learning elt-future

The Future of English?

This book is about the English language in

the 21st century: about who will speak it

and for what purposes. It is a practical

briefing document, written for

educationists, politicians, managers –

indeed any decision maker or planning

team with a professional interest in the

development of English worldwide.

The Future of English? takes stock of the

present, apparently unassailable, position of

English in the world and asks whether we

can expect its status to remain unchanged

during the coming decades of

unprecedented social and economic global

change. The book explores the possible

long-term impact on English of

developments in communications

technology, growing economic

globalisation and major demographic shifts.

The Future of English? examines the

complex mix of material and cultural

trends which will shape the global destiny

of the English language and concludes that

the future is more complex and less

predictable than has usually been assumed.

The book has been commissioned by the

British Council to complement the many

texts already available about the teaching

and learning of English, the history and

development of English and the diversity

of forms of English worldwide. It is

intended to stimulate constructive debate

about the future status of English which

can inform policy developments both in

the British Council and other organisations

concerned with the promotion of English

language teaching and learning.

The book is divided into five main

sections, each followed by a summary of

main points and references. The first

section explains how English came to

reach its present position in the world.

Section two examines techniques of

forecasting, identifies the patterns which

underlie typical linguistic change and

describes the way large corporations have

used ‘scenario planning’ as a strategy for

coping with unpredictable futures. Section

three outlines significant global trends

which will shape the social and economic

world in the 21st century. Section four

discusses the impacts these trends are

already having on language and

communication in everyday life.

The last section summarises implications

for the English language and outlines ways

in which we might reach a better

understanding of the status which English

will hold in the 21st century world. This

concluding section also argues for a

reassessment of the role played by British

providers of ELT goods and services in

promoting a global ‘brand image’ for

Britain.

A guide to forecasting the popularity of theEnglish language in the 21st century

David Graddol

What is this book about?

First published 1997© The British Council 1997, 2000

All Rights Reserved

This digital edition created by The English Company (UK) Ltd

David Graddol hereby asserts and gives notice of his right under section 77 of the UK Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author ofthis work.

Why worry now?Why worry now about the global future of the Englishlanguage? Is it not the first language of capitalism in aworld in which socialism and communism have largelydisappeared? Is it not the main language of internationalcommerce and trade in a world where these sectors seemincreasingly to drive the cultural and political? Has it notmore cultural resources, in the sense of works of litera-ture, films and television programmes, than any otherlanguage? Is it not, as The Economist has described it,‘impregnably established as the world standardlanguage: an intrinsic part of the global communicationsrevolution’? (The Economist, 21 December 1996, p. 39)Isn’t it obvious, in other words, that the Englishlanguage will continue to grow in popularity and influ-ence, without the need for special study or strategicmanagement?

The simple answer to all these questions is probably‘yes’. There is no imminent danger to the Englishlanguage, nor to its global popularity – a fact which isrecognised by the majority of people who are professio-nally concerned with the English language worldwide(Figure 1). The press release for the launch of the BritishCouncil’s English 2000 project in 1995 summarised theposition of English:

World-wide, there are over 1,400 million people living incountries where English has official status. One out of five ofthe world’s population speak English to some level ofcompetence. Demand from the other four fifths is increa-sing. ... By the year 2000 it is estimated that over one billionpeople will be learning English. English is the mainlanguage of books, newspapers, airports and air-traffic cont-rol, international business and academic conferences,science technology, diplomacy, sport, international competi-tions, pop music and advertising.

Fin de siècleThe position of English as a world language may seem tobe so entrenched and secure that agonising over ‘wherewe are’ and ‘where we are going’ might be regarded asno more than a fin de siècle indulgence. The end of the19th century was characterised by much heart searchingover the state of society – evident in social behaviour andexperimentation, fiction, scientific writing and legislativereform – prompted by a concern at the social consequ-ences of the industrial revolution. How much greatermight be the mood of self-reflection at the end of amillennium, when the communications revolution andeconomic globalisation seem to be destroying the reassu-ring geographical and linguistic basis of sovereignty andnational identity. How many titles of social and econo-mics books include the word ‘end’ or the prefix ‘post’:‘The end of history’, ‘the post-industrial societies’,‘post-modernism’, ‘post-capitalism’, ‘post-feminism’.There is a general awareness of change, but no clearvision of where it may all be leading. It seems we are notyet living in a new era, but have fallen off the edge of anold one.

But there are reasons why we ought to take stock andreassess the place of English in the world. The future ofthe English language may not be straightforward: celeb-ratory statistics should be treated with caution.

This book examines some facts, trends and ideaswhich may be uncomfortable to many native speakers.For example, the economic dominance of OECD count-ries – which has helped circulate English in the newmarket economies of the world – is being eroded asAsian economies grow and become the source, ratherthan the recipient, of cultural and economic flows.Population statistics suggest that the populations of therich countries are ageing and that in the coming decadesyoung adults with disposable income will be found inAsia and Latin America rather than in the US andEurope. Educational trends in many countries suggestthat languages other than English are already providingsignificant competition in school curricula.

The Future of English? identifies such significant globaltrends – in economics, technology and culture – whichmay affect the learning and use of English internatio-nally in the 21st century. We suggest that the close of the20th century is a time of global transition and that a newworld order is emerging. The period of most rapidchange is likely to last about 20 years and can be expec-ted to be an uncomfortable and at times traumaticexperience for many of the world’s citizens. During thisperiod, the conditions will be established for more settledglobal relations which may stabilise about 2050. Hencethe next 20 years or so will be a critical time for theEnglish language and for those who depend upon it. Thepatterns of usage and public attitudes to English whichdevelop during this period will have long-term implicat-ions for its future in the world.

In this book we argue that the global popularity ofEnglish is in no immediate danger, but that it would befoolhardy to imagine that its pre-eminent position as aworld language will not be challenged in some worldregions and domains of use as the economic, demograp-hic and political shape of the world is transformed.

A language in transitionAs the world is in transition, so the English language isitself taking new forms. This, of course, has always beentrue: English has changed substantially in the 1500 yearsor so of its use, reflecting patterns of contact with otherlanguages and the changing communication needs ofpeople. But in many parts of the world, as English istaken into the fabric of social life, it acquires a momen-tum and vitality of its own, developing in ways whichreflect local culture and languages, while diverging incre-asingly from the kind of English spoken in Britain orNorth America.

English is also used for more purposes than everbefore. Everywhere it is at the leading edge of technolo-gical and scientific development, new thinking ineconomics and management, new literatures and enter-tainment genres. These give rise to new vocabularies,grammatical forms and ways of speaking and writing.Nowhere is the effect of this expansion of English intonew domains seen more clearly than in communicationon the Internet and the development of ‘net English’.

But the language is, in another way, at a criticalmoment in its global career: within a decade or so, thenumber of people who speak English as a secondlanguage will exceed the number of native speakers. The

Overview

2 The Future of English?

English is widely regarded as having become the global language – but will itretain its pre-eminence in the 21st century? The world in which it is used is inthe early stages of major social, economic and demographic transition.Although English is unlikely to be displaced as the world’s most importantlanguage, the future is more complex and less certain than some assume.

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

Agree

No vie

w

Disagr

ee

Figure 1 Will English remainthe world’s language?

Composite responses to theBritish Council’s English

2000 Global ConsultationQuestionnaire

A world in transition

WWWENGLISH 2000

http://www.britcoun.org/english/enge2000.htm

ENGLISH CO UK LTD

http://www.english.co.uk/

implications of this are likely to be far reaching: thecentre of authority regarding the language will shift fromnative speakers as they become minority stakeholders inthe global resource. Their literature and television mayno longer provide the focal point of a global Englishlanguage culture, their teachers no longer form theunchallenged authoritative models for learners.

Contradictory trendsMany of the trends that are documented here are notsimply ‘driving forces’ whose impact and consequencescan be easily predicted. And in so far as they are under-stood they appear to be leading in contradictory direc-tions – tendencies to increasing use of English arecounterposed by others which lead to a reducingenthusiasm for the language. On the one hand, the useof English as a global lingua franca requires intelligibilityand the setting and maintenance of standards. On theother hand, the increasing adoption of English as asecond language, where it takes on local forms, is leadingto fragmentation and diversity. No longer is it the case, ifit ever was, that English unifies all who speak it.

These competing trends will give rise to a less predi-ctable context within which the English language will belearned and used. There is, therefore, no way of preci-sely predicting the future of English since its spread andcontinued vitality is driven by such contradictory forces.As David Crystal has commented:

There has never been a language so widely spread or spokenby so many people as English. There are therefore no prece-dents to help us see what happens to a language when itachieves genuine world status. (Crystal, 1997, p. 139)

The likelihood, as this book demonstrates, is that thefuture for English will be a complex and plural one. Thelanguage will grow in usage and variety, yet simulta-neously diminish in relative global importance. We mayfind the hegemony of English replaced by an oligarchyof languages, including Spanish and Chinese. To put itin economic terms, the size of the global market for theEnglish language may increase in absolute terms, but itsmarket share will probably fall.

A new world eraAccording to many economists, cultural theorists andpolitical scientists, the new ‘world order’ expected toappear in the 21st century will represent a significantdiscontinuity with previous centuries. The Internet andrelated information technologies, for example, mayupset the traditional patterns of communication uponwhich institutional and national cultures have been built.We have entered a period in which language andcommunication will play a more central role than everbefore in economic, political and cultural life – just at themoment in history that a global language has emerged.

There are signs already of an associated shift of socialvalues which may have a significant impact on the futuredecision-making of organisations, governments andconsumers. Some commentators predict that, just asenvironmental issues were once regarded as less impor-tant than the need for profit, so issues of social equity willform a third ‘bottom line’ in the global business environ-ment. This suggests that those who promote the globaluse of English will be burdened with new social responsi-bilities and may have to engage with a more complexpublic agenda, including ethical issues relating to lingu-istic human rights.

The Future of English? thus explores a range of topics witha common theme: the changing world which affects ouruse of language. Its primary purpose is to stimulateinformed debate about the global future of English andthe implications both for British providers of Englishlanguage services and the institutions and enterpriseswith which they work overseas. For this reason, the bookaims to provide thought-provoking ideas rather than firmpredictions. It points to areas of uncertainty and doubt –where an understanding of local issues will be as valuableas that of global trends. Many of the issues the bookaddresses will be of interest to a wide range of people,both specialists and professionals, but also members ofthe general public. These issues raise such questions as:

● How many people will speak English in the year2050?

● What role will English play in their lives? Will theyenjoy the rich cultural resources the English languageoffers or will they simply use English as a vehicularlanguage – like a tool of their trade?

● What effects will economic globalisation have on thedemand for English?

● Will the emergence of ‘world regions’ encouragelingua francas which challenge the position ofEnglish?

● How does English help the economic modernisationof newly industrialised countries?

● Is the Internet the electronic ‘flagship’ of globalEnglish?

● Will the growth of global satellite TV, such as CNNand MTV, teach the world’s youth US English?

● Will the spread of English lead to over half of theworld’s languages becoming extinct?

● Is it true that the English language will prove to be avital resource and benefit to Britain in the comingcentury, giving it a key economic advantage overEuropean competitors?

Commentators vary greatly in attitudes towards, andexpectations of, global English. At one extreme, there isan unproblematic assumption that the world will eventu-ally speak English and that this will facilitate the culturaland economic dominance of native-speaking countries(especially the US). Such a view is challenged, however,by the growing assertiveness of countries adoptingEnglish as a second language that English is now theirlanguage, through which they can express their ownvalues and identities, create their own intellectual propertyand export goods and services to other countries.

The spread of English in recent years is, by anycriterion, a remarkable phenomenon. But the closer oneexamines the historical causes and current trends, themore it becomes apparent that the future of English willbe more complex, more demanding of understandingand more challenging for the position of native-speakingcountries than has hitherto been supposed.

This book is neither triumphalist nor alarmist, butseeks to chart some of the territory, to stimulate a moreinformed debate which can, in turn, help all those con-cerned with the future of English prepare for thesignificant changes the 21st century will bring.

The Future of English? 3

The future of English will be more complex, moredemanding of understanding and more

challenging for the position of native-speakingcountries than has hitherto been supposed.

What have been theheroic failures of the pastin predicting the number

of English speakers?p. 18

Jurassic Park grossed $6min India in 1994. But in

what language?p. 47

385 million people willbe employed in world

tourist services by 2006.Will they all need

English?p. 36

How many people willspeak English in 2050?

p. 27

Questioning the future

Book highlights


Crystal, D. (1997) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

The Economist (1996) Language and Electronics: the coming global tongue. 21December, pp. 37–9.

Further readingThere are many books now available which examine the social and linguisticcontexts in which English developed historically. The Future of English? hasbeen written to complement the following books in particular:


Graddol, D., Leith, D. and Swann, J. (1996) (eds) English: history, diversity andchange. London: Routledge/Open University.

Maybin, J. and Mercer, N. (1996) (eds) Using English: from conversation to canon.London: Routledge/Open University.

Mercer, N. and Swann, J. (1996) (eds) Learning English: development and diversity.London: Routledge/Open University.

Goodman, S. and Graddol, D. (1996) (eds) Redesigning English: new texts, newidentities. London: Routledge/Open University.

SourcesA composite list of sources for the tables and figures in this book can be found

on the inside back cover.

NoteAll references to $ in this text are to US$. 1 billion = 1,000 million; 1 trillion =

1,000,000 million

1 English and the international economyThe shifting patterns of trade and new working practices (suchas the growing prevalence of screen-based labour) whichfollow globalisation are affecting the use of the Englishlanguage in complex ways. At present there is a considerableincrease in the numbers of people learning and using English,but a closer examination of driving forces suggests that thelong-term growth of the learning of English is less secure thanmight at first appear.

2 English and global cultureAs the number of people using English grows, so second-language speakers are drawn towards the ‘inner circle’ offirst-language speakers and foreign-language speakers to the‘outer circle’ of second-language speakers. During this statusmigration, attitudes and needs in respect of the language willchange; the English language will diversify and other countrieswill emerge to compete with the older, native-speakingcountries in both the English language-teaching industry andin the global market for cultural resources and intellectualproperty in English.

3 English as a leading-edge phenomenonEnglish is closely associated with the leading edge of globalscientific, technological, economic and cultural developments,where it has been unrivalled in its influence in the late 20thcentury. But we cannot simply extrapolate from the last fewdecades and assume this trend will continue unchanged. Infour key sectors, the present dominance of English can beexpected to give way to a wider mix of languages: first, theglobal audio-visual market and especially satellite TV; second,the Internet and computer-based communication includinglanguage-related and document handling software; third,technology transfer and associated processes in economicglobalisation; fourth, foreign-language learning especially indeveloping countries where growing regional trade may makeother languages of increasing economic importance.

4 A bilingual futureThere is a growing belief amongst language professionals thatthe future will be a bilingual one, in which an increasingproportion of the world’s population will be fluent speakers ofmore than one language. For the last few hundred yearsEnglish has been dominated by monolingual speakers’interests: there is little to help us understand what will happento English when the majority of the people and institutionswho use it do so as a second language.

5 Social value shiftsThe spread of English has been made more rapid in recentyears as a consequence of decisions and actions taken bygovernments, institutions and individuals. This process hasbeen guided by a logic of ‘economic rationalism’. However,significant social value shifts may occur in public opinion,making social equity as important a factor in public policy aseconomic issues, and quality of life as important as income inpersonal life choices. Such value shifts would foreground thecomplex ethical issues associated with the world dominance ofa single language and cause a reassessment of the impact ofEnglish on other cultures, national identities and educationalopportunities for the world’s non-English speaking citizens.The economic argument for English may also be challenged asdeveloping countries make more careful evaluations of thecosts and benefits of mass educational programmes in theEnglish language.

6 Need for scenario buildingThis book suggests that development work should be put inhand towards the building and testing of ‘scenarios’ whichencompass a range of possible futures for English in key areas.A ‘Delphi panel’ of experts (p. 23) in different regions of theworld could be invited to respond to the scenarios and helpestablish local understandings of the changing role of English.Such qualitative work should go hand-in-hand with thecollection of key statistics and trend data.

References

English today


1● The legacy of history

Britain’s colonial expansion established the pre-conditions for theglobal use of English, taking the language from its island birthplace tosettlements around the world. The English language has grown up incontact with many others, making it a hybrid language which canrapidly evolve to meet new cultural and communicative needs.

● English in the 20th century The story of English in the 20th century has been closely linked tothe rise of the US as a superpower that has spread the Englishlanguage alongside its economic, technological and cultural influence.In the same period, the international importance of other Europeanlanguages, especially French, has declined.

● Who speaks English?There are three kinds of English speaker: those who speak it as a firstlanguage, those for whom it is a second or additional language andthose who learn it as a foreign language. Native speakers may feel thelanguage ‘belongs’ to them, but it will be those who speak English asa second or foreign language who will determine its world future.

● Language hierarchiesLanguages are not equal in political or social status, particularly inmultilingual contexts. How does English relate to other languages in amultilingual speaker’s repertoire? Why does someone use Englishrather than a local language? What characteristic patterns are there inthe use of English by non-native speakers?

Looking at the past is an important step towardsunderstanding the future. Any serious study of Englishin the 21st century must start by examining howEnglish came to be in its current state and spoken bythose who speak it. What factors have ensured thespread of English? What does this process tell usabout the fate of languages in unique political andcultural contexts? In what domains of knowledge hasEnglish developed particular importance and howrecently?

English is remarkable for its diversity, its propensity tochange and be changed. This has resulted in both avariety of forms of English, but also a diversity ofcultural contexts within which English is used in dailylife. The main areas of development in the use andform of English will undoubtedly come from non-native speakers. How many are there and where arethey located? And when and why do they use Englishinstead of their first language? We need to be awareof the different place that English has in the lives ofnative speakers, second-language users and thosewho learn it as a foreign language.

This section examines the development of English,identifies those languages which have historicallyrivalled English as a world language and explains thespecial place that English has in multilingual countriesand in the repertoires of multilingual speakers. Byshowing how our present arose from the past, we willbe better equipped to speculate on what the futuremight hold in store.

The colonial periodThe English language has been associated with migrat-ion since its first origins – the language came into beingin the 5th century with patterns of people movementand resettlement. But as a world language its historybegan in the 17th century, most notably in the foundat-ion of the American colonies. Many European powerswere similarly expanding: French, Dutch, Portugueseand Spanish became established as colonial languages,the latter two still important outside Europe in LatinAmerica. But in the 19th century the British empire,with its distinctive mix of trade and cultural politics,consolidated the world position of English, creating a‘language on which the sun never sets’.

The rise of the nation stateIn Europe of the middle ages, power was distributedbetween Church, sovereign and local barons, creatingmultiple agencies of social control, government and landmanagement. Even in the 1500s, a monarch such asCharles V ruled geographically dispersed parts ofEurope. But by the 17th and 18th centuries, the nationstate had emerged as a territorial basis for administrationand cultural identity. Yet language diversity was exten-sive and many language boundaries crossed the bordersof newly emerging states. Each nation state requiredtherefore an internal lingua franca, subject like otherinstruments of state to central regulation, which couldact as a vehicle of governance and as an emblem ofnational identity. ‘National’ languages, not existing inEurope prior to the creation of nation states, had to beconstructed. Consequently, the English language wasself-consciously expanded and reconstructed to serve thepurposes of a national language.

Profound cultural as well as political changes affectedthe English language. Modern institutions of sciencewere founded, such as the Royal Society in Britain;language was added to the scientific agenda and madean object of study alongside investigations of the naturalworld. New words and ways of writing in English weredeveloped. For a time, scholars and clerics who regularlytravelled across the boundaries of national languagescontinued to use Latin as their lingua franca. But asknowledge of Latin declined and the rise of merchantand professional classes produced travellers unschooledin Latin, people sought alternative means of internatio-nal communication.

The idea of a national language being a requirementfor a nation state has remained a powerful one. The20th century process of decolonisation created a drive toestablish new national languages which could provide anintegrated identity for multi-ethnic states set up on theEuropean model. Few countries were as bold asSingapore, in adopting a multi-language formula whichreflected the ethnic languages of the new state. Even inIndia, Hindi is the sole national language and Englishtechnically an ‘associate’. In some countries a new natio-nal language had to be created – such as BahasaMalaysia which raised the status of Malay into a national

language in a way similar to the 17th century extensionof English in vocabulary and function.

