Issues No.155

Case Studies of English Dominance in Global Affairs

Editor's Note: In each of the following articles, the matter of present day English domination of global interactions is used as a basis for discussing both its impact and possible effects on both languages and cultures. The one example is from South Africa, where that nation undergoes a cultural transformation following years of apartheid, or forced cultural separation. The author has a very decided view of the possible negative effects of globalization in its English form. One of the major arguments that Horn makes is his fear that English, as the key communication and trade language, and the global values of the Anglo-Western perspective inherent in that role, tends to suppress local/ regional/ national identities, and, languages, through the processes of economic globalization. Fishman in the second article, an abstract of an article he wrote for Foreign Policy journal, suggests that such English domination may not be long lasting, and he believes that instead regional economic processes and languages will prevail. An examination of present or potential internet programs (the present day mode of rapid business communication) designed to transform any program into a "local" language by any sender indicates that such programs are in the works at least for European languages. (for example, see: www.columbia.edu/cu/help/jdk). What this suggests is that Fishman's contention may be on target. If English is perceived as an "elite" language, then there will be more pressures to produce programs that immediately translate from one language into another. Thus, an "internet language" may already exist, but it is not unique to English, and has the potential for use across geographic or political boundaries in an unlimited manner.

"Globalisation": Culture, hybrid cultures and the study of culture in South Africa
by Peter Horn, International Cultural Studies

In my home country, Croatia, there rages at this moment a war of extermination against everything foreign. Foreign words have become enemy words. In Zagreb the following true story is circulating: A professor of linguistics has a problem and complains to a colleague, who is at the same time a poet, that he could not find the literary evidence for three Croatian concepts, they seem to exist only in Serbian. No problem, says the poet, I write the poem, in which these three Croatian words occur, then you have the literary evidence.

Such a "deliverance of the Croatian language from the scourge of foreign words" is pursued with every academic gravity. Especially the Serbisms come under the crossfire of the purists. A chauvinist language magazine has been conducting a competition for the last three years. It is looking for neologisms which sound Croatian, in order to liquidate "foreign" words. The results are often the most absurd language creations. That is, of course, not a completely unknown phenomenon in Paris or Berlin.

The French government has mobilized money and resources and threatens considerable punitive measures against those, who mix their "pure" French with English-American "enemy words", forgetting, that about two thirds of the English vocabulary derive from Norman-French words anyway. We know the same absurd language purism, which tried to replace such "enemy words" as "nose" by such newly created German words as "Gesichtserker" from the baroque German language societies to Hitler's Greater Germany. In South Africa the Boers tried keep their creole language Afrikaans pure of Anglicisms and worse, and constantly invented such beautiful neologisms like "binnebandelose buitebande", although in the practice almost each Afrikaans speaker uses the Englsh expression "tubeless tyres."

No language is monolingual. German is infiltrated by foreign and loan words from Latin, Greek, French and English. That is true also in apparently "pure" languages like Xhosa, where hundreds of words like "itreyini" (train) were taken over from English and Afrikaans. Everyone, who besides his native language, masters a second language in at least a rudimentary way, is tempted to replace the word "wit" by "cute".

Whoever lives, as I do, for decades in a multilingual environment, and is used to switch from a sentence to the next, from English to German and back to English, this kind of code-switching has become a habit. How should one render the word "relax" in German, where there is neither a word for it nor the attitude of being relaxed. Code-switching between languages also implies a code-switching between cultures. If an English speaker asks, "How are you?", he is not really interested in the fact, that I have a stomach-ache. If my Xhosa-friend asks me "Kunjani?"then I anticipate a long conversation about my bodily and mental ailments and those of his and my family. Herder's (German poet and philosopher) concept of the nation state, which coincides with the monolingual "nation" and their monolithic culture, as a refuge of efficiency and humaneness, still has its attraction today, above all as a counter-move to globalisation, through which one's identity, history and culture appears threatened. Like the nation state itself threatened local and regional identity, as the Bavarian saw himself endangered in his existence by the "Saupreiss", so in the experience of many the global market and its Anglo-American" language threatens the identity of all other nations. On the global plane there is an attempt to create a uniform thinking, which in its word and concept formation relies heavily on English as global lingua franca, and that produces, what Ramonet calls "la pens-acute; unique", an expression, which is only imprecisely translated as "politically correct thinking". Rather it denotes the homogenized thinking of one standardizing idea, a One-Idea-system. This attempted uniformity of thought replaces the earlier attempts of the nation states to create a uniform national language. The determining characteristic of this homogenized thinking is the belief in the market as the solution of all problems: Capitalism can not be about to collapse, capitalism is the natural condition of society. Democracy on the other hand is not natural. The market is nature.

