Nearly a decade ago, at a nationally televised debate, Donald Trump chided Jeb Bush for speaking another language on the Presidential election campaign trail. “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish”. Ever since, Trump, it is said, has stayed true to his word. Trump has always shown his apprehension regarding languages coming into the USA, reiterating that migrants are entering the country speaking “truly foreign languages”. More recently, he described New York classrooms as overwhelmed with “pupils from foreign countries where they don’t even know what the language is.”
Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. It is a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” The Japanese novelist Mizumura describes English as a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency.
Jonathan Arc, a literary critic, goes to the extent of noting, in a critique of what he calls “Angloglobalism” that “English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global”. Today, when the world is already rife with anti-US sentiments, the talk of de-dollarization is also on the increase, meaning thereby reducing the importance of the US in the three motives that Keynes had ascribed to currency ~ as a means of exchange, as a store of value and for speculation. But are military and economic might enough to dislodge a global anchor currency? When Germany had almost challenged British power in 1870 after defeating France, the German currency was envisaged to be replacing the British Pound.
But it was during the First World War that all the British and French gold ended up in the US as collateral for American loans to both the countries. Even so, the pound remained a major currency till the major devaluation of 1966. As a knock-on effect, is the status of English as the global lingua franca set to be marred as Mandarin is flexing its muscle amidst growing Chinese dominance on the world economic horizon? History suggests that there is a concurrence between the economic status of a nation and its language. But is the US trust factor not there to ensure the dollar’s dominance?
While the dollar’s pre-eminent role in global trade and finance may diminish with time, recent fears about the demise of the English language seem overblown. Is the dominance of the English language over others because of its perceived aesthetic qualities, clarity of expression, literary power or religious standing? But these qualities did apply also to Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and French. Is it due to the intrinsic, structural properties of English?
Or because it has produced rich literature from ancient through classical to modern times? Not really so. It is because the US dollar talks in English and so does the British pound. If English is a global language today, it is so because political power and financial power are together responsible for the dominance of one language over others. When Willi am White wrote in 1872 about the introduction of English language in a part of the world: “As we link Calcutta with Bombay, and Bombay with Madras, and by roads, railways and telegraphs interlace province with province, we may in the process fuse India into unity, and the use and prevalence of our language (English) may be the register of the progress of that unity”, he certainly focused on English as a symbol of political unity and as a language of vision.
Before English acquired the international status it now has, it was Latin that dominated the global scenario ~ not because the Romans formed a major slice of the world population, overriding the languages of the countries they colonized, but because they were more powerful. Latin continued to dominate the language landscape as the international language for a millennium, much after the decline of Roman military power, because by that time the Roman Catholic Church had become most powerful and adopted Latin as its lingua franca. So the best way a language establishes itself is through its political power, especially its military power.
The philosophical doctrines of Aristotle and Plato were hardly the reason for the popularity of Greek; the credit, in fact, should go to Alexander the Great and his army. Military muscle may help establish a language as a dominant one, but its sustenance over time and its expansion as well as dissemination can be acquired through economic power alone. English, says David Crystal, happened to be in the right place at the right time. By the end of the 19th century, Great Britain had become the world’s leading industrial country.
Then, the USA became the fastest growing economy of the world. It was during the 20th century that the domination of English was sustained, expanded and promoted almost singularly through the economic supremacy of the new American superpower. Sensational news from across the Atlantic came nearly three decades ago when Representative Peter King introduced a Bill in Congress declaring that “English be the official United States language”. He wanted all federal support for other languages and all bilingual programmes to cease forthwith. English, said Mr King, is “the bond that unites the American people”. When the Warsaw Pact was wound up, it was wound up in English. When the G7 meets, it meets in English.
English is the language of the UN antechamber, of international peacekeeping, of world banking, of diplomacy and of air traffic control. English is the language of academic research, space travel and scientific discovery. English is the global computer language; it is the language of news gathering and world entertainment. English is the chief lingua franca of the Internet, which according to Michael Spector “has more than ever become America’s greatest and most effective export”. Linguists used to attribute the dominance of English to imperial history. “Had it not been for Francis Drake, the world would speak Spanish”, they hold. Yet Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Arabia ~ all have imperial histories.
The world’s most prominent tongue is Han Chinese, with more than a billion adherents, but it is not one language, being as variegated as French, Spanish or Italian. English is an official language in 40 countries and is partly spoken as mother tongue in18 countries. With nearly 272.48 million native speakers, a total of about 410.4 million people worldwide speak English as their mother tongue, whereas there are 423 million Spanish speakers in the world. Recent geopolitical tensions have stoked fears of dollarisation and may help bolster the status of other currencies. The Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of World War II also established the dollar as the primary currency of international trade. That is a massive source of economic power for the US.
Some fear that the US dollar might lose the primacy it has held since supplanting the British pound as the world’s top reserve currency in the postWorld War II period. However, the US dollar remains the world’s dominant mode of exchange. Last year the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) reported that the US dollar was the most commonly used currency on its global payment system, accounting for 41.7 per cent of payments, followed by the Euro. The US dollar also serves as the standard way that trading partners measure the market value of goods and services being exchanged.
It would be hard to break away from the dollar-centric system that has dominated global trade and been the leading reserve currency for nearly 80 years. In an essay Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist, in “Imaginary Homeland”, Salman Rushdie wrote, “the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago.” His remark was caustic and unwittingly pointed out the precise source from where English, as a global language derives its power today.
(The writer, a former Associate Professor, Department of English, Gurudas College, Kolkata, is the author of English, quo Vadis, Auntie English, Nobel Prize in Literature: a case for India)