The Rise of English

In Episode 17 of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Rosemary Salomone about her 2021 book The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, which has just been reissued in paperback by Oxford University Press, with a new preface.

The Rise of English charts the spread of English as the dominant lingua franca worldwide. The book explores the wide-ranging economic and political effects of English. It examines both the good and harm that English can cause as it increases economic opportunity for some but sidelines others. Overall, the book argues that English can function beneficially as a key component of multilingual ecologies worldwide.

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!

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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!