Nation states are getting more plentiful – there arenow over 180 states represented at the UN – and oneconsequence of the break-up of larger territories intoseparate states has been the emergence of new nationallanguages. Simultaneously, the role of the nation state isbeing weakened as economic globalisation, regionaltrading blocs and new multilateral political affiliationslimit national spheres of control. Nevertheless, the deathof the nation state is much exaggerated. National educa-tion systems, for example, play a major role in determi-ning which languages in the world are taught andlearned. The role of nation states is changing but is byno means abolished.

The emergence of national varietiesThe attempt to fix and ‘ascertain’ the English language,made in the 18th and 19th centuries, was never entirelysuccessful: the language has continued to adapt itselfswiftly to new circumstances and people. And it was notjust Britain which desired a national language fromEnglish. Noah Webster’s proposed reforms of theAmerican spelling system, some of which give it a distin-ctive appearance in print, were intended explicitly tocreate a national linguistic identity for the newly inde-pendent country:

The question now occurs; ought the Americans to retainthese faults which produce innumerable inconveniences inthe acquisition and use of the language, or ought they atonce to reform these abuses, and introduce order and regu-larity into the orthography of the American tongue? ... acapital advantage of this reform ... would be, that it wouldmake a difference between the English orthography and theAmerican. ... a national language is a band of nationalunion. ... Let us seize the present moment, and establish anational language as well as a national government.(Webster, 1789)

There are an increasing number of national stan-dards, including those related to the ‘New Englishes’which have appeared in former colonial countries suchas Singapore. Each standard is supported (or soon maybe) by national dictionaries, grammars and style sheets.Nevertheless, no central authority has ever existed,either nationally or globally, which can regulate thelanguage.

A hybrid and flexible languageEnglish has always been an evolving language andlanguage contact has been an important driver ofchange. First from Celtic and Latin, later fromScandinavian and Norman French, more recently fromthe many other languages spoken in the British colonies,the English language has borrowed freely. Some analystssee this hybridity and permeability of English as definingfeatures, allowing it to expand quickly into new domainsand explaining in part its success as a world language.

One of the few certainties associated with the futureof English is that it will continue to evolve, reflecting andconstructing the changing roles and identities of its spea-kers. Yet we are now at a significant point of evolution:at the end of the 20th century, the close relationship thathas previously existed between language, territory andcultural identity is being challenged by globalising forces.The impact of such trends will shape the contexts inwhich English is learned and used in the 21st century.

The legacy of history


Britain’s colonial expansion established the pre-conditions for the global useof English, taking the language from its island birthplace to settlementsaround the world. The English language has grown up in contact with manyothers, making it a hybrid language which can rapidly evolve to meet newcultural and communicative needs.

Is English the mostwidely spoken languagein the world today? p. 8

Will future language usebe shaped by time zonerather than geography inthe 21st century?p. 53


1 Pre-English period ( – c. AD 450) The origins of English are, for a language, surprisingly well docu-mented. At the time of the Roman invasion c.55 BC, the indigenouslanguages of Britain were Celtic, of which there were two mainbranches (corresponding to modern Gaelic and Welsh). TheRomans made Latin an ‘official’ language of culture and govern-ment, probably resulting in many communities in Britain beco-ming bilingual Celtic-Latin. Garrisons of troops then arrived fromelsewhere in the Roman empire, particularly Gaul, another Celticarea. In some points, the English language has repeated this earlyhistory of Latin: it was brought into many countries in the 17th to19th centuries as the language of a colonial power and made thelanguage of administration, spoken by a social elite, but not usedby the majority of the population. It served, moreover, as an inter-national lingua franca amongst the elites of many countries. Butthe use of Latin rapidly declined in the 17th and 18th centuries.Will English share this fate?

2 Early Old English (c.450–c.850) The English language developed after the Anglo-Saxon invasionc.449 AD, when the Romans left Britain and new settlers broughtGermanic dialects from mainland Europe. Latin was still an impor-tant written language because of the Church and many Latinwords were introduced into Old English during this early period,but the language developed a new form: the first English literarytexts appeared.

3 Later Old English (c.850–1100) This was a time of invasion and settlement from Scandinavia (theVikings) and a time of language change. In the north of Englanddialects of English were extensively influenced by Scandinavianlanguages. In the south, King Alfred, concerned about fallingeducational standards, arranged for many Latin texts to be transla-ted into English.

4 Middle English (c.1100–1450)The Norman Conquest (1066) and rule brought about many lingu-istic changes. French, now the official language in England, affec-ted English vocabulary and spelling. The grammar of English wasalso radically transformed. Whereas Old English expressed gram-matical relations through inflections (word endings), MiddleEnglish lost many inflections and used word order to mark thegrammatical function of nouns. Educated people probably neededto be trilingual in French, Latin and English. It was a flourishingperiod for English literature. Writers included Geoffrey Chaucer,whose language is beginning to look like modern English.

5 Early Modern English (c.1450–1750) This period spans the Renaissance, the Elizabethan era andShakespeare. It is the period when the nation states of Europe tooktheir modern form. The role of the Church and Latin declined. InEngland, key institutions of science, such as the Royal Society,were established and, by the end of the 17th century, theoreticianslike Isaac Newton were writing their discoveries in English ratherthan Latin.

Britain grew commercially and acquired overseas colonies. Englishwas taken to the Americas (first colony at Jamestown, Virginia1607) and India (first trading post at Surat 1614). With the rise ofprinting (first printed book in English 1473) English acquired astable typographic identity. Teaching English as a foreign languagebegan in the 16th century, first in Holland and France.

6 Modern English (c.1750–1950) English had become a ‘national’ language. Many attempts weremade to ‘standardise and fix’ the language with dictionaries andgrammars (Johnson’s Dictionary 1755, the Oxford English Dictionary1858–1928). The industrial revolution triggered off a globalrestructuring of work and leisure which made English the internat-ional language of advertising and consumerism. The telegraph waspatented in 1837, linking English-speaking communities aroundthe world and establishing English as the major language for wireservices. As Britain consolidated imperial power, English-mediumeducation was introduced in many parts of the world. The interna-tional use of French declined. The first international series ofEnglish language-teaching texts was published from Britain in 1938and the world’s first TV commercial was broadcast in the US in1941. English emerged as the most popular working language fortransnational institutions.

7 Late Modern English (c.1950–) With Britain’s retreat from the empire, local and partially standar-dised varieties of English have emerged in newly independentcountries. ELT has become a major private-sector industry. In theaftermath of World War II, the US became a global economic andcultural presence, making American English the dominant worldvariety. The first geostationary communications satellites werelaunched (Early Bird 1965) and the Internet was invented (US1970s). A world market in audio-visual products was created andsoap operas such as Dallas circulated the globe. Worldwide Englishlanguage TV channels began (CNN International launched 1989).Meanwhile, English has acquired new electronic forms, as the frag-ment of a textual interaction from a north European reflector forInternet Relay Chat shows:

Moonhoo joined (total 22)<Moonhoo> cam someone ping me please<NorthBoy> action fires a harpoon at Moonhoo.<Wiz09> whispers: U all dont sound to awfullly excited :(:(<BigMix> North the host is a geek though<NorthBoy> Moonhoo: you’re lagged bigtime.

Gefeng þa be feaxe (nalas for fæhðe mearn)Guð-Geata leod Grendles modor;

brægd þa beadwe heard, þa he gebolgen wæs,feorhgeniðlan, þæt heo on flet gebeah.

Beowulf seizes Grendel’s mother by the hair: a fragment from the epic Old English poem composed c. 750

A common writing: whereby two, although not understanding one the others language, yet by the helpe

thereof, may communicate their minds one to another. ... The harshness of the stile, I hope, will be corrected by

the readers ingenuity.Preface to A Common Writing, Francis Lodwick, 1647

And preie God save the king, that is lord of this langage, and alle that him feith berith and obeieth, everich in his degre, the more and the lasse. But considere wel that I ne usurpe not to have founden this werk of my labour

or of myn engyn.Prologue of A Treatise on the Astrolabe,

Geoffrey Chaucer, 1391

Seven ages of EnglishThis page provides an overview of the history of English, from its birth in the 5th century to the present day

The rise of the USBy the end of the 19th century, Britain had establishedthe pre-conditions for English as a global language.Communities of English speakers were settled aroundthe world and, along with them, patterns of trade andcommunication. Yet the world position of English mighthave declined with the empire, like the languages ofother European colonial powers, such as Portugal andthe Netherlands, had it not been for the dramatic rise ofthe US in the 20th century as a world superpower.There were, indeed, two other European linguisticcontenders which could have established themselves asthe global lingua franca – French and German. Eco(1995) suggests:

Had Hitler won World War II and had the USA been redu-ced to a confederation of banana republics, we wouldprobably today use German as a universal vehicularlanguage, and Japanese electronic firms would advertisetheir products in Hong Kong airport duty-free shops(Zollfreie Waren) in German. (Eco, 1995, p. 331)

This is probably a disingenuous idea: the US wasdestined to be the most powerful of the industrialisedcountries because of its own natural and human resour-ces. The US is today the world’s third most populouscountry with around 260 million inhabitants. Not surpri-sing therefore that it now accounts for the greaterproportion of the total number of native English spea-kers. According to Table 1, which uses data generatedby the engco forecasting model (described more fully onp. 64), only Chinese has more first-language users. Whilesuch league tables beg as many questions as they answer,(and we will later discuss the serious problems attachedto statistics relating to language use) they do makeprovocative reading – Hindi, Spanish and Arabic areclose behind English, but how secure their place will bein the 21st century is a matter of speculation.

For the spread of English, the aftermath of WorldWar II was decisive. American influence was extendedaround the world. As George Steiner has observed:

English acted as the vulgate of American power and ofAnglo-American technology and finance. ... In ways toointricate, too diverse for socio-linguistics to formulate preci-sely, English and American-English seem to embody formen and women throughout the world – and particularlyfor the young – the ‘feel’ of hope, of material advance, ofscientific and empirical procedures. The entire world-imageof mass consumption, of international exchange, of thepopular arts, of generational conflict, of technocracy, ispermeated by American-English and English citations andspeech habits. (Steiner, 1975, p. 469)

Steiner captures the complex mix of the economic,technological, political and cultural which is evident inthe international domains of English at the end of the20th century. Those domains, listed in Table 2, arediscussed more fully later in the book. Here, we brieflyexamine how this situation arose in the second half ofthe 20th century.

World institutionsAfter the war, several international agencies were estab-lished to help manage global reconstruction and futuregovernance. The key one has proved to be the UnitedNations and its subsidiary organisations. Crystal (1997)estimates that 85% of international organisations nowuse English as one of their working languages, 49% useFrench and fewer than 10% use Arabic, Spanish orGerman. These figures probably underestimate the defacto use of English in such organisations. TheInternational Association for Applied Linguistics, forexample, lists French as a working language (and isknown by a French acronym AILA), but English is usedalmost exclusively in its publications and meetings. InEurope, the hegemony of English – even on paper – issurprisingly high. Crystal (1997) estimates 99% ofEuropean organisations listed in a recent yearbook ofinternational associations cite English as a workinglanguage, as opposed to 63% French and 40% German.

French is still the only real rival to English as a work-ing language of world institutions, although the worldposition of French has been in undoubted rapid decline

English in the 20th century


The story of English in the 20th century has been closely linked to the rise ofthe US as a superpower that has spread the English language alongside itseconomic, technological and cultural influence. In the same period, theinternational importance of other European languages, especially French, hasdeclined.

Language engco model Ethnologue

1 Chinese 1,113 1,1232 English 372 3223 Hindi/Urdu 316 2364 Spanish 304 2665 Arabic 201 2026 Portuguese 165 1707 Russian 155 2888 Bengali 125 1899 Japanese 123 125

10 German 102 9811 French 70 7212 Italian 57 6313 Malay 47 47

Table 1 Major world languages in millions of first-languagespeakers according to the engco model and comparative

figures from the Ethnologue (Grimes, 1996)

1 Working language of international organisations and conferences

2 Scientific publication3 International banking, economic affairs and trade4 Advertising for global brands5 Audio-visual cultural products (e.g. film, TV,

popular music)6 International tourism7 Tertiary education8 International safety (e.g. ‘airspeak’, ‘seaspeak’)9 International law

10 As a ‘relay language’ in interpretation and translation

11 Technology transfer12 Internet communication

Table 2 Major international domains of English

Will the growth of theInternet help maintainthe global influence of English?p. 50

What effect will changingpatterns of trade have onthe use of English?p. 33

since World War II. Its use in international forums isunlikely to disappear entirely, however, because it retainsa somewhat negative convenience in being ‘not English’,particularly in Europe. It is the only alternative whichcan be used in many international forums as a politicalgesture of resistance to the hegemony of English. As adelegate from Ireland once addressed the League ofNations many years ago, explaining his use of French, ‘Ican’t speak my own language, and I’ll be damned if I’llspeak English’ (cited in Large, 1985, p. 195).

Financial institutionsEnglish has been spread as a world language not only viapolitical initiatives. Key financial institutions have beenestablished in the 20th century, again after World WarII and with major American involvement. TheInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bankwere established after the ‘Bretton Woods’ conference in1944. Through the Marshall plan, the US becameclosely involved in the post-war economic reconstructionof Europe, Japan and other parts of the Asia Pacificregion. The Korean and later the Vietnamese war conti-nued the process of spreading American influence.Cultural, economic and technological dependency onAmerica were soon a concern for nations across theworld. The Bretton Woods system has since played asignificant role in regulating international economic rela-tions and in introducing free-market regimes in countrieswhere control has been traditionally centralised. Asmore countries have been rendered ‘open’ to globalflows of finance, goods, knowledge and culture, so theinfluence of English has spread.

Scientific publishingEnglish is now the international currency of science andtechnology. Yet it has not always been so. The renais-sance of British science in the 17th century put English-language science publications, such as the PhilosophicalTransactions instituted by the Royal Society 1665, at theforefront of the world scientific community. But the posi-tion was soon lost to German, which became the domi-nant international language of science until World WarI. The growing role of the US then ensured that Englishbecame, once again, the global language of experimentand discovery.

Journals in many countries have shifted, since WorldWar II, from publishing in their national language topublishing in English. Gibbs (1995) describes how theMexican medical journal Archivos de Investigación Médicashifted to English: first publishing abstracts in English,then providing English translations of all articles, finallyhiring an American editor, accepting articles only inEnglish and changing its name to Archives of MedicalResearch. This language shift is common elsewhere. Astudy in the early 1980s showed nearly two-thirds ofpublications of French scientists were in English. Viereck(1996) describes how all contributions in 1950 to theZeitschrift für Tierpsychologie were in German, but by 198495% were in English. The journal was renamed Ethologytwo years later.

As might be expected, some disciplines have beenmore affected by the English language than others.Physics is the most globalised and anglophone, followeda close second by other pure sciences. Table 3 shows thepercentage of German scholars in each field reportingEnglish as their ‘de facto working language’ in a study bySkudlik (1992).

It is not just in scientific publishing, but in bookpublication as a whole that English rules supreme.Worldwide, English is the most popular language ofpublication. Figure 2 shows the estimated proportion oftitles published in different languages in the early 1990s.

Unesco figures for book production show Britainoutstripping any other country in the world for thenumber of titles published each year. In 1996, a remar-kable 101,504 titles were published in Britain(Independent, 25 February 1997, p. 11). Although thereare countries which publish more per head of the popu-lation and many countries which print more copies,none publishes as many titles. Many of these books areexported, or are themselves part of a globalised trade inwhich books may be typeset in one country, printed inanother and sold in a third.

It is difficult to decide the relative cultural influenceof huge numbers of copies of few titles available on theone hand, against many titles printed in short runs onthe other. However, the statistics show the enormousamount of intellectual property being produced in theEnglish language in an era where intellectual property isbecoming increasingly valuable.

English in the 21st centuryThe position of English in the world today is thus thejoint outcome of Britain’s colonial expansion and themore recent activity of the US. Any substantial shift inthe role of the US in the world is likely to have animpact on the use and attractiveness of the Englishlanguage amongst those for whom it is not a firstlanguage. Later, we will see how the economic domi-nance of the US is expected to decline, as economies inAsia overtake it in size. The question remains whetherEnglish has become so entrenched in the world that adecline in the influence of the US would harm it. Are itscultural resources and intellectual property so extensivethat no other language can catch up? Or will otherlanguages come to rival English in their global impor-tance, pushing English aside much in the same way asLatin was abandoned as an international lingua franca300 years ago?


‘It has all happened so quickly’ – David Crystal inEnglish as a global language.

Physics 98%Chemistry 83%Biology 81%Psychology 81%Maths 78%Earth Sciences 76%Medical Science 72%Sociology 72%Philosophy 56%Forestry 55%Vet. Sciences 53%Economics 48%Sports Sciences 40%Linguistics 35%Education 27%Literature 23%History 20%Classics 17%Theology 12%Law 8%

Table 3 Disciplines inwhich German academics

claim English as theirworking language

Japanese 5.1%

Spanish 6.7%

French 7.7%

German 11.8%

Chinese 13.3%

Russian 4.7%

Portuguese 4.5%

Korean 4.4%

Italian 4.0%

Dutch 2.4%

Swedish 1.6%

Other 5.8%English 28%

Figure 2 The proportion of the world’s books annually published in each language. English is themost widely used foreign language for book publication: over 60 countries publish titles in

English. Britain publishes more titles than any other country, thus generating more intellectualproperty in the language than the US. Some UK publishers, however, adopt US English house-

styles and this, together with the fact that print runs in North America are typically muchlonger than in the UK, ensures that books published in US English receive a wider circulationthan those in British English. In the 21st century there is likely to be considerable growth in

English language publishing in countries where English is spoken as a second language

Three types of English speakerThere are three types of English speaker in the worldtoday, each with a different relationship with thelanguage. First-language (L1) speakers are those forwhom English is a first – and often only – language.These native speakers live, for the most part, in countriesin which the dominant culture is based around English.These countries, however, are experiencing increasinglinguistic diversity as a result of immigration. Second-language (L2) speakers have English as a second or addi-tional language, placing English in a repertoire oflanguages where each is used in different contexts.Speakers here might use a local form of English, but mayalso be fluent in international varieties. The third groupof English speakers are the growing number of peoplelearning English as a foreign language (EFL).

Leith (1996) argues that the first two kinds of English-speaking community result from different colonialprocesses. He identifies three kinds:

In the first type, exemplified by America and Australia,substantial settlement by first-language speakers of Englishdisplaced the precolonial population. In the second, typifiedby Nigeria, sparser colonial settlements maintained theprecolonial population in subjection and allowed a propor-tion of them access to learning English as a second, or addi-tional, language. There is yet a third type, exemplified bythe Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica. Here aprecolonial population was replaced by a new labour fromelsewhere, principally West Africa. ... The long-term effectof the slave trade on the development of the Englishlanguage is immense. It gave rise not only to black Englishin the United States and the Caribbean, which has been animportant influence on the speech of young English spea-kers worldwide, but it also provided the extraordinarycontext of language contact which led to the formation ofEnglish pidgins and creoles. (Leith, 1996, pp. 181–2, 206)

Each colonial process had different linguistic conse-quences. The first type created a diaspora of native spea-kers of English (US, Canada, South Africa, Australia,New Zealand), with each settlement eventually establis-hing its own national variety of English. The second(India, West Africa, East Africa) made English an elitesecond language, frequently required for further educat-ion and government jobs.

The linguistic consequences of the third type werecomplex, including the creation of new hybrid varieties

of English called creoles. Creoles have as their origin apidgin – a reduced form of communication usedbetween speakers of mutually unintelligible languages –which becomes extended in vocabulary and grammar asa result of being used as a mother tongue. Classificationof creole speakers is problematic. From a linguistic view,there is merit in regarding creoles as distinct languages.From a sociolinguistic view, it may be better to regardcreole speakers as belonging to the English-speakingcommunity, because of the emergence in several count-ries of a ‘post-creole continuum’: a range of languagevarieties from standard English to fully fledged creole.

Dividing English speakers into three groups is a time-honoured approach to language use and, though notwithout its problems, is a useful starting point for under-standing the pattern of English worldwide. These threegroups have become widely known (after Kachru, 1985)as the ‘inner circle’, the ‘outer circle’ and the ‘expandingcircle’ (Figure 3). One of the drawbacks of this termino-logy is the way it locates the ‘native speakers’ and native-speaking countries at the centre of the global use ofEnglish and, by implication, the source of models ofcorrectness, the best teachers and English-languagegoods and services consumed by those in the periphery.

