The Great English Language Shift, Part 2: A feast of (English) languages

Atime machine lands in your backyard, and you, being the gung-ho adventurer that you are, hop aboard it with nary a second thought. Immediately you find yourself transported to the year… 2065!

Spanking new world! As you look around, and hear people talk among themselves, you realize with a pang that rapid changes in society have altered the world so drastically that you feel like an alien in a parallel universe. At any time you expect a John Rhys-Davies-looking character to boom over your shoulder saying, “Welcome, slider!”

As you survey the scene, you can’t help recalling the first decade of the millennium — your decade — with nostalgia. Gone are the traffic jams of old. Instead, electric and hydrogen-fueled monocars zoom by in the air like beetles on Benzedrine. Several sloe-eyed, dark-skinned teenagers saunter by, their neon hair and bodies blinking. They’re literally wired wirelessly to the net, as various telecommunication devices flash from their bodies. No more handheld cell phones! No more dangling iPods! When you look closely, you discover that what they have, among other things, are “biophones” — nth-generation Brazilian-designed, Russian-manufactured, Indian-marketed, Chinese-owned ubersmartphones built into cytoplasmic-fiber gloves operated with flickering fingers. A wave of their hand, and a small holographic touch screen lights up over their palm. Talk about portability! Clearly, advances in science and technology have altered modes of living in a way you’ve never anticipated.

You rush to a decrepit-looking bookshop to look for a map, for where in tarnation are you? People of various ethnicities stream by, and you hear a smattering of strange languages — none of them English, or so you think. As you enter, you breathe a sigh of relief. Thank God for books and paper! As you pore over a map, it dawns on you that as economies have risen and fallen, former nation-states have collapsed and reformed into new geopolitical configurations. This place is… London? If not for the building landmarks, you might as well be in Shanghai or New Delhi!

You signal a swarthy store clerk in twinkling turban and cuff and ask him where you are, but all you get from him is a curious stare at your “naked” (read: blinker-less) attire, and a polite smile. He points you to a slim volume entitled, ELF: English as Lingua Franca, meaning for you to use it. Beside it on the shelf is another title, Globish. Then the hard truth hits you: as global communication has become more critical over the past (actually, your future) decades, a need for a global lingua franca has arisen, and it’s… English! Yet not the English familiar to you, but a bewildering tongue with its own lexicon and strange rules of grammar.

A whole new world, indeed! And a new beast of a language.

Extremely far-fetched?

Well, all right, it may be a long while before we can manufacture cell phones from cytoplasm, but if linguists are to be believed, and if current trends continue, the above scenario could possibly be the state of our world, and of English, in the coming decades.

This much I gained from the Second Philippine English Language Conference held at the SMX last September hosted by the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature in celebration of its centennial, and co-sponsored by the British Council Access Program and publishing companies Cengage and Anvil. The flights of fancy are mine, but the projections on English were those of plenary speakers David Graddol, applied linguist and author of English Next; Suzanne Romaine, sociolinguist and University of Oxford professor of English; and Andy Kirkpatrick, professor of English and expert on World Englishes.

English language dominance is evident everywhere. What’s the language of the Olympics and the World Cup, may I ask? Of the Pacquiao boxing matches? Of Facebook, YouTube, blockbuster movies, cable television? In what language does Justin Bieber sing? (No-brainer, that one! I meant the question, not Bieber.) All those postings on the Internet are done mainly in what language? (Internet usage reports list English as the top language in the Internet, favored by 40 percent of users.) What’s the medium of instruction in universities here and abroad? (Even the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in the heart of Saudi Arabia uses English, as part of its drive to become a center of international excellence.) What countries include English in their primary curriculum? (According to Dr. Kirkpatrick: All, except Indonesia.) When Iranian President Mahmoud Amahdinejad gave a speech at the UN last September, what language did he use? Okay, Persian. But in what language was it interpreted? Yes, English!

