In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, I speak with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Employment Office, Vienna

Further reading

Holzinger, C. (2020). ‘We don’t worry that much about language’: street-level bureaucracy in the context of linguistic diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(9), 1792-1808.
Holzinger, C. (2023). “Wir können nicht alle Sprachen der Welt sprechen”. Eine Studie zu Street-level Bureaucracy im Kontext migrationsbedingter Heterolingualität am Beispiel des österreichischen Arbeitsmarktservice [“We can’t speak all the languages of the world”. A study of street-level bureaucracy in the context of migration-induced heterolingualism as exemplified by Austrian employment services]. PhD thesis. Universität Wien.
Holzinger, C., & Draxl, A.-K. (2023). More than words: Eine mehrsprachigkeitsorientierte Perspektive auf die Dilemmata von Street-level Bureaucrats in der Klient*innenkommunikation. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 52(1), 89-104.
Scheibelhofer, E., & Holzinger, C. (2018). ‘Damn it, I am a miserable eastern European in the eyes of the administrator’: EU migrants’ experiences with (transnational) social security. Social Inclusion, 6(3), 201-209.
Scheibelhofer, E., Holzinger, C., & Draxl, A.-K. (2021). Linguistic diversity as a challenge for street-level bureaucrats in a monolingually-oriented organisation. Social Inclusion, 9(1), 24-34.

Transcript (coming soon)

In the conversation, we explore how the dominance of English has become more contested since the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in higher education and global knowledge production.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

References

Novak Milić, J. 2024. 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University. Language on the Move Podcast.
Piller, I. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move.
Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2022). Peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production: a positive case study. Multilingua, 41(6), 639-662.
Salomone, R. C. (2021). The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language. Oxford University Press.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 30/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Professor Rosemary Salomone. Rosemary is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. Johns University in New York, USA. Trained as a linguist and a lawyer, she’s an internationally-recognised expert and commentator on language rights, education law and policy, and comparative equality.

Rosemary is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She’s also a former faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, a lecturer in Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management, and a trustee of the State University of New York. She was awarded the 2023 Pavese prize in non-fiction for her most recent book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language.

Welcome to the show, Rosemary.

Prof Salomone: Thank you for inviting me, Ingrid.

Dist Prof Piller: It’s so great to have you and to be able to chat about The Rise of English. The Rise of English was first published in 2022 and has just been re-issued in paperback. The NY Times has described The Rise of English as “panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening”, and I totally have to agree. It’s an amazing book. Can you start us off by telling us what in the seemingly unstoppable rise of English has happened since the book was first published two years ago?

Prof Salomone: When I look back over those two years, I was looking for trends, you know, was there some theme running through language policy that indicated there were some new movements going on, if you will. Or was it just more of the same? I actually found both. In terms of themes I saw running through, for sure, were nationalism, immigration and a backlash against globalisation.

So, you saw that coming through in English-taught programs in universities, where the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were pushing back. They had been in the vanguard of offering English-taught programs, and then they started pushing back. Some of that was related to governments moving towards the right and hostile feelings toward immigration and linking internationalisation with immigration.

So, you saw, for example, Denmark limiting the number of English-taught courses in certain business subjects. They saw enrolments drop precipitously, particularly in STEM enrolments, and the business community started pushing back on it. Denmark, then, had to back-pedal because they realised they really did need these international students to come in. Many of these countries are suffering from declining demographics, and so they’re trying to balance this internationalisation and migration against the needs of labour and the global economy.

We see the Netherlands, right now, this week it’s been in the newspapers in the Netherlands, where there’s been proposed legislation to limit the number of courses taught in English. There was a real concern about the quality of education and accessibility for Dutch students, and whether the Dutch language itself was dying or being lost, so there was a proposal that was put forth by the minister of Education into their legislative body. That seems very likely to be adopted.

So, again, you see these Nordic countries where there was this connection between migration, internationalisation and a backlash against globalisation coming through in these very nationalistic environments.

What I saw also, which was interesting, was the use of English in diplomacy. I was tracking the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as he was giving speeches and addressing the British parliament in English, the US Congress in English. Progressively, he was more and more speaking English, and his English was, indeed, improving. But you could see the effect of it, that he was able to address these groups. He was speaking from the heart. He was asking them for aid, appealing to them, and he was doing it very directly in their language, and without the barrier of an interpreter. He was able to control the message better. It became more and more comfortable for him to do that.

I also saw it, which was interesting, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he visited NY. He has been pushing to have Hindi considered one of the official languages of the United Nations. So, he goes to address the United Nations, he speaks to them in Hindi to indicate the importance of his language, but then there’s a yoga event on the lawn of the United Nations. Now, there he has a rather young, progressive group of individuals. Some celebrities were there. And he speaks in English. So, you see this very strategic use of English being used by world leaders for diplomatic effect, for diplomatic purpose.

So, those were two of the trends that I saw, or novelties. There was also a rather interesting proposal in Italy, and again, Italy being a country where it’s become a much more conservative to the right government at this time. There was a legislative proposal that all education would have to be in Italian. Now, you understand that would be devastating for English-taught courses in the universities, and we see those growing more slowly than, certainly, in the Nordic countries. But we see Italy adopting many more English-taught courses because they also are suffering from declining demographics. And in order to attract young people from other countries to come in and stay, in order to keep their own students from leaving to take English-taught programs in other countries, the Italian universities realised that they have to move toward English-taught programs or courses. And yet, you had this proposal from the government saying that all education would have to be in Italian. There would even be fines imposed up to 5,000 euros to businesses that would use words like “deadline” or “blueprint”.

This is the sort of thing we’re accustomed to more seeing from France, from the Académie Française, but even their equivalent in Italy, the Academia della Crusca, they opposed the legislation. There was legislation proposing that English should be the official language of Italy. It’s all coming from these feelings of nationalism. So, Italy doesn’t have an official language in their constitution. Any references to an official or national language raises concerns about fascism because Mussolini imposed standard Italian on everybody, and there were so many regional varieties being spoken. So, again, that theme of nationalism, the pushback against globalisation, fears of internationalisation, that’s what I found in those two years.

Then, on the other side, there was much more young children in primary and secondary schools learning English as their second language throughout Europe and throughout the world. More and more, universities were offering English-taught courses. So, it seemed like English was really unstoppable, but then there were these other forces operating that I didn’t see originally trying to set it back.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I think that’s really one of the fascinating bits of your book, that it’s in many ways such a contradictory and conflicting story. I mean, throughout the 20^th century it seemed that there was this much more linear narrative of the rise of English. But in the 21^st century, it has become more complex and there’s this competition with other languages, as you’ve just pointed out. In diplomacy, multilingual people are English and their other language strategically. So, the story of competition between languages that is inherent in The Rise of English really also looms large in your book.

So, I thought maybe we can take this conversation now to Africa, which also plays a big role in your book, and focus on the competition between French, another European language, and English, and how it plays out there. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Prof Salomone: Well, there’s competition in the former French colonies, the francophone countries, with regard to English. France has had a rather tenuous relationship with those former colonies over the years. We see Morocco, very slowly, moving toward English. We see Algeria, I guess it was about 2 years ago, the minister of higher education announced that university courses would then be offered in English, that university instruction would be in English in Algeria. It made headlines in Morocco when the minister of education announced that children would be learning English beginning in the 3^rd grade.

In those countries, you have English competing with Arabic and with French. There was a study done by the British Council several years ago looking at about 1200 young Moroccans, asking them what they favoured in terms of a language. Well, they favoured English more than they did French or Arabic. They predicted a large number, a very large percentage, predicted that English would be the primary secondary language in Morocco within 5 years, meaning that it would push out French. Arabic being their primary language and English being their secondary language.

So, there is this competition in Africa within the francophone countries between French and English. But you also have China in Africa now. You have Russia in Africa now. You have Chinese Confucius institutes in Africa, and Africa has been much more willing to accept those institutions. Certainly, the US and some western European countries as well. They just don’t have the resources to provide those language programs on their own, and they’re not as concerned about the issues of academic freedom that certainly rose in the US where most of those programs have closed at this point. But you do have this competition between Chinese and English, and other languages within Africa.

And now Russia coming through, and Russia is sort of following the China playbook on language, and instituting language programs both online and in person in Russia. Russia has moved into the Sahel region where we’ve had those coups in recent years, and some of that has been provoked by Russian disinformation. So, here you have, again, the use of language in kind of a perverse way as well. There’s lots going on in Africa right now in terms of the competition for languages.

That said, I don’t think Chinese or Russian is going to replace English as a lingua franca throughout Africa. I think it is replacing French in many ways.

Dist Prof Piller: Interesting that you mention misinformation because it seems to me that a lot of the misinformation is actually also enabled by English. I’m wondering whether you have any thoughts on how the global spread of English is actually part of a lot of misinformation that’s coming out of Russia or wherever it’s coming from.

Prof Salomone: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting observation because of the internet and because of streaming. Because of all these media outlets and what we call fake news. The ability of people all over the world to access this information through English. You’re absolutely right, that English is in a way fomenting some of that or facilitating or enabling some of that disinformation as well. For sure.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s contradictory yet again. So, you’ve already mentioned Chinese, and China was also one of these countries after the pandemic, as the Nordic countries, where English became a bit more controversial and they are kind of pulling back on English in higher education a bit.

So, I thought let’s turn to higher education now because English is, of course, the global language, even if it’s not the language of teaching in all higher education, it’s certainly the language of academic publishing. It’s the language of knowledge-making. So can you maybe tell us a bit more about the role of English in international academia?

Prof Salomone: Well, it’s there for good and for bad. We can argue that there is a value of a common language so researchers can better collaborate. If you think of the Covid 19 vaccine that was produced between Pfizer, an American company, and BioNTech, a German company. Could that have been produced at such breakneck speed if those scientists couldn’t collaborate with each other and communicate with each other in a common language? So, you see there the benefit of having a common language.