This model, however, will not be the most useful fordescribing English usage in the next century. Those whospeak English alongside other languages will outnumberfirst-language speakers and, increasingly, will decide theglobal future of the language. For that reason we retainhere the terminology of ‘first-language speaker’ (L1),‘second-language speaker’ (L2) and ‘speaker of Englishas a foreign language’ (EFL). Figure 4 provides an alter-native way of visualising these three communities.

Who speaks English?


There are three kinds of English speaker: those who speak it as a firstlanguage, those for whom it is a second or additional language and thosewho learn it as a foreign language. Native speakers may feel the language‘belongs’ to them, but it will be those who speak English as a second orforeign language who will determine its world future.

INNER

OUTER

EXPANDING

320-380

150-300

100-1000

Figure 3 The three circles ofEnglish according to Kachru

(1985) with estimates ofspeaker numbers in millionsaccording to Crystal (1997)

375 million L1 speakers

750 million EFL speakers

Possible languageshift

Possible languageshift

375 million L2 speakers

Antigua and Barbuda 61Australia 15,316Bahamas 250Barbados 265Belize* 135Bermuda 60Brunei* 10Canada 19,700Cayman Is 29Gibraltar* 25Grenada 101

Guam* 56Guyana 700Hong Kong* 125India* 320Irish Republic 3,334Jamaica 2,400Liberia* 60Malaysia* 375Montserrat 11Namibia* 13New Zealand 3,396

Papua New Guinea* 120Philippines* 15Puerto Rico* 110Sierra Leone* 450St Kitts and Nevis 39St Lucia 29St Vincent and Grenadines 111Singapore* 300South Africa* 3,600Sri Lanka* 10Suriname 258

Trinidad and Tobago 1,200UK (England, Scotland, N. Ireland, Wales*) 56,990UK Islands

(Channel*, Man) 217US* 226,710Virgin Is (British) 17Virgin Is (US) 79Zambia* 50Zimbabwe* 250

Figure 4 Showing the three circles of English as overlappingmakes it easier to see how the ‘centre of gravity’ will shift

towards L2 speakers at the start of the 21st century

Table 4 Native speakers ofEnglish (in thousands)incorporating estimates byCrystal (1997)

(*indicates territories inwhich English is used as anL1, but where there isgreater L2 use or significantuse of another language)

Using a tripartite division as a starting point for analysis,we can find English spoken as a first language in over 30territories (Table 4). Crystal (1997) calculates that world-wide there are a little over 377 million speakers ofEnglish as a first language, including creole. It is a figurein line with other recent estimates and the figures gene-rated by the engco model (Table 1, p. 8, see also p. 64).

The second-language areasIn the 19th century, it was common to refer to English as‘the language of administration’ for one-third of theworld’s population. It is interesting to compare thisfigure with Crystal’s present-day estimate (1997) that theaggregated population of all countries in which Englishhas any special status (the total number of people‘exposed to English’), represents around one-third of theworld’s population. It is not surprising that the figuresare similar, since the more populous of the 75 or socountries in which English has special status (Table 5)are former colonies of Britain.

Competence in English among second-languagespeakers, like that in EFL speakers, varies from native-like fluency to extremely poor, but whereas in EFL areasEnglish is used primarily for communication with spea-kers from other countries, in an L2 area English is usedfor internal (intranational) communication.

Areas in which English is used extensively as a secondlanguage usually develop a distinct variety of Englishwhich reflects other languages used alongside English.Parts of the world where such varieties (‘New Englishes’)have emerged are the former colonial territories inSouth Asia, South-east Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.Although these local forms of English have their ownvitality and dynamic of change, there is often an under-lying model of correctness to which formal usage orients,reflecting the variety of English used by the former colo-nial power. In the majority of countries this is British(Figure 5), with some exceptions such as the Philippinesand Liberia, which orient to US English.

The foreign-language areasThe number of people learning English has in recentyears risen rapidly. This, in part, reflects changes inpublic policy, such as lowering the age at which Englishis taught in schools. Like L2, the EFL category spans awide range of competence, from barely functional inbasic communication to near native fluency. The maindistinction between a fluent EFL speaker and an L2speaker depends on whether English is used within thespeaker’s community (country, family) and thus forms

part of the speaker’s identity repertoire. In the EFLworld there is, by definition, no local model of English,though speakers’ English accents and patterns of errormay reflect characteristics of their first language.

Language shiftIn many parts of the world there are ongoing shifts inthe status of English. These are largely undocumentedand unquantified, but will represent a significant factorin the global future of the language. In those countrieslisted in Table 6, the use of English for intranationalcommunication is greatly increasing (such as in profes-sional discourse or higher education). These countriescan be regarded as in the process of shifting towards L2status. In existing L2 areas, a slight increase in theproportion of the population speaking English (forexample, in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and thePhilippines), would significantly increase the global totalof secondlanguage speakers.

In many L2 areas, there is a trend for professionaland middle classes who are bilingual in English (arapidly growing social group in developing countries) toadopt English as the language of the home. English isthus acquiring new first-language speakers outside thetraditional ‘native-speaking’ countries. Yet the numberof new second-language speakers probably greatly offsetsthe children in L2 families who grow up as first-languagespeakers – a trend shown graphically in Figure 4.


Those who speak English alongside other languages willoutnumber first-language speakers and, increasingly, will

decide the global future of the language.

American English British English

W. AfricaE. Africa

AnglophoneS. Africa

AUSTRALASIA

New ZealandAustralia

PNGS.E. Asia

S. AsiaCaribbean

U.S.

Canada British Isles

Philippines (US)

Fiji

Am. Samoa

Figure 5 The branches of world English

The first-language countries

ArgentinaBelgiumCosta RicaDenmarkEthiopiaHondurasLebanonMyanmar (Burma)NepalNetherlandsNicaraguaNorwayPanamaSomaliaSudanSurinamSwedenSwitzerland United Arab Emirates

Table 6 Countries intransition from EFL to L2

status

Table 5 (below)Second-language speakers of

English (in thousands)(*indicates a larger number

of L1 English speakers)

Australia* 2,084Bahamas* 25Bangladesh 3,100Belize* 30Bhutan 60Botswana 620Brunei 104Cameroon 6,600Canada* 6,000Cook Is 2Dominica 12Fiji 160Gambia 33Ghana 1,153Guam 92Guyana* 30

Hong Kong 1,860India 37,000Irish Republic* 190Jamaica* 50Kenya 2,576Kiribati 20Lesotho 488Liberia 2,000Malawi 517Malaysia 5,984Malta 86Marshall Is 28Mauritius 167Micronesia 15Namibia 300Nauru 9,400

Nepal 5,927New Zealand* 150Nigeria 43,000Northern Marianas 50Pakistan 16,000Palau 16,300Papua New Guinea 28,000Philippines 36,400Puerto Rico 1,746Rwanda 24St Lucia* 22Samoa (American) 56Samoa (Western) 86Seychelles 11Sierra Leone 3,830Singapore 1,046

Solomon Is 135South Africa 10,000Sri Lanka 1,850Surinam 150Swaziland 40Tanzania 3,000Tonga 30Tuvulu 600Uganda 2,000UK* 1,100US* 30,000US Virgin Is* 10Vanuatu 160Zambia 1,000Zimbabwe 3,300

English and other languagesA large number of native speakers is probably a pre-requisite for a language of wider communication, forthese speakers create a range of cultural resources (worksof literature, films, news broadcasts) and pedagogicmaterials (grammars, dictionaries, classroom materials)and provide opportunities for engaging in interactionswhich require knowledge of the language.

But a full understanding of the role of English in aworld where the majority of its speakers are notfirst-language speakers requires an understanding of howEnglish relates to the other languages which are usedalongside it. The European concept of bilingualismreflects an idea that each language has a natural geog-raphical ‘home’ and that a bilingual speaker is thereforesomeone who can converse with monolingual speakersfrom more than one country. The ideal bilingual speakeris thus imagined to be someone who is like a monolin-gual in two languages at once. But many of the world’sbilingual or multilingual speakers interact with othermultilinguals and use each of their languages for diffe-rent purposes: English is not used simply as a ‘default’language because it is the only language shared withanother speaker; it is often used because it is culturallyregarded as the appropriate language for a particularcommunicative context.

Languages in multilingual areas are often hierarchi-cally ordered in status. To the extent that such relations-hips are institutionalised, the hierarchy can be thought ofas applying to countries as much as to the repertoire ofindividual speakers. Shown schematically in Figure 6 is alanguage hierarchy for India, a complex multilingualarea where nearly 200 languages exist with differingstatus. At the pyramid base are languages used withinthe family and for interactions with close friends. Suchlanguages tend to be geographically based (or used bymigrant communities) and are the first languages learnedby children. Higher up the pyramid are languages whichare found in more formal and public domains and which

have greater territorial ‘reach’. For example, in thesecond layer from the base will be languages which inIndia form the medium of primary education, newspa-pers, radio broadcasts and local commerce. Above thesein the hierarchy will be languages used in official admini-stration, secondary education and so on to the highestlevel, in which will be found the languages of wider andinternational communication. The taper of the pyramidreflects the fact that fewer language varieties occupy thisposition: greatest linguistic diversity is found at the baseamongst vernacular languages. Indeed, very few of theworld’s languages are used for official administration andin other public forums.

Not all speakers will be fluent in language varieties atthe higher levels. The normal pattern of acquisition willbegin with those languages at the base. Many of theworld’s population never require the use of varieties atthe uppermost layer because they never find themselvesin the communicative position which requires suchlanguage. For example, an Indian from the state ofKerala whose mother tongue is a tribal language mayalso speak Tulu (2 million speakers) and the statelanguage Malayalam (33 million), or the neighbouringstate language of Kannada (44 million). If they know anyHindi or English, it is likely to be their fourth or fifthlanguage. However, more and more people in the worldwill learn languages in the uppermost layer as a result ofimproved education and changing patterns of communi-cation in the world.

Although a simple pyramid figure captures somet-hing of the hierarchical relationship between languagevarieties, it perhaps suggests too neat a pattern oflanguage use. For the majority of the world’s population,a particular language will exist at more than one level(for example, serve as a public language as well as alanguage in the family), though where a language servesdifferent communicative functions in this way it usuallyalso takes a variety of forms. For example, the classicsociolinguistic pyramid used to describe British English(Trudgill, 1974, p. 41) shows a similarly layered structurein which vernacular, informal varieties, often with stronggeographical basis, exist at the lowest layer, whilst at theapex is a standard form of English, showing little regio-nal variation and used for public and formal communi-cation. All speakers can be expected to modify theirlanguage to suit the communicative situation; even amonolingual English speaker will adapt accent, vocabu-lary, grammar and rhetorical form to suit the context.

English and code-switchingWhere English has a place alongside other languages ina local language hierarchy, speakers will normally usetheir first language in different contexts from those inwhich they use English. Whereas the first language maybe a sign of solidarity or intimacy, English, in manybilingual situations, carries overtones of social distance,formality or officialdom. Where two speakers know bothlanguages, they may switch between the two as part of anegotiation of their relationship. Indeed, they mayswitch between languages within a single sentence. Inthe following example a young job seeker comes into themanager’s office in a Nairobi business. The young manbegins in English, but the manager insists on usingSwahili, ‘thus denying the young man’s negotiation ofthe higher status associated with English’ (Myers-Scotton, 1989, p. 339). Bilingual speakers use code-switching as a communicative resource, varying the mix

Language hierarchies


Languages are not equal in political or social status, particularly inmultilingual contexts. How does English relate to other languages in amultilingual speaker’s repertoire? Why does someone use English rather thana local language? What characteristic patterns are there in the use of Englishby non-native speakers?

HINDI, ENGLISH

National languages

Scheduled languages

Languages with widespread currency

Local vernacular varieties

HINDI, TELEGU, BENGALI, MARATHI, TAMIL

URDU, GUJRATI, KANNADA, MALAYALAM, ORIYA

PUNJABI, KASHMIRI, SINDHI, ASSAMESE, SANSKRIT

41 languages used for education58 taught as school subjects

87 used in media

Over 190 recognised language varieties

1,652 'mother tongues' recorded in 1961 census

Figure 6 A language hierarchy for India

of the two languages, for example, Swahili and English,in a way which only a member of the same speechcommunity can fully understand.

One of the global trends we identify later is the develop-ment of world regions composed of adjacent countrieswith strong cultural, economic and political ties. As suchregions develop, so it is likely that new regional languagehierarchies will appear. The European Union, forexample, may be in the process of becoming a singlegeolinguistic region like India (Figure 7). A survey in1995 by the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languagesreported that 42% of EU citizens could communicate inEnglish, 31% in German and 29% in French (cited inCrystal, 1997). Surveys of European satellite TV audien-ces (p. 46) confirm the widespread understanding ofEnglish – over 70% of viewers claim they can follow thenews in English and over 40% could do so in French orGerman. (Sysfret, 1997, p. 37).

It is possible to conceptualise a world hierarchy, likethat outlined for Europe or India, (Figure 8), in whichEnglish and French are at the apex, with the position ofFrench declining and English becoming more clearly theglobal lingua franca. Later, we argue that English is alsosteadily ‘colonising’ lower layers in this hierarchy formany of the world’s speakers, whereas the majority ofthe world’s languages – found at present only at the base– are likely to become extinct.

English increasingly acts as a lingua franca between non-native speakers. For example, if a German sales managerconducts business in China, English is likely to be used.Little research has been carried out on such interactions,but they are likely to have characteristic features,reflecting complex patterns of politeness and strategiesfor negotiating meaning cross-culturally. Firth (1996), forexample, analysed international telephone calls involvingtwo Danish trading companies and identified severalconversational strategies. The exchange below, betweena Dane (H) and a Syrian (B), shows one strategy whichhe termed ‘let it pass’ – where one person does notunderstand what has been said, but delays asking forelucidation in the hope that the meaning will emerge astalk progresses or else become redundant.

Experienced users of English as a foreign language mayacquire communicative skills which are different fromthose of native speakers, reflecting the more hazardouscontexts of communication in which they routinely findthemselves. However, the strategies employed by non-native speakers remains an under-researched area ofEnglish usage, despite the fact that there may already bemore people who speak English as a foreign languagethan the combined totals of those who speak it as a firstand second language.


English is not used simply as a ‘default’ language;it is often used because it is culturally regarded as

the appropriate language for a particularcommunicative context.

ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN

The big languages

National languages

Officially recognised and supported

Vernacular varieties of indigenous EU communities

DANISH, DUTCH, ENGLISH, FINNISHFRENCH, GERMAN, GREEK, IRISH

languages

ITALIAN, PORTUGUESE, SPANISH, SWEDISH

ALSATION, ASTURIAN, BASQUE, CATALAN, CORSICANFRISIAN, GALICIAN, LADIN, LUXEMBOURGISHOCCITAN, SARDINIAN, SCOTS GAELIC, WELSH

ALBANIAN, ARAGONESE, BRETON, CORNISH, FRANCO-PROVENCAL, FRIULIANKARELIAN, LALLANS, MACEDONIAN (GREECE), MANX, POLISH, ROMANY, SAMISH

CROAT, SLOVENE, SORBIAN, TURKISH, VLACH

Figure 7 A language hierarchy for the European Union

ENGLISH FRENCHThe big languages

Regional languages(*languages of the United Nations)

ARABIC, CHINESE*, ENGLISH* FRENCH*, GERMAN, RUSSIAN*

National languages Around 80 languages serve over 180 nation states

Official languages within nation states(and other ‘safe’ languages)

Around 600 languages worldwide (Krauss, 1992)(e.g. Marathi)

Local vernacular languages

The remainder of the world's 6,000+ languages

SPANISH*

Figure 8 The world language hierarchy

B: So I told him not to send the cheese after the blowingin the customs. We don’t want the order after thecheese is blowing.

H: I see, yes.

B: So I don’t know what we can do with the order now.What do you think we should do with this all blowing,Mr Hansen?

H: I’m not uh (pause). Blowing? What is this, too big orwhat?

B: No, the cheese is bad Mr Hansen. It is like fermentingin the customs’ cool rooms.

H: Ah, it’s gone off!

B: Yes, it’s gone off.

Young man: Mr Muchuki has sent me to you about thejob you put in the paper.

Manager: Ulituma barua ya application? [DID YOU SEND A

LETTER OF APPLICATION?]

Young man: Yes, I did. But he asked me to come to seeyou today.

Manager: Ikiwa ulituma barua, nenda ungojee majibu.Tutakuita ufike kwa interview siku itakapofika. [IF YOU’VE

WRITTEN A LETTER, THEN GO AND WAIT FOR A RESPONSE. WE WILL

CALL YOU FOR AN INTERVIEW WHEN THE LETTER ARRIVES]

Leo sina la suma kuliko hayo. [TODAY I HAVEN’T ANYTHING

ELSE TO SAY]

Young man: Asante. Nitangoja majibu. [THANK YOU. I WILL

WAIT FOR THE RESPONSE]

Will English become alanguage for work, like a‘coat worn at the officebut taken off at home’?

p. 42

Will the spread of Englishbe responsible for the

extinction of thousandsof lesser used languages?

p. 38

Non-native speaker interactions

Summary


Ammon, U. (1995) To what extent is German an international language? In P.Stevenson (ed) The German Language and the Real World: sociolinguistic, cultural andpragmatic perspectives on contemporary German. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Crystal, D. (1995) Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.


Eco, U. (1995) The Search for the Perfect Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Firth, A. (1996) ‘Lingua Franca’ English and conversation analysis. Journal of

Pragmatics, April.Gibbs, W.W. (1995) Lost science in the third world. Scientific American, August,

pp. 76–83.Grimes, B.F. (1996) (ed) Ethnologue: languages of the world. Dallas: Summer Institute

of Linguistics.Hagen, S. (1993) (ed) Languages in European Business: a regional survey of small and

medium-sized companies. London: CILT.Hesselberg-Møller, N. (1988) Eksport og uddannelse. Copenhagen:

Industrirådet.Kachru, B.B. (1985) Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the

English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson (eds)English in the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krauss, M. (1992) The world’s languages in crisis. Language, vol. 68, no. 1, pp.7–9

Large, A. (1985) The Artificial Language Movement. Oxford: Blackwell.Leith, D. (1996) English – colonial to postcolonial. In D. Graddol, D. Leith and

J. Swann (eds) English: history, diversity and change. London: Routledge.

McArthur, T. (1992) (ed) The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

McArthur, T. (1996) English in the world and in Europe. In R. Hartmann (ed)The English Language in Europe. Oxford: Intellect.

Myers-Scotton, C. (1989) Code-switching with English: types of switching, typesof communities. World Englishes, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 333–46.

Skudlik, S. (1992) The status of German as a language of science and theimportance of the English language for German-speaking scientists. In U.Ammon and M. Hellinger (eds) Status Change of Languages. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Swinburne, J.K. (1983) The use of English as an international language ofscience: a study of the publications and views of a group of French scientists.The Incorporated Linguist, vol. 22, pp. 129–32.

Steiner, G. (1975) After Babel: aspects of language and translation. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Strevens, P. (1992) English as an international language. In B.B. Kachru (ed)The Other Tongue: English across cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Sysfret, T. (1997) Trend setters. Cable and Satellite Europe, January, pp. 34–7Trudgill, P. (1974) Sociolinguistics: an introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Viereck, W. (1996) English in Europe: its nativisation and use as a lingua franca,

with special reference to German-speaking countries. In R. Hartmann (ed) TheEnglish Language in Europe. Oxford: Intellect.

Webster, N. (1789) An essay on the necessity, advantages and practicability ofreforming the mode of spelling, and of rendering the orthography of wordscorrespondent to the pronunciation. Appendix to Dissertations on the EnglishLanguage. Extracts reprinted in T. Crowley (ed) Proper English: readings inlanguage, history and cultural identity. London: Routledge.

1 The development of the languageThe English language has changed substantially in vocabularyand grammatical form – often as a result of contact with otherlanguages. This has created a hybrid language; vocabulary hasbeen borrowed from many sources and grammatical structurehas changed through contact with other languages. This maycause problems for learners, but it also means that speakers ofmany other languages can recognise features which are not toodissimilar to characteristics of their own language. Although thestructural properties of English have not hindered the spread ofEnglish, the spread of the language globally cannot beattributed to intrinsic linguistic qualities.

