The Future of English: A mighty language and its prospects

National Review, August 28, 2000 by John Derbyshire

We live in an age of Anglophone triumphalism. The melange of low-German dialects carried to Britain on the tongues of mercenary war bands a millennium and a half ago has now become the first language of some 350 million people and the second language of at least a billion more. When an Indonesian businessman meets a customer from Finland, they converse in English. Airline pilots flying international routes communicate with their controllers in English. Seventy-six percent of the content of the Internet is in English. (The runners-up are, in order: Japanese, French, German, and Chinese.) English is the world language, and this will become more true as time goes on-these are assumptions most of us carry around in our heads without much examination. Are they true?

There are a number of reasons for thinking that English may be at, or perhaps even past, the high tide of its influence. To begin with, the proportion of humanity speaking English as its first language is declining. Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, gives the following numbers: 9.8 percent in 1958, 7.6 percent in 1992. If the rate of decline is linear we must now be hovering just over 7 percent. To be sure, this decline is relative, not absolute. The populations of the great English-speaking nations are not falling. Nor are the people of those nations switching to any other first language, even where there are strongly felt linguistic issues in controversy. Irishmen show even less inclination to speak Irish than their grandfathers did; the enthusiasm of Francophone Canadians for their language has not infected their English-speaking compatriots; and Americans, despite all the blandishments of the "multicultural" hustlers, are pleased to resist Spanish. The decline in the proportion of the world's people who have English as their first language is simply a consequence of those people being First Worlders with low birthrates. The rest of the world is outbreeding them. Since no English-speaking nation is in the imperialism business any longer, our language is left with its home islands, the child colonies of the early-modern period, and a scattering of nations once ruled from London (or, like the Philippines, from Washington) but with indigenous cultures of their own into which English has been able to put down some shallow roots.

Granted that English as a first language is in relative decline, may we not still console ourselves with the thought that it has no challenger as the preferred second language over a large part of the world? Russian imperialism turns out to have been a damp firecracker, and the post-Sputnik enthusiasm for learning Russian seems ludicrous now. In the 21st century you will learn Russian only if you want to read Pushkin in the original. The present fad for Chinese will go the same way unless that nation can shake off its addiction to despotic government, a development of which there is currently no sign at all. No other language is even a candidate for worldwide acceptance. Air-traffic controllers will continue to speak to pilots in English for as long as they need to speak to them at all-perhaps for another generation, after which automation will take over completely. Even then, will not the world still need a lingua franca? And those nations once under English-speaking rule-won't they be glad to have got a head start from their former imperialist masters?

Not necessarily. In these latter cases, English has been accepted against the grain of national, racial, and anti-imperialist emotions because of its convenience and neutrality. A country with a multitude of quarreling tribes or sects needs some common tongue, and it is best that it should be one that is hors de combat. Nigeria, where anyone with any education at all above the elementary-school level can speak English, offers a good example. Yet even these common-sense considerations have not helped English to hold its own everywhere. During the years when Julius Nyerere ruled Tanzania (1962-85), he promoted Swahili as the only proper common language for his people, with the result that one now meets college-educated Tanzanians who can hardly speak English at all.

Even India, often cited as the one nation where English is an indispensable medium of exchange for myriad sects and races, is slipping the leash. Samuel Huntington quotes two professors of English at New Delhi University: "[W]hen one travels from Kashmir down to the southernmost tip at Kanyakumari, the communication link is best maintained through a form of Hindi rather than through English." It is true that English is the common tongue of a small, well-educated elite of Indians. Democracy militates against established elites, though; as, of course, do more radical social changes. The Russian ruling classes of the Napoleonic age who populate War and Peace spoke French among themselves. A hundred years later, as Tsarist Russia began to modernize and the towering achievements of 19th-century Russian literature generated pride in the national language, that nation's elites were using French less and less-and after Lenin's revolution, of course, not at all.