But then again, you also see all the downsides of it, particularly in academia. It used to be, when I would attend conferences in Europe, that you would get a headset, that there would be interpreters. That doesn’t exist any longer. Most often, those conferences may be in the national language and in English. Maybe. But very often they’re just in English. So, it really does put non-native English speakers, those who are not fluent or proficient in English, not necessarily just native speakers, it does put them at a disadvantage in terms of the ease with which they can present their scholarship. Do they have humour? Do they understand the nuances of the language? It forecloses them from networking opportunities as well if they don’t speak English proficiently. It forecloses them certainly from publishing opportunities. It used to be “publish or perish”, but now it’s “publish in English or perish”. In order to have your scholarship published in an academic or well-respected academic journal, you have to write it in English.

I bring that point up in the book. It really puts younger faculty or researchers at a disadvantage. They may not have the economic means to hire someone to do the editing on it, whereas those who do have the economic means can get that outside help. This is a booming business of editing scholarship and refining the English of scholarship. So, you see that there are some serious inequities built into the rise of English in academia.

Dist Prof Piller: You’ve got this law background as well. Do you have any thoughts on what we can do to enhance fairness? You’ve just raised all the issues and laid them out quite clearly, but what can we do to improve equity and fairness in global knowledge-making?

Prof Salomone: In a legal sense, I don’t think there’s much we can do. But I think pf Philippe Van Parjis and his proposals. He believes very strongly in English and the utility and value of English as a common language, but he understands (being a political philosopher and economist) on the other hand the limitations of it. How can we build more equity? Should there be a tax imposed on countries that have high levels of English? That money would go to other countries where there’s not a high proficiency in English in order to gain proficiency. I don’t see that being workable. I don’t see how that can occur.

I think it’s just, at this point, unfortunate. I don’t see any legal way, or even a policy way, out of it. English has become just so dominant. The interesting question I find, though, in talking to other people about this, and people in other countries, as to whether English really belongs to us, to the Australians and Canadians and Brits and Americans. Does it belong to us any longer? Or does it belong to the world? Has it become neutral? Is it just utilitarian? Just a tool, a pragmatic tool for communication that’s kind of unleashed from British colonialism or American imperialism or American soft power in Hollywood.

I think that’s easier for those of us who are anglophones to say, “Yeah, sure, I think it’s neutrual.” But I’m not sure that, for other people, it’s really neutral. I think it does carry all that baggage for better or worse.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, true, and I guess even on the individual level. Things like, you mentioned earlier, that networking is so much more difficult in a language in which you are not entirely confident. Or even if you have high levels of proficiency, you might not be the one to joke easily or have that confidence. So, there are challenges at all kinds of levels.

Personally, I am also quite interested in individual mentoring approaches and co-publishing. I think there is a responsibility that we as people who are in established anglophone academia have to co-author or collaborate with people who are struggling with their English and to support peripheral scholars to come into these networks as more central members.

Prof Salomone: I think that’s a really interesting suggestion. I really do. Should there be some of us coordinating this? Should there be some movement, if you will, for those of us who are strong in English to mentor professors who are not, or to collaborate or to coauthor pieces with them? I think that’s really an interesting suggestion. I do. And I wonder what the vehicle could be for instituting a project of that sort. I have to give it some thought. What networks you or I belong to, seriously, to raise that.

Dist Prof Piller: For us, the Language on the Move network has been a little network where we collaborate, and we have lots of people, particularly PhD students, who come to Australia as international students and then return to their countries of origin to teach there. We continue to collaborate, so we’ve built, at a very small level in our field of applied sociolinguistics, a kind of international collaboration network. We’ve tried to co-publish in English, but also then translate some of the publications into other languages for more national or regional dissemination.

That brings me to my next question, actually, to the anglosphere. We’ve talked about English in the non-anglosphere, the countries that are not traditionally considered the owners of English. But, of course, the dominance of English, the hegemony of English, also does something to English in the US, in Australia, in the UK, and to the speakers there. We mostly see that kind of as an advantage, I think. That’s how we’ve discussed it here.

But there is also this other dark side. There is a real complacency about other languages in the anglosphere – like, “If I speak English, I don’t really need another language because I’m able to get around wherever I am on this globe.” We see that in the dwindling numbers of students who enrol in languages programs, the disestablishment of languages at all kinds of universities. Every couple of months we have the news that this or that university in the US, in Australia, in Britain, is establishing their language programs.

I’d like to hear how you view these developments and how we can push back.

Prof Salomone: It’s so short-sighted. It really is very short-sighted. It’s myopic. English cannot do it all. It just can’t. And there is a value to speaking other languages other than the human flourishing that many of us experienced in learning other languages when we were young at the university or whatever. That seems to have gone by the wayside. People don’t talk about it anymore. It really is unfortunate.

Just the joy of reading a classic in the original, or the joy of watching a movie in the original. I’ve tried it. I’ve tried a little experiment of my own of reading a book in English that was translated from Italian, then reading the book in Italian, then watching the movie version, the Hollywood movie version of the book, which was totally perverted (the book). I realised that it just lost so much in the translation. Even the best of translators, and it really is an art form and I totally respect them, even the best of translators – you’re not reading the original. So, there is that sense of human flourishing that we don’t talk about anymore.

Multinational corporations – a large percentage of businesses are done through a cocktail of different languages, so it really does give you a leg up in the job world. In the US there is this slow-moving interest toward offering dual-language immersion programs where you have half the student population (in the public schools) are native speakers of Spanish, Chinese, French, whatever. The other are native speakers of English. And you put the kids together, half the day in one language and half the day in another. What’s motivating the English-speaking parents here is the value of languages in the global economy. They’re not concerned about their children reading Dante in the original, or Moliere in the original. They’re interested in their children having a leg up in the global economy, so they’re becoming more and more popular in the US within public school districts.

So, you have that value in terms of job opportunities. We saw during the pandemic the need for multilingual speakers to deal with immigrant communities, you know, to explain to them what the health hazards were, whether it was in hospitals or social welfare agencies. There was a critical need for speakers of other languages, and some of them were relying on Google Translate or software translation. But even Google Translate – the state of California posted a disclaimer on their website that you cannot rely totally on the translation of Google Translate. It didn’t have necessarily 100% accuracy.

We know that artificial intelligence is getting much more sophisticated. As I was writing the book over those 7 years, I didn’t know Afrikaans. I didn’t know Dutch. I didn’t know Hindi. So, I had to rely on translation software, and it became more and more accurate as the years went on. BUT….but…. you lose lots of nuance there. You lose the human element. Very often, translation or interpretation is needed in a crisis situation, whether it be in foreign affairs diplomatically, or in a health crisis. Can you rely on artificial intelligence in that critical kind of moment where you really do need the understanding of nuance and sensitivity toward the human situation?

So, I think we are really short sighted in not understanding the value of other languages. Just this week it’s come up in newspapers here in the US that our Department of Defense has dropped 13 what we call flagship programs at universities. These were federally funded programs that provided funds for university students for 4 years to learn a critical language – Chinese, Arabic, Russian. They dropped 13 of them, ok? Five of them being Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s unbelievable.

Prof Salomone: What are they thinking? What are they thinking? That this should be a high priority for the federal government, to be training our young people in speaking Chinese and where they would have a study abroad opportunity in either mainland China or Taiwan. Thirteen of them were dropped, and 5 of them were Chinese programs.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I mean that’s just stupid and heartbreaking. And shocking to hear.

I want to get back to what you’ve just said about AI in a second but, before we do, you’ve mentioned the dual language programs in the US and that parents and their children are there to enhance their careers and for economic reasons.

But I have to pull out one of my favourite bits from your book, and that was the information that the most bilingual state in many ways, or the one that has the most bilingual programs is Utah. That’s related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and how they want to be missionaries. I really enjoyed reading that. I’ve met lots of young Americans in various places who speak the language beautifully. Maybe you can tell us a bit about one of these other impulses, why people actually learn languages. The missionary impulse and this particular church.

Prof Salomone: When I thought of what states or localities should I select to flesh out these dual language programs, I chose California because that was a dramatic turnaround where bilingual programs were just about dead several decades ago. What that did, effectively, was mobilise the support for language programs to the point where they could turn that legislation around through a popular referendum. So that was just a dramatic turnaround.

I looked at Utah because Utah has just such a high number of dual language programs and was really in the forefront of these programs because you had the support of a governor, a senator, of somebody within the educational establishment. But it was all done because of a particular religious population there that values languages. They train their young people there in Utah and then send them out on a mission.

But what it has done, it’s been a boon for industry in Utah. Multinational companies are looking to move into Utah because you do have this linguistic infrastructure that’s already there.

In NY City, what I found really interesting, was the French community, this bottoms up, grassroots community of mothers who were looking for an affordable alternative to bilingual education for their children. (Then they went) to the NY City Board of Education to a particular principal whose mother was French, and so she was very sympathetic. But also, she had declining enrolments in her school, so she was very eager to welcome a larger population. That school has so changed that community in Brookly. You walk down Court Street, which is the main street there. Loads of French cafes. French restaurants. People on the street speaking French. It changed the community. It became a focal point for the community. French mass at the local Catholic church. The French population has never been politically active in NY City at all, but because of their efforts and with the support of the French Embassy as well, other language groups within NY City started saying, “We could have that as well”. So, you see a proliferation of dual language programs across the city in all kinds of languages.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. The importance of these flagship programs. And if you’ll allow me, I’ll just plug another of our podcast episodes here. We recently spoke with Dr Jasna Novac Milić, about the Croatian studies program here at Macquarie University. It’s one of the few Croatian studies programs outside of Croatia. And, like you’ve just said for this French school in Brooklyn, it’s got such a flagship role and it’s also so inspirational to other language communities when they see what you can build in terms of structures from primary education through secondary up to the tertiary level. So yeah, these programs are really, really important.

Prof Salomone: I was speaking in the UK last week, and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “My grandson attends a dual language program in California. He’s 9 years old, and he speaks Spanish fluently.” And I said, “Well I admire his parents for having the good sense to enrol him in that program.”

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. I think we really need to think about the rise of English within bi and multilingual ecologies. It’s not just about English, right? This is not English doing away with other languages. We really need to keep thinking about how we can make the best use of this international lingua franca while also supporting all these multilingual ecologies. All these languages have different roles for different people, and that’s sort of the positive side of it.

Before we wrap up now, I wanted to ask you on your thoughts on the future of English. Will we really, you know, will English keep rising? Or will not another language come along but will language tech and generative AI and automated translation be the end of any kind of natural language hegemony?

