Global Language

 

Two years ago, in the dwindling days of December, I found myself wandering round a bustling marketplace in downtown Cape Town. This was my first trip to Africa and usually when I visit a new place, I go downtown to get a feel for the culture, the language. Before my departure, as always, I did some research and had a feel for the predominant tribal groups, ethnic minorities and majorities. In South Africa, with its eleven official languages, I expected to hear some Afrikaans, Zulu, or Xhosa in the streets; yet amidst my meandering between booths, heavily laden with stylistically streamlined African artifacts, I heard only English.

English is being described as the new global language, dominating science, medicine, academics, business, government, technology, media and most of all, the Internet. One quarter of the planet is fluent in English, native and non-native speakers, and this number is growing exponentially (Crystal, 4). Of course, with any global issue, there is a heated debate as to its advantages and disadvantages. Many individuals view the spread of English as an inevitable result of globalization. With English as a baseline mechanism for communication for the ‘global village,’ business runs easier, travel is less daunting, information can be shared without tedious translation, and people of many different backgrounds can come together to express ideas in a common tongue. At the same time, many, including myself, see the domination of the English language as an expression of cultural imperialism and homogenization, fearing for a loss of diversity within the realm of human experience. In this essay I will vouch for the preservation of diversified language because I believe each human’s identity and culture, both of which are intrinsically connected with language, contain ineffable value that should not be suppressed by the powers-that-be.

To critically analyze an issue, one must have an idea of its roots and mechanisms of maintenance. David Crystal, in his book, English as a Global Language, describes a global language as one that is recognized internationally for its special uses and purposes (Crystal, 2). Crystal claims that languages spread, not due to the inherent nature of the language itself but because of the power of the people who speak it, particularly military and economic power (Crystal, 7). He applies this concept to 19^th and 20^th century politics, when Britain and America were thriving as militant, economic and technological superpowers. British colonization and the growth of the United States as an economic heavyweight spread English around the world. With this financial padding, Anglo-phonic countries invested more in research and technology, marketing this knowledge through the multinational corporation and further entrenching the supremacy of English. This empire was finally consecrated with the invention of the Internet (8).

Around 72% of Internet pages are in English and majority of telecommunication infrastructure resides in developed, English aware countries (Ngai, 2012). Obviously the Internet is a huge wealth of information, available only to those who speak English. One doesn’t only need to learn English to be tech-savvy, but to be a member of the global marketplace, to have a chance at economic and social mobility, to communicate with younger generations, the list goes on. In the words of Mark Warchauer, a professor of education and informatics at the University of California, "English has become the second language of everybody. It's gotten to the point where almost in any part of the world to be educated means to know English,"(Mydans 2007). It seems in today’s world the mantra rings, assimilate or perish.

The spread of English and globalization have been like twisting strands of a double helix, complementing and supporting each other. As Warchauer comments, “"Having a global language has assisted globalization, and globalization has consolidated the global language,” (Mydans 2007). As with globalization, there have been countless benefits to the ubiquity of this language. For one, a mono-linguistic comportment has provided a platform for international communication in the public and private sector. For example in international business meetings, Saudi Arabian, Chinese and Brazilian individuals could use English as a common ground of communication instead of hassling with interpretation. Costs of translation and interpretation within global relations definitely factor in the promotion of a lingua franca (The Guardian 2001). Some proponents claim that a global language would reduce cultural misunderstandings although there is no empirical support of this notion (Crystal 13). Learning English can be a ticket out of poverty in developing countries and many families prefer sending their kids to English schools because they feel it will serve them better in the long run.

There is also an overall sentiment that English is already a global language and therefore we might as well use it to our advantage. Some people take the middle ground by promoting a bilingual stance to linguistic globalization; that is, people should utilize local languages as well as English depending on the context. This is keenly expressed in an article written for The Guardian, an online news source based out of the UK, “there is no need to set up an old-fashioned dichotomy between local languages and English as the "hegemonic aggressor": there is a place for both, because they fulfill different functions,” (The Guardian 2001). In other words, many supporters of a lingua franca believe that people don’t have to identify themselves, culturally or socially, through English, but should recognize the language’s relevance in modern society. In a globalized world we need to have a global language; indigenous languages have no use in the world of blogs and happy meals.

