies, may slow their real integration. But ultimately it is hard to doubt that this very large and self-conscious group, sharing a faith and a language, and increasingly able to communicate at all levels through modern media, will make common cause, even without political leadership from one of the main states of the region.

Less prominently, too, we can note that two-thirds of the world's 147 million Turkish-speaking peoples, notably Turks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are now organised independently of foreigners for the first time since the Russian advance into central Asia.* As a total community, there are more of them than there are speakers of any of German, French or j.a.panese. With better communications, they will begin to consider themselves a unit, for most of their languages are mutually intelligible.

Such reorganisations will not immediately threaten, or even at first significantly diminish, the global use of English. But they may offer early signs that the equilibrium of languages used in global communication is beginning to shift in a different direction.

To foresee Chinese or Arabic as major international languages requires no imagination: it follows from extrapolation of current population trends, in combination with well-known economic and political facts. But in reality, the future language history of the world will quite likely involve surprising new developments that alter population balances. Who could have foreseen that discovery of gold in Brazil in the 1790s would suddenly spur that place to fill up with Portuguese speakers, when Portugal had already held the land for three centuries without any great linguistic effect? Sometimes a single event is enough to trigger a potential that has long been possible, but remained unrealised.

And who, even in the eleventh century, could have foreseen that the import into Europe of paper-making (twelfth century), gunpowder (fourteenth century) and printing (fifteenth century) would have first revolutionised its religious life in the Reformation, and then sent its adventurers out to settle, and to dominate others all over the non-Christian world? These three were all imports of techniques that had been known in China since the early first millennium, without any noted effect in their homeland. So even in a closed system, new interactions can have revolutionary consequences.

Major events and interactions, now unforeseen, will disrupt and reroute the future too; there seems little doubt of this. Most easily predictable-but not, I hope, certain-is some kind of military holocaust, something that is nowadays technically all too easy. This could profoundly alter the balance of populations in the world, as the Anglo-Saxon advance through North America led rapidly to the extinction or endangerment of all its indigenous languages. An epidemic too could have a ma.s.sive balance-tipping effect-as everywhere in the Americas when Europeans came, but as perhaps also twice in Britain, during the twilight years of Celtic British and Norman French-especially in situations where there is pre-existing bilingualism. A truly horrific epidemic, even if localised, could well permanently alter the linguistic situation in Malaysia, or in Canada.

Not every unforeseen event need change the status quo to the detriment of English, of course. Remember the Persian emperor Darius, who decreed the use of Aramaic throughout his realm, although it was then a foreign language with nothing to recommend it but a very strong background as a vehicle of administration. It is quite possible, on that a.n.a.logy, that some pragmatic government might hasten the spread of English to a part of the world hitherto without it-in the Baltic, perhaps, or central Asia. Indeed, something like this happened when Lee Kwan Yew decreed English for the largely Chinese-speaking colony of Singapore in the 1960s.

Whatever happens, any changes that do occur may have a surprisingly disturbing effect on the English speakers who remain. For three centuries now, the bounds of the language have continually expanded. Typical speakers may pride themselves on their pragmatism, and welcome the breaking down of language barriers, in the interests of wider understanding and easy communication. But when the language whose use is to be reduced is their own, expect discomfort to be registered. In 1984, some 8 per cent of the US population professed a first language other than English. This was enough for a programme of legislation to get under way in the early 1990s, to 'recognize English in law as the language of the official business of the Government'.9 There is now a continuing hubbub of proposal and appeal on the topic in many states' a.s.semblies, which remains inconclusive. We have yet to see how other English-speaking countries will react when they too can no longer easily a.s.sume that the option of communication in English is always open.

But no law and no decree anywhere has ever yet stemmed the ebbing of a language tide.

Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.

What one cannot speak of, one must pa.s.s over in silence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus

Freedom

At various points in this narrative, there has been a temptation, almost a duty, to speak of freedom. Many language traditions make a particular claim to speak with it, or for it. Freedom of speech is one of the cardinal ideals, upheld in the great modern statements of human rights, and endlessly controversial in practice. For many civilisations, freedom is the virtue that gives speaking its main purpose. Yet in the end, we have said next to nothing about it. Why?

Freedom is a particular concern of some kinds of states, particularly republics. Some peoples that have particularly exhibited freedom as an ideal are the Greeks, the Romans, the Venetians, the French after their Revolution in 1789, the British (though discreetly) after their 'Glorious Revolution' in 1688 which a.s.serted the supremacy of Parliament over monarch, and the United States of America. But although it is generally agreed that eleutheria, libertas, liberta, liberte and freedom are translation equivalents, there has never been widespread agreement on what makes a person, a people or a state free-even in these polities, which are in a continuous, and very self-conscious, tradition of European political philosophy.* Is it independence from foreign overlordship, civic self-governance, non-recognition of hereditary rights, or the right of personal choice over religion, location and means of support? All these ideals suggest different ways in which the right of choosing what to say should be exempt from restriction.

From our perspective, the avocation of all these ideals, dear as they are to so many, has made little concrete difference to the survival and spread of any language community. Greek-language culture, as ostentatiously propagated round the Levant, Egypt and Persia by Alexander and his successors, and taken up by the Roman elite, involved little or no democracy, and mostly allegiance to absolute rulers-basileis-who declared themselves the legitimate successors of the kings of Macedon and Persia and the pharaohs of Egypt. Rome went on purveying Latin round its empire when the free, civic, inst.i.tutions of the republic had been placed in thrall to a single family with army backing. French had become the preferred international language of European culture under the auspices of the Bourbons' absolutist monarchy; the French Revolution projected the slogan 'Liberte! egalite! Fraternite!' and made France much more aggressive militarily, but it had little or no effect on the attractions of its language; its popularity began to falter only in the early twentieth century, long after the Restoration and the second fall of the French monarchy. The political freedoms so prized by Englishmen and Americans, which had brought the former to behead one monarch and depose his son, and then the latter to declare independence from the British state altogether, turned out to be quite compatible with a ruthless disregard for American First Nations' rights as specifically granted by treaty, and the use of military force to build a global empire out of other peoples' territories. Even 'free trade' turned out to be no bar to imperial preference within the British empire, or in our day to continuing ma.s.sive subsidies to domestic producers. None of this in any way diminished the spread of the English language, whether by sweep-aside or re-education, all round the world.

Freedom of speech may now be a reality, not just an unfulfilled ideal, in all these languages' current territories. But over the centuries and millennia of their development, freedom, under any definition, has never for very long been more than a hollow boast, or at best an aspiration. Our review of their histories has chosen to dwell rather on what life in these languages really meant.

Prestige

Prestige is about positive a.s.sociations: in the case of languages, the roots of prestige are a.s.sociations with wealth (in Europe, this above all), but also practical wisdom, enjoyment, and spiritual enlightenment.