2 The spread of EnglishThere have been two main historical mechanisms for the spreadof English. First was the colonial expansion of Britain whichresulted in settlements of English speakers in many parts of theworld. This has provided a diasporic base for the language –which is probably a key factor in the adoption of a language as alingua franca. In the 20th century, the role of the US has beenmore important than that of Britain and has helped ensure thatthe language is not only at the forefront of scientific andtechnical knowledge, but also leads consumer culture.

3 English and other languagesThe majority of speakers of English already speak more thanone language. An important community for the futuredevelopment of English in the world is the ‘outer circle’ of thosewho speak it as a second language. English often plays a specialrole in their lives and the fate of English in the world is likely tobe closely connected to how this role develops in future. English,for example, is becoming used by many EFL and L2 speakersfor a wider range of communicative functions. This process, bywhich English ‘colonises’ the lower layers of the languagehierarchy in many countries, means that English may take oversome of the functions currently served by other languages in theconstruction of social identity and the creation and maintenanceof social relationships.

4 A single, European, linguistic areaWestern Europe is beginning to form a single multilingual area,rather like India, where languages are hierarchically related instatus. As in India, there may be many who are monolingual ina regional language, but those who speak one of the ‘big’languages will have better access to material success. Otherworld regions may develop in a similar way. This book focusesparticularly on emergent trends in Asia, but significantdevelopments are likely to occur also in the Americas, in Russiaand in sub-Saharan Africa.

References

Forecasting


2● Futurology

Futurology is one of the oldest of professions, judged with scepticismand awe in equal measure. Although facts and figures are an impor-tant ingredient in forecasting, they need to be interpreted with care.On these pages we outline some basic features of language changeand describe common problems with using statistics.

● Making sense of trends One of the key skills in forecasting is being able to recognise an un-derlying trend and to understand how it might develop in the future.Linguistic and social change rarely happen at a steady and predictablerate. Here we discuss various hazards associated with the interpre-tation of trend data using examples relevant to the English language.

● Predictability or chaos?The use of English worldwide can be regarded as a ‘complex system’in which many factors interact in ways that are not easily predictable.But recent advances in modelling the behaviour of complex systems– such as the weather – could help us understand what patterns mayemerge in the global use of English.

● Scenario planningHow do forecasters in large companies cope with the uncertaintythat the future holds? Can the methods they employ be applied tomatters of culture and language as easily as to the price of oil?Scenario building is one methodology used by strategists to put to-gether known facts with imaginative ideas about the future.

History is littered with failures of prediction and thereis no reason to believe that attempts to predictprecisely what will happen to the English language willfare any better.

It is, however, possible to understand something ofthe ways in which languages evolve and howindividual speakers adapt their patterns of languageuse. This gives us some useful indicators as to theconditions under which change occurs, which kinds ofchange are likely and which unlikely, the reasons whylinguistic change happen and the timescales thatdifferent kinds of change require.

But many factors affecting the use of languages cannotbe predicted easily. Major upheavals – war, civilrevolution and the breakup of nation states – cancause languages to take unexpected directions, as canthe vagaries of fashion amongst the global elite. Mostpeople have opinions, ambitions and anxieties aboutthe future, but few people know how to planstrategically for such unpredictable events.

Strategic planning is not the same as prediction. Thissection provides a guide to some of the techniquesused by strategists and planners to create‘future-proof ’ models and shows how they can beapplied to aspects of language change and globaltrends in the use of the English language.

The section begins with the hazards of extrapolatingfrom current data, examines what insights chaostheory – used for weather forecasting – has providedinto the behaviour of complex systems and ends witha discussion of the scenario-building techniques usedby transnational companies to ensure their strategicdecisions on investment and management stay robustagainst a range of possible futures.

Trend spottingFuturologists inhabit a frontierland between historicalfacts and guesses about the future. Most of the practicaltechniques of strategic planning used by large corporat-ions employ some kind of mix of empirical evidencetogether with the insight and judgement borne of practi-cal experience. But getting the mix right is an extremelydifficult task. Identifying trends even in the present canbe remarkably problematic. And although statisticalinformation is a primary resource for the futurologist,anyone trying to forecast the future of English willencounter problems in locating and using statistics asso-ciated with relevant worldwide trend data (opposite).

English in the future, as in the past, will be subject tothree types of change. First, although different speakers,communities or communicative domains may be affec-ted differently, there will be changes to the language itself.Certainly in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar,but also in the range of text types and genres whichemploy English. Second, there will be changes in status.English may acquire a different meaning and pattern ofusage among non-native speakers, or be used for a widerrange of social functions. Third, English will be affectedby quantitative changes, such as numbers of speakers, theproportion of the world’s scientific journals published inEnglish, or the extent to which the English language isused for computer-based communication.

Listed here are some broad principles of languagechange. Identifying ways in which various changes aretaken up and spread from one community to anothermay suggest areas where we need to seek further infor-mation. While the dynamics of language change arelikely to be different within the three communities ofEnglish speaker we have already identified –first-language speaker (L1), second-language speaker (L2)and the speaker of English as a foreign language (EFL) –some general patterns can be observed.

How does language change?● Some kinds of change occur quickly, others slowly. Fashions

in slang usage among native speakers, or the borro-wing of words into another language, can develop inmonths, not years. But the shift which occurs when acommunity or family abandons one language andbegins to use another as a first language is usuallyintergenerational. Language shift often needs threegenerations to take full effect, which means that theremay be initial signs now of long-term changes whichmight take the greater part of another 100 years tofully complete.

● Individuals act as agents of change as do governments andinstitutions. Successful learning of English is known tobe closely associated with personal ambition andattributes such as personality type. But languagechange may also be imposed from outside or it mayresult from a rational response to a change in circum-

stances. A government policy decision, for example,might change the status of English as the first foreignlanguage taught in schools, or may encourageEnglish as a medium of university education. Ormarket liberalisation might result in the establishmentof joint-venture companies, paying high salaries butrequiring English-language skills in their workforce.

● Innovation in language tends to diffuse through social networks.It has often been observed that people who interacttogether on a regular basis, who have common loyal-ties and identity and who like each other, tend to uselanguage in similar ways. Any change in the patternsof communication or in the structure of social relat-ionships in such networks is likely to lead to a changein language use. The creation of new forms of socialnetwork or new patterns of social affiliation can alsobe expected to alter the way that speech communitiesare created and maintained. New communicationstechnology, such as the Internet for example, may beencouraging the formation of new kinds of socialaffiliation and new ‘discourse communities’.

● Language change does not move across geographical territories ina linear fashion. Linguistic innovations, such as newpronunciations, tend to jump from one urban area toanother, across rural areas and across nationalborders. In this respect they are similar to otherchanges brought about by social contact throughurban settings – such as fashions in clothing, or theadoption of some new kind of consumer hardware.The growth of large cities in Asia will lead to manykinds of social change, including new patterns oflanguage use.

● Young people are important leaders of change. There haslong been recognised a so-called ‘critical period’ inearly life when children seem able to learn languageseasily. But adolescence is perhaps an even moreimportant stage, where young people make the tran-sition to a social life which is largely directed bythemselves, when they acquire new social networksand identities and feel the requirement for appropri-ate language styles. They may take aspects of theseidentities through to adulthood; others may be transi-tional teenage phenomena. An understanding ofwhich languages the next generation of teenagers willbe speaking and learning is an important step inidentifying future trends.

● Language change may follow change in material circumstances.Language is often linked to particular social andcultural practices. Rehousing schemes, shifts inemployment and increased wealth may all contributeto rapid linguistic change. This particularly contribu-tes to ‘language loss’ – such as the disuse of Gaelic innorth-eastern Scottish fishing communities, or ofAboriginal languages in Australia, in favour ofEnglish.

● Social and geographical mobility cause language change.People moving, whether as migrant labour to anothercountry, or even within the same country (especiallyfrom rural areas to urban ones), take their languagewith them, but also learn the language used in thenew home area. The more mobile a society, the moreopen it will be to change.

Futurology


Futurology is one of the oldest of professions, judged with scepticism andawe in equal measure. Although facts and figures are an importantingredient in forecasting, they need to be interpreted with care. On thesepages we outline some basic features of language change and describecommon problems with using statistics.

What effect will thegrowth of third-worldcities have on the futuredevelopment of English?p. 27

How much of the world’swealth will Asia control in2050?p. 29

● Languages in contact with each other cause change. Languagecontact has long been recognised as a major engineof change; a historical example is that of Danish andEnglish which led to a major shift in the vocabularyand grammar of English. The increasing use ofEnglish in many parts of the world affects both locallanguages and English and is giving rise to new,hybrid language varieties.

● Changes often occur first in informal and casual language.Since the majority of such language is spoken, changeis rarely documented in the early stages. For similarreasons, language change occurs quickest amongfirst- and second-language users, rather than amongspeakers of English as a foreign language.

● New technology gives rise to language change. Technologicalinnovation may give rise to new modes of communi-cation. The style of written text widely used inelectronic mail, for example, seems to share characte-ristics of spoken language. Technology may alsocreate new patterns of communication, perhaps byproviding cheap international telephone links, or itmay create new words needed to describe newobjects and social practices which arise around theiruse.

● The dynamics of L1, L2 and EFL change are very different.Change in the number of people speaking English asa first language cannot happen rapidly: change inspeaker numbers will depend mainly on demographicshifts, but populations in the English-speaking count-ries are fairly stable. The number of people usingEnglish as a second language could change moresubstantially over a generation or two. The EFLcommunity is potentially the most volatile: majorshifts in the number of people learning Englisharound the world could occur quickly – within adecade – as a result of changing public policy indeveloping countries or a change in public interest.

It will be clear that the key ‘drivers’ of linguisticchange are both social and material in nature. Economicdevelopments, technological innovations, new socialnetworks or demographic shifts are all likely to give riseto language change. We can also see that some kinds ofchange extend over longer periods of time than others:language shift may take 50–100 years, while a significantchange in the number of people learning English as aforeign language can occur within a few years. Certainage groups also play a more important role in instigatingand advancing change than others. The complex inter-action between these factors means that it is perfectlypossible that there will be widespread shifts in the waylanguages are used in the future.


Establishing and understanding the links betweenthose things which can and have been measured and

the use of the English language worldwide, is amatter of theory building and testing.

1 Statistics rarely provide equivalent dataacross the countries, sectors and yearssurveyed. Often, like is not comparedwith like, or key data is missing fromtables.

2 Statistical data is collected primarily bynational or international agencies. Thismeans that particular information, forexample about flows within transnationalcorporations (TNCs), either is not collec-ted or is not publicly available.

3 Statistics take time to collect, collate andpublish. There is typically a lead time ofabout three years for the publication ofprimary UN statistics. There is a furtherlead time for studies which analyse andinterpret such figures. Thus books andscholarly papers published at the end ofthe 1990s draw on statistics from thebeginning of the decade – by the timedecision makers read them the figures area decade out of date. Unfortunately, manykey developments affecting the use ofEnglish have emerged in the last few years.Take, for example, the growth of theInternet, which seemed to reach a criticalmass outside the US only during 1996.Somehow, futurology needs to be infor-med by an understanding of recent trends,as well as by data collected within a longertimeframe; it needs to be able to identifynew trends in the early stages.

4 Statistics are costly and futurologists tendto be under-funded. Elsewhere in this

book we document a global shift towardsthe information society: the world is infor-mation rich, but information has become atraded commodity. The World Wide Web,for example, provides a wonderful mecha-nism for disseminating the most recent dataand all the key international agenciespossess their own Web sites. But informat-ion is now too valuable to give out for freeand, increasingly, such agencies are expec-ted to be self-financing if not profit centres:hence the most useful and recent data issold at market rates. A single report on thedemographics of the Internet might sell for$1,500. Since futurology is an eclectic disci-pline, drawing together information fromscattered sources across many sectors, thecost of access to a range of databases canexceed the value of the information gained.Furthermore, those institutions whichemploy futurology typically do so in orderto help develop policy before major fundingis committed.

5 Very little comparative data exists for theimmediate sphere of our enquiry, the inter-national use of English. Who truly knowshow many people are learning Englisharound the world? How could we reachagreement on a method of estimating theproficiency of the millions of casual lear-ners? How can we gather sensible figures ofEnglish as a second language in countrieswhere the gathering of statistical informat-ion is difficult? How can we apply systematiccriteria when patterns of English use are so

divergent in a huge variety of contexts?The lack of comparative data means thatfuturologists have to make their own facts:to put together what is known in an inno-vative manner and make informed estima-tes.

6 Interpretation of statistics needs qualita-tive work. There is a tendency to countthat which can be easily counted, but asPeter Schwartz commented in a classicbook on strategic planning, ‘we know thenumbers, we just don’t know theirmeaning’ (Schwartz, 1996, p. 118).Establishing and understanding the linksbetween those things which can and havebeen measured and the use of the Englishlanguage worldwide, is therefore a matterof qualitative work, theory building andtesting. It may be necessary to carry outsmall-scale studies, such as ethnographicstudies of employee behaviour, languageaudits or focus-group studies of youngpeople. In this way we might betterunderstand the link, for example, betweenthe start-up of joint-venture companies indeveloping economies and the demandfor English, or the relationship betweennumbers of Internet users in a country andthe use of local languages in electroniccommunities. A great deal of data thenbecomes usable because we can under-stand the potential implications of thestatistics for the everyday use of English.

Problems with statistics

Simple projectionsThe rise of global English was foreseen in the 19thcentury by many commentators in America and Europe.Indeed, wild speculations began to circulate about thegrowth of the number of English speakers in the comingcentury, based on projections of current trends. Bailey(1992) reviews some of these accounts:

The most extravagant projections were the most satisfyingto the anglophone community and, therefore, the mostpopular. The Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle(1806–93) turned his attention to the question in the early1870s. ...

‘Now, judging by the increase which has taken place in thepresent century, we may estimate the probable growth ofpopulation as follows:

‘In England it doubles in fifty years; therefore in acentury (in 1970) it will be 124,000,000. In the UnitedStates, in Canada, in Australia, it doubles in twenty-five;therefore it will be 736,000,000. Probable total of theEnglish speaking race in 1970, 860,000,000.’

(Bailey, 1992, p. 111)

As each speculation quickly became ‘fact’, ever largerfigures appeared, until projections of English speakersfor the year 2000 exceeded a billion. The reality (Table4, p. 10) is that there are only about 375 million nativespeakers of English. Clearly, the 19th century futurolo-gists were not only misguided in their projections ofnative speakers, they also failed to foresee that thegrowth in second- and foreign-language speakers wouldbe a much more important phenomenon.

When assessing what will happen next, we oftenassume that what is happening now will simply continue.Thus the 19th century commentators imagined thatgrowth in the number of native speakers would follow astraight-line progression. But most social changes do not

have a linear pattern. Rather, a change begins slowly,gathers speed and then slows down. If you graphed sucha change against time, you would get an S-shaped curve.Such a curve can represent changes within a language,say of pronunciation, as well as larger scale changes suchas language shift.

As an example of change within a language,Chambers and Trudgill (1980) show how in the north ofEngland many speakers still pronounce words like ‘must’and ‘butter’ with a [U] sound, not dissimilar to the gene-ral pronunciation in Shakespeare’s day. Gradually, suchspeakers are adopting the RP pronunciation [^]. Not allwords are immediately affected, however. The changediffuses through the vocabulary, following an S-curvepattern. Figure 9 shows the way a new pronunciationmoves through the English vocabulary, picking up speedas the majority of words become pronounced in the newway and then slowing down when only a few, apparentlymore resistant words remain.

The S-curve applies as much to grammatical changeas to change in pronunciation. For example, Englishprogressive verb forms – such as I am coming as opposedto I come – began to develop slowly in Old English,gathered speed in Shakespeare’s time and are now thenorm. Although this change in usage is levelling off, thetrend is still gradually extending to other kinds of verb.Aitchison notes that mental-process verbs such as ‘know’and ‘want’ are also beginning to be used in the progres-sive form, as in utterances such as ‘we’re certainlyhoping they’ll be wanting to do it again’ (Aitchison, 1991,p. 100). This example demonstrates how difficult it issometimes to recognise that a trend is still in progresswhen it is in the slow sections of the curve.

Recognising trendsBy the time we notice a change is in progress, it isusually in its middle segment – the period of most rapidchange. Then it is easy to assume that the trend willcontinue indefinitely at the same rate. But the S-curvemodel suggests the assumption may be mistaken, for arapid change may shortly slow up. Some changes have anatural end point – when everyone who can change hasdone so, when market penetration approaches 100%and so on. But the end point in many cases is less certainand dependent on a complex interaction of factors. Forexample, an increase in numbers of children learning

Making sense of trends


One of the key skills in forecasting is being able to recognise an underlyingtrend and to understand how it might develop in the future. Linguistic andsocial change rarely happen at a steady and predictable rate. Here wediscuss various hazards associated with the interpretation of trend datausing examples relevant to the English language.

Time

Perc

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Figure 9 Lexical diffusion of a sound change Figure 10 Singular verbs used with collective noun subjects ineditorials in The Times

English at school is limited ultimately by the size of theglobal school population. But in practice the limits arelower; many countries lack qualified teachers or otherresources to make the teaching of English in primaryschools effective. However, if new methods of languageteaching were developed, or if there were a shift inpublic-sector resources, then the end point would moveand a new S-shaped trajectory become established.

A futurologist ideally wishes to identify changes at thebeginning, but because so many changes start slowly, it isdifficult to know whether we are at the beginning of anS-curve or just experiencing an insignificant, temporary‘blip’. It also means that if one is looking for evidence ofa particular change (such as ‘the economy is picking up’,or ‘house prices are rising again’) then there will be atendency to ‘recognise’ the start of the trend prematu-rely, whenever a temporary movement occurs in theexpected direction. But the start of unexpected changesare likely to go unnoticed.

Long-term trends are rarely as consistent as Figure 9suggests: a smooth progression uninterrupted by theinterfering variables of real life. Figure 10 shows a 20thcentury change in the use of singular verbs where thesubject is a collective noun. Many writers in standardEnglish are in doubt as to whether they should writesentences such as ‘The team was in good form’ or ‘Theteam were in good form’. A study reported by Bauer(1994, p. 63) shows that writers of editorials in The Timeshave been inconsistent. If you had started collecting datain 1945, you would probably have assumed that theongoing trend would continue – in this case towardsplural verbs with subjects such as ‘government’, or‘team’. If you collected data over a longer period youwould have found an underlying increase in the use ofsingular verbs with collective noun subjects. The manyfluctuations which move in the opposite direction werecaused, no doubt, by the fact that different writers wereresponsible for the texts studied. Such ‘noisy’ data iscommon: it means that trend data needs to be collectedover a longer period of time and then averaged. Thisshould alert the cautious futurologist to the fact that localperturbations may disguise a general trend.

When several trends interactAs we can see, there are two common reasons for mista-ken forecasting: first, extrapolating in a linear fashion

from trend data gathered during the period of mostrapid change; second, failing to recognise an underlyingtrend because of local or temporary variation. A thirdcommon error arises when it is assumed that the trendwhich is currently most visible will remain the dominantfactor in the future.

Figure 11 shows schematically the growth in Internetusage in the US and elsewhere in the world. What startsas the uppermost curve shows users in the US, where theInternet started and where growth during the 1990s wasquickest. But the second, underlying curve shows thelikely growth elsewhere in the world, particularly inEurope and Asia. If we examine the data in 1997, at firstsight it appears that Internet usage is much higher in theUS and that growth here is quickest. By implication,English would appear to be the most dominant languageof the Internet. But the first trend will not continue to bethe main determinant. Internet usage began later inEurope and elsewhere in the world and is now rapidlygathering pace. By the year 2000, it is likely that users inthe US will be outnumbered by users elsewhere. InEurope, Germany is expected to be the largest Internetuser. In other words, the proportion of the globalInternet population based in the US is expected to incre-ase during 1997, but then begin to fall.