At first glance, the aforementioned statements are rendered intuitively sound; unfortunately the relationships between language, identity and society are not so cut and dry. Individuals are against making English a global language for numerous reasons: they believe it promotes the homogenization of humanity; it is a mechanism of cultural imperialism; it will result in a loss of indigenous knowledge, music, poetry, stories—a loss of culture. But there is a question that presupposes all of these adverse conclusions, a question linguists and psychologists have been quarreling over for decades: does language affect thought?

In his chapter, Babel Revisited, Peter Mühlhäusler, describes two theories through which to understand the relationship between language and the world: mapping theory and the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Mühlhäusler 104). The mapping or labeling theory contends that our world is made up of fundamental units for which language has different labels. This view is expressed by linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker, who claims that language is an adaptation; language evolved out of necessity to label the things around us and communicate cognitions (Pinker 2003). Pinker expands on Noam Chomsky’s ideas of universal grammar by claiming that all languages can be broken down into basic cognitive categorizations, in other words, language doesn’t shape our thoughts (and therefore our experiences), but language works as it does by virtue of innate, adaptive biological mechanisms (Chomsky 1977, Papineau 2007). In the words of Mühlhäusler, "according to this theory, the differences between languages are only superficial and all languages are fully inter-translatable,” (Mühlhäusler 104); therefore a global language is neutral because all languages end up communicating the same universal labels and cognitions.

The second theory through which to understand the role of language in society is referred to as the Sapir-Whorf or linguistic relativity hypothesis (Mühlhäusler 104). The idea of linguistic relativity is expressed eloquently by David Crystal, during his feature in the documentary, In Languages We Live: Voices of the World, a film by Janis Billeskov Jansen and Signe Bryge Sørenson, “the world is a mosaic of visions, and each vision is encapsulated by a language… every time a language is lost, one vision of the world disappears;” in other words, language defines how each human experiences the world (Jansen and Sørenson 2005). In an article for the New York Times, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” Guy Deutscher comments on re-vamped understandings of linguistic relativity, “if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about,” (Deutscher 2010). For example, English is a gender-neutral language and therefore its speakers are less focused on gendered dichotomies in their comprehension, whereas a Spanish or French speaker would view this information as vital to their understanding of the world (Deutscher 2010).

Deutscher continues to comment on how language demands us to speak, feel and think about concepts differently, such as space, color, perception, time, geography etc. Peter Mühlhäusler also describes the immense diversity between languages with regards to communicating certain phenomena: specifically with nature, plants, weather, color, kinship ties, parts of the body, emotions, states of mind, religion, spiritual ideas, social distinctions, and metaphors (Mühlhäusler 106). For example: some indigenous cultures having thousands of names for plants, whereas the western knowledge of nature is quite generalized; the Hopi of North America have no word for ‘depression’; the Tofa people of Siberia have many terms for ‘reindeer’ similar to the Tuvans who use special names for colors, body patterns, and head marking of horses, cows, and yaks (Harrison 2007, Sommers-Flanagan 2012). David Harrison in this chapter, An Extinction of (ideas about) Species, contends that humanity is at risk of losing an amazing vault of eco-knowledge with the extinction of languages (Harrison 2007).

There are around 6000 languages left in the world it is predicted that in 100 years, half of those languages will be extinct. If this occurs, as David Crystal describes, not only will we lose specialized knowledge of the natural world, “[but] if we do nothing…half of the world’s heritage will be gone,” (Jansen and Sørenson 2005). Crystal’s statement alludes to the idea that we experience reality through language, we experience ourselves, and this is only so pure in our mother tongue. The book, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice, written by John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-Flanagan, describes the self as a narrative concept, birthed in the cultural parameters of language. Language and identity are two sides to the same coin; if our concept of the self is intrinsically linked to our personal narrative, then taking away that understanding and filtering it through another cultures’ perspective is very undermining and detrimental to psychological and emotional health (Sommers-Flanagan 2012). As Director Janus Jansen describes, “to lose my mother tongue would be like being forced into language exile. I would lose my family’s history and culture,” (Jansen and Sørenson 2005).