While the nation state according to Herder's ideas had to insist on shaping a homogeneous language and culture in order to create that unit, within which the national market could function, and thus had to engage in an aggressive language politics with regard to its minorities, the global market can afford language and cultural enclaves, as long as the key ideas of globalisation are universally translatable into every language.

While Namibia for example made English, which is spoken by a minute minority and mastered by few, the national language, and in this way attempts to forge a nation state on the old model of the linguistically uniform nation state, despite the fact that the large majority of the population speaks about a dozen of indigenous languages plus Afrikaans and German, South Africa has accepted the more modern model a multicultural and polyglot state. Even if English is in many situations the lingua franca, all eleven domestic languages are equal, and even the so-called "heritage languages", languages of larger groups of immigrants and culturally significant languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, Portuguese and German are put under the special protection of the new Constitutional Law.

While the afrikaans-speaking white Boers are still anxious about their language and cultural identity and dream about a "Volksstaat" (literally, "folkstate") in the semi-desert of the northern Cape Province, most South Africans have accepted that all languages are equal and that English is more equal than the others. Normally one speaks English in parliament and in court, but if you can't speak English or want to emphasize your cultural identity, you may speak Xhosa or Zulu, Afrikaans or Venda, and translators are provided. On the one hand there are polyglot and multicultural festivals in South Africa to display the diversity of the rainbow nation, on the other hand there is for example the monolingual and almost monocultural Afrikaans festival in Oudshoorn in the Karoo.

Hybrid cultures, as one can observe them not only in South Africa, have the advantage, that they free the individual from often very limiting traditional cultural forces, without, however, putting a really livable alternative cultural model at his disposal. And so the black high school graduate, before he begins his study at the university, drives "home"to the Transkei, to be "presented to the ancestors" and undergo the traditional rites of passage and circumcision, before he progresses to the study of nuclear physics. In the same way the German high school graduate does not normally escape the Christmas tree, confirmation or first communion. The traditional, essentially sacred culture fills a gap in global culture, and the traditional healer is as much in demand in case of a disease as the tertiary hospital equipped with the most modern instruments. Global culture can tolerate such cultural mixtures and the world policeman does not need to cite the culprits before the school principal for punishment, who do not speak English during the break.

It is not language, cultural and educational policy in the first instance, which in South Africa rouses the fears of the minorities, but the politics of "affirmative action" and these fears are taken advantage of by the opposition parties, especially as at the moment over a third of South Africans is unemployed.

Geographic Distribution of Living Languages, 1996

	Total Living Languages	Percentage

The Americas	1,000	15%
Africa	2,011	30%
Europe	225	3%
Asia	2,165	32%
The Pacific	1,302	19%

TOTAL	6,703

Grimes, Barbara F., ed. Ethnologue, 13th Edition, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc. 1996 http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/ distribution.html (11 August 1999).

"Coloured identity" as opposed "Black Consciousness" manifested itself in South Africa politically effectively for the first time, when the Coloureds, descendants the San and Khoi and slaves, imported in the 17th and 18th century, when they, who had been protected for a long time by the apartheid law of the "Coloured Labour Preference Area [in the Western Cape] against the competition of black-african workers, were fearing to be replaced in the workplace by escpecially Xhosas, who after 1990, were streaming in their hundreds of thousands to the Western Cape. The old National Party in the guise of the New National Party took advantage of these fears, and discovered suddenly that the Coloureds belonged culturally and linguistically to the Boers, after they had treated them for decades as second class citizens. In this way cultural identities emerge according to economic pressures.