Cyclical patternsSometimes, trends change direction in a cyclical butpredictable way. For example, many thousands of youngpeople visit Britain each year to enrol on Englishlanguage courses – a demand that rises over summer.Seasonal cycles like this must be taken into accountwhen assessing underlying trends (Figure 12). It may bethat other factors with cyclical patterns also vary trenddata – the regular upturns and downturns in the econ-omy of any country known as the ‘business cycle’.During a recession, there will be fewer jobs in the touristindustry or less opportunity for the kind of casual jobthat language students often require to support them-selves whilst taking courses.

Identifying trends is therefore of great help to plan-ners and strategists, but generally they need to be inter-preted with awareness and caution. The use of historicaltrend data may be most helpful when combined withother approaches, which we examine next.


19th century futurologists failed to foresee that thegrowth in second- and foreign-language speakerswould be a much more important phenomenon.

0

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Jan Aug Jan Aug Jan Aug

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Figure 12 Cyclical patterns in student enrolments on Englishlanguage courses in Britain

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Figure 11 Projected increase in Internet users

How much of the globaleconomy will be basedon ‘language-intensive’

service culture by 2050?p. 35

How will the falling costof transatlantic calls affect

language use?p. 31

Using forecasting modelsHow do we assess such complex trends as are involved inthe study, use and evolution of English worldwide? Thetraditional approach to forecasting requires allsignificant factors to be identified. A mathematicalmodel is then constructed which shows how theseinfluence each other and produce the behaviour which isof interest. Future demand for electric power, forexample, is usually forecast in this way (below).

Such methods might be applied to forecasting thedemand for English which is, after all, a little like electri-city consumption in the way that demand is related to avariety of economic and cultural factors. Each ‘driver’ ofEnglish would be identified, the reasons why it led todemand for English understood and its own future beha-viour modelled. Indeed, such forecasting techniques –based on demographic models which predict how manychildren will be living where – are used by governmentsto anticipate the future need for teachers.

We draw on two forecasting models in this book toanalyse the future of English. The first, which we refer toas the ‘Hooke model’, was devised by the Australianeconomist Gus Hooke. The model provides long-termforecasts of the global economy, including the educationand training sector. It also provides projections of thedemand for different languages in education through tothe year 2050.

The second forecasting model, the ‘engco model’ (seep. 64) has been constructed by The English Company(UK) Ltd to provide predictions of the global ‘influence’of key languages, such as English, Spanish andMandarin. Just as the electricity example requires datafrom a weather forecasting model, so the Hooke andengco models require input data from demographic andeconomic forecasts in order to predict demand forlanguages. The Hooke model takes account of environ-mental development, technical progress and technologytransfer. The engco model draws on UN demographicprojections and a model for regional language shift.

Of three linguistic communities which we identifiedearlier (first language, second language and EFL, p. 10),it is the first-language community which is most easilyforecast. Two main factors need to be considered: futurepatterns of language shift and demographic trends –including birth rate, migration and so on. Figure 14shows the projections made by the engco model foryoung speakers of Malay in order to assess the likely roleof the language in South-east Asia in the 21st century.The ‘low’ line shows projections based on UN populat-ion forecasts. The ‘high’ line includes potential languageshift during this period (both from the many smallerlanguages spoken in the region, but also from Javanese).The uppermost line shows, for comparison, the demog-raphic projections for young English speakers globally.This line does not include any allowance for languageshift which is much more difficult to estimate for Englishthan for Malay because of the number of countriesinvolved. It does, however, show how the demographiccurve for English is surprisingly ‘bumpy’, as babyboomers themselves have children.

Forecasting the use of a second language is a similar,but more complex process, more dependent on accurateforecasting of language shift.

Forecasting EFL speakersIt is, however, the EFL community which will be of mostinterest to many readers of this book. More complexforecasting models, along the lines of the electricitymodel, might be constructed to predict ELT demand incertain sectors. For example, demand for the ‘BusinessEnglish Certificate’ increased in Central China in themid 1990s. A forecasting model which took into accountthe long-term plans to make the city of Wuhan a focus ofindustrial development, based around joint-venturecompanies, might have been able to predict demand fordifferent kinds of vocationally oriented English courses.The development of such complex forecasting modelsdoes help identify the key variables and bring togetherrelevant baseline statistics, but there is reason to believethat a forecasting model is not the best approach tounderstanding future EFL demand around the world.

The limits of deterministic modelsThere is a strong argument against attempting forecastsin a sphere of life in which cultural and political factors

Predictability or chaos?


The use of English worldwide can be regarded as a ‘complex system’ inwhich many factors interact in ways that are not easily predictable. Butrecent advances in modelling the behaviour of complex systems – such asthe weather – could help us understand what patterns may emerge in theglobal use of English.

Forecasting electricity demandElectricity generating companies need to forecast demand for power,both in the short and long term. The pattern of power consumption isan uneven one, but it contains many cyclical patterns such as a dailycycle (night/day), a weekly cycle (weekend/weekday) and an annual

cycle (winter/summer) (below left). Superimposed on these may be along-term trend for increased consumption, reflecting new housing orindustrial development, or short-term fluctuations – for example, whenin Britain there is a rush to switch on an electric kettle during an adver-tising break in a popular TV programme. A forecasting model wouldthus need to take into account a huge number of variables related tothe physical environment, the economic cycle, cultural and demograp-hic factors. Separate forecasting models are then required to providethe data in each area known to affect demand for power: weatherforecasts would indicate temperature trends, TV schedules would indi-cate when the advertising breaks were due and so on. The complexityof the operation – not to say the hazards in using data which are alre-ady the output from another, possibly inaccurate, model – can beappreciated. And, having built the model, it might apply only to condi-tions in one region. In Britain, for example, high temperatures decreaseconsumption of electricity: there is no need for heating. In Saudi Arabiahigh temperatures lead to an increase: people switch on the air condi-tioning.

1,000

1,500

2,000

2,500

1 6 11 16 21 26 31 36 41 46 51 56

MW

H (

thou

sand

s)

Months

Figure 13 Monthly electricity consumption in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia 1986–90 (after Al-Zayer and Al-Ibrahim, 1996)

Forecasting L1 and L2 speakers

are so salient. A forecasting model suggests that patternsof English language usage will be determined by econo-mic and technological developments which can bemeasured and reduced to numbers. But of course,English is used by people and institutions and is partlyregulated by governments. Real-life decisions are takenfor a variety of reasons. They are driven not simply byinstrumental motives such as economic improvement,but also by less tangible, cultural and political processes,such as those connected with the construction of perso-nal and national identities.

Predictability would rely, at the very least, on indivi-duals and institutions behaving in ‘rational’ ways tochanged material circumstances and continuing to expe-rience the same needs and motives and seeking the samegoals. This cannot be relied upon in the 21st century.

The ‘rationality’ of the rush to English for economicreasons is also far from uncontested: a variety of culturaland political movements exist around the world promo-ting views which are directly or indirectly ‘anti-English’;other regional languages may gain in political impor-tance to national governments as patterns of trade andpolitical alliances change; there is widely believed to be achanging attitude in the world’s public towards decisionsbased on concerns with quality of life rather than simplefinancial benefit. It may be that, in the longer term, analternative logic will guide people’s responses to econo-mic and technological change. We explore this idea atthe end of the book.

A world in chaosForecasting is thus best suited to mechanistic systemswhere certain ‘driving forces’, such as economic moder-nisation, are taken to have a predictable effect on a‘dependent variable’, such as the demand for English.But the ‘system’ – which interrelates language use withcultural, political, economic and technological factors –is not, as we have seen, a mechanistic one: it may displaysome of the characteristics of what has become known asa ‘complex system’.

The mathematical approach used to model suchcomplex systems is known as ‘chaos theory’. Chaostheory can help in forecasting the future of English inseveral ways. First, it provides a conceptual metaphor forthe ‘behaviour’ of English as a complex system – as theoutcome of many different effects, each of which couldbe modelled, but whose complex interactions makeprediction unreliable. One of the first applications ofchaos theory was in weather forecasting and this provi-des a useful analogy for English. As Roger Bowers,addressing an English 2000 conference in Beijing (asAssistant Director-General of the British Council),suggested:

It is like one of those weather maps that we see on our tele-visions of the globe as viewed from above the earth’satmosphere – with great swathes of cloud sweeping andswirling around continents and across oceans. And here weare at the epicentre of two such systems – English spreadingacross the world on a tide of functionality, Chinese on a tideof common culture and ethnicity. (Bowers, 1996, p. 1)

Chaos theory tells us that, as in weather forecasting,it may be possible to make short-term general predictionswith some success, but predictions of precise local condi-tions or long-term forecasts are likely to go badly wrong.

But the system that spreads English usage around theworld is not entirely a ‘chaotic’ one – the situation is in

some ways worse. Just as it would be foolish to regard itas being a well-governed, mechanistic system, amenableto traditional forecasting techniques, so it would beequally foolish to imagine it is a wholly random affair. Asa recent futurological analysis of social behaviour inEurope suggests:

The complex systems and worlds which are coming underthe spotlight share the unpredictability of chaotic systems,but also demonstrate self-organisation, evolutionary innova-tion, creativity, and, as a result, far-from-equilibrium beha-viour. Such characteristics mean that complex systems – orworlds – are intrinsically uncertain and unplannable.(Elkington and Trisoglio, 1996, p. 764)

As it is difficult to predict exactly what will happenwhen a prevailing wind enters a local landscape, meets avariety of obstructions and is channelled down valleysand around buildings, so there is a similar global-localdynamic with the spread of English. There may appearto be a prevailing trend, but a country’s cultural, econo-mic, political and linguistic conditions provide a localhuman-built landscape across which winds of changemust flow. Thus there is a need for an understanding ofthe dynamics of the overall system, but also a knowledgeand understanding of local conditions.

Perhaps the most important lesson provided by thestudy of complex systems is the finding that apparentlystable states or trends can, without much warning,become unstable. An apparently unstoppable trendtowards global English usage could change direction inthe future as the consequence of some surprisingly minorevent.


An apparently unstoppable trend towards globalEnglish usage could change direction in the future as

the consequence of some surprisingly minor event.

Chaos theoryOne of the central insights of chaos theory is that complex behaviour can result fromthe interaction of simple forces. For example, the forces which act on a table-tennisball and which determine the direction of movement are relatively simple and can bemodelled. But when a number of balls are put together, so that they bounce off eachother, the result is sufficiently unpredictable as to form the basis for choosing thenumbers in the British national lottery.

Chaos theory also explains why very small influences can sometimes give rise to largeeffects. The classic but somewhat fanciful metaphor is that of a butterfly which flapsits wings in the Amazon and triggers a hurricane in the Pacific. In both cases, thebehaviour of the system is counter-intuitive: most people imagine that if we under-stand basic mechanisms we should be able to predict the overall behaviour of thesystem. We also feel a small force should have a smaller effect than a large one.Chaos theory suggests that both intuitions can be wrong.

How do forecasts forEnglish native speakers

compare with those forother world languages?

p. 26

0

20

40

60

80

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050

English

Malay (low)

Malay (high)

Num

bers

of s

peak

ers

(mill

ions

)

(globally)

Figure 14 Young nativespeakers (aged 15–24) ofEnglish and Malay, 1950–2050,from the engco model

The ‘Malay low’ line is the lowestimate for Malay, basedsimply on population change.The ‘high’ line is the higherestimate obtained by takinglikely language shift intoaccount. The line for Englishdoes not incorporate languageshift

Dealing with uncertaintyIf all cultural and linguistic trends could be linked tofactors of relatively little uncertainty, such as economicgrowth, population trends and technological innovation– areas where futures research has been conducted andforecasting models developed – then there would be littleproblem in modelling the future of English in differentparts of the world. But where there is extensive uncer-tainty, a different approach is needed – preferably, amethodology which bridges the gap between the predi-ctable and the unknown in a structured way, whichmarries empirical data such as market intelligence withintuition, experience and imagination.

The importance of processFuturology is an ancient discipline whose practitioners –star gazers, palmists, tarot-card readers, geomancers anddiviners – traditionally use some form of empirical data.It is tempting to see corporate consultants as the modernparallel, to whom large sums of money are paid to advisecompanies how to manage the future. But fortune tellersprovide a valuable lesson. Their predictions are based ontwo important mechanisms: first, predictions typicallyarise from interactions with the client who may give agreat deal of information – often unwittingly – to thefortune teller. Second, through the same process, clientsare likely to offer their own interpretations and betraytheir own fears and desires, providing the fortune tellerwith the required information.

Fortune telling offers a mechanism for clients toreflect on what they already know; to see newsignificance in details and to confront fears and desiresabout the future. After all, the client is the ‘expert’ inlocal knowledge and experience. The fortune teller actsas a facilitator who provides a structure within whichknowledge can be married with hopes and anxieties andthus lead to a clearer understanding of what mighthappen, what is desired and what must be avoided.

This aspect of the technique has its analogy in corpo-rate planning in the ‘processual approach’ – the ideathat a planning and learning process ensures a companymaintains an active and intelligent watch on its businessenvironment – which is more important than a finishedplan. Van der Heijden (1996) retells an anecdote about agroup of Hungarian soldiers lost in the Alps and presu-med dead, but who returned safely after some days. ‘Weconsidered ourselves lost and waited for the end, butthen one of us found a map in his pocket ... and with themap we found our bearings’ (p. 36). When their lieuten-ant examined the map he found it was of the Pyreneesnot the Alps. Van der Heijden comments:

the map had given them a reason to act. Accuracy did notcome into it. By taking some action the soldiers started toobtain new feedback about their environment, and theyentered a new ‘learning loop’ which gradually built uptheir understanding and mental map. (Van der Heijden,1996, p. 37)

Perhaps the most popular form of futurology is sciencefiction, which gathers together complex ideas aboutscience and society and communicates them in an enga-ging and persuasive narrative. Indeed, science fiction hasperhaps had more influence than any other genre informing public awareness of the effects of technology onsociety. H.G. Wells, for example, author of sciencefiction such as The Time Machine and idealist socialcommentaries such as The Work, Wealth and Happiness ofMankind, published a Utopian fictional history of theworld as written in the 22nd century, The Shape of Thingsto Come, where he foresaw a triumphant future for globalEnglish.

One of the unanticipated achievements of the twenty firstcentury was the rapid diffusion of Basic English as thelingua franca of the world and the even more rapid modifi-cation, expansion and spread of English in its wake. ... Thisconvenience spread like wildfire after the first Conference ofBasra. It was made the official medium of communicationthroughout the world by the Air and Sea Control, and by2020 there was hardly anyone in the world who could nottalk and understand it. (Wells, 1933, pp. 418, 419)

Language is a common preoccupation in sciencefiction: the genre has probably explored the linguisticfuture more extensively than any other mode of futuresresearch. Much science fiction provides a narrativestructure through which we can conceptualise the future,exploring possible social outcomes of technologicaldevelopments and asking ‘what if?’ Arthur C. Clarke, forexample, famously speculated on satellite communicat-ions long before the first satellite was launched.

Social and political forecastingIn the late 1960s and 70s several companies attemptedsocial forecasting. Among them, the General ElectricCompany (GEC) instituted an in-house forecastingservice to guide strategic corporate planning. Its BusinessEnvironment Studies unit was aware that economic andtechnological forecasting would be insufficient to predictthe contexts in which the company would employlabour, produce goods and market its products. The unittherefore devised methods of ‘sociopolitical’ forecasting.One tool used was a chart (Figure 15) showing likely atti-tude shift over a 15 year period amongst the ‘trendsetting’ segment of the population – young, well educa-ted, relatively affluent, committed. The commercialrationale for the exploration of social trends was that:

Without a proper business response, societal expectations oftoday become the political issues of tomorrow, legislatedrequirements the next day, and litigated penalties the dayafter that. (Wilson, 1982, p. 218)

This illustrates several features of social forecasting.First, how long-term events can be predicted by hypot-hesising a chain of events and looking for precursors.Second, how some sectors of the population are of parti-cular interest to the futurologist. Third, that if trends canbe identified earlier, the more options are available foraction. Indeed, it may be possible to alter a chain ofevents by intervening in the early stages. For this reason,the best forecasts are often inaccurate – their very exis-tence may change the course of history.

Scenario planning


How do forecasters in large companies cope with the uncertainty that thefuture holds? Can the methods they employ be applied to matters of cultureand language as easily as to the price of oil? Scenario building is onemethodology used by strategists to put together known facts withimaginative ideas about the future.

What value shifts amongyoung people mightaffect the future ofEnglish?p. 48

The importance of a good story

WWWDEMOS SERIOUS FUTURES

http://www.demos.co.uk

Techniques of social forecasting were, by and large,superseded by alternative techniques that are better ableto deal with social and political uncertainties. Themethod now known as ‘scenario planning’ bringstogether ideas of social forecasting, the processualapproach and the envisioning of futures in narrative.

A scenario is a possible future. Scenario builders takeknown facts and trends and build imaginatively on them,providing a narrative account which links events andexplores possible chains of consequences. Scenarios werefirst developed as a strategic military-planning techniqueafter World War II and later adopted by large corporat-ions such as Royal Dutch/Shell. The company’s use ofscenarios was one of the first significant demonstrationsof the technique’s utility when, in the 1970s, Shellproved to be the only large oil corporation prepared forthe oil crisis.

In building a scenario for the future of English, thelanguage itself would be a central character; hero orvillain. Other characters might be institutions andgovernments, or the driving forces identified in forecastmodels. A scenario would allow motives, probableactions, possible decisions, relationships between‘characters’ to be explored and ‘what if’ questions to beasked. Peter Schwartz, who helped Shell’s scenario plan-ning exercises, explains:

Scenarios are not predictions. It is simply not possible topredict the future with certainty. ... Rather, scenarios arevehicles for helping people learn. Unlike traditional businessforecasting or market research, they present alternativeimages; they do not merely extrapolate the trends of thepresent. ... The point of scenario-planning is to help ussuspend our disbelief in all the futures: to allow us to thinkthat any one of them might take place. Then we canprepare for what we don’t think is going to happen.(Schwartz, 1996, pp. 6, 195)

Kees van der Heijden, another former member ofthe Shell team, suggests that scenario planning is the bestmethodology for dealing with mid-term futures – whenthere is much information to hand, but where key factorsmay be unknown. In the long term, when too much isunpredictable, there is little left but hope. In terms ofcorporate strategy, ‘hope’ might be said to be invested inmission statements or corporate visions (Figure 16).

There is a clear management advantage in scenariobuilding. Scenarios provide a windtunnel where personalor corporate strategies can be tested, weaknesses in

thinking highlighted, organi-sational obstacles accountedfor in management design, orforward plans made robustagainst a range of possibilities.Scenarios also sensitise aplanning team to recogniseearly-warning signs whichotherwise might be missed.Shell did not predict the oilcrisis, but had tested theirmanagement strategiesagainst such an improbablecontext. When the crisis arri-ved, they were able to recog-nise the signs faster thancompetitors and already hadan organisational understan-ding of the required course ofaction for a rapid response.

Scenario planning is aflexible methodology whichcan be adapted to organisat-ions and circumstances. Onerecent project, using a scena-rio technique to explorepossible futures for Europeantransport and communicat-ions during the next 30 years, described the focus of theenquiry in ways which could apply to language:

As a method of exploring the future scenarios are superiorto more rigorous forecasting methods such as statisticalextrapolation or mathematical models if the number offactors to be considered and the degree of uncertainty aboutthe future is high. This clearly applies in the case of trans-port and communications. Transport and communicationsare closely interrelated with almost all aspects of human life.They are linked to social and economic developments, areinfluenced by technological innovations and are subject tonumerous political and institutional constraints. (Masser etal., 1992, p. 4)

This project developed a variation of the classicscenario-planning technique by employing the so-calledDelphi method: panels of experts from different count-ries were involved in both the construction of scenariosand their evaluation. This, the authors claim, facilitated:

the process of converging initially different expert viewstowards one or possibly a few dominant opinions. In addi-tion, scenario writing as a group exercise has the potential ofgenerating awareness of factors and impacts which may nothave been identified through formal forecasting methods.(Masser et al., 1992, p. 4)

There are many possible variants of scenario plan-ning but most share an emphasis on alternatives andpossibilities. The technique is capable of bringingtogether a variety of stakeholders: those in the field withlocal knowledge, at the centre in senior managementroles, people who have researched the issues, or thosewho are most affected should the scenarios turn out tobe true. But scenario planning only really makes sensewhen particular questions have been identified as requi-ring answers. There is little point in building a wind-tunnel if there is no vehicle to test.


