Speaker A
[Music] Asking about the future of language is that way madness lies. Who would have predicted a thousand years ago that Latin would no longer be used in a thousand years' time by hardly anybody? You know, I mean, obviously Latin is still used in certain circumstances, but it would not be the normal education to be fluent in Latin. If you'd said that a thousand years ago, people would have said you were mad. So in a thousand years' time, will English still be a global language? We could all be speaking Martian by then if they land and take over. You know, who knows what's going to happen? To ask about the future of language is to really ask about the future of society, and futurologists are just as unclear about what will happen eventually as I am about language. Because language, you see, is global for one reason only, and that is the power of the people who speak it. Power always drives language. There is no other reason to speak somebody else's language other than you want to improve your quality of life or you want to influence them in some way or whatever it might be. I mean, the tradition in English, of course, English became global for a whole variety of reasons. First of all, the power of the British Empire, later the power of American imperialism, later in the 17th century the power of the Industrial Revolution, which meant that the language of science and technology became English predominantly. In the 19th century, the power of money. Money talks, and the two most productive nations of the world were Britain and America, both using English. So the language of international banking became the pound and the dollar, English once again. And then in the 20th century, cultural power, as you all know, because every aspect of culture you've encountered has some sort of history in the English language, like pop songs, for example, international advertising, air traffic control, the development of radio and television, the development of the internet. Internet, 100% an English language medium when it started, though today only a fraction of the internet is English. Internet has become multilingual. So what's going to happen next? English will stay a global language as long as certain things happen. First of all, that the nations that are recognized as the most powerful nations in the world continue to use English, and all the other nations want to be like them or want to interact with them or want to sell things to them, and so on. And so English will stay like that for as long as those nations retain that kind of power, and we're talking mainly America here, aren't we, predominantly. On the other hand, it doesn't take rocket science to think of scenarios where, for whatever reason, American power diminishes, the power of some other nations grows, and you get other parts of the world becoming more dominant. And, you know, people say, well, what about Chinese? Well, one day, maybe. At the moment, there's no sign of China wanting Chinese to be a global language because they're all learning English in China for the most part. But you can imagine a scenario where it was the other way around. You can imagine a scenario in Spanish. Spanish is the fastest growing language in the world at the moment population-wise because of South America and Central America, and increasingly in North America, Spanish is becoming very widely used. You can imagine a scenario where one day we might all end up speaking Spanish. In another scenario, you can imagine one day we might all end up speaking Arabic for reasons that are perfectly obvious to anybody who looks at the world. So all of these things could happen. At the moment, there's no sign of a diminution in the prestige of English, the desire to learn English. The figures are going up and up and up every year. At the moment, over two billion people speak English. There's never been so many people speaking one language before, and there's no sign of any slackening off in that progress. So the long-term future, no idea. The short-term future, no change. And for people who ask that question, implicit in it, I think, is the question, what English will it be that continues for a while to be the global language? What English will it be? Indeed, there are so many answers to this question. Really, if you look at what's happening at the moment, then you see certain trends. Remember that this whole business of global English is very recent. Nobody was talking about global English 30 years ago. I only started giving lectures on global English in the 1980s. The first books on global English were not written until the end of the 1990s. And so we're talking about a very recent trend here. The world needs a global language because countries want to talk to each other, so there have to be institutions to enable that to happen. And the obvious institution is the United Nations. So the UN is only, you know, 1940s when there were 50 or so nations in it, and now there are nearly 200. And so suddenly the world is talking. The countries of the world are talking to each other. Now, what kind of English will it be? Well, if you join the club, as it were, the English-speaking club, you will, as at joining any club, you will look to the senior members, as it were, the most established members, and you look at the statistics. You'll speak the English that you most often encounter in the world, and that, of course, is American English. And so that is one scenario, that American English will ultimately dominate all other varieties of English. And we already see this happening in small ways, don't we? In British English, for instance, you see the impact of American English in all sorts of ways. On spelling, for example, you know, once upon a time, you'd spell the word encyclopedia with an AE in the middle in a traditional British way. The American way is to spell it with an E in the middle, and now in Britain virtually everybody spells it with an E in the middle. And so you see American English coming in. In pronunciation, I say schedule. All my kids say schedule. That's happened in a generation. That's an American pronunciation that's taken over. And similarly, in grammar, you get American English grammar influencing British English grammar a lot. I've just eaten. I'd use the present perfect, I would, but an awful lot of young people today say I just ate or I just at, depending on your pronunciation. You use the American, you know, they use the predate form, past tense form. So there are differences there. American vocabulary coming into British English as well, only a little bit in the other direction. You can go to New York now and see pubs everywhere. Well, that's a British term. So there is a little bit of movement in both ways, but it's large one way. And now I've been to Australia, and one of the complaints that people have in Australia is the American English that's coming into Australian English, and I see this everywhere. So that is one scenario. But there is a different scenario as well, and it is this: why is there American English in the first place? Because the Americans wanted to identify themselves as American and not as British. It was quite a conscious decision when America became independent. Noah Webster, among others, said, we want an American English for an American identity for the new nation, and that's where American spellings started, you see, and how new American vocabulary got into dictionaries. Now, what happened in America then is now happening globally. So all over the English-speaking world, people are saying, well, you can be British if you like, you can be American if you like, but we want to be Indian or we want to be Nigerian or we want to be Ghanaian or what have you. And the English that we use will reflect that cultural identity. Now, we're not talking just a few people here, you see. In India, nobody knows exactly how many, but there must be at least 400 million people speaking English in India, speaking Indian English, not speaking British English or American English or anything like that, quite distinctive English too, both in pronunciat-