I believe the only way to truly observe issues of global injustice are through a holistic lens. In the documentary, The Color of Fear, a group of mixed-ethnicity men explore issues of racism. At one point in the documentary, a white men comments that he doesn’t understand himself as part of an ethnic community and is perplexed at why race has to be such an issue, “why can’t we all just be members of the human race?” Two African American men retort,

“This is the problem with racism…As a white man, he doesn’t have to think about his position in life, his place in the world. The history books tell him, as they are written, that this is his world…he doesn’t have to think of himself as a white person because the way the world is set up, America in particular, white is a human-being…they step into a world that is theirs.” (Mun Wa, 1994)

Similarly with language, those who grow up speaking English don’t understand why globalizing the English language has to be such a problem, because they are already privileged in that they speak it. I have noticed this paradigm of globalizing homogenization in which what it means to be human is to be a white male who speaks English, dresses a certain way, expresses emotion a certain way, eats certain foods, celebrates certain traditions, practices a certain religion. This idea of English as global language, which is supported by many valid points, is just another veiled expression of white supremacy. What English as a global language is saying to the marginalized peoples of the world is that their cultural contribution does not matter; they do not matter unless they assimilate and essentially ‘lose themselves.’

I am against promoting English as a global language not only because I support the aforementioned arguments that there will be a loss of diversity, culture, and knowledge; I also believe this trend to be another form of Anglo-phonic oppression on minorities. From the moment I first inhaled, my senses were inundated with stimuli of privilege. For example: I was born in a sanitary hospital, with all the necessary accoutrements to meet my medical needs; I was taken to a warm home where I was fed properly and loved; my genealogical heritage is such that my skin color is defined as ‘white’; the first words I heard were English words and English is my mother tongue. All of these things, probably reminiscent stories of many individuals born in the United States, although seemingly basic, are flagrant status symbols, laying the bedrock for my certain success in the world. I agree with Crystal when he claims,

“a global language will cultivate an elite monolingual linguistic class, more complacent and dismissive in their attitudes towards other languages…[who] will be more able to think and work quickly in it, and to manipulate it to their own advantage at the expense of those who do not have it, thus maintaining in a linguistic guise the chasm between rich and poor,” (Crystal 2003).

            The promotion of a mono-linguistic world disrespects my basic tenet that each human has something very unique to share with the world and this ability to share is an intrinsic right that should be protected. With the extinction of language not only will we lose culture and knowledge, but also we will be affirming a paradigm that doesn’t respect the inherent value of human beings. Although there are some advantages to English as a global language, economically, corporately, communicatively, the advantages seem to favor the privileged. I believe accepting these veiled rationales without digging deeper into the perpetual top-down injustices would be an ignorant conclusion. And while those who speak English can remain linguistically blind to their true advantage and vouch for everyone to be like them for sake of convenience, I believe that forcing people to eschew their mother tongue and essentially, their identity for the sake of a further globalized, homogenized, interdependent monoculture is not worth the price.

Works Cited

“A Stateless Language that Europe Must Embrace.” The Guardian 18 April. 2001: Web. Accessed 5 Dec. 2012.

Chomsky, Noam. Essays on form and interpretation. New York: North-Holland, 1977.

Crystal, David. Why a Global Language? New York: 2003. Cambridge University Press. New York, NY. Print.

Deutscher, Guy “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” New York Times.  26 Aug. 2010: web. Accessed 9 Dec. 2012.

Harrison, David. “An Extinction of Ideas about Species.” Oxford University Press. 2007. Print. p. 23-55.

Jansen, Janis Billeskov and Signe Bryge Sørenson, dirs. In languages we Live: Voices of the World. Final Cut Productions, 2005. Documentary.  

Muelenhausler, Peter. “Babel Revisited.” Print. p. 103-108.

Mydans, Seth. “Across Cultures, English is the Word.” New York Times 9 April. 2007: Web. Accessed 5 Dec. 2012.

Ngai, Phyllis. Power Point. Lesson 2: Globalization, Informatization and Communication. 2012.

Papineau, David. “Caveman Conversations.” Rev. of The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker. The Independent 5 Oct. 2007. Web: Accessed 9 Dec. 2012.

Pinker, Steven. “Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche.” In: Kirby S, Christiansen M Language evolution: States of the Art. Language evolution: States of the Art. New York: Oxford University Press; 2003. p. 16-37.

Sommers-Flanagan, John and Rita Sommers-Flanagan. Counseling and Psychotherapy Theries in Context and Practice: Skills Strategies, and Techniques. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012. Print.

The Color of Fear. Dir, Lee Mun Wa, 1994. Documentary.