According to Dr. Graddol, the number of English language speakers has been steadily growing and has now passed the two billion mark — that’s close to a third of the world’s population. English is used as the de facto language in international organizations like the UN as well as the working language in international forums. It’s also the language of international banking and law, tertiary education, research, technology transfer, and scientific publishing. There are more books published in English than in any other language. English dominates our consumerist culture. Advertising for global brands is done in English. Along with the Internet, audio-visual cultural products such as television, film and popular music, are predominantly in English. Sixty-five percent of business process outsourcing (BPO) corporations use English and require English language operations, as these corporations come from the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

That English as a language rules our world today is a given fact. Yet the world is also more complex than we think. Global economic, socio-cultural and historical trends create permutations and counter-forces that reverberate throughout the world in unpredictable ways. According to Graddol in his book The Future of English, chaos theory — that branch of mathematics that deals with highly unpredictable, seemingly random dynamic systems — helps to explain much of what happens as a language grows and changes with use. Chaos theory teaches that slight differences in initial conditions can have far-reaching, even divergent and drastic, consequences.

In applying this to language, linguists have observed that, as the world changes, the forces that contributed to the hegemony of English are the very same that drive it to a new global position, bringing forth new global players and reshaping the rules of the game. English has become a driver of change as well as a recipient of change, influencing the mechanisms that generate change, and itself being transformed in the process. As English spreads across the world, and as it gets assimilated into the cultures of various peoples, the norms of its use also change, altering the language itself. At the same time, linguistic diversity has also increased, as the world becomes increasingly bi- and multi-lingual.

A look at major globalizing forces will help us understand this phenomenon:

• Growing urbanization along with the rise of the middle class in many countries (such as India and China) has created an environment where English, being the language associated with upward mobility, thrives, side-by-side with indigenous languages.

•Population growth and the wholesale migration of peoples — as immigrants, migrant workers, refugees, exiles, international students, tourists, entrepreneurs, multinational families flourish — have encouraged the spread of English as well as the native languages spoken by these people groups.

•Increased globalization and the emergence of a high-value knowledge-based economy have enhanced global trade and strengthened the currency of English, as well as opened new markets for other languages. The recent inking of a US$10 billion trade deal between India and the United States will ensure not only economic but also greater cultural and linguistic exchange between the two countries.

•Revolutionary technological innovations such as what gave rise to the Internet have revamped patterns of communication, social interaction and information exchange, paving the way for borderless networks where English is the dominant medium. Yet even now, as more non-English speakers use the Internet and as more languages are supported by computer software, Internet communication is becoming more multilingual.

Instead of becoming the linguistic monolith that would be expected of it as the international lingua franca, paradoxically — owing to the tug of global forces mentioned above — the growth of English has encouraged a shift towards multilingualism. It has also engendered distinct varieties of nationalized English known as “World Englishes” — a term coined by the pioneering linguist Dr. Braj Kachru to describe the phenomenon of the use of English by non-native speakers in order to express their national identity and local culture. In such a setting, English becomes “owned” by non-native speakers, and the norms adopted are those that emerge organically out of local use and not necessarily those set by native English speakers. In the words of Kachru: “Who owns English? If you can use it, you own it.”

Thus, types of English such as Philippine English, Indian English, Malaysian English or Nigerian English are not substandard versions of the native English model but legitimate forms that validate English as a “local language” for the rest of the non-Western world. English has indeed become an Asian, an African, a Caribbean language — in short, an important local linguistic resource used by non-native speakers to achieve their own purposes. Native English speakers are no longer perceived as the sole authority on English language use or even the best teachers of it. In a feast of languages — English and otherwise — my English is as good as yours and is as good as that of any other English speaker from Jamaica, Singapore, Bombay or Beijing.

But what about standards? Does ownership mean “anything goes”? Is international beauty queen Venus Raj’s “major, major” as standard as any English expression? Having gained a high level of cultural capital, should world-class champion boxer and congressman Manny Pacquiao serve as a model for Philippine English language use? How does English as a “local language” affect the use of our indigenous languages and our policies on language education? As an aside, what will happen to English language use when China becomes the major global superpower?

(Next week: What are the implications of the great English language shift for us?)

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Your comments are welcome. Email me at urbanpilgrim2010@gmail.com or urbanpilgrim2010@yahoo.com.