Prof Salomone: Or any kind of natural language communication at all! We don’t know. We just don’t know where AI is going to take us. And it’s developing by the nanosecond. Yesterday I viewed audios that one of my colleagues at the law school has been a partner on where they took the oral arguments from the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which was the racial desegregation case from 1954. Now it’s the anniversary.

They recreated the voices of the justices of what they would have sounded like. They took the transcript, the written transcript, and converted it into an audio using artificial intelligence. So, they just took audios of the justices speaking in other contexts so that they could get a sense of their voice and then transposed it onto this written transcript and created what would have been, could have been, the oral arguments in the case. I mean, who would have thought? And it sounded convincing. It sounded convincing. These were bots speaking, not the real justices. So, we have no idea.

We need human communication. We will. We’re not going to have machines communicating with each other. Not in our lifetimes. So, as a language of human communication, I think English is going to steadily increase. Not this huge trajectory that we’ve seen in the past 20 years. It’s really gone quite high. It’s not going to level off. I think it’s going to slowly increase as we see more young people learning English in schools and colleges. More of these English talk programs at universities. So, more and more people are speaking English than ever before, and that will continue.

Will it be the lingua franca forever? Don’t know. If I had to think of any language that could possibly replace it, it would be Spanish because it is a language that’s spoken on 5 major continents. But I don’t see that happening in a long time. I think English, as a dominant lingua franca, is here to stay for quite some time.

Will we see more pushback against it? Possibly. A couple of years ago I didn’t foresee the pushback that I’m seeing now. Certainly, in a country like the Netherlands or Denmark, I never could have predicted that. Or the kind of radical legislation coming out of Italy. I couldn’t have predicted that. Or the incursion of Russia into Africa. Couldn’t have foreseen that. The world is in such constant flux, and the global politics are really in such constant flux that I don’t think we’re capable of foreseeing how English is going to intermix here.

I was hoping that with the streaming of movies, that more people would become interested in foreign languages because there are so many movies being produced on Netflix. So many of those movies are produced in other countries, in other languages. But, you know, there’s dubbing. So, people just turn on the dubbing and would rather listen to the dubbed voices than listen to the original or make any effort to understand the original. I think that’s unfortunate. Part of it is us. Part of it is anglophones ourselves. Seeing English as being just the possibility of doing everything with it.

But English will continue. It will be our lingua franca for a while.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I agree. Obviously, you can never predict the future, but I think there are interesting questions to be raised, particularly in terms of how the bulk of text and garbage that is being put out by digital technologies now, how that actually will overwhelm communication in a sense.

One sense that I get from my students, many of whom are from Asia, many of them are very multilingual, is that English is completely normal. You have to have English in the same way you need to know how to read and write. But what they’re interested in is actually learning other languages. You spoke about Netflix. Korean is super popular with K-pop and Korean drama and whatnot. Really, all kinds of different languages being learned. So, I do see a great diversification actually. It seems to me that English has become so basic. You need it, no doubt about it. But what’s really interesting seems to be more and more other languages, other skills, other frontiers. It’s an exciting time to think about language.

Prof Salomone: Well (Korean) is the one language where enrolments are on the rise in the United States. Because of K-pop. Totally. It’s the only language where enrolments are going up. So, it gives you a sense of the soft power, the power of soft power.

Dist Prof Piller: Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. It’s been really fantastic and really informative. Everyone, go and read The Rise of English. It’s such a rich book and so many interesting panoramic views as we said earlier.

Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Official coronation portrait (Image credit: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015)

The Queen and the English language are both unique within their categories. The Queen enjoyed special social status among humans through a complex combination of exceptional legal standing, imperial power, accumulated wealth, and sophisticated celebrity cult. The same is true of English: it is different from any other language in terms of reach, clout, and popularity.

English has more speakers than any other language

English today is said to have around 1.5 billion speakers, close to 20% of the global population. Even if counting speaker numbers is notoriously tricky, that’s a lot more than any other language in history. If we were to include everyone with basic proficiency, 1.5 billion is a substantial undercount.

But it is not the large number of speakers that makes English exceptional. After all, Chinese is not far behind with 1.1 billion speakers.

What makes English categorically different from Chinese is the relationship between first and second language speakers. The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers live in Greater China and speak Chinese as their mother tongue.

By contrast, only a minority of ca. 370 million English speakers live in the United Kingdom and its settler colonies (most notably the USA but also Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa).

The vast majority of English speakers live outside the Anglosphere: some in former exploitation colonies of the UK or USA (e.g., India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Ghana), and others in countries with no special ties to the Anglosphere where English is learned as a foreign language (e.g., China, Germany, France, Japan, Russia).

In short, what makes English exceptional among languages is twofold: it is widely used outside the heartlands of the Anglosphere, and it is learned as an additional language by countless multitudes across the globe.

The most spoken languages worldwide, 2022 (Source: Statista)

English is more powerful than any other language

A language does not have power per se. It derives its power from the people and institutions it is associated with. And English has been associated with some of the most powerful people and institutions of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.

The British Empire was the largest empire in human history, covering 35.5 million km² in 1920 (when it was at its largest), or more than a quarter of the world’s land mass. Even after the decline of the British Empire, English got a second imperial boost due to US global domination.

English is not only associated with powerful states but almost all international organizations have English as their working language (sometimes along with a few other languages), from Amnesty International to the World Trade Organization. Even organizations far removed from the Anglosphere have adopted an English Only policy, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The political might of English is accompanied by economic clout. Most of the world’s most powerful corporations are headquartered in the USA, and even those that are not have been adopting English as their corporate language.

The world’s richest people speak English, too: 8 of the world’s 10 richest people are based in the USA, and the other two (one in France, one in India) undoubtedly also have English in their repertoires.

The examples could go on and on to illustrate that English is spoken in most of the world’s halls of power. That creates an effect that sociologists call “misrecognition”. Power comes from control over military, economic, or political resources; not from language. However, because English is so consistently associated with high power, it becomes “misrecognized” as a source of power.

And because everyone wants a piece of the cake, everyone wants to learn English so that they, too, can reap the successes it seems to confer.

Countries with largest numbers of English speakers

English is more hegemonic than any other language

Misrecognition is closely tied to another exceptional characteristic of English: it dominates through the ideas associated with it. English is stereotypically associated with the best in almost any field of human endeavor.

Most languages are associated with cultural stereotypes, beliefs, ideas, and emotions. Unlike the specific and relatively narrow cultural stereotypes associated with other languages (e.g., “French sounds romantic”), ideas about English are highly versatile: it is the language of modernity itself.

English is seen as the language of Hollywood media glitz and glamour, the language of freedom and liberal democracy, or the language of science and technology. Indeed, the cultural versatility of English is so great that it not only serves as the language of global capitalism but can also appear as its antagonist: the language of resistance.

One important way in which the hegemony of English is maintained is through the pomp and pageantry of the British monarchy. We are currently seeing global media saturation coverage. Its effect is not only to create a cultural, emotional, aspirational, and personally-felt connection with the Queen but with everything she stands for, including the English language.

The future of English

Although the role of the Queen is highly exceptional, her passing reminds us that the role was filled by an ordinary human being. It is likely that the next incumbent will be less capable at arresting the decline of the British monarchy. The role is likely to become less special, with a reduced realm and against the continuing diversification of celebrity cults.

The passing of the Queen has unleashed a global media frenzy, which also reinforces the hegemony of English (Image credit: sohu.com)

It might take longer for English to see a diminished status. In the past, imperial languages such as Latin and Persian survived the empires that spread them by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

At the same time, the fate of English now rests to a significant degree with the language policies of countries outside the Anglosphere. And these might change as beliefs about the importance of the language change. For instance, if China were to curtail the role of English language proficiency for university entrance, this could send speaker numbers plummeting quite quickly.

The role of English is no longer solely in the hands of the Anglosphere.

Related content

To explore further how English went from peripheral peasant tongue to global superspreader language, and what its meteoric rise means, head over to this guest lecture I delivered at Yunnan University, Kunming, China) on Sept 28, 2021.

***

Adéṣínà Ayẹni [@yobamoodua] to Gerald Roche [@GJosephRoche] (2 Feb 2022): I will surely love to be a part of the global day. But one question, can I contribute in my language in place of English?

Gerald: My heart sank as I read this message on Twitter. I’d been messaging people all day, promoting Global Language Advocacy Day (GLAD22), the first ever global event dedicated to raising awareness about language rights. I was really proud to be part of this event, but reading this message suddenly filled me with doubt. Although I had assumed and hoped that people would use whatever language they wanted in participating in the day, I hadn’t really made that clear in how I communicated.

Claire: I responded to Gerald’s plea for personal stories of multilingualism for GLAD22, and in so doing, drew from my English resources to concretise the dialogue with Gerald, as a mediator to his (and my) followers. I wrote about my experiences as a multilingual that began with learning German. But, I wrote it in English to attend to the monolingual question-answer framework implicit in the Twitter reply function. This framework mimics social interactions, particularly in institutional settings, to see a dominant speaker lead a discussion towards certain personal, political and institutional aims. Interactants (like me) know that they are cut-off from doing this if we deviate from the lingua franca, limiting our combined reach. Thus, the replying function alone is structured by a monolingual bias.

***

In this piece, we interrogate the exchange that followed the question above to explore how I (Gerald) endeavored to uphold the language rights that are at the centre of our combined work with GLAD22 and the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR). We interrogate the options made available by social platforms like Twitter and make suggestions for multilingual frameworks for communication that might be upheld in our future language rights work.

GCLR is a relatively young organization. It emerged in the early days of the pandemic when a group of organizations, based mostly in Europe and North America, came together to discuss the promotion of language rights. Founding members and co-chairs of the coalition were mostly representatives of non-governmental organizations and professional translation services. Membership in the coalition grew substantially throughout 2021, as GCLR expanded to include individual academics, activists, and advocates. The changing composition of the coalition, and its increasing size, began to see us nurture our definition of ‘global’ and its articulation through GLAD22.

For GCLR, being global means not just getting the message out as widely as possible, but also being as inclusive as possible, and working in a way that responds to the diverse challenges facing language rights advocates around the world. This global inclusion creates solidarity so we can act together, lending our support to those who face greater risks in their own advocacy.

