By Elisabeth Seiple
As an increasingly global society, we have become more and more reliant on English as our international language. In fact, an astounding 20% of the world’s population speaks or studies English to some extent. While many find it easy to erroneously blame our ignorance as Americans and apathy towards learning other languages for this huge linguistic hegemony, it’s not that simple, not to mention the erasure of non-American English speaking countries that this statement perpetuates.
First off, we should recognize the fact that there is a desperate need for a global language. It gives political leaders and businesses a greater opportunity to build understanding and foster global citizenship. Equally important to recognize is that English isn’t chosen solely because of the large economic sway of English-speaking countries. Oftentimes, it is used for its ability to make interactions efficient and fair. Say, for example, a business abroad is looking to expand to a global market, they could spend the time, money, and effort to expand to every country one by one by translating their entire interface each time. Or, they could make their official corporate language English, since they already know that a large portion of their audience would be able to understand it. Similarly, in the case of transnational company mergers, like that of the German firm Hoechst and the French firm Rhône-Poulenc, many companies choose English as the new company language in order to avoid looking like they are playing favorites.
However, the problem with English being the de facto world language comes when language and culture becomes insperable. In most cases, the culture is essential to learning a language. In fact, learning most languages without learning the culture can end up hurting the actual cultural community around a language. This type of learning lends itself to exploitation, allowing the learner to reap the benefit of multilingualism without the understanding and care for the history and the people behind that language. With English, this becomes more complicated. The history of English was often one of colonization, domination, and maintaining superiority. This history isn’t lost in the way that English speaking countries, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, treat English’s modern expansion. Since English belongs to this culture of domination, when it spreads around the world, it mimics a kind of conspicuous colonization. This is not to say that countries in which English is widely spoken as a second language are in any way under legislative control of the U.S. or the U.K., but it does widen a cultural control and hegemony that the U.S. and U.K. have long enjoyed. Once a country is known to have a substantial population that can understand English, oftentimes the U.S. will seize this as an opportunity to reaffirm their global power via popular media and social influence, which in turn can lead to a loss of the native culture. For example, Native American
There have been efforts in the past to create a neutral global language, for example, Esperanto. Esperanto was invented by Polish-Jewish opthamologist L.L. Zamenhof, and was meant to be used as a language that combined parts of many different languages and was simple enough to be learned in a matter of months. The language, spoken by just two million people around the world, is controversial. It’s based only on European syntax and vocabulary, and there have been accusations that the language contains sexist elements, in that its default is often a male pronoun.
What this all serves to show is that creating a global language, whether artificially or naturally, will never come without conflict. It is almost impossibly hard to find a language that is simultaneously globally understood and is respectful of global differences while being a language with an entirely neutral history. English isn’t going to be phased out any time soon, but we do need to think more critically about its role in the coming years.
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