‘Scenarios are not predictions. The point of scenario-planning is to help us suspend our disbelief. Then we

can prepare for what we don’t think is going to happen’– Peter Schwartz in The Art of the Long View.

War (militarymight)

Peace(economicdevelopment)

Nationalism Internationalism

Federalgovernment

State/ localgovernment

Publicenterprise

Privateenterprise

Organisation Individual

Uniformity/conformity

Pluralism

Independence Inter-dependence

Sociability Privacy

Materialism Quality of life

Status quo/permanence/routine

Change/flexibility/innovation

Futureplanning

Immediacy

Work Leisure

Authority Participation

Centralisation Decentralisation

Ideology/dogma

Pragmatism/nationality

Moralabsolutes

Situation ethics

Economicefficiency

'Social justice'

Means (esp.technology)

Ends (goals)

1970 1985 2000

Shortterm

Mid term Longterm

Uncertainty

Predetermined

Fore

cast

ing

Scen

ario

pla

nnin

g

Hop

e

Figure 16 Forecasting, scenario planning and hope

Figure 15 A profile of socialvalues held by ‘trend setters’

created by GEC in 1970,together with GEC’s

forecast of likely value shiftsduring the following 15

years. This study was one ofthe earliest to forecast atrend away from values

based on ‘economicefficiency’ towards those

based on ‘social justice’ – atrend which other

researchers suggest hassince gathered momentum.The dashed line for the year

2000 represents aspeculative assessment of

how social values haveshifted since the GEC study

Scenario planning

Summary


Aitchison, J. (1991) Language Change: progress or decay? Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Al-Zayer, J. and Al-Ibrahim, A.A. (1996) Modelling the impact of temperatureon electricity consumption in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. Journal ofForecasting, vol. 15, pp. 97–106.

Bailey, R.W. (1992) Images of English: a cultural history of the language. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Bauer, L. (1994) Watching English Change. London: Longman.Bowers, R. (1996) English in the world. In J. Hilton (ed) English in China: the

English 2000 Conference. Peking: British Council.Chambers, J. and Trudgill, P. (1980) Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Elkington, J. and Trisoglio, A. (1996) Developing realistic scenarios for the

environment: lessons from Brent Spar. Long Range Planning, vol. 29, no. 6, pp.

762–9.English 2000 (1995) Benchmarks Report: a study to establish systems to measure Britain’s

share of the global ELT market. Manchester: British Council.Hooke, A. (1996) An Export-Oriented Approach to Regional Development. Unpublished

paper, Sydney.Masser, I., Sviden, O. and Wegener, M. (1992) The Geography of Europe’s Futures.

London: Belhaven Press.Schwartz, P. (1996) The Art of the Long View. New York: Doubleday.Van der Heijden, K. (1996) Scenarios: the art of strategic conversation. Chichester:

John Wiley & Sons.Wilson, I. (1982) Socio-political forecasting: the General Electric experience. In

B. Twiss (ed) Social Forecasting for Company Planning. London: Macmillan.Wells, H.G. (1933) The Shape of Things to Come: the ultimate revolution. London:

Hutchinson.

1 Scarcity of relevant factsThere is a surprising scarcity of data which directly relates to thedevelopment of global English, since there is no centralinternational authority which collects such information.

2 Variety of changeA wide range of change is occurring in the status and form ofEnglish around the world. Some changes are relatively swift andephemeral (such as fashions in vocabulary), others are moreprofound and long term (such as language shift in families).

3 The complex interplay of causesWe may be able to identify some of the apparent ‘drivers’ ofchange – the circumstances which appear to encourage peopleto learn English or to give up their parents’ language in favourof English – but the way such causes of change interact witheach other makes prediction of the direction and extent ofchange extremely hazardous.

4 Some predictions are safe, others dangerousAn understanding of the nature of change helps identify whatkind of prediction is relatively safe and what is dangerous. Thegrowth and decline of native speakers of a language is arelatively long-term change which can be monitored and tosome extent forecast. Changes in the number of people learningEnglish as a foreign language, however, may be surprisinglyvolatile.

5 Scenario buildingScenario building is one approach to strategic managementwhich allows an understanding of the causes and patterns ofchange to inform forward planning, even where there isconsiderable uncertainty about what the future might hold.‘Forecasting’, in a narrow sense of building models whichpredict future patterns of behaviour, is not the only form of‘futurology’.

References

Global trends


3● Demography

How many people will there be in 2050? Where will they live? Whatage will they be? Population projections exist for all the world’scountries and answers to such demographic questions can help usmake broad predictions about a question at the heart of this study:who will speak what languages in the 21st century?

● The world economyThe economic shape of the world is rapidly changing. The world asa whole is getting richer, but the proportion of wealth created andspent by the west will decrease markedly in the next few decades.This will alter the relationship between the west and the rest of theworld – especially Asia – and will change the economic attractivenessof other major languages.

● The role of technologyAdvances in technology in the 19th century helped ‘kick start’ thelong wave of economic growth which is yet to reach some parts ofthe world. Technological change transforms the spaces in which wework and live, but it is difficult to predict precisely how technologywill shape our future global patterns of language use.

● GlobalisationWorld economies and cultures are becoming increasingly intercon-nected and interdependent, politically, socially and technologically:‘complexification’, ‘cross-border activity’ and ‘process re-engineering’have been the buzz words of the 1990s. Here we examine the im-pact of economic globalisation on patterns of communication.

● The immaterial economyThe world’s output is getting lighter. Within a few decades, manymore people will be employed in the service industries which cha-racterise economic globalisation. New forms of global teleworkingare emerging and an increased proportion of the value of goods isproduced through language-related activity.

● Cultural flowsLanguage has been regarded since the Renaissance in terms of ter-ritory. Statistics about language, culture and economy, collected byinternational bodies, have been based on nation states, populationsof speakers and relative sizes of economies. But chaos theory sug-gests the concept of flow may be better suited to understandinglanguage in a borderless world.

● Global inequalitiesAs developing economies mature and per capita income rises, sosocial and economic inequalities also seem to grow: proficiency inEnglish may be one of the mechanisms for dividing those who haveaccess to wealth and information from those who don’t. The globalspread of English may also be associated with decreased use of en-dangered languages.

There is much evidence – economic, technologicaland demographic – that the world has now entereda period of unprecedented and far-reaching changeof a kind which will transform societies and reshapethe traditional relations of economic, cultural andpolitical power between the west and ‘the rest’which have led world events for several hundredyears.

It is coincidental that a new millennium should beassociated with the construction of a new worldorder: the roots of the present period lie at least inthe industrial revolution which began in Europe andin particular in Britain. It can be argued that itsstarting point was even earlier – in RenaissanceEurope which gave rise to the nation state andnational languages, to modern science andinstitutional structures.

The fact that the world has reached a transformativemoment in a long historical process is remarkableenough, but even more remarkable is the idea thatrapid change will not now be a permanent featureof global life; rather it is a consequence of thetransition towards a new and more settled worldorder, with quite different cultural, economic andlinguistic landscapes.

This section deals with key global trends, each ofwhich are now helping transform the need forcommunication between the world’s peoples – frompopulation shifts to economic globalisation; from theinvention of the Internet to the restructuring ofsocial inequality. It is these trends which will shapethe demand for English in the future, but theyinteract in complex ways and may produceunexpected cultural and political outcomes.

Population growthWhen looking to the future, few things are more predi-ctable than population growth. Provided that currenttrends of increased lifespan and fertility rates in develo-ping countries continue, we can estimate from infantsborn this year the numbers of their offspring in 2020 andso on: the UN estimates the global population in 2150will be 11.54 billion. Figure 17 shows the predictedpopulation growth worldwide to 2300. Charted, it showsan S-curve rise (such as those described in section 2),with rapid growth beginning about the time of the indu-strial revolution. As is the problem with S-curves, it isdifficult to determine the point at which rapid populat-ion increase will slow and stabilise, but the demographicmodels used by the UN do expect stabilisation to takeplace in the first half of the next century.

Population trends differ greatly from country tocountry, however. This in turn means that as the demog-raphic shape of the world changes, so will the relativestatus of different languages. Which languages then willthis growing number of people speak?

The languages people speak show two maininfluences: first, the speech community they are borninto, which for an increasing number of the world’spopulation is a multilingual one; and second, thelanguages people learn through life as a consequence ofeducation, employment, migration or increased socialmobility. The languages that people use in their every-day interactions do not change rapidly, unless aspeaker’s social circumstances quickly change.Multilingual speakers may add languages during theirlifetime and they may find that another becomes lessused. But major language shift, from one first languageto another, is usually slow, taking place across generat-ions. Hence, if we take into account current patterns oflanguage use amongst the young, including infants andteenagers, we can make a fair prediction about patternsof language use in 50 years time, with the proviso thatrapid social change may complicate the pattern. The

engco model uses this approach as the basis of its projec-tions: Figure 18 shows estimates based on UN demog-raphic data for first-language speakers of major worldlanguages from 1950 to 2050. Table 7 shows the possiblenumber of native speakers of a wider range of languagesin 2050.

However, population growth is slowing in Europeancountries: roughly equal percentages of the populationare under the age of 15 and over the age of 65 (TheEconomist, 1996). Yet in non-OECD countries, the popu-lation is increasingly becoming younger. This global shiftin the location of young people will have significantlinguistic consequences. Since young people are keyagents for language change and development, whileolder people tend to be more stable in speech habits, wecan expect patterns of language change to be marked inthose countries of increasing youth: Africa, Asia andSouth America. Of these, the last two regions are experi-encing considerable social and economic change. Thiscombination of factors will make Asia and LatinAmerica potentially significant regions of languagechange in the next century.

Language and migrationThe English language arose as a fringe consequence oflarge-scale people movement in northern and westernEurope, which not only changed the European linguisticmap but also led to the downfall of the Roman empire.Migration has since shaped the development of Englishacross the world. During the 16th to 19th centuries, boththe slave trade and colonisation moved people andlanguages: from Europe to the Americas, India, Africaand Australia; from Africa to the Americas; and fromOceania to Australia and New Zealand.

In the 20th century, patterns of immigration partiallyreversed. As a consequence of decolonisation, manyfamilies came to Britain from the Indian sub-continentand the Caribbean, while immigration policies ofAustralia encouraged migration from Asia rather thanfrom Britain and Europe. As a consequence, highlymultilingual cities have arisen in countries which imagi-ned themselves to be predominantly monolingualEnglish speaking. Censuses of London schoolchildren,for example, show that by the 1980s around 200 langua-ges were spoken in the city’s primary schools.

Yet the mass migrations of the 1990s between partsof Africa have had little impact upon world varieties:

Demography


How many people will there be in 2050? Where will they live? What age willthey be? Population projections exist for all the world’s countries and answersto such demographic questions can help us make broad predictions about aquestion at the heart of this study: who will speak what languages in the21st century?

0

2.5

5

7.5

10

12.5

1500 1700 1900 2100 2300

Wor

ld P

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atio

n (b

illio

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Figure 17 World populationgrowth is expected to

stabilise at the end of the21st century

0

10

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30

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50

Hispanic Asians & PacificBlack Native Americans

Perc

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ge o

f US

popu

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Total non-white

Islanders

1992

2050

Figure 19 How the ethnic composition of the USpopulation is expected to change

What languages will bespoken by globalteenagers in 2050?p. 49

0

500

1,000

1950 1970 1990 2010 2030 2050

Chinese

Hindi/Urdu

English

Spanish

Arabic

Japanese

Portuguese

French

300

100

Figure 18 Demographic estimates of first-language speakers (in millions) forsome major languages according to the engco model

WWWUN DEMOGRAPHIC DATA

gopher://gopher.undp.org:70/11/ungophers/popin

Africa is one of the least-developed world regions econo-mically and is least connected to global cultural systems.This, of course, may change in the longer term. But itappears that mass, long-distance migration is no longer asubstantial source of language shift, as the richer count-ries effectively close their doors.

There remain three kinds of migration which arelikely to have linguistic consequences in the 21st century.First, migration from poorer countries on the fringes ofricher ones – either permanently or as ‘guest workers’.Second, migration across language boundaries withineconomic blocs, such as the EU. Third, migration withincountries, mainly towards areas of economic growth.

The flow of economic migrants across borders intoricher countries seems to be ever increasing. It is estim-ated that 4% of the population of Mexico shifted to theUS between 1970 and 1990. In Europe in 1990, follo-wing the breach of the Berlin wall, roughly 1 millionpeople moved from Poland, East Germany and elsew-here to settle in West Germany. Layard et al. (1994)suggest that this is the beginning of continued movementfrom eastern Europe to the richer west, mirroring therelationship between Mexico and the US.

If we focus on the next 15 years and think in terms of 3 percent, this would imply that at least 4 million non-SovietEastern Europeans would wish to move to Western Europeor the United States. (Layard et al., 1994, p. 12)

Such movements have unpredictable effects onlanguage use and often give rise to political tension. Inthe US for example, immigration from other countriesmay leave the ‘white’ population barely in the majorityby 2050, according to estimates from the US CommerceDepartment’s Census Bureau (cited in McRae, 1994).The population of Hispanic, Asian, Native Americanand black Americans would grow as indicated in Figure19. Some political groups in the US now suggest this willthreaten the hegemony of English. Certainly, demograp-hic change is likely to alter the percentage of US citizenswho are first-language English speakers and estimates ofglobal native English speakers in 2050 may be, as aresult, too high.

Increasingly, migration is taking place within count-ries. In developing countries, the most important trend islikely to be migration to the cities from rural areas. TheSpecial Economic Zones of China, for example, willexperience greater pressure as these trading areasdevelop. Migration to these zones is likely to lead towider usage of regional lingua francas, such asCantonese or Wu Chinese.

The growing middle classesOne of the most significant social consequences of theindustrial revolution in Europe was the creation of aneducated middle class with social aspirations andsufficient disposable income to help build a consumerculture. Likewise, one of the significant trends in Asiaand Latin America is a parallel expansion of the middleclasses: Schwartz and Leyden (1997, p. 126) suggest thatover 2 billion Asians will have made the transition intothe middle class by 2018. This demographic shift mayprove to be the most significant factor of all in determi-ning the fate of global English in the next century – it isamongst professional groups that the use of English ismost prevalent and professional middle-class families aremost likely to adopt English as the language of the home.

The future for an increasing number of the world’spopulation will be an urban one: the UNDP suggests theproportion of people living in towns and cities will beover 50% by 2005 (UNDP, 1996). A far cry from thestart of the 16th century when only 5 European citieshad populations over 100,000 – Constantinople, Naples,Venice, Milan and Paris. By 1600 the number hadtrebled. Between World War I and World War II, NewYork became the first city to grow beyond 10 millioninhabitants. The cities expected to be the largest by theyear 2000 are listed in Table 8.

The most rapid urbanisation, like population growth,is taking place in the developing world. Between 1950and 2000 some 1.4 billion more people will have becomecity dwellers in the developing world. UN estimates for1994 to 2025 show Asia achieving one of the largestincreases in urban growth – some 20.7%. And in SouthAsia alone, over the period 1960 to 2000, urban popula-tion is expected to have doubled.

Urbanisation is likely to have wide-reaching effectson the world’s languages. Rural areas have been knownas linguistically conservative since 19th centuryEuropean dialect surveys hunted out elderly, rusticpeasants as ‘informants’ about ‘pure unadulterated’speech, untainted by the culture of the industrial revolu-tion. There was considerable romanticism in theseprojects, but also a recognition of the role that urbanareas play in cultural and linguistic change. As cosmopo-litan centres they provide a focal point for in-migrationfrom different parts of a country and become importantzones of language contact and diversity; they give rise todense but interlinked social networks; they encouragethe growth of a middle class with disposable income whobecome consumers of global material culture; they arecentres of social innovation and fashion. This is preciselythe kind of environment where social and cultural practi-ces are transformed and where new language varietiesand speech habits emerge. Furthermore, new languagevarieties emerging from large, densely populated citiesare usually economically and culturally significant. In thecoming decades, the rapid urbanisation in the Shanghaiarea of northern China, for example, may create a newvariety of Wu Chinese with not only a large number ofspeakers but also powerful economic and culturalsupport.

A good deal of sociolinguistic research has been carr-ied out in urban centres but studies of new city develop-ments are scarce. One recent British research projectexamined the linguistic consequences of new-city devel-opment in the British town of Milton Keynes (situated90 km north-west of London). Kerswill (1996) reportsthat the accents of children had a great deal in common,but did not follow those of their parents, nor that whichalready existed in the area. A new dialect seemed to beemerging amongst new-town adolescents. ‘What we seeis possibly a sign of future changes in English: new townsare perhaps in the vanguard of the dialect levellingfound in England as a whole’ (Kerswill, 1996, p. 299).

Urbanisation thus has important effects on languagedemography. New languages emerge, others change,some are lost. In the world’s cities – the nexus for flowsof people, goods and ideas – the spread of English will befelt first and most keenly; new patterns of English use willarise amongst second-language speakers. But such citieswill also form the foundation for other, potentially rival,lingua francas.


It is amongst professional groups that the use ofEnglish is most prevalent and professional middle

class families are most likely to adopt English as thelanguage of the home.

1 Mexico City 25.62 Tokyo-Yokohama 24.23 Sao Paulo 22.14 Shanghai 17.05 New York 16.86 Calcutta 15.77 Bombay 15.48 Beijing 14.09 Los Angeles 13.9

10 Jakarta 13.7

Table 8 The 10 largestcities in the ye ar 2000(population millions)

1 Chinese 1,3842 Hindi/Urdu 5563 English 5084 Spanish 4865 Arabic 4826 Portuguese 2487 Bengali 2298 Russian 1329 Japanese 108

10 German 9111 Malay 8012 French 76

Table 7 Estimates providedby the engco model ofnative-speaker numbers

for major world languagesin 2050 (millions)

The language of cities

A richer, smaller worldSince the industrial revolution, the world’s wealth hasbeen steadily increasing. A calculation of the total valueof goods and services created and supplied throughoutthe world shows that in 1750 (converted to 1990 prices),the Gross World Product (GWP) was around $50 billion.By 1990, however, this was the size of the Malaysianeconomy alone – GWP had risen to $25 trillion. TheHooke forecasting model suggests that by 2050 theglobal economy will have grown a further tenfold to$250 trillion. The relatively rapid growth in wealth hasled to the popular idea that economic growth is a perma-nent condition – but in fact the growth of GWP seems tobe taking the form of an S-curve, beginning with theindustrial revolution and flattening out in the nextcentury. This period of rapid growth – the steep portionof the curve we are now living in – began in Britain andEurope and may span eventually a period of 250 to 300years.

GWP is now rising at an average annual 2.5%. Mostof the industrialised countries have experienced growthrates around the global average, but elsewhere growth isuneven. Some countries have experienced, like China,an average annual growth of over 9% since 1985; theeconomies of other countries, particularly those affectedby war or political upheaval, have shrunk. These unevengrowth rates reflect the fact that economies of develo-ping countries are gradually coming ‘up to speed’ – thatis, achieving productivity levels typical of developedcountries. This process is facilitated by technology andskills transfer from richer countries, which have greatlyreduced the time required for a country to double its percapita income. Whereas Britain took 58 years – itsgrowth was generated by invention and innovation –countries benefiting from flows of knowledge, expertiseand technology transferred from the west have been ableto double their income in reducing timescales, as Figure20 illustrates.

Turning the tablesAs countries grow richer, the OECD countries willbecome proportionally less important in the world econ-omy. Figure 21 shows world distribution of wealth for1990 and Figure 22 that projected for 2050 – the timewhen world growth is expected to stabilise. These figures

group together those OECD countries which comprisethe world’s ‘Big Three’ trading blocs – North America,the European Union and Japan. At the present time, thevast proportion of the world’s wealth is produced bythese regions and circulates within them. As yet, the BigThree blocs also possess most of the world’s manage-ment and technological expertise, scientific knowledgeand advanced industrial skills.

But the present period is a transitional time: we arewitnessing radically changing economic relationshipsbetween countries and world regions. Transition overthe next 50 years will be uncomfortable in many ways,particularly for the Big Three trading regions. As GusHooke (1996) remarked, ‘For those who don’t likechange, best either to be born before 1800 or hang on toabout 2050. For those who love change, the ideal time tobe alive is 1995 to 2010.’

