How Long Will English be Global?

As I attempt to make my proposals for internationalizing the study of English Literature as practical as possible, the future of Global English as the predominant “lingua franca” is a key variable. And as a former Catholic altar boy, I know that Latin looked eternal, but in fact is fast fading away. As the Chinese economy looks fair to soon rule the economic roost, will Mandarin force its way to the top?

Nicholas Ostler’s latest book, “The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel” (Allen Lane, 2010)is as close as we can come right now to a plausible answer(s). (He doubts that Global English will retain its hegemony: his long, complicated–but fascinating—book is his reading of the linguistic tea leaves.) It’s a complicated puzzle, and I have one preliminary suggestion to make the new IE Ph.D. globally helpful.

I got the idea from noting that a Notre Dame English professor has just grabbed 15 minutes global fame for translating the first winner in the new Mann Booker award for Arabic Lit. Each IE Ph.D. candidate, I propose, shall chose a global minority language for his service to expanding IE as one of his five prelim exams. And I would parse the category“language” broadly. An ABD might offer as his “minority language” radio interviewing, writing or producing TV documentaries, or shooting photoessays.

European cultural TV and radio is so much better than ours because there artists are involved in interpreting Culture. My USOE contacts in writing “Tradition and Innovation in the Craft of English“(1966) with Welsh poet and BBC/Wales TV producer John Ormond and Scots poet and Borders TV producer Maurice Lindsay energized my looking forward in teaching.

Ideally, this “minority language” candidate would spend her ABD years abroad teaching ESL in the minority culture whose language she wants to master. I have yet to find a primer more useful for preparing for those years abroad than Ostler’s book. As a revisionist American Lit specialist I would make one other principle: reject the past-oriented view that we must counter the snooty Scottish early 19th century slur “Who (implying “in his right mind”) reads an American book etc….?” IE is to be a future oriented, bread and butter, humanism which seeks to share our culture with other diverse human societies learning how to cope creatively with the complexities with the rest of the twenty-first century.

Our job is to create a clerisy that wants to metabolize for his diverse students the discreet futures facing us. Learning how to speak and write in a “minority tongue” is the dues we pay to join the human race. As you find reading Ostler that while there may have been as many as 6,000 “tongues” we’ve only been at the language learning game some 5,000 years or more, depending on how orderly our ancestors have been. And over the millennia there have been many “lingua francas” (the term originally meant ”the Latin variants”) that those Venetian traders used to bargain along the Silk Road.

And each “global language” added some useful element to the linguistic armory we now possess—with Sumerian the savvy to keep records in clay, with the Phoenicians an alphabet with vowels, und so weiter. Expanding empires (Arabic as well as Portuguese), an expanding theology (Latin and Hebrew), a flourishing commerce (English as well as Mandarin). Who woulda thunk that the current Globish started out 12 centuries ago as a wild mix of other languages and dialects thereof in a tiny island off the coast of Europe?

When I studied Mandarin for six weeks in Shanghai in 1982, I also tutored some locals in English as a fraternal gesture. Whenever I meet a Chinese person I try my only Chinese joke on them. I tell them I studied harder than I ever studied anything but only learned three words! Amazed, they always answer skeptically, “Which three words?” WO PU DONG! (I not understand!) Their reaction is inevitably a side-splitting laugh! And I never even tried to crack their writing system—Thus their 50,000 characters beats our 26 letters.

So Chinese supremacy may not include their language! These details and many, many more will explain how a language gains supremacy to begin with—with no guarantee of supremacy forever. But this book is your initiation to the minority language you will master to make Humanism stronger in some centuries that are destined to be complex. Choose your language well and add it to your disgracefully narrow Monolingual American English. It declares to the world you want to join the human race as an Exceptionally Narrow American eager to do much better.