The first GLAD22 used the phrase ‘language rights are human rights’ to nurture such solidarity. Modeled on Language Advocacy Day, GLAD22 aimed to raise awareness of the need to defend language rights, and to expand our network of solidarity, thus strengthening our capacity to work together in defense of language rights.

There were several approaches via social media to facilitate multilingual discussions but the majority of the engagement came through English language dialogue, which is where the question via Twitter was located.

A Twitter Exchange 

I (Gerald) responded to the request to participate in languages other than English with an enthusiastic ‘yes’. What followed was a post in Yorùbá, featuring a banner image with the phrase ‘Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ’,—‘language rights are human rights’—alongside the GLAD22 hashtag.

Òní tí í ṣ'ọjọ́ kejìlélógún, oṣù Èrèlé ọdún; 22-02-2022 ni Àyájọ́ Ọjọ́ Àgbàwí fún Èdè Àgbáyé, àkọ́kọ́ irú ẹ̀ lágbàáyé. A ya ọjọ́ òní sọ́tọ̀ fún ìgbàsọ̀ láárí ẹ̀tọ́ èdè ẹni.
Àkórí tí 2022 ni Ẹ̀TỌ́ ỌMỌNÌYÀN NI Ẹ̀TỌ́ SÍ ÈDÈ.#GLAD22 #YORUBA #ETOSIEDE pic.twitter.com/wJbX3bSJtE

— ỌMỌ YOÒBÁ (@yobamoodua) February 22, 2022

The post featured a long thread covering existing language challenges in Nigeria and suggestions for improvement. Priorities included refocusing policy concerns for Indigenous languages as well as prioritizing Indigenous languages in the home and in education.

It received several likes and retweets, including by Gerald to his followers. This is important because Gerald’s actions demonstrated not only that he supported participation in Yorùbá, but also his institutional alignment. Other members of GCLR also engaged with the post, and in doing so, advocated for multilingual participation.

Later in the day, one of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s mutuals, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) [@kolatubosun], called out for a language rights group in Nigeria. Several of the key points of the first post were highlighted, especially those that pressure the government for language policy changes. This post was liked by several more users, who commented with their support for the group.

We need a language rights group in Nigeria. An organisation dedicated solely to advancing the rights of its languages. That supports language revitalisation and commits funds to supporting efforts in that direction; pressures government and policymakers on relevant issues, etc

— Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (커라 투버순) (@kolatubosun) February 23, 2022

This Twitter exchange provides some opportunities to ascertain the impact of Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s  multilingual interaction on the language rights values of GCLR and GLAD22. With the GLAD22 affiliation, users communicated their local barriers to language rights. They assembled to develop solidarity and organizing potential.

Importantly, these interactions were in contexts that GCLR has not yet managed to reach. As one observer pointed out on the day, GCLR had organized ‘no activities in or relating to Africa’ as part of the day. Thus, Gerald’s response helped catalyze meaningful discussion for Indigenous languages with strategies for implementation and, possibly, movement towards local organizing in Nigeria.

What if GCLR has real fit and capacity to do more? What if multilingual frameworks for communication were modeled by GCLR for use within platforms like Twitter, and beyond?

Initiating Multiple Moderators 

GCLR might mobilize the Twitter responses shown in this post, and others, to recruit them as moderators for future Global Language Advocacy Days. A series of starting points, methods for moderating in and to multiple languages might be developed amongst members.

These could include reaching out to key educational and government institutions listed in Adéṣínà Ayẹni’s post, to nominate individuals from their institution to speak on their behalf on the day within a nominated social media platform. GCLR members could act as moderators of these discussions in their languages, accumulating new communication hubs across several languages for GLAD23. These hubs could be observed to grow insight around multilingual designs for communication that may eventually be adopted by global north-based moderators such as us.

GCLR has the culture and capacity to do this. Throughout 2021, the coalition participated in a number of larger events, such as International Translation Day and RightsCon. Members’ presentations discussed the importance of language rights as a means of realizing linguistic justice, particularly in the digital realm. GCLR made this information available in as many languages as possible. We feel that it is a natural next step for GCLR to grow its member base meaningfully and initiate multiple moderators across several languages in GLAD23.

Redesigning Multilingual Frameworks for Communication

GCLR is also well-placed to improve decolonizing and multilingual frameworks for communication. Let’s say that Gerald offered to co-author a post with Adéṣínà Ayẹni that would be a thread between English and Yorùbá, linking with Australian and African institutions with power and reach. Such a post may invite comments in both languages (and varieties) that either moderator could respond to.

Such a post may invite language practices such as codeswitching to enter the dialogue because of an ease of intelligibility by the moderators. Users may draw from English resources creatively and as a tool for reaching wide audiences, defined by personal choices rather than monolingual biases. Such frameworks for communication may invite new language practices that emerge in digital spaces but rarely in English-dominated zones.

These frameworks go beyond the otherwise profit-driven knowledge generation in social media discourses as they redesign more socially and linguistically equitable interactions online.

There is great scope for testing such frameworks within Global Language Advocacy Day. On Twitter, the #GLAD22 hashtag received nearly 60,000 impressions with individuals contributing stories, ideas, and resources and language-focused organizations participating including the Linguistics Society of New Zealand, the PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, Cultural Survival, Tehlike Altındaki Diller, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, and Hausa Language Hub.

Prefiguring Linguistic Justice

GCLR upheld language rights within several aspects of its communication in GLAD22, leading to 13 events in 6 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, and North America and to the support of new debates such as those in Nigeria. We published about language rights issues in the UK and Bangladesh; New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Ireland and the USA, Australia, and Myanmar, organized a social media campaign on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and received attention in the media, such as this article in Kronos News that was published in English and Turkish. However, as advocates for language rights, we must discern ‘how’ we do this within the limited and often monolingual platforms that we are offered online.

We are currently working to create a set of multilingual principles and practices for the organization, which we aim to have in place before we begin planning Global Language Advocacy Day 2023. Doing so is part of the coalition’s prefigurative practices, i.e., those based on the idea that we should try to ‘create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build.’

This work is also part of evolving organizational strategies in the coalition, which include the formation of working groups, modeled on processes that were used in the Occupy movement (among other contexts). These groups come together to undertake a specific task, without supervision, and then once that task is done, they dissolve. One of these working groups will develop the coalition’s multilingual principles and practices, which will undoubtedly evolve over time, while others address discrete issues raised by coalition members.

If you would like to be part of these language rights activities, and help to prefigure and work towards a world of greater linguistic justice, then we invite you to join us. Contribute your passion, ideas, and labor, your solidarity and commitment, to realizing our mission of language rights for all.

***

Don’t trust the British speaking English?

The cover story of The Guardian Weekly of 18 September 2020 has a portrayal of Boris Johnson’s back, with both hands behind him, one gripping a hammer, the other with his fingers crossed, and the caption ‘Promises, promises. What will Boris Johnson break next?’ European Union negotiators in dialogue with the British government have every reason to be concerned about whether Johnson can be trusted. British behaviour is probably no surprise to the head of the EU’s task force, Michel Barnier, a top EU and French government insider. The confrontation looks like yet another drama in a millennium of clashes between France and England, now in the form of a war of words. The words in question, for the British negotiators and doubtless for many of the Eurocrats involved, are English words. What is ironical is that the British are leaving the Union, whereas the English language is staying on.

How and why this is so requires an analysis of how the EU manages the multilingualism of its activities and functions in its key institutions and in links with the 27 member states. The way languages are used, and which languages are used, are key social and political issues in an international world.

The dream of ‘global Britain’ of Theresa May and Boris Johnson is the idea that the UK should join up with the old Commonwealth countries and the USA in an Anglosphere network that will replace membership of the EU. The Anglosphere idea is rooted in the assumption that those who speak English are simply superior to others. That an Anglosphere union of ‘English-speaking peoples’ will emerge is a post-imperial pipe dream that has entranced some influential British politicians for decades. In a speech at Harvard University in 1943, when Winston Churchill was awarded an honorary doctorate, he sketched out a plan for the post-Nazi world. The primary aim was to perpetuate British and American global dominance, with a ‘birthright’ to spread English worldwide. The promotion of ‘global English’ had been discussed at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s.

Others see English differently.

“Perfidious Albion”

The British have been known in France for centuries as ‘Perfidious Albion’. Wikipédia in its French variant explains that Albion is an ancient way of referring to England, and defines the term as ‘acts relating to diplomatic manoeuvres, duplicity, treachery, and thereby of infidelity (vis-à-vis promises or assumed alliances made with other state-nations) by monarchs or governments of the United Kingdom (or of England prior to 1707) in their quest for egoistic interests.’

Perfidious Albion? (Image credit: thejournal.ie)

This French website provides a wealth of examples of British treachery from the time of Joan of Arc onwards. It refers to Nelson, the banishing of Napoleon to a remote island, incidents of imperial competition in the Middle East, and Winston Churchill’s decision to sink much of the French fleet on 3 July 1940 in the naval port near Oran in French Algeria, Mers-El-Kébir. Churchill acted when the French were allies but had just been overrun by Hitler’s troops. His purpose was to prevent any take-over of French warships by the Germans or the Italians. In addition to many vessels being wrecked, 1,297 French servicemen died.

Wikipedia in English also provides a wealth of examples of how Perfidious Albion has been used by enemies of the UK over several centuries, and recently in connection with Brexit. By contrast an online history course for British schoolchildren has a different understanding of the term: ‘Perfidious Albion is a term used by some people to describe the British Empire. It is a term that suggests that the British were deceitful and treacherous in their dealings as an Empire.’ This website states that the originator of the term was a French author, but fails to provide any examples of the way the term has been used in France or of French resentment of British behaviour.

President Charles de Gaulle rejected an application by the British to join the European Economic Community (as it then was) on 27 November 1967, after blocking an earlier attempt in 1963. The other five member states were keen for the UK to join, but they were not consulted by de Gaulle. At a press conference he stated that the UK would need to change drastically before it could be accepted. De Gaulle did not want the pound sterling complicating European economic integration, and rightly saw the risk of the UK serving as a bridgehead for US influence. This was a reasonable consideration, even if de Gaulle was doubtless well aware that the creation of the EU was as much a project of the US as of key Europeans. Among these the most influential was Jean Monnet, a banker who collaborated with the British and the Americans between the two world wars and was an influential adviser to Franklin Roosevelt during the war. American involvement in planning for Europe is described in Pascaline Winand’s book, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe.