Economic strength of languagesThe shift in economic relations will have a profound, butas yet poorly understood, effect on the popularity anduse of different languages. It is clear that a languagewhich is spoken by rich countries is more attractive tolearners than one which provides no access to personalbetterment or lucrative markets. Ammon (1995) putsforward this argument in exploring the status of Germanas an international language:

The language of an economically strong community isattractive to learn because of its business potential.Knowledge of the language potentially opens up the marketfor producers to penetrate a market if they know thelanguage of the potential customer. (Ammon, 1995, p. 30)

One corroboration of the attractiveness of thelanguage of an economically strong country comes fromCoulmas (1992), who was able to show that the rise inthe number of students enrolling on courses worldwidein Japanese as a foreign language closely mirrored a risein the value of the Japanese yen against the US dollarduring the period 1982 to 1989 (Coulmas, 1992, p. 78).A relatively straightforward way of estimating the econo-mic strength of a language is simply to rank the econo-mies of the countries where native speakers live (Table9). According to this we find an international order forthe late 1980s (Ammon, 1995).

A slightly more sophisticated approach is to take intoaccount all countries in which a language is spoken andallocate the GDP of each country proportionally to thelanguages spoken there. The engco forecasting modelcalculates a ‘GLP’ (Gross Language Product) in this wayand produces figures for the major languages (Table 10).The estimates differ from Ammon’s both because of thedifferent method of calculation and because the engcomodel draws on GDP figures for 1994 – the latest avai-lable in 1997.

Traded languagesEstablishing a link between macro-economic factors andlanguage popularity is an attractive idea: there are morestatistics on the economy available, country by country,than for any other sphere of human activity. But it isinsufficient to note that strong economies attract interestin languages: we need to understand better how econo-mic power encourages the use of particular languages.Only then can we predict whether the relative shrinkingof English-speaking economies will lead to a reduction indemand for English.

The world economy


The economic shape of the world is rapidly changing. The world as a wholeis getting richer, but the proportion of wealth created and spent by the westwill decrease markedly in the next few decades. This will alter therelationship between the west and the rest of the world – especially Asia –and will change the economic attractiveness of other major languages.

20

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Figure 20 Length of timetaken to double per capitaincome

WWWWORLD TRADE ORGANISATION

http://www.wto.org

This is a large question which cannot be answeredsimply, but one approach is to analyse business transac-tion. It is notable that the volume of international tradehas been growing rapidly: between 1950 and 1994 worldtrade multiplied 14 times while output rose only 5.5times (World Trade Organisation, 1995). In otherwords, an increasing proportion of wealth is created bytrade – part of a general process of globalisation nowbringing world economies and cultures in ever-closerunion.

There is a general rule of thumb, probably existingsince the earliest days of international trading, thatselling must be carried out in the customer’s languageunless the commodity is in short supply or there is amonopoly provider. The linguistic consequence of this isthat language popularity will follow markets: ‘themerchant speaks the customer’s language’. In import-export terms, the language of the customer will tend todictate the process. Since most countries aim to balancethe value of imports and exports, at least roughly, thenthe language effect should be reciprocal. Therefore itmight be argued that the world status of a languagedepends less on GDP than on the extent to which itsnative speakers trade their goods and services internatio-nally. The engco model calculates languages related totrade in an index of traded GLP (Table 11).

English in businessBut international trade is often a complex, cross-borderbusiness: goods are taken from one country, refined orgiven added value by a second, sold to a third, repacka-ged, resold and so on. Such multilateral trade bringswith it greater reliance on lingua francas.

In Europe there is growing evidence that English hasbecome the major business lingua franca. A studyconducted in 1988 for the Danish Council of Trade andIndustry reported that English is used by Danish compa-nies in over 80% of international business contacts andcommunications (cited in Firth, 1996). A more recentinvestigation in small and medium-sized businesses inperipheral areas of Europe (Hagen, 1993) found thatalthough English is probably the most used language ofbusiness across Europe, German is used extensively inparticular areas, especially for informal communication.

German is, understandably, in more widespread use thanEnglish in European regions bordering on Germany,thereby underlining a common misperception of English asthe sole lingua franca of international business. This is appa-rent in the Dutch and Danish samples, where German isahead of English in the use of oral-aural skills, though thisorder is reversed for reading and writing. (Hagen, 1993, p.14)

The use of German seems to be increasing in parts ofcentral and eastern Europe: a trend that may beconfirmed as more countries join the European Union.Hagen (1993) suggests knowledge of one language is notsufficient for a company to conduct business successfullyin Europe: ‘a minimum level of linguistic competence fora European company is the ability to perform in three:namely, English, German and French’ (Hagen, 1993, p.12). British companies seem least able to meet this crite-rion.

However, the use of German and French is almostexclusively confined to trade within Europe: Germancompanies generally use English for trade outside theEuropean Union. This is apparent from recommendat-

ions made by German Chambers of Commerce tomembers on which languages should be used for tradewith each country in the world (cited by Ammon, 1995).English is recommended as the sole language for 64countries. German is recommended as the exclusivelanguage of trade with only one other country – Austria– though German is suggested as a co-language for up to25 countries, including Holland, Denmark and those ineastern Europe. French is recommended for 25 countriesand Spanish for 17. English is thus the preferred, but notthe sole, language of external trade for European count-ries. Japan and the US also use English widely for inter-national trade.

The overall pattern seems to be that trade driven bythe Big Three encourages the use of English globally.But as patterns of trade change, so patterns of languageuse may change. The key to understanding the future ofbusiness English will lie in the extent to which otherlanguages become important trade lingua francas forinternal trade within Asia and Latin America.


The shift in economic relations will have a profound,but as yet poorly understood, effect on the popularity

and use of different languages.

Big Three 55%

Asia 21%

Rest 24%

Big Three 12%

Asia 60%

Rest 28%

Figure 21 Proportions ofworld wealth in 1990 (total $25 trillion)

1 English 4,2712 Japanese 1,2773 German 1,0904 Russian 8015 Spanish 7386 French 6697 Chinese 4488 Arabic 3599 Italian 302

10 Portuguese 23411 Dutch 20312 Hindi/Urdu 10213 Indonesian 6514 Danish 6015 Greek 49

Table 9 Estimated economicstrength of languages

in $billion(after Ammon, 1995)

1 English 7,8152 Japanese 4,2403 German 2,4554 Spanish 1,7895 French 1,5576 Chinese 9857 Portuguese 6118 Arabic 4089 Russian 363

10 Hindi/Urdu 11411 Italian 11112 Malay 7913 Bengali 32

Table 10 Estimates of GrossLanguage Product (GLP) ofmajor languages in $billion

(engco model)

1 English 2,3382 German 1,1963 French 8034 Chinese 8035 Japanese 7006 Spanish 6107 Italian 4888 Portuguese 1389 Malay 118

10 Arabic 8511 Russian 7312 Hindi/Urdu 2513 Bengali 9

Table 11 Major languages bytraded GLP in $billion

(engco model)

Figure 22 Estimated sharesof world wealth in 2050(total $250 trillion, averageworld growth at 4%)

Technological pastEnglish today has been shaped by the effects of the indu-strial revolution. As English became the world’slanguage of discovery and as rapid advances were madein materials science, engineering, manufacturing andcommunications, new communicative functions wererequired of the language. Industrial and communicationstechnology created legal, management and accountingstructures, each with different forms of informationgiving. New, more complex communicative skills wererequired by employees – such as literacy skills – whilethe industrial economy gave rise to greater interactionbetween institutions and the general public, mediatedthrough railway timetables, company accounts, instruc-tions for household products and advertisements.Typographic design expanded accordingly, as did therange of written and spoken genres institutionalised inEnglish. Thus the ‘information age’ began in the 19thcentury, establishing many of the styles and conventionswe take for granted today.

Technology has indeed proved to be of profoundsignificance to culture and language. Is there now arevolutionary technology ‘just around the corner’ whichwill transform our use and expectations of language inthe way that the industrial revolution did?

Technological futureForecasting key technologies of the future is an unrelia-ble activity, as some heroic failures in the past demonst-rate. An editorial in The Times, October 1903, predictedthat heavier-than-air flying machines were theoreticallyimpossible – two months before the Wright brotherslaunched their first plane. In 1876 the Western Union –a telegraph company – decided not to take up the patenton Bell’s telephone because they considered the deviceto be ‘inherently of no value to us’. Western Union werenot Luddites: they were in business at the leading edge oftelecommunications technology. But even ‘experts’ canget it wrong.

It is unlikely that the world will be transformed bysome extraordinary invention in the next few decades.New technology takes time to develop, be implemented

and then to have important transformative effects. Anytechnology which is to have significant social, economicand linguistic effects in the near future will be alreadyknown. David (1990) shows how the introduction of thedynamo – permitting commercial use of electricity –took, from the early 1880s, another 40 years to yieldsignificant productivity gains. Likewise, the building ofthe first computers and development of high-levelcomputer languages in the 1940s only now have a signif-icant impact on people’s work and leisure. The impact oftechnology on everyday life is determined by the speedof institutional and social change rather than by thespeed of technological invention and scientific discovery.

Joseph Schumpeter suggested in the 1930s that tech-nological innovation affected the economy in a series of‘long waves’ about 50 years apart. If we update his ideas,to cover the period 1780 to 2080, this provides six ‘longwaves’ each associated with a transformative technology(Table 12). Based on this, we can see that major changesin culture and language during the next few decades arethose connected with computers and communications.

Computer languagesEnglish and computers have seemed, for decades, to gotogether. Computers and the programs which makethem useful were largely the invention of English-speaking countries. The hardware and software reflectedthe needs of the English language. The early systems fortext-based communication were unfriendly to accentedcharacters and almost impossible for languages usingnon-roman writing systems, while computer operatorsinteracted with programs using instructions in English.

English will, no doubt, continue to be spread via soft-ware products and digitised intellectual property, but itseems the days of language restriction are over. Thereare, for example, Chinese versions of all major Americanprograms, including the Windows operating system andMicrosoft Word word processor. Interface design and on-screen help now make new software more easily andrapidly customised for lesser used languages. Schools inWales, for example, are able to use software and opera-ting systems in Welsh. This adaptability of recent soft-ware is a significant characteristic. It has allowed newtechnical vocabulary to develop in languages other thanEnglish, while desktop publishing systems have madepossible short-run printing in minority writing systems.The close linkage that once existed between computersand English has been broken.

One of the most important computer-related techno-logies to emerge in recent decades with implications forlanguage use is, undoubtedly, the Internet, which wediscuss in detail later. The Internet illustrates the waytechnologies have been converging: television, telep-hone, music and document transfer all share the samedistribution infrastructure. And new consumer technolo-gies, such as multimedia computers and ‘Web TV’,bring them together in the home, school and workplace.

Language engineeringBesides consumer applications software, such as wordprocessors and spreadsheets, there now exists a widerange of software products designed for natural languagemanipulation: parsing tools, abstracting and informationretrieval, speech recognition and automatic translation.The majority of this research and development work iscarried out in the US, Europe and Japan. At present themost advanced tools are based in English (Figure 23)

The role of technology


Advances in technology in the 19th century helped ‘kick start’ the long waveof economic growth which is yet to reach some parts of the world.Technological change transforms the spaces in which we work and live, but itis difficult to predict exactly how technology will shape our future globalpatterns of language use.

0 200 400 600 800

English

French

German

SpanishItalian

Portuguese

Japanese

Russian

Arabic

Language engineering products available

Figure 23 Language-engineering productsavailable for major languagesin the mid 1990s

Will English continue tobe closely associatedwith leading-edgetechnology?p. 61

although other major languages – such as Chinese –have recently become the focus of much research anddevelopment by the US software industry.

Language professionals, however, have long beensceptical of the ability of computer-based applications todeal adequately with natural language. In the 1970smost linguists were convinced of the impossibility of a‘typewriter you could talk into’ – it raised problems at somany levels of linguistic processing that it was widelyregarded as no more than a dream of science fiction.And yet, only 20 years later, practical voice-transcriptionsoftware is used on desktop PCs. A similar scepticism isnow directed at automatic translation, but this overlooksthe fact that machine translation already plays asignificant role in commercial and institutional life. Andit is English, sometimes in special form, which has emer-ged as a lingua franca for machines.

Yet globalisation requires the closer integration oforganisations which employ different working languageswhile the increase in world trade has multiplied the needfor document translations of technical manuals, productspecifications, patent applications, regulations governingtrade and so on. Such documents tend to be more predi-ctable in content and style than, say, informal conversat-ion and hence more amenable to manipulation bymachines. The current state-of-the-art is one in whichmachines routinely help human translators, allowingincreased productivity, accuracy and standardisation.But this close working relationship between humans andmachines is beginning to alter the language and the waysin which texts are organised.

New, simplified forms of English have been construc-ted by many global engineering companies, such asCaterpillar and Boeing, which are claimed to makemaintenance manuals more comprehensible to overseasengineers. But the use of ‘controlled English’ is alsointended to make automatic translation easier – openingup the possibility of humans writing in restricted forms ofEnglish so that machines can translate documents intorestricted forms of target languages. The growing use ofEnglish as a ‘relay language’, to permit translation fromany language to any other via English, will produce newforms of language contact which may encourage theconvergence of other languages, at least in their control-led forms, with the semantic and syntactic structures ofEnglish.

The death of distanceThe impact of computers on society and language hascome about largely because of developments in the rela-ted field of telecommunications.

Telecommunications technology is surprisingly old.By the 1870s, the world was linked by the electric teleg-raph, along whose wires the English language flowed.The Victorian network was almost entirely owned and

operated by British companies and London was therelay centre for most of the world’s long-distance cables.The social and commercial implications of the techno-logy were widely debated and by the end of the 19thcentury it had become a cliché to wonder at ‘the annihi-lation of space and time’. Since then there have emergedthree related trends in telecommunications – alongsideimproved technology – which have shaped globalpatterns of communication and which may continue toimpact on language flow and use: liberalising regulatoryregimes allowing competition and reducing nationalcontrol, falling costs and the increasing one-to-one, orpoint-to-point, nature of telecommunications.

Cheaper communicationsCost has been, traditionally, a major barrier to long-distance calls. But the cost of communication has lowe-red dramatically (Figure 24). Falling prices have resultedfrom liberalisation of the market, huge increases indemand and technological development. The first trans-atlantic telephone cable, laid in 1956, allowed 36 simul-taneous conversations; the latest undersea fibre-optic linkis capable of carrying 600,000. Once the infrastructure isin place, the cost of establishing an international call isvery close to zero; the cost of a call between the US andBritain could fall, according to some commentators, tothe equivalent of present British local rates. And, if linesbetween London and Glasgow are congested, the callmight be routed via the US, with no loss of profit to theoperator.

In 1997 Britain became the first country to open upits entire international phone traffic; nearly 50 compa-nies applied for licences. The result is expected to beenormous capacity and falling prices: London is expec-ted to become ‘the switching centre for the world’s telep-hone services’ (McRae,1996, p. 19).

One-to-one connectionOver the last few decades there has been a significantshift towards direct, point-to-point communications,either person to person, or machine to machine.Whereas in the early days of the telegraph, a communi-cation needed to pass through the hands of many media-tors and gatekeepers who were able to control thequantity, speed and content of messages, now it ispossible for an individual to contact another directly,across oceans and continents. This development is seenin both the telephone and the Internet: a PC on the deskof one executive or academic can connect directly toanother PC on some far-off desk to exchange data.

This shift towards a communication network ratherthan a hierarchy allows dispersed ‘discoursecommunities’ to emerge, based on shared interests suchas hobbies, (gardening, exotic fish), criminality (terro-rism, pornography) or support (ulcerative colitis suffe-rers, parents of children with Downs Syndrome).Diasporic cultural and linguistic groups can shareconcerns, ideas and decision making as never before.

Networks potentially change cultural and economiclandscapes, condensing distance and overcoming barri-ers to communication. And the interconnectedness ofcultural and decision-making systems, facilitated by one-to-one communication, has produced a ‘complex system’capable of unpredictable cultural and economic shifts.But communication patterns on such networks is largelyinvisible to traditional statistical monitoring – new trendsmay take decision makers unawares.


Any technology which is to have significant social,economic and linguistic effects in the near future will

be already known.

£0

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£200

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£500

19271928

19351945

19551963

19701984

19931996

Figure 24 Falling cost ofmaking a transatlantic

telephone call. Costs shownare for a three minute callLondon–New York at 1996

equivalent prices(a fall from £486 to 30p)

Pre-1780s Pre-industrial society1780s–1840s Steam power1840s–1890s Railways1890s–1930s Electric power1930s–1980s Cheap fuel/car/road haulage/air travel1980s–2030s Information technology (IT)2030s–2080s Biochemical engineering

(including genetic engineering and nano-engineering)

Table 12 Seven ages of the technological economy

Transnational ownershipGlobal trade is no longer a matter of bilateral arrange-ments between nation states, or between organisationseconomically rooted in nation states. Such is thecomplex structure of business ownership, through jointventures and holding companies, that establishing anysimple national pattern of ownership of the major enter-prises is difficult. And many of the world’s largest corpo-rations can hardly even be called multinational; ratherthey have become transnational. It has been calculatedthat transnational corporations (TNCs) account for asmuch as two-thirds of international trade in goods, while50 of the 100 largest economies are said to be not nationstates but TNCs. The largest of the world’s TNCs areinvolved in the energy and chemicals industries (oil,pharmaceuticals) and the communications industry(airlines, telecommunications, media). The majority areheadquartered in the Big Three trading blocs (Figure25). And, at the present stage of global economic devel-opment, the international activities of TNCs are tendingto promote English.

Global distribution of labourThe rise of TNCs has supported a new, global distribu-tion of labour: large corporations can shift production tocountries with a cheaper, less regulated workforce. Ifproduction costs in one country become too great,production can be shifted to another part of the world,perhaps with tax incentives and subsidies to start up newenterprises. Although some commentators see this as apredatory, ‘slash and burn’ activity on a global scale,others regard it as an important and benign driver ofeconomic development in third-world countries.

Such shifts of production require in-flows of capital,skills and technology, and are one means by which adeveloping economy is helped to ‘come up to speed’ in ashorter timescale than the industrialised countries them-selves required. This process promotes the Englishlanguage, as the box (below) explains.

Growing complexificationIn February 1996, an oil tanker ran aground whilstattempting to enter an oil terminal off the Welsh coast ofBritain, leading to a major oil spillage and environmen-tal disaster. As journalists tried to establish ‘who was toblame’, they uncovered an extraordinarily complextransnational activity.

Built in Spain; owned by a Norwegian; registered in Cyprus;managed from Glasgow; chartered by the French; crewedby Russians; flying a Liberian flag; carrying an Americancargo; and pouring oil on to the Welsh coast (Headline,Independent, 22 February 1996, p. 1)

One question raised by the tanker disaster was theextent to which key members of the crew could under-stand the English instructions of the local pilot. Laternews reported the need to bring in a Chinese tug and theproblems of interpretation which resulted. Yet English issupposedly the basis for ‘Seaspeak’ – the special Englishused by deck officers as an international maritimecommunication. Johnson (1994) has noted, however, howchanging job requirements have led to an increase in thenumber of personnel who need English language skills:

Scarret (1987) has chronicled the recent trend towards thedemanning of ships and the de-skilling of those crewmembers who remain; Kitchen (1993) has related this trendto the incipient disappearance of the RO [radio officer]from deep-sea ships, and goes on to note the opposition ofinsurance underwriters to such a move. The current trend istowards broad training courses, such as those provided inthe Netherlands which incorporate deck, engine room andradio office skills, leading to the status of ‘polyvalent mari-time officer’. It may well be that, as crews become less tech-nically skilled in the maintenance of increasingly complex

Globalisation


World economies and cultures are becoming increasingly interconnected andinterdependent, politically, socially and technologically: ‘complexification’,‘cross-border activity’ and ‘process re-engineering’ have been the buzz wordsof the 1990s. Here we examine the impact of economic globalisation onpatterns of communication.

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1 Although an incoming company may not be headquarteredin an English-speaking country, it will typically establish ajoint venture with a local concern. Joint ventures (e.g. Sino-Swiss and German) tend to adopt English as their linguafranca, which promotes a local need for training in English.

2 Establishment of joint ventures requires legal documentsand memoranda of understanding. International legal agre-ements are written in English because there exists internat-ional consensus about the meaning of terms, obligations andrights. This activity may create a demand for specialistEnglish language training for lawyers – the case in Chinawhere new courses are being established.

