The Language Revolution (3 page)

Broadcasting

It took many decades of experimental research in physics, chiefly in Britain and America, before it was possible to send the first radio telecommunication signals through the-air, without wires. Marconi's system, built in 1895, carried telegraph code signals over a distance of one mile. Six years later, his signals had crossed the Atlantic Ocean; by 1918, they had reached Australia. English was the first language to be transmitted by radio. Within twenty-five years of Marconi's first transmission, public broadcasting became a reality. The first commercial radio station, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast its first programme in November 1920, and there were over 500 broadcasting stations licensed in the USA within two years. A similar dramatic expansion affected public television twenty years later. We can only speculate about how these media developments must have influenced the growth of world English. There are no statistics on the proportion of time devoted to English-language programmes the world over, or on how much time is spent listening to such programmes. But if we look at broadcasting aimed specifically at audiences in other countries (such as the BBC World Service, or the Voice of America), we note significant levels of provision – over a thousand hours a week by the former, twice as much by the latter. Most other countries showed sharp increases in external broadcasting during the post-war years, and several launched English-language radio programmes, such as the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. No
comparative data are available about how many people listen to each of the languages provided by these services. However, if we list the languages in which these countries broadcast, it is noticeable that only one of these languages has a place on each of the lists: English.

Motion pictures

The new technologies which followed the discovery of electrical power fundamentally altered the nature of home and public entertainment, and provided fresh directions for the development of the English language. The technology of this industry has many roots in Europe and America during the nineteenth century, with England and France providing an initial impetus to the artistic and commercial development of the cinema from 1895. However, the years preceding and during the First World War stunted the growth of a European film industry, and dominance soon passed to America, which oversaw from 1915 the emergence of the feature film, the star system, the movie mogul and the grand studio, all based in Hollywood. As a result, when sound was added to the technology in the late 1920s, it was the English language which suddenly came to dominate the movie world. And despite the growth of the film industry in other countries in later decades, English-language movies still dominate the medium, with Hollywood coming to rely increasingly on a small number of annual productions aimed at huge audiences. It is unusual to find a blockbuster movie produced in a language other than English, and about 80 per cent of all feature films given a theatrical release are in English. The influence of movies on the viewing audience is uncertain, but many observers agree with the view of director Wim Wenders: ‘People increasingly believe in what they see and they buy what they believe in. … People
use, drive, wear, eat and buy what they see in the movies.'
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If this is so, then the fact that most movies are made in the English language must surely be significant, at least in the long term.

Popular music

The cinema was one of two new entertainment technologies which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century; the other was the recording industry. Here too the English language was early in evidence. When in 1877 Thomas A. Edison devised the phonograph, the first machine that could both record and reproduce sound, the first words to be recorded were ‘What God hath wrought', followed by a recitation of the nursery-rhyme ‘Mary had a little lamb'. Most of the subsequent technical developments took place in the USA. All the major recording companies in popular music had English-language origins, beginning with the US firm Columbia (from 1898). Radio sets around the world hourly testify to the dominance of English in the popular music scene today. Many people make their first contact with English in this way. By the turn of the century, Tin Pan Alley (the popular name for the Broadway-centred song-publishing industry) was a reality, and was soon known worldwide as the chief source of US popular music. Jazz, too, had its linguistic dimension, with the development of the blues and many other genres. And by the time modern popular music arrived, it was almost entirely an English scene. The pop stars of two chief English-speaking nations were soon to dominate the recording world: Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley in the USA; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the UK. Mass audiences for pop singers became a routine feature of the world scene from the 1960s. No other single source has spread the English
language around the youth of the world so rapidly and so pervasively.

International travel and safety

The reasons for travelling abroad are many and various. Each journey has immediate linguistic consequences – a language has to be interpreted, learned, imposed – and over time a travelling trend can develop into a major influence. If there is a contemporary movement towards world English use, therefore, we would expect it to be particularly noticeable in this domain; and so it is. For those whose international travel brings them into a world of package holidays, business meetings, academic conferences, international conventions, community rallies, sporting occasions, military occupations and other ‘official' gatherings, the domains of transportation and accommodation are chiefly mediated through the use of English as an auxiliary language. Safety instructions on international flights and sailings, information about emergency procedures in hotels, and directions to major locations are now routinely in English alongside local languages. Most notices which tell us to fasten our seatbelts, find the lifeboat stations or check the location of the emergency stairs give us an option in English.