De Gaulle had personal experience of Perfidious Albion, since he lived in exile in London from 1940 to 1943 as head of the Free French movement. Churchill considered de Gaulle ‘an enemy of Britain’, with a ‘messianic complex” and ‘dictatorial’ tendencies. Churchill’s hostile assessment was first made public when secret documents were released in 2000. Richard Norton-Taylor reported on this in ‘How Churchill plotted against “our bitter foe” ’ in The Guardian (5 January 2000). He reveals that Churchill conspired with President Roosevelt to prevent de Gaulle from leading French recovery in the final phase of the war or after it. The article concludes with stating that between the UK and France ‘tensions remain’. This is still the case in 2020. The French and some other Europeans will breathe a sigh of relief once the UK has gone, but its departure weakens both the EU and the UK.

Britain and the European Union

British disagreements about many EU policy issues with other EU countries are partly caused by the goals of European integration being deliberately left unclear. Unification has been a gradual process since 1955. For some the goal is an increasingly merged union and ultimately a federal United States of Europe; for others the EU should remain only an economic union, but it is already vastly more than that. The EU faces major challenges quite apart from Brexit: migration, member states not observing the rule of law, the messy interface between national and supranational interests, and the euro serving some countries better than others. A book by a distinguished American observer of EU affairs, John R. Gillingham, The EU. An obituary (2017, updated in 2018) argues strongly that the EU’s many weaknesses mean that it could disintegrate.

Those who thought that a British exit would rapidly lead to other countries following suit have been proven wrong.

Gillingham, an economic historian, basically recommends that the EU should become more like the USA. This fits well into an Anglosphere agenda, which I will return to. He complains that ‘Europe is governed today neither by its peoples nor by its ideals but by a bank board, but  tendentiously argues that ‘repair of the financial system ….will mean dropping ambitious EU reform plans in favour of American banking practices and accepting increased influence for US investors and financial methods’ (ibid., 239, 207).

This is almost as crude as when the US ambassador to Denmark stated at my university in 1997: ‘The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this preventing real integration and development of the Union’.

It was de Gaulle’s successor as president, Georges Pompidou, who agreed to the UK joining in 1973. This was on one condition, namely that all British staff in EEC institutions should be fluent in French. In Pompidou’s view, French was the language of Europe, and English the language of the Americas. This sample linguistic nationalism provides a glimpse of the complexity of managing multilingualism in the EU, in which in principle and in law all 24 EU languages have equal rights.

There was a witticism circulating during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Ministers from many continental European countries have often been able to function in more than one language. The British by contrast were relentlessly monolingual. In Thatcher’s government only two of her Ministers had any proficiency in a foreign language. But these two were the ones who really could not be trusted because they were suspiciously interested in foreign cultures! A key factor influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum vote is English insularity. A key factor influencing the Brexit vote was ignorance about how the EU functions.

The British vote to leave the EU can be seen as British perfidy vis-à-vis its European partners of 47 years. The perfidy reached new heights in September 2020, after three years of complicated negotiations on the terms of the UK’s departure and future relationship with the EU. Johnson’s government decided on legislation that was in breach of a legally binding treaty with the EU, one that he himself had negotiated and described at the time as ‘fantastic’. The legislation, the Internal Market Bill was passed by the House of Commons on 29 September 2020. Perfidious Albion of the crudest kind.

On 1 October 2020 the European Commission reacted by sending the UK a ‘letter of formal notice’ for breaching its obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement. This marks the beginning of an infringement process against the UK, since ‘Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement states that the European Union and the United Kingdom must take all appropriate measures to ensure the fulfillment of the obligations arising from the Withdrawal Agreement, and that they must refrain from any measures which could jeopardise the attainment of those objectives. Both parties are bound by the obligation to cooperate in good faith in carrying out the tasks stemming from the Withdrawal Agreement.’

Face to face negotiations on this issue failed to deter the UK from acting illegally. The British legislation is in conflict with the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland, as Ursula von der Leyen stressed in her press statement of 1 October. Failure to react to the infringement notification and to comply with the UK’s obligations can result in the issue being referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which can impose heavy fines. The UK is still legally obliged to respect the Court’s decision.

One of the goals of Brexit was to escape this kind of control. However, the UK’s behaviour is undermining its international reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.

EU language policies

Language policy management in the EU system is complex and politically sensitive. Any analysis of it needs to be calibrated with language rights and language use in law and in practice, and the market forces that have propelled English forward over the past five decades. There are very different challenges for permanent employees of the European Commission, for Members of the European Parliament and their staff, for the activities of the European Council of Ministers, which brings together government ministers of the 27 member states, and for countless experts involved in negotiations on policy documents or budget implementation. The continuous production of policy documents and of the massive corpus of Eurolaw (the ‘acquis communautaire’), which overrides national law, and is published in parallel in 24 languages, in principle with the same semantic content in each of them, requires the world’s largest translation service. These activities are radically different from the management of speech in diverse institutional contexts, supported by extensive, flexible interpretation services.

The language of EU official documents is sui generis. It is screened by legal specialists as well as linguists. High-level negotiation on all of the many policy issues on which the EU legislates is dependent on the precision of every word in written texts, and the capacity to decode these, in all of the 24 languages. The written language is essentially a technical, bureaucratic, legalistic one for very specific purposes. It has to navigate the turbulent waters of maintaining linguistic diversity, and consistency in formulating EU principles. This is of major importance for citizens and for the representatives of all countries, since EU law takes precedence over national law. Unfortunately, the general public, and probably many British Members of Parliament, know little about the interface between national law and EU law, and the shared responsibility of all member states for the formulation and implementation of decisions and policies.

Blaming ‘Brussels’ for EU decisions and decrees is simply false, when each and every country has had a shared responsibility for these policies.

Use of one language rather than another is not merely a pragmatic choice. Seeing a language as purely instrumental, or as ideologically neutral matter, is false.  Choice of language reflects political choices and realities. A language is one particular way of understanding and shaping reality, drawing on a worldview that emerged in specific historical and cultural contexts. All languages change over time, as the variety of English worldwide demonstrates. All 24 EU languages are in both national and international use because of the way the EU operates.

When Finland joined the EU, it needed to translate the over 70,000 pages of Eurolaw into Finnish. They attempted to translate from the English version but could not understand it without consulting the French original.

One of the consequences of British EU membership has been a major change in the language policies of EU institutions. English has gradually since 1973 become the dominant in-house language of the European Commission, largely displacing French. In communications with the wider world, it is mostly English that is used. English has become the default language, and massively important in the conduct of EU affairs, not least when policies are initially conceptualised in English, and drafted in English. Proficiency in English therefore, whether used by a native speaker or by a well-qualified non-native speaker, delivers a strategic advantage to those who think in English and are able to use it optimally in speech or writing. Conversely, for those less proficient, English puts them at a disadvantage. English may not be fully understood, especially when native speakers do not adjust their discourse sensitively for an audience with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Speech in limited English, sometimes disparagingly described as ‘broken English’, can lead to misunderstandings or can complicate interaction. Whether any ‘Euro English’ has evolved, as has been claimed, is disputed, and seems improbable, in part because of the diversity of its users and of its contexts of use.

The triumph of English

Many factors have contributed to the expansion of English in Europe and worldwide. English is the dominant language of the USA, Hollywood, NATO, the UN, international finance, several countries, and many international organisations. Economic integration has strengthened English in continental Europe. It has also contributed to major investment in the UK by corporations from Japan, the USA, and continental Europe because the UK was part of the European common market with freedom of movement of goods, people, and capital. This investment is at risk once Brexit is completed if there is no agreement that suits both the EU and the UK. Industrial products, for instance vehicle or airplane parts, can typically cross borders many times before a finished product exists. Bailey’s Irish cream reportedly crosses the UK/Irish border six times during its production process. Even the pre-eminence of the City of London in finance has suffered because of Brexit.

“Uncle Sam Teaches the World”, Puck Magazine, 1899 (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Other factors influencing the expansion of English in continental Europe are geographical proximity, giving the learning of English pride of place in schools, and extensive use of it in higher education and research. Applications for research grants from the EU are invariably submitted in English (even if the regulations state that any of the 24 languages can be used!). Applications are also assessed by a variety of Europeans using English. This puts applicants and assessors whose primary research language is a Romance, Slav, or Finno-Ugric language, or Greek at a disadvantage. Since there is immense competition for such funds, the hegemony of English is consolidated in this way, and will not change once Brexit is finalised.

The expansion of English was not left to chance. US ‘philanthropic’ foundations invested significantly in academia in Europe from the 1920s onwards. The British and Americans have promoted English worldwide since the 1950s, as advocated by Churchill (and by political leaders in the UK and US over 200 years). Linguistic imperialism of this kind is well documented. When the iron curtain was removed, it was an explicit policy of successive British governments to expand the learning of English in former communist countries so as to make English the link language across the continent, and to marginalise Russian and German. French has been losing out to English for centuries, after losing wars with the British in North America, India, and Europe. Former French colonies in north and western Africa are also moving into using English. English is the dominant language of the African Union. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is modelled on the EU, has English as its sole official language.

Other key factors influencing the expansion of English can be related to what some term its soft power, the reputation of the BBC, prestigious universities, literature and culture from Shakespeare to the Beatles and Harry Potter, the Westminster parliamentary system, etc. Soft power in fact converts into major economic benefits, through fee-paying foreign students, cultural industries, and English language teaching. Almost the entire budget of the British Council, the para-statal body that promotes British interests and English in over 100 countries, is funded by its income from teaching English, testing proficiency, and educational consultancies. English is a billion dollar commodity.

That all of this will continue unchanged once Brexit has been completed is extremely unlikely. Detachment from continental Europe will affect commercial, political, educational, and cultural affairs in the UK negatively. A hard or no Brexit is a catastrophe for higher education as well as business in the UK. Much will depend on what sort of policies the British government will follow worldwide.

The Anglosphere – a policy or a chimera?