Behind the beautiful facade the South African multiculturality one can clearly discern the global, that is to say essentially American and Western culture. While in South Africa "local" is alleged to be "lekker" [nice], every TV channel confirms, as does every fashion or teenager journal, every look in one of the anyhow rare bookstores confirms, that local culture survives only as colourful exotism in the global American culture. Multi-culti serves only to integrate that remnant alienness, which has survived here and there despite American-Western world cultural domination. Cultural studies, in South Africa, as elsewhere, crawl slowly and cannot catch up with the speed of these developments. I am not concerned here with the last remnants of apartheid ideology in cultural and educational policies and in the cultural studies of those living in an eternal yesterday, nor about the rather transparent power political tactics of the Inkatha Freedom Party of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to take advantage of Zulu nationalism once more for his purposes, although both could become dangerous under certain circumstances, as the bloody wars in Central Africa show. I am dealing here with the new cultural studies of the rainbow nation, which considering the globalisation and its inhumane consequences, sees itself once more thrown back to the idea of the nation, dreaming at the same time about an African renaissance, yet sepaks the politically correct world language and formulates its ideas theoretically in the internationally current concepts of postmodernism and postcolonialism. The chance to develop a genuinely African culture, which would for example contain the ideas an inclusive democracy and an African humaneness containing elements of "ubuntu" has been lost under the impact of the terminology of globalisation. Cultural and academic values are noted like commercial ones only at a stock exchange, which understands nothing but what can be translated into the universal equivalent, the dollar, or which can be understood by grade eight readers or freshmen in an American college.

While the idea of a local, regional or national culture is of use only for cultural political sermons, in order to give comfort to those globally intimidated by internet and satelite TV, fearing to be the victim of a traffic accident on the worldwide information highway, wheras de facto that system of the uniform idea of a global culture has been dominant for a long time even in South Africa, an idea, whose witness and producer, the CNN, is present in each hotel room, together with the Wall Street Journal or its local offshoot. In these global media the African renaissance presents itself as a Clinton whirlwind tour to the poor savages, who must be helped times and times again, finally to understand the universal and global system of the market and the blessings of democracy American style. Against a such understanding of globalisation the nation state as an idea has a relative efficiency and moral right, even though it does not have a chance to survive. In global capitalism it will play more and more a merely cultural virtual existence, in which the universal policeman can interfere with bombs and rockets any time. Whether for example the millions of Aids-patients in South Africa in future can have a culture at all, depends less on the national ministry for culture as on the force the large multinational pharmaceutical conglomerates. "Ubuntu" that African culture of a common humanity, under these circumstances becomes a merely sentimental popular reminiscence, which hinders the progress of the one comprehensive global idea, which likes to adorn itself with the attributes "realistic" and "pragmatical".

In a country, in which 90% of the population does not have the resources and the money for culture, and in which, like in all third-world countries the state is forced to spend its money first of all on the most necessary expenditure, namely the repayment of the international debts, culture is already fully commercialized and exists, where at all, at the mercy of the advertising budget of large banks and companies. If one speaks of culture and cultural studies in a country like South Africa, then one must be aware, that one must talk about the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It is here where it is determined finally, whether in a country like South Africa at culture is possible at all. There are no people without a culture, but even in very advanced civilizations the majority of the inhabitants are often precluded from an effective entrance to culture, and are dependent on a very impoverished cultural life, in which their abilities often waste away or stagnate rather than develop. If even Europe feels itself threatened by American cultural dominance and can oppose nothing equal to the incredible resources for the production and dissemination of this "global" culture, then it is not remarkable, that countries in the third world like South Africa have hardly anything to oppose this cultural world domination. Cultures begin to disappear in the black hole of the global information - and entertainment net, in the potholes the information high ways. Just as as the global financial market can no longer be controlled by the institutions of the liberal democracy so global culture develops beyond that which the individual citizen, his political organization and his national parliament can control. The mixtures, which emerge de facto, have little to do with the real cultural needs of the consumers. The essential decisions in culture are taken beyond the control of institutions, which were once the voice the participants in culture. Whatever a critic writes in a newspaper in Cape Town about a Hollywood film, has a minimal influence on the success of this film, not only because the consumers of films probably do not read reviews at all any more, but also because any locally divergent opinion is damned to drown unheard in the scope of the global culture. The destruction of the cultural network and the peculiar mixtures of the cultural elements of each geographical area on this earth is a destruction of diversity and an impoverishment of the cultural productivity of each person. Culture as part of a profit-oriented global economy shows itself as global culture of consumption, under the control of American conglomerates and as constant twentyfour hour propaganda for itself. The possibly highly productive cultural mixture of a diverse and rich world becomes a cultural stew with less taste than a MacDonalds hamburger.

