My earlier post talked about English as the world's de facto lingua franca.
Is this simply because America followed Britain as the world's dominant imperial/ economic power, and by some quirk of history both happened to be English speaking? Or does this connecting power come from something intrinsic to the English language?
How to find out? Ideally, I would run a test vs. control version of history.
The test version would feature a Swahili speaking super power. The control version would feature an English speaking super power. Both super powers would rise, shine, decline and die. 250 years after the death of the empires, a statistician would measure the usage rates of both English and Swahili in the former Imperial domains/ spheres of influence and perform a test of proportions to determine if English is stickier than Swahili.
Looking around at the real world, there probably are a number of natural experiments that come interestingly close to this design.
Do Kazakhs and Estonians, once united within the mighty USSR, speak to each other in Russian or in English? And how will they speak to each other a hundred years from now? My money is on English. Or Mandarin.
How sticky was Spanish in the old American colonies? Pretty darn sticky. Did the newly independent Latin American nations try to embrace their native American-Indian languages? Were the native American languages sub-scale? Was there really a viable alternative to Spanish?
Did Urdu, the great language of the Mughal courts, survive the decline of the Mughals? Just about survived in Lucknow and Hyderabad. Did not thrive. I'm not sure if the Punjabi version spoken in modern Pakistan would be recognized as Urdu by the Lucknow cognoscenti.
How sticky was Turkish in the former Ottoman Empire? This empire extended from Hungary, through what is now called Iraq, to the Persian border. As far as I know (I don't know much about the Middle East) this swath speaks Arabic, the language of the Koran.
Did Latin survive the fall of the Roman Empire? Yes, thanks to the Catholic church. Will Latin survive the Second Vatican Council? Maybe, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI. Sanskrit survived long after classical Hindu India because of a similarly tenacious priesthood. Hebrew has done rather well in modern Israel. There is a pattern here.
Go back to the randomized test and check if either empire embedded language within a religion. The more sticky language was probably the one which was embedded in a religion.
Is modern English woven into a religion? Yes. Its called Hollywood. Maybe English will continue to thrive long after the USA ceases to be the world's only super power because the world continues to worship at the temple of Brad, Angelina and their spiritual heirs.
2 comments:
I see that Obama wants everyone to learn a foreign language, but which one should it be?
The British learn French, the Australians study Japanese, and the Americans prefer Spanish.
Yet this leaves Mandarin Chinese out of the equation.
Interestingly nine British MP's have nominated Esperanto for the Nobel Peace Prize 2008.
Detail can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Why not all the above?
America's greatest strength is that it is home to people from all over the world. For critical masses of Americans to speak French, Japanese,Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, Sinhalese and Swahili is entirely feasible. That would do so much good both for America's self-concept as well as America's standing in the world.
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