The idea of the “Anglosphere” is closely aligned with the former British Empire (1886 map)

The idea of an Anglosphere was first promoted in The Anglosphere challenge. Why the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-first century, a book written by a USA industrialist, James C. Bennett, in 2004. He defines the Anglosphere as meaning ‘the sharing of fundamental customs and values at the core of English-speaking cultures: individualism; rule of law; honoring of covenants; in general the high-trust characteristics described by Francis Fukujama in Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity; and the emphasis on freedom as a political and cultural value’.

With Boris Johnson in charge in the UK, trust is elusive. The idea that the rule of law and trusting others are uniquely Anglo-American traits is an insult to all other countries. The rule of law in British India served British rather than Indian interests, as described in Inglorious empire. What the British did to India, a book written by a senior UN diplomat, Shashi Tharoor.

Parliamentary systems in both the USA and the UK are less democratic than in countries with proportionate representation. They are also invidiously influenced by financial interests, by social media schemes, and by many abstaining from voting. In the EU the rule of law is a well-established key value, despite the varied historical roots and trajectories of member states. The rule of law is now monitored and reported on annually in each country.

The essential unifying bond between countries in the Anglosphere vision is the language. It is English which is the foundational glue that is seen as binding the people together, and expresses what Bennett sees as the particular virtues of ‘English-speaking countries’. English has been privileged in each of them. Major efforts were made to eliminate all other languages in these countries, using punitive legislative and educational measures, but with only partial success. The concept also occludes the reality of each country being multilingual, and English changing over time to meet local needs in each.

The myth of American exceptionalism, that the USA is a uniquely virtuous country, continues when Bennett writes ‘Increasingly during the past few centuries, the English-speaking world has been the pathfinder for all of humanity’ through the ‘first modern nation-state, the first liberal democratic state’. These are very dubious claims. Links between the UK and the USA have for centuries been close, albeit contentious, but were reinvigorated when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan orchestrated the launch of neoliberalism.

Bennett argues that the North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, and the European Union are ‘of limited value at best, and at worst do harm when they attempt to homogenize nations with substantially different characteristics.’ His contention is that the British people have more in common with Americans than with continental Europeans, and that the media and internet are intensifying this convergence.

Detaching Britain from Europe

The idea of ‘detaching’ the UK from the EU has been pursued in several think tanks in the USA. Conferences on the Anglosphere were organised by the Hudson Institute in 1999 and 2000, with significant participation by leading British cultural conservatives. The third Anglosphere century. The English-speaking world in an era of transition is a tract written by Bennett and published by the Heritage Institute in 2007. It includes an Anglosphere agenda for the economic, political, and military integration of the UK and other ‘English-speaking countries’, possibly India and Singapore too, under USA leadership.

He advocates the merging of the United Kingdom with NAFTA and its detachment from Europe so that the British and US defence industries can integrate, and as in finance, function as a ‘seamless market’. This would strengthen the massive impact of the military expenditure of the US, and of the ‘Five eyes’ intelligence alliance that connects Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to the US. Bennett propounds that ‘The past thirty years of British history have encompassed a period of political and cultural schizophrenia that has created ongoing unresolved tensions in its national life and identity’, the solution to which is an Anglosphere Network Commonwealth.

(Image credit: ArcGIS Storymap)

One thrust is to entrench English monolingualism.

Bennett recommends that ‘Multiculturalism and bilingualism should be abandoned, and assimilation and learning of English should become national policies’. This proposal dovetails with English-only policies that a number of states in the USA have introduced, whereas this policy has had little support at the national level. Insisting on monolingualism in the UK and Australia is a political no-brainer, even if many people in each country remain personally monolingual. Bennett seems to have forgotten the strength of French in Canada. The indigenous peoples in all these countries and their languages are ignored.

The deep historical roots in the UK of the notion of an Anglosphere are explored in depth in Shadows of empire. The Anglosphere in British politics, by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, published in 2018. A deep commitment to Anglo-American unity and to Anglosphere ideas can be traced across British cultural and political history in statements by Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher.

The book also analyses the way Anglosphere ideas are currently impacting on the British political scene. Several influential British politicians in the Conservative party are attracted by an Anglosphere vision. The main champion of Anglosphere ideas in the build-up to a referendum vote on Brexit of 23 June 216 was Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but the Leave campaign made sure that Farage was left in the background. A lengthy book entitled All-out war. The full story of Brexit, written by Tim Shipman in 2017, never refers to the Anglosphere. The term has evidently not become established in political discourse or journalism.

There is little evidence of  the Anglosphere ideas appealing to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, and few of the other, less ‘white’ Commonwealth countries are contenders. The Anglosphere, and strengthening economic links with the UK has never been a priority in these countries, quite the opposite.

Championing Brexit

How the UK might benefit by leaving the EU was totally absent from the Brexit Leave campaign, other than fraudulent promises of financial relief and the claim that exiting would be a simple matter. The slogan ‘take back control’ is a meaningless notion in an interconnected world, as the negotiations on exiting have shown. Benefits of any kind have still not been clarified. The vision of a ‘global Britain’ is vacuous and ahistorical, but smacks of the idea of making the UK ‘great’ again.

The trio of British government Ministers appointed by Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with the EU all appear to have had neoimperial dreams: Liam Fox, the Minister for Foreign Trade, had a portrait of Cecil Rhodes in his office. David Davis had attended Anglosphere think tank events in the USA. Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, had a bust of Winston Churchill in his. During a visit to Australia, he talked warmly of the Anglosphere. Later, as Prime Minister, Johnson nominated an unsuccessful former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, as an adviser on trade relations, a hugely controversial appointment.

Trust? (Image credit:
Jannes Van den wouwer, Unsplash)

Creating closer trade links with the USA has figured prominently in the policies of the governments of both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They are extremely controversial because what is at stake is less stringent regulation of food products (chlorinated chicken, hormones in beef, etc.) and the prospect of the National Health Service being sold off to US corporate interests, despite health care being vastly more expensive in the US, and failing to serve a large section of the population. From what is known about ongoing negotiations, it appears that the UK government is covertly following an Anglosphere agenda. There is virtually no parliamentary control, and the general public have not being given any insight into what is in the transatlantic pipeline. The British NGO Global Justice Now has been following these negotiations carefully and campaigning against what it sees as ‘the corporate take-over of global health’.

The British Academy organized a conference on the Anglosphere on June 15-16, 2017. It brought together academics from several countries, but mainly from the UK, British Foreign Office staff, and James Bennett. Martin Kettle of The Guardian wrote about it under the title ‘Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines’.

The myth of the Anglosphere alternative needs nailing. These ideas have old roots. They have shaped a lot of British thinking in different ways, not just on the right of politics, for at least 150 years. In their 2017 incarnation, however, they run into two immovable facts. First, UK trade with the Anglosphere nations has massively declined from its pre-1914 peak; realistically, the US is now the UK’s only significantly large Anglosphere trading partner. Second, the US has long treated bilateral trade deals as zero-sum games, played on US terms, even before the election of an ultra-nationalist president, never mind now.

English in the EU now and in the future

At no point since the accession to the EU of the UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973 has there been any official recognition of English having a privileged or superior status in the EU. The progressive expansion of its use over nearly half a century has resulted in a downgrading of the use of French, which was primus inter pares earlier, and German, as well as the marginalisation of all other languages.

There has been speculation about whether English will remain as the dominant language in EU institutions after Brexit. Both President Macron and the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, are on record as wanting French to regain its former dominant role. Some increase in the use of French is possible. At present any unclear English and French texts are submitted to a language revision before they are translated into other EU languages. Nearly all new policy statements as well as texts that ultimately will have the force of law are drafted initially in English. It therefore seems safe to predict that any downgrading of English within the EU system is very unlikely to occur. Not only because the Irish and Maltese (both formerly run by the British) will continue to function almost exclusively in English, as will many from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and individuals from other countries. The main reason is that EU employees from all parts of Europe have become accustomed to functioning in English. The hegemony of English has been internalised and accepted.

When addressing the media, senior EU staff increasingly make statements in English, even if in principle they could speak any of the other 23 official languages. This practice strengthens the idea of it being ‘natural’ to use English, even if this practice is in conflict with the principle of the EU as a multilingual organisation, and is a consequence of multiple hegemonic forces behind English.

When Ursula von der Leyen, as the incoming President of the Commission in 2019 presented her priorities to the European Parliament, her mission statement was delivered mainly in English, and made brief, token use of French and German. Her multilingual competence is impressive. Her prepared speeches in English are delivered lucidly and persuasively, whereas some of her colleagues, the other Commissioners, are incapacitated and unconvincing when they opt to use English. The same applies when Ministers from continental Europe feel an obligation to speak English even when their mother tongues are languages that are widely used internationally, such as French, Spanish and German.

Charles Michel, the European Council President, reads prepared statements fluently in English but with a strong French accent. Whether he can use English spontaneously and effectively in a negotiating context one is unable to judge, but it is more than likely that he sounds more competent in French.

After a meeting of the European Council on 1 and 2 October 2020, the results were presented in an 8-minute speech delivered by Ursula von Leyen, in English. The written version was available in English, French, and German. One would have expected the presentation of results to be presented by Charles Michel, the European Council president, but it was von Leyen, the Commission president who spoke. One wonders whether this was a tactical decision, simply because she sounds more professional in English. Michel stood silently beside her. In principle these two presidents, plus the president of the European Parliament, have the same status but distinct portfolios.

On 12 September 2020, when reporting on a Brexit meeting in London, the German Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz chose to use English. He was reporting on highly sensitive issues, including the effect of the British intention to renege on the treaty signed a year earlier with the EU. Scholz sounded hesitant and unconvincing in English, and would doubtless have been vastly more effective and informative in German.

In any case it is unreasonable and unfair to expect people from 27 continental European countries to be as effective in English as in their national languages. The problem for von Leyen, Michel, and Scholz is, as the German-Danish linguist Hartmut Haberland points out, that in such contexts there is in effect no choice. ‘You are damned if you speak English and you are damned if you don’t.

This is the true triumph of English language imperialism: leaving everybody with no alternative.’