Source Horn, Peter. "Globalisation: Culture, Hybrid Cultures and the Study of Culture in South Africa." International Cultural Studies, http://www.adis.at/arlt/institut/studies/s_0501_e.htm (31 July 1999).

The New Linguistic Order

by Joshua A. Fishman

As you read this sentence, you are one of approximately 1.6 billion people - nearly one-third of the world's population - who will use English in some form today. Whether we consider English a "killer language" or not, whether we regard its spread as benign globalization or linguistic imperialism, the expansive reach of English is undeniable and, for the time being, unstoppable.

Yet beyond the ebb and flow of history, there are reasons to believe that the English language will eventually wane in influence. For one, English actually reaches and is then utilized by only a small, atypically fortunate minority. Furthermore, globalization has also encouraged regionalization and with it the spread of regional languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hausa, and Spanish. Finally, the spread of English and these regional languages collectively has created a squeeze effect on small communities, producing pockets of anxious localization and local-language revival resistant to global change.

For all the enthusiasm and vitriol generated by grand-scale globalization, often heavily associated with the spread of English, it is the growth in regional interactions - trade, travel, the spread of religion, interethnic marriages - that touches the widest array of local populations. These interactions promote the spread of regional languages. In Africa, for example, where a third of the world's approximately 6,000 languages are spoken and where 13 percent of the world's population lives, English is neither the only nor even the best means of communication. Throughout East Africa, Swahili is typically the first language that two strangers attempt upon meeting. In West Africa, Hausa is often the language of choice.

Some regional languages are spreading in part due to the efforts of organizations and government agencies. France spends billions of francs annually to support French language and culture abroad. The German government funds 78 Goethe Institutes, scattered from Beirut to Jakarta, that promote German language and arts. And Singapore, a tiny country with four official languages, is in the nineteenth year of its national "Speak Mandarin" campaign.

The importance of regional languages should increase in the near future as more and more regional lingua francas are used by merchants, writers, and relief workers to reach larger populations. In many developing areas, regional languages are used to facilitate agricultural, industrial, and commercial expansion across local boundaries. Wherever the local vernaculars are just too many to handle, regional languages come to the fore among ordinary, "rank and file" citizens.

For all the pressures and rewards of regionalization and globalization, local identities remain deeply ingrained. Local languages often serve a strong symbolic function in most communities as a clear mark of "authenticity," which represents a sum total of a community's history. They also foster higher levels of school success, participation in local government, and knowledge of one's own culture and faith. Like regional languages, many of these smaller tongues, even those with far fewer than 1 million speakers, have benefited from governmental or voluntary preservation movements. The European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages, created by the European Parliament in 1984, protects the language rights of the nearly 50 million European Union citizens who speak one or more of Europe's 40 recognized minority languages. As a result, never before in world history have there been as many languages of literacy as there are today: roughly 1,200.

Multilingualism - where each language is assigned its own distinctive societal functions - may be the wave of the future. The language characteristically used with intimate family and friends, the language generally used with coworkers or neighbors, and the language used with one's bosses or government, need not be one and the same. Many West Africans, for example, are trilingual on a fully functional basis: They use local mother tongues when among "their own," Hausa for regional trade and secular literacy, and Arabic for prayer and Koranic study. As long as no two or more languages compete for the same functions, a linguistic division of labor can be both amicable and long-standing.

What is to come of English? It may well gravitate increasingly toward the higher social classes, as those of more modest status turn to regional languages for more modest gains. Or it might become widely disliked as a linguistic bully, even as it is widely learned. Resentment of both the predominance of English and of its tendency to spread along class lines could in the long term prove a check against its further globalization.

There is no reason to assume that English will always be necessary, as it is today, for technology, higher education, and social mobility, particularly after its regional rivals experience their own growth spurts. The decline of French has not irreparably harmed art or diplomacy, nor has the similar decline of German harmed the exact sciences. But just because the use of English around the world might drop does not mean the values associated today with its spread must also fade. Ultimately, democracy, international trade, and economic development can flourish in any tongue.

This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Winter 1998-99 issue of FOREIGN POLICY.