A special aspect of safety is the way that the language has come to be used as a means of controlling international transport operations, especially on water and in the air. English has emerged as the international language of the sea, in the form of Essential English for International Maritime Use – often referred to as ‘Seaspeak'. Progress has also been made in recent years in devising systems of unambiguous communication between organizations which are involved in handling emergencies on the ground – notably, the fire service, the ambulance service and the
police. There is now ‘Emergencyspeak', trying to cope with problems of ambiguity at the two ends of the Channel Tunnel. And of course there is ‘Airspeak', the language of international aircraft control. This did not emerge until after the Second World War, when the International Civil Aviation Organization was created. Only then was it agreed that English should be the international language of aviation when pilots and controllers speak different languages. Over 180 nations have since adopted its recommendations about English terminology – though it should be noted that there is nothing mandatory about them.

Education

English is the medium of a great deal of the world's knowledge, especially in such areas as science and technology. And access to knowledge is the business of education. When we investigate why so many nations have in recent years made English an official language or chosen it as their chief foreign language in schools, one of the most important reasons is always educational – in the broadest sense. Sridath Ramphal, writing in 1996, provides a relevant illustration:

Since the 1960s, English has become the normal medium of instruction in higher education for many countries – including several where the language has no official status. No African country uses its indigenous language in higher education, English being used in the majority of cases. The English language teaching (ELT) business has become one of the major growth industries around the world in the past thirty years.

Communications

If a language is a truly international medium, it is going to be most apparent in those services which deal directly with the task of communication – the postal and telephone systems and the electronic networks. Information about the use of English in these domains is not easy to come by, however. It is thought that three-quarters of the world's mail is in English. But as no-one monitors the language in which we write our letters, such statistics are highly speculative. Only on the Internet, where messages and data can be left for indefinite periods of time, is it possible to develop an idea of how much of the world's everyday communications (at least, between computer-owners) is actually in English. This domain will receive separate discussion in chapter 3, but the relevant point can be anticipated here. The Internet began life as an English-language medium, and English has retained its dominance. It started out as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency network, in the late 1960s, conceived as a decentralized national network, its aim being to link important American academic and government institutions in a way which would survive local damage in the event of a major war. Its language was, accordingly, English; and when people in other countries began to form links with this network, it proved essential for them to use English. The dominance of this language was then reinforced when the service was opened up in the 1980s to private and commercial organizations, most of which were (for the reasons already given) already communicating chiefly in English. There was also a technical reason underpinning the position of the language at this time. The first protocols devised to carry data on the Net were developed for the English alphabet, and even today no browser is able to handle all aspects of multilingual data presentation. However, the number of non-English-language users on the Internet is growing all the time, and now exceeds the number of new English-speaking users. The consequences of this for minority languages are explored in chapter 3.

The future

When a language becomes a world language, what happens to it, and what happens to other languages as a consequence? There are no precedents, because no language has ever been spoken by so many people in so many countries before. But several major trends can already be seen, and each of them is going to play a significant role in forming the new linguistic climate of the twenty-first century.

However, before considering the case of English in greater detail, we should ask: is English going to continue
in its present position, or is its global status likely to be challenged by other languages? History teaches us one thing: there are never grounds for complacency in considering a language's position. A thousand years ago, the position of Latin would have seemed unassailable. Who knows what the position of any language will be in a thousand years' time? Language status, as we have seen, is intimately bound up with political, military, economic and cultural power, and as these variables alter, so languages rise and fall. Futurologists do not find it difficult to envisage scenarios in which, for example, Arabic, Chinese or Spanish becomes the next world language. Spanish is in fact the world's fastest-growing mother-tongue at present. But for the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that another language is going to replace English in its global role. The factors which brought English to its present position are still very largely in place. English has achieved a presence and momentum which will be extremely difficult to dislodge. People continue to learn English in increasing numbers all over the world. Whatever the attitude towards the cultures who use it, the value of the language as a functional tool is widely accepted. Even those who are most opposed to it find themselves having to use it, if only to achieve a universal audience for their opposition. There is no real sign of this position weakening within the first decade of the new millennium.

English may be relatively stable in its world status, but it is certainly not stable in its linguistic character. Indeed, the language is currently changing more rapidly than at any time since the Renaissance. Several factors are involved, but the chief one is undoubtedly the change in the language's centre of gravity. It is a point often forgotten, especially by native speakers, that a language which has come to be spoken by so many people has ceased to be owned by any of its constituent communities – not the
British, with whom the language began 1,500 years ago, nor the Americans, who now comprise its largest mother-tongue community. The total number of mother-tongue speakers in the world, some 400 million, as seen above, is actually falling, as a proportion of world English users, because of the differential in population growth between first-language countries and those where English is a second or foreign language. Three out of four English speakers are now non-native.