Romano Prodi, when he was President of the European Commission, was interviewed by an American journalist on many aspects of European integration, and was asked about EU language policy. The journalist is reported in Newsweek (31 May 2004) as saying: ‘A unified Europe in which English, as it turns out, is the universal language?’ Prodi replied: ‘It will be broken English, but it will be English.’

Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, is highly proficient in English

Broken English is increasingly what we hear when continental Europeans choose to address the international media and public in English. Broken English is a derogatory term for use of the language that does not conform to correct native speaker use. It is not a term that is used in scholarly analysis of the language, but it has a long pedigree. It was used by Shakespeare in a scene in the play Henry V, when the English king is wooing a French princess who is a complete beginner in English. There is a comic scene in Act III in which a lot of French is spoken, with Katherine’s lady in attendance teaching her a few basic words. In Act V the triumphal King Henry tells the princess: ‘If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue’. What follows is playful interaction on this theme, with Katherine accusing Henry of being ‘full of deceits’. Perfidious Albion?

Broken agreements in not so broken English

Boris Johnson’s government decided in September 2020 to renege on a major agreement with the EU, one enshrined in an international treaty. The decision is in defiance of the UN Convention on International Treaties, as many legal specialists have pointed out. Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law at University College London: ‘Every international lawyer is familiar with the Vienna convention on the law of treaties, and its article 27, which reflects a general principle: “A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty” ’(cited in The Guardian 12 September 2020). Despite the draft legislation being severely criticized by senior judges and lawyers, it was approved in the House of Commons on 29 September 2020.

It thus appears possible that Johnson’s team of negotiators has been duplicitous throughout negotiations on a Brexit agreement with the EU. Have they been negotiating in good faith? Perfidious Albion once more? Their word is not their bond?

Michel Barnier, the ‘Head of Task Force for Negotiations with the United Kingdom’, has made a succession of official statements on the progress of the Brexit negotiations, and increasingly on the lack of progress. It is difficult to imagine anyone more competent than Michel Barnier to represent the EU. He is the epitome of French experience and competence, was a Commissioner in the EU for two five-year periods, with responsibility for trade and regional policies, and has held several ministerial posts in French governments, including one as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The EU’s position has been transparently clear throughout. The multilingual website on the negotiations is fully informative, whereas nothing comparable exists in the UK. The British have repeatedly been asked to specify what their position is on key issues, among them fishing rights, a level playing field for trade, and Irish border arrangements. This has been frustrating for the EU, as its position has always been that it is in the interests of both the UK and the EU’s 27 member states that the negotiations should reach an agreement.

Since Germany has the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2020, its role is of great importance. Germany’s presidency does not entail direct responsibility for Brexit negotiations, but Germany’s excellent multilingual website has comprehensive coverage of all significant issues, including Brexit.

The EU is drawing its own conclusions. An anonymous EU representative was cited in The Guardian Weekly, on 18 September 2020: ‘People say that state aid and fisheries are the biggest stumbling blocks to a deal. It isn’t. It is trust’.

It seems highly likely that the power behind Johnson’s throne is Dominic Cummings, the ‘Chief Adviser’ to the Prime Minister. He is widely seen as a modern day Svengali or Rasputin. This understanding tallies with a detailed study of the Brexit Leave campaign, which Cummings was the brain behind. The most important Leave slogan was the claim that the UK was sending 350£ million a week to Brussels. This was untrue. It was plastered on campaign buses and widely cited. This did not disturb Cummings, since what was important was ‘message discipline and consistency’. As reported in the Financial Times, Cummings had ‘a cynical understanding that it did not matter if what the campaign said was factually correct’. This is the man that many experienced political commentators see as deciding what Boris Johnson does.

Johnson’s government’s illegality has been denounced by 5 former British Prime Ministers. Many Conservative Members of Parliament, for whom the rule of law is a fundamental principle, are in despair. On the other hand, according to The Economist, and cited in Pankaj Mishra’s Bland fanatics. Liberals, race and empire, conservative politicians are people who ‘coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise”. They are mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers’ who engage in ‘egotistical and destructive behaviour’.

Mishra sees quitting the EU as similar to and as catastrophic as the British division of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921, and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, in both cases with appalling loss of life as a result.

The politics of English

In complex negotiations between the EU and the UK over the terms of a Brexit divorce agreement, every word counts. This presupposes that all are using the language or languages of negotiation in an optimal, honest way. The British use English, quite possibly a sophisticated form of native speaker communication which may be difficult for others to understand fully or to see through. Since very few British politicians have attained a high level of proficiency in a foreign language, it is highly likely that they do not adjust their language so that it is easier for foreigners to understand. EU representatives probably mainly speak English, with varying levels of both precision in speaking and in understanding the English of their interlocutors.

Michel Barnier probably mostly uses French, but has spoken English in some statements to the press, and when delivering a prepared speech in Ireland. The general public can only guess at how far language issues are complicating the negotiations, but the issue would need clarification. There is research evidence from universities where students from a variety of language backgrounds are studying in programmes in which English is the language of learning. They experience that people using English with a foreign accent are often clearer and easier to understand than native speakers of English. The same is probably true of politicians and eurocrats with a high level of proficiency in English.

The increase of the use of English in EU affairs has made it easier for the British to remain monolingual, whereas the EU has for many years been committed to making all its citizens able to function multilingually. My book on European language policy, published in 2003, English-only Europe? Challenging language policy, is a lengthy plea for member states to take language policy more seriously, so as to strengthen all European languages and to avoid an excessive focus on English.

The concluding sentence is: ‘If inaction on language policy in Europe continues, at the supranational and national levels, we may be heading for an American English-only Europe. Is that really what the citizens and leaders of Europe want?’

Brexit will significantly diminish British influence on how Europe evolves. This is in the interest of the USA, as think tanks in the USA and the key architect of Anglosphere, James Bennett, have indicated and doubtless worked for.

The book was recently updated and translated into French, entitled La domination de l’anglais: un défi pour l’Europe (The domination of English: a challenge for Europe). Part of this challenge is that many EU policies have strengthened English and simultaneously weakened other languages, in processes that can be seen as constituting linguistic imperialism.

Business leaders in the UK have repeatedly pleaded with Boris Johnson to ensure that businesses are not harmed by both a lack of clarity on an agreement with the EU and on the need to ensure an agreement. They have for years had the feeling that their needs were being neglected. The BBC reported on 26 June 2018, when Johnson was Foreign Secretary: ‘Asked about corporate concerns over a so-called hard Brexit, at an event for EU diplomats in London last week, Mr Johnson is reported to have replied: “Fuck business”. When challenged over what he was overheard saying, he did not deny it. Asked about this in the Commons, he said he may have ‘expressed scepticism about some of the views of those who profess to speak up for business’.

Johnson’s outstandingly perfidious remark ought to come back to haunt him, since the uncertainty for business remains, and has already had devastating consequences. The traffic jams of thousands of lorries clogging roads in Kent symbolize the utter incompetence of the British government. This is harming businesses, the British economy, lorry drivers of all nationalities, and the residents of Kent.

The government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been equally incompetent. In Posh boys. How English public schools ruin Britain Robert Verkaik shows how attendance at elite schools and Oxford University cuts the elite off from the rest of British society; it ‘divides society into winners and losers’. It produces politicians who are out of touch with ordinary people and unable to provide informed leadership. These are the people who are responsible for Brexit.

Why should anyone trust them?

Related content

• Cramer, R. 2018. From oil spill to Brexit.
• Piller, I. 2016. Have we just seen the beginning of the end of English?

A non-fluent Latin reader painstakingly worked her way through this text

“Man is an obligate aerobe”, I recently read in a medicine book for general readers (Nuland, 1993). The phrase was noteworthy to me because it did something that rarely happens to an educated adult reader: it broke the automaticity of my reading. The phrase “obligate aerobe” was new to me and I had to look it up in the dictionary. In case you don’t know, either, an “obligate aerobe” is an organism that requires oxygen to live.

Without knowing exactly what the phrase meant, I could, of course, still guess the general idea: if not as an adjective, “obligate” was still familiar to me as a verb; I knew related words such as “oblige” and “obligation”, and their Latin root “obligare”; “aerobe” did look like it might be a combination of “air” and “microbe”, I knew “anaerobic”, and my mind also made an association with “aerobic exercise”.

All these considerations took me away from the content of the text and made me focus on the language itself. In other words, I had to do a bit of language learning before I could continue to learn about the physiology of dying – the primary purpose why I was reading that particular book in the first place.

This kind of language learning distraction happens extremely rarely to me in English and German, the two languages in which I am highly literate. However, it is very familiar from other languages I read with less fluency. The images show pages from my copy of Caesar’s Gallic War in Latin, which I read as a high school student. Given the copious notes on grammar and vocabulary my younger self left between the lines and in the margins, it must have been difficult to focus on the content. And it certainly was a slow read – the way I remember it, reading Gallic War took up most of Year 9.

Reading in Latin was a slow process for this 15-year-old, who, at the time, was already an accomplished German reader

Back to “obligate aerobe”: as a linguist, discovering a new turn of phrase always gives me pleasure. As a student of medicine, being forced to learn a new turn of phrase was an unwelcome distraction.

My experience was unusual in that I am primarily a linguist and only secondarily a – very amateur – student of medicine. Most readers are in a very different position: they read for the content, not for the language. In the vast majority of cases, the primary purpose of reading is to get new information and to learn new content. This is best achieved if reading is highly automatic.

Reading basically involves matching visual shapes – letters and larger chunks – with the words and expressions of a specific language. To do that efficiently, we not only need to be able to decode those visual shapes at extremely high speed but we also need to be able to retrieve the meaning of the words and expressions they represent at equally high speed. The larger our vocabulary and our general knowledge, the easier it is to do that.

The whole point of learning to read is ultimately reading to learn.

Education is designed with that purpose in mind: the early years of schooling are devoted to developing automaticity. By the time we reach secondary and higher education, literacy learning is no longer an aim in itself. By that point, the aim of literacy is to make us more efficient learners.

Caesar’s Gallic War is a puny little book of around 100 pages; at this pace, it took months to read.

For learners who hear the language of schooling from birth, who are then taught how to read and write that language in primary, and who have access to high-quality content in a wide variety of subjects throughout their further education and for the remainder of their lives, this can become a highly virtuous cycle.

After the saying “whoever has will be given more” from the Matthew Gospel, this virtuous cycle is known as the “Matthew Effect”: rich oral input in early life facilitates learning to read quickly and enjoyably; the latter, in turn, facilities ease of learning all kinds of content later in life.

In literacy research, the Matthew Effect is typically used to explain the reading gap between children from middle-class families who are exposed to the language of schooling in the early years and children from poor and/or minority backgrounds. For the latter group, having to learn the language of schooling at the same time as learning how to read can result in permanent educational disadvantage.

Much less research has been devoted to the gap that is experienced by students who have learned how to read in one language and then go on to read to learn in another language.

Back in the Middle Ages in Europe, the use of Latin as universal language of higher education constituted such a barrier to knowledge. As John Wycliffe, the first translator of the Bible into English, famously wrote in the 14^th century: “[…] it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”

If English is the new Latin, are we slowing down the learning of students around the world?

His advocacy for the use of the mother tongue in religious education soon became a steady stream of critical debate over the use of Latin in higher education. “The main point of these critiques was that the use of foreign languages allowed professionals to mystify and so to dominate ordinary people” (Burke, 2004, p. 17).

By the 19^th century, these reform efforts had largely been successful and the national languages had replaced Latin as the language of instruction in higher education. The change in the medium of instruction went hand in hand with an explosion in human knowledge: the flourishing of the sciences, the age of invention and discovery, the industrial revolution all happened after a variety of national languages had replaced Latin as the main medium in which knowledge was available.

Today, the trend is in the opposite direction, and English is fast becoming the predominant language of higher education. Inevitably, studying through the medium of English is easier for those who come to higher education as proficient readers of English. Conversely, proficient readers in another language will have to put in extra effort as they read to learn in English while, at the same time, still learning to read in English.

What are your experiences with reading to learn in another language?

References

Burke, P. (2004). Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nuland, S. B. (1993). How We Die. New York et al.: Random House.

Professor Katrijn Maryns explains the linguistic transformations that turn “undocumented migrants” into “genuine” or “bogus refugees”

Language is the inescapable medium through which we live our lives. Access to social goods such as education, employment or community participation occurs through the medium of a particular language. However, all too often we take language for granted and its social role is obscured. One context that exemplifies both the power of language and its invisibility is the asylum determination procedure.

The asylum determination procedure is designed to distinguish between “genuine” refugees – migrants who should be granted asylum because of a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries – and economic migrants.

Katrijn Maryns, Professor of Translation, Interpretation and Communication at Ghent University, illuminated the linguistic challenges inherent in the Belgian asylum determination procedure during her recent visit to Sydney, where she attended the inaugural “Language and Law” symposium at Sydney University (organized by Alexandra Grey and Laura Smith-Khan) and delivered the first Lecture in Linguistic Diversity of 2019 at Macquarie University. Professor Maryns showed that the determination that distinguishes between “genuine” refugees and economic migrants is essentially a linguistic process. Language is central to producing the asylum seeker’s story in interview with an asylum officer; and the officer’s report of the asylum seeker’s story ultimately forms the basis for the decision.

In this process, meaning is transformed from one language to another, from one person to another, and from the spoken interview to the written report. These multiple transformations are highly complex but their complexity is obscured in the definite binary outcome of acceptance or rejection.

Asylum seekers are mostly talked about in numbers. Sociolinguistic ethnography illuminates the processes behind the numbers (Image credit: Europarl)

So much can go wrong, as Case 1, an excerpt from the asylum interview of a soft-spoken young woman from Sudan illustrates. The woman (in the excerpt represented as “AS” for “asylum seeker”) explained that a man had aided her escape from Juba by stating “one man .. carry me . help me …” (l. 20). The Belgian asylum officer (“AO”) misheard “carry me” as “Karimi” and her report – which entered the file and became the version of record of the asylum seeker’s story – stated “A man named Karimi helped me.”

Although the final written report (in Dutch) is written in the first person – as if it were the authentic voice of the asylum seeker – it is obviously highly mediated and undergoes a series of linguistic transformations to arrive at its final form.

Could the “carry me – Karimi” misunderstandings have been avoided if an interpreter had been used? Maybe.

However, before the question of interpreter use can even be entertained, a determination of the asylum seeker’s language must be made by the asylum officer. Asylum seekers often have complex linguistic repertoires that are not easily summed up under one single language name. The complexity of the linguistic repertoires of people on the move clashes with the monolingual assumptions of a neat match between national origin and a named language that typically guides European asylum procedures.

Case 1 (Source: Katrijn Maryns, Guest lecture, Macquarie University, 02-04-2019)

This clash between factual complexity of linguistic repertoires and the bureaucratic drive to simplify means that even something as seemingly simple as determining the language in which an interview should be conducted is not simple at all. For instance, in another example (Case 2), Professor Maryns introduced us to a Belgian asylum officer, who was keen to get the interview done in English.

Given that English is the official language of Sierra Leone, the country of origin of the asylum seeker she was interviewing, this does not seem like such an unreasonable idea. It only becomes unreasonable when one knows that proficiency in English in Sierra Leone, as in many other postcolonial countries with English as an official language, is closely tied to formal education. The asylum seeker tried to explain that much to the officer when she said “I no go to school” (l. 4).

In a testament to the power differential inherent in the interview situation, the officer waves away that objection and makes the asylum seeker “sign” (indicate by cross or circle) that she’s happy to conduct the interview in English.

The asylum interview is a high stakes situation: for asylum seekers, matters of life and death may ride on it. Most of the time, all they have to succeed in this effort is their story: they must tell a credible story, in a plausible linguistic form, in a plausible genre, and of a plausible content. However, what is plausible to the European asylum bureaucracy may be vastly different from the story an asylum seeker can tell with the resources at her or his disposal.

Case 2 (Source: Katrijn Maryns, Keynote lecture, Sydney University, 01-04-2019)

In short, the asylum interview places extremely high linguistic demands on the asylum seeker while severely curtailing the possibilities for the production of a credible story.

Further reading

• Maryns, K. (2005). Monolingual language ideologies and code choice in the Belgian asylum procedure. Language & Communication, 25(3), 299-314.
• Maryns, K. (2006). The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
• Maryns, K. (2013a). Disclosure and (re)performance of gender‐based evidence in an interpreter‐mediated asylum interview. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(5), 661-686.
• Maryns, K. (2013b). Procedures without borders: The language-ideological anchorage of legal-administrative procedures in translocal institutional settings. Language in Society, 42(1), 71-92.
• Maryns, K. (2015). The use of English as ad hoc institutional standard in the Belgian asylum interview. Applied Linguistics, 38(5), 737-758.

Related content

• Forgotten and invisible? The legal protection of refugees with disabilities
• Are we all different in the same way?
• Telling stories? Credibility in asylum interviews
• Crucial communication: language management in Australian asylum interviews
• Don’t know what “jurisdictional error” means? Some people’s future depends on it

Poland in China (Artwork by the author)

Intercultural communication at work in multinational companies (MNCs) is increasingly common. Workplace communication in MNCs can be highly complex, as is the case when Polish expatriate workers of an MNC headquartered in Western Europe are deployed in China. What are the communication challenges they face and how do they overcome these?

To examine this question, my team and I conducted narrative interviews with six Polish professionals who had just returned from a three-year international assignment in China in late 2016. They had worked to build a Chinese subsidiary of the MNC together with 1,500 local and 150 international employees.

The company language in the Chinese subsidiary was English (and, practically, also Chinese) while in Poland the company language was French (and, practically, also Polish).

The findings of our research have recently been published in the journal Multilingua in an article entitled “Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues”.

Interviewees reported a lot of miscommunication and communication problems, which they ascribed to both language and cultural barriers. In particular, they felt under-prepared when they first arrived and highlighted communication problems in the initial stage of their deployment:

We were sent there without… any preparation for working in a different cultural circle. China is far different from France, Romania, or Hungary. We have lots of factories in Eastern, Southern, and Northern Europe—but these are pretty much the same. We think in a similar way, we have the same working style. But what I saw there… I was completely unprepared for that.

One of my co-authors in China (Image credit: A. Gut)

All interviewees claimed that face-to-face communication with locals was problematic and that English as the company language was part of the problem. They found it difficult to understand the English spoken by their Chinese colleagues and the company jargon. They had to either translate the previously acquired terminology from Polish or French into English, or learn new company jargon, for example, abbreviations of products, company positions, or those used in production management.

In turn, because locals often communicated in Mandarin at work and during social events, expatriates’ lack of Mandarin proficiency prevented them from acquiring information from local superiors, learning about problems within a team, or from participating in decision-making processes. It also hampered integration with locals at lunchtime and led to social isolation and a feeling of not belonging to the work group.

To overcome these barriers, expatriates devised a number of ad hoc strategies such as asking clarifying questions, asking for confirmation, or summarizing the message by e-mail. One interviewee recounted how he simply imitated locals:

I often nodded back (…) and did what they did: nodded, smiled, and so on. Even when I needed something very much, and urgently, I knew it would be difficult to get it due to all the steps you need to go through with them. (…) Sometimes I had to ‘walk in their shoes’ and behave like them. That let me get many things faster.

Another interviewee related that changing the medium of communication from oral to digital worked for him:

One of my employees told me…, because I sent him a message via a chat program, (…) ‘You know what? Chatting with you is much better than talking, because I understand you better [this way].’ So they gave me such signals from time to time.

These communication strategies did not always help to alleviate ambiguity or uncertainty. In fact, they often were experienced as counterproductive, for example when their strategies threatened their Chinese interlocutor’s face, as was the case when they asked for clarifications at team meetings. By contrast, showing respect through simply nodding was felt to be more time-consuming but more effective in the long run.

Our research provided an opportunity for interviewees to reflect on their intercultural communication experiences in China. Their retrospective interpretations were in themselves beneficial as they enabled  them to understand, accept, and appreciate the cultural differences they had encountered in China.

Reference

Wilczewski, M., Søderberg, A.-M., & Gut, A. (2018). Intercultural communication within a Chinese subsidiary of a Western MNC: Expatriate perspectives on language and communication issues. Multilingua, 37(6), 587-611. doi:10.1515/multi-2017-0095