3 A newly established company will be in most cases involvedin international trade – importing raw materials and expor-ting finished goods. This will create a need for back-officeworkers, sales and marketing staff with skills in English.

4 Technology transfer is closely associated with English,largely because most transfer is sourced by a TNC whoeither is English speaking or who uses English for externaltrade. Technology transfer is not restricted to the enter-

prise itself, but may extend to associated infrastructureexpansion such as airports, railways and telecommunicat-ions. In central China, engineers in local steel factories learnEnglish so they can install and maintain plant bought fromGermany and Italy. The predominance of English in techno-logy transfer reflects the role of TNCs more than the factthat much leading-edge technology derives from the US.However, technology transfer to developing economiestends not to be at a leading edge: keeping new technologyin Europe, North America and Japan helps the Big Three tomaintain a competitive edge despite high costs of labour.

5 Establishing joint ventures creates incoming demands frominternational visitors who require supporting services, suchas hotels and tourist facilities. The staff of secondary enter-prises also require training in English for these visitors.

6 Jobs in the new enterprises may be better paid and moreattractive than those in the public sector of a developingeconomy. English qualifications may become an entrynecessity, or have perceived value in access to jobs – even ifthe job itself does not require English.

Figure 25 Distribution of the500 largest global

corporations by worldregion

Why economic development encourages English

Will economicmodernisation continueto require English fortechnology and skillstransfer?p. 61

shipboard equipment, they will all need greatly increasedskills in English, if only to be able to ask for help by radio,and understand the reply! (Johnson, 1994, p. 90)

This illustrates two features of economic globalisation:the transnational nature of ownership and managementand the increasing demand for ‘flexible labour’.Complexity of ownership is a necessary, but at first sightcounter-intuitive, consequence of the concentration ofownership. As TNCs become larger and their enterprisesglobal, new ventures involve considerable risk. No singlecorporation can accept the risk, for example, of establis-hing a global satellite network. Instead, a TNC attemptsto spread the risk of large, single ventures throughcooperation with other large enterprises: they tend to‘hunt in packs’. Thus globalisation is not, as might beexpected, creating huge global monopolies. Rather, it iscreating global oligopolies: a small number of largeoperators who display some of the features of a cartel.Later, we will argue that world languages may be devel-oping on similar lines: rather than English acquiring a‘monopoly’ position as a world lingua franca, there mayemerge an ‘oligopoly’ consisting of a group of majorlanguages, each with particular spheres of influence.

New working practicesGlobalisation has a significant effect on labour practices.The new global distribution of labour has led to a reduc-tion of unskilled jobs in richer countries. But there hasalso been greater pressure, as we have seen, for moreflexible labour. This derives from the speed of corporateand technological change – workers must turn theirhands quickly to a wider variety of activities and retrainregularly. This trend – arising in all economic sectors –has led to a decreasing reliance on key communicatorsand gatekeepers (in the case of maritime workers, theradio officer) who possess specialist language skills.

Trends suggest there is a growing need for people invarious jobs to communicate with each other directly,yet in the transnational activities of world trade, there isless likelihood that they share the same language. As aresult, more people in a wider variety of jobs require agreater competence in English. Figures 26 and 27 illu-strate changes in patterns of communications nowarising in many industries. Case studies in section 4 showhow these changes may affect particular groups ofworkers.

The global-local tension Globalisation is probably the most significant socio-economic process affecting the world in the late 20thcentury. Its effects are felt not only in the economy, butalso in politics and culture. It would be wrong, however,to think of globalisation as primarily a ‘neo-colonial’process – whereby the capital and social values of richcountries are imposed upon poorer ones. Discussions ofglobalisation usually emphasise the importance of localcontexts, for globalisation creates patterns of interdepen-dence and interconnection, where cultures and econo-mies influence each other rapidly, but in complex andoften unpredictable ways.

Rather than a process which leads to uniformity andhomogeneity, globalisation seems to create new, hybridforms of culture, language and political organisation: theresults of global influences meeting local traditions,values and social contexts.


Rather than a process which leads to uniformity andhomogeneity, globalisation seems to create new,

hybrid forms of culture, language and politicalorganisation.

Japan

Korea

Japan

Korea

Indonesia

France

Germany

US/UK

Indonesia

France

Germany

US/UK

Local languagespeakers

Englishspeaker

Figure 26 (upper) English as an internationallingua franca: traditional import-export model

Traditional international trade is associated with:

● Physical movement of goods;

● Interactions with all foreign countriesconducted in English;

● Key intermediaries (negotiators/ inter-preters) with English language skills;

● Manufacture/business conducted in locallanguage;

● Location of workers based on labour costs;

● Communications technology used to controland monitor remote operations.

Figure 27 (lower) English as an internationallingua franca: post-modern/globalised model

In a globalised model, English is associated with:

● Services and ‘knowledge-intensive industries’;

● Working is dispersed – employees do notneed to be in physical proximity;

● All (or most) team members need Englishlanguage skills;

● Local interactions may not be in English;

● Location of workers sensitive to availableskills/knowledge and communications infra-structure;

● Communications technology used to integra-te work of dispersed teams.

Team member

Team member

Team member

Team member Team memberTeam member

Team member

Team member

Team member

Communicationswithin local teamsin local language

Communicationswith members ofother teams in

international linguafranca

Englishspeaker

The immaterial economyAs a national economy matures, there is usually a trendaway from the ‘primary’ sector (resources, agriculture)and ‘secondary’ sector (manufacturing and industry)towards the ‘tertiary’ sector, made up of service indu-stries. It is the tertiary sector which is most languageintensive. Yet the developments in these activities areunder-recorded: many services are internal to largeenterprises and transnational corporations (TNCs),where they remain invisible to standard statistics.

Manufactured goods, however, are clearly becominglighter and a higher proportion of the value of goodsrelates to style, branded image or ‘added value’.

The fashionable talk is about the ‘weightless’ or‘dematerialized’ economy. As production has shifted fromsteel, heavy copper wire and vacuum tubes to microproces-sors, fine fibre-optic cables and transistors, and as serviceshave increased their share of the total, output has becomelighter and less visible. ... The average weight of a realdollar’s worth of American exports is now less than half thatin 1970. (The World Economy Survey, The Economist, 28September 1996, p. 43)

The immaterial economy is bolstered by a majorgrowth in the service sector and this trend is nowhereclearer than in the US, where nearly 75% of the totallabour force was employed in services by 1995. UntilWorld War I the services and industrial sector grewtogether, but afterwards services continued to grow asindustry declined (Figure 28).

According to the Hooke forecasting model, the servi-ces sector will, by 2050, account for 75% of Gross WorldProduct, as opposed to 50% in 1990 (Figure 29).‘Services’, however, includes many disparate activities,from McDonalds to banking, from health to education.Much of the economic activity associated with thesetrends is difficult to measure or survey. The most comp-lete economic statistics tend to be those prepared at a

national level and associated with the movement oftangible goods. Global movements of immaterial goodsand services, particularly involving transfers withinmultinational corporations, tend not to be captured byexisting statistics.

This shift from manufacturing towards services isvisible in the English language itself. The word ‘product’used to be associated almost exclusively with manufactu-red goods. Now it is used with rising frequency inconnection with services. A search through the BritishNational Corpus of English shows how the trend hasdeveloped. For example, the British trade journalCaterer & Hotelkeeper (5 September 1991) demonstratesthe trend in usage in an article about a new, computeri-sed booking service for hotels:

‘Bravo will distribute “UK Ltd” worldwide, and give thetravelling public access to the total UK product,’ saidBravo spokesman John Roussel. ... ‘Essentially it’s anelectronic brochure, but it could be used to promote abranded product, such as a hotel consortium or AgathaChristie weekends.’ (British National Corpus)

The use of ‘product’ reflects the extent to whichservices have become commodified: services are desig-ned, packaged and marketed in ways similar to standar-dised manufactured products. Much of this involvesdiscursive activity. Advertising, marketing, promoting,receiving clients and guests, servicing – all these are acti-vities reliant on language. The British linguist, NormanFairclough, has noted the extent to which language itself– the way flight attendants, receptionists or waiters talkto clients – has become a key part of the ‘product’ offe-red to customers (Fairclough, 1994).

TeleworkingTeleworking – the ability to work away from a centraloffice using telecommunications – has been hailed fordecades as a major shift in working practices. Thechange seems not to have come about in the direct waypredicted, although an increasing number of peoplework at least part of the week at home. Jack Nilles, theAmerican who invented the term, anticipates thenumber will grow to 200 million by 2016. AT&T nowhas a telecommuting workforce of 35,000. However,Nilles does not consider technology as the major deter-minant, but rather management culture: many peoplecould work from home with no more technology than atelephone, but some employers remain resistant(Financial Times, 8 January 1997, p. 6).

Yet new management trends and organisationalstructures are certainly increasing the need for bothdispersed and remote workers. Major growth areas havebeen telesales and support services. British Telecom, forexample, has a dispersed team of directory enquiryoperators working from home, but their work can bemonitored and coordinated by supervisors as easily as ifthey were in a central office. Callers, meanwhile, areunaware of an operator’s physical location.

The more business takes place over the international phonelines, the more the common language of business will domi-nate. Of course English is an open standard – anyone canuse it – but this should be some advantage to Anglophonecountries. (McRae, Independent, 16 November 1996, p. 19)

The immaterial economy


The world’s output is getting lighter. Within a few decades, many morepeople will be employed in the service industries which characteriseeconomic globalisation. New forms of global teleworking are emerging andan increased proportion of the value of goods is produced through language-related activity.

0

10

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30

40

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60

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1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 1995

Services

Industrial

Agriculture

Figure 28 US employment by sector

WWWBRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/

A study of EU workers showed that 20% of workingtime was spent in handling documents. Since documenthandling now involves word processing, email communi-cations, database queries and information retrieval,workers everywhere spend more time using computers.One feature of the weightless economy is the extent towhich labour has become screen based. And suchscreen-based labour is easily globalised using telecom-munications technology.

The trend towards globalised screen-based labourbegan with the sub-contracting of data-entry work fromthe US to the Caribbean. Pearson and Mitter (1993)describe a history of routine punching of computer cardstaking place in Jamaica from the 1970s:

One of the largest and earliest foreign owned companiesoperating in the Caribbean is Caribbean Data Services, asubsidiary of American Airlines, which operates data-entryshops in Barbados and the Dominican Republic. ... A majornew facility, which came on stream in 1989 is the JamaicanDigiport at Montego Bay, which was established for thespecific purpose of promoting off-shore teleworking – bothdata entry and other activities. (Pearson and Mitter, 1993)

Many other, large transnational companies whoseemployees are involved primarily in screen-based labourhave distant and dispersed workers. The New York LifeInsurance Company is credited with establishing the first‘intelligent office work’ offshore, when it opened anoffice in County Derry, in Ireland. Some US 0800 telep-hone numbers, offering telesales and support services,are also routed to Ireland. Some London boroughs havethe administration and issue of parking tickets handledin the north of Scotland. Swiss Air, Lufthansa andBritish Airways have back offices in India handlingaccounting and ticketing queries. British Airways alsoexploits timezone differences by switching Europeantelephone enquiries to their New York office at the endof the British working day. Indian software engineers areemployed to reprogram US supermarket computers tofix the ‘2000’ bug. British railway companies use anIndian back office to process ticketing accounts of thekind which allow travel on different sectors to be attribu-ted to different service providers. A number of internat-ional construction and car companies have design unitsbased in Britain, from where architectural plans, designdrawings and engineering models are daily transmittedto factories and construction sites on the other side of theworld.

Work which once had to be located close to clients orother divisions of companies is now distributed acrossthe world to an extent that is remarkable. The new,globally wired economy has become so significant thattax revenues, based on tangible transactions, are threate-ned, provoking serious discussion in recent years ofintroducing a European ‘bit’ tax on data flows to recoverlost revenue (Independent, 20 January 1997, p. 5).

But the motive of TNCs in relocating back offices orsub-contracting work to other countries is not simply asearch for cheaper and less-regulated labour. TNCs nowroam the world in search of skilled labour, especially forwork in the growing ‘knowledge-intensive’ industries,engaged in the production and manipulation of intellec-tual property. Employers require ever-higher levels ofskills and education in workers. There seems to be devel-oping a new, global English-speaking market in theknowledge-intensive industries. Intellectual property,

documents and ‘speech’ are light: they can be shiftedaround the world easily. English-speaking countries areable to join this global business since many of the jobsrequire a near native-speaker competence: foreign-language skills will rarely be sufficient. Those countriesin which English is a first or second language have aclear economic advantage.

BrandingBranding is one way in which value can be added tomaterial goods through immaterial means. Theconstruction of a brand image is primarily a semioticactivity. Levi’s make jeans, but the value of thesegarments is much greater than their intrinsic value asmanufactured cotton goods: the cultural associations ofbuying and wearing Levi’s permits them to be sold atpremium prices.

The economic activities of clothing production allowsrelatively unskilled labour to be employed in third-worldcountries. A worker producing a T-shirt in thePhilippines, for example, may be paid one-thousandth ofthe final retail value of the goods. Companies such asNike, who have created a global market for their goods,are well known for their propensity to shift manufacturefrom country to country, in search of the cheapestlabour. The added value obtained through marketing,however, is the result of activity in languages and placesother than those in which primary manufacture tookplace. Even goods which have weight (like Coca-Cola),when locally produced and sold, possess a brand imageand added value from a globalised activity.

Semiotic activity is more easily globalised than physi-cal activities. Global branding requires centralised cont-rol of an image: technology allows the intellectualproperty which is intrinsic to marketing (such as images,slogans, video materials) to be moved more rapidly andcheaply than physical goods. The growth of internatio-nal franchising in the fast-food industry recognises thisfact: a branch of McDonalds may be established anyw-here in the world using marketing images and reputat-ions manufactured in the US.

Today, a greater number of goods and products havebecome the objects of style and consumer culture.Correspondingly, an increasing proportion of aproduct’s worth is now semiotic. Whilst there is, as yet,no means of attributing different quotients of productiveactivity to different languages, it does seem that Englishhas become a primary language of design, advertisingand marketing. Software has become more importantthan the hardware in the computer industry; film andprogramme production more important than televisionsand satellites in the entertainment industry. It is a shiftnot simply to services, but specifically towardsknowledge-intensive industries.


There seems to be developing a new, globalEnglish-speaking market in the knowledge-intensive

industries.

0

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60

80

1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050

Perc

enta

ge s

hare

Services

Goods

Resources

Figure 29 Composition ofGross World Product 1990–2050

Screen-based labour

Will the British ‘brand’ of English play an

important role in the 21st century?

p. 57

A new direction?We earlier suggested that it was possible to view globalEnglish as a complex system. Chaos theory, the mathe-matical method of modelling the behaviour of complexsystems, is essentially a model of flow. Already used tounderstand the turbulent behaviour of fluid in pipes, orthe aerodynamics of aircraft wings, the idea of flow canalso be applied to language and culture.

The concept of globalisation includes the ideas bothof flow and counter-flow, producing a tension betweenthe global and local. The English language flows intoother languages, which adopt English words and phra-ses. English also ‘colonises’ the space of other languagesby taking over certain communicative domains. Butlocal languages also influence English, giving rise to newhybrid language varieties in second-language-speakingareas. If we examine communication patterns as flow wemight widen our focus to include the translation of booksor the dubbing of films as they move from one languageto another, or of tourists moving from one city toanother, telephone calls and Internet data carryinginformation and intellectual property from one part ofthe world to another.

Although the modelling of culture in terms of flow isstill a poorly developed discipline, social scientists havebecome more interested in viewing the world in suchways rather than relying on static entities such as‘cultures’, ‘nations’ and ‘national economies’. Appadurai(1990) identifies five global flows in terms of metaphori-cal landscapes. These he terms ethnoscapes (people move-ment), technoscapes (technology transfer, technologyconvergence), financescapes (flows of capital and currency),mediascapes (flows of audio-visual product but also theimages and narratives they convey) and ideoscapes (flowsof ideas and ideologies). Here we examine some of themore measurable kinds of flow, to see what broad shiftsthere might be as globalisation develops.

Flows of peopleThe ultimate drivers of language are the people who useit. People move extensively: for business or education, astourists and pilgrims, as migrant workers and immig-rants, as refugees and exiles, taking with them languagesand cultural values. Desire for physical mobility hascreated further massive industries in transport and servi-

ces. The increase in people flow relates to othersignificant changes – rise of world trade, shifts to servicesrequiring face-to-face contact, wider dispersal of families,the emergence of new cultural diasporas, the operationsof transnational companies and the growing internatio-nal trade in higher education.

Tourism is one well-documented form of people flowwhich has had a significant impact on the use of English.Tourism is of increasing importance to the world econ-omy: Figure 30 shows the development of world tourismover a 40 year period. Some estimates suggest that over10% of the world’s labour force is now employed intravel and tourism-related activities, accounting fornearly 10% of the world’s economy. These figures areset to rise: projections are for 100 million new jobs in theindustry by 2006 (Sunday Business, 6 October 1996, p. 20).Tourism has a ripple effect elsewhere in the economy: inmanufacturing, retailing, services and construction. Andmore destinations are being sought – such as China,South Korea and Indonesia – causing governments toinvest in the infrastructure which supports tourist traffic.

International travel has a globalising effect. Peopleare brought together, businesses and institutions formrelationships of interdependency and closer communica-tion. And, more directly than many other kinds of flow,international travel brings people from differentlanguage backgrounds together, promoting the need tolearn a language in common. But there is also a growingprovision for a customer’s own language, as service indu-stries find they must compete on levels of service. Qantasairline of Australia, for example, requires proficiencylevels in ‘priority’ languages from its staff. An indicationof trends in Asia is provided by a study published by theAustralian government which recently identifiedJapanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Thai aspossessing commercial significance (Australian Languageand Literacy Council, 1994).

While there is little research that allows us to stateconfidently which languages will be encouraged throughwhat kinds of contact, we can assume that internationaltraffic within a single region will encourage the use of aregional language, whereas traffic between two or moreworld regions may encourage one of the ‘worldlanguages’, of which English is the most important.However, while passengers moving between regions suchas the US to Asia may promote English, passengers fromEurope travelling to Latin America may expect to usePortuguese.

One means to forecast linguistic flow is to examineprojected worldwide destinations and sources of passen-gers. Figures for international air travel in 2010 betweenkey regions suggests that major changes will occur inAsia: a region that will by 2010 account for over half theworld’s total international air travel. Some 267 millionpassengers (67% of Asian international arrivals) will bemoving within the Asia Pacific region; the majority of thisinternal traffic will be travelling in a conduit openingbetween the north-east and south-east. A major route isfurther likely to develop between the ‘hotspots’ of Taipeiand Hong Kong. By 2010 this alone may have trafficequivalent to that of London and New York in 1993 (AirTransport Action Group, 1993). The effects on languageare not easily predicted, but it seems likely that thepreponderance of flow between North-east and South-east Asia – particularly as it relates to business activity –will promote Mandarin as a regional lingua franca.

Cultural flows


Language has been regarded since the Renaissance in terms of territory.Statistics about language, culture and economy, collected by internationalbodies, have been based on nation states, populations of speakers andrelative sizes of economies. But chaos theory suggests the concept of flowmay be better suited to understanding language in a borderless world.

0

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19601965

19701975

19801985

1990

Inte

rnat

iona

l tou

rist

arr

ival

s (t

hous

ands

)

Figure 30 Development ofworld tourism 1950–1990

Will the demand forEnglish in the worldcontinue to rise at itspresent rate?p. 60

WWWWORLD AIR TRAFFIC FORECASTS

http://www.atag.org

TELEGEOGRAPHY INC

http://www.telegeography.com

While sales of communications equipment – switches,fibre-optic interfaces, modems, or handsets – can bemeasured in millions of units, it is the flow of communi-cation between countries, via Internet or telephone,which is of greater interest in terms of language.International telephone calls are counted in minutes andare recorded by the outgoing, billing service provider.Worldwide in 1994 there were 53 billion minutes ofinternational telecommunications traffic (MiTTs) whichis expected to rise to 106 billion minutes by the year2000. Figure 31 analyses the 48 most heavily used inter-continental flows in 1994 (as calculated by Tele-Geography Inc.) according to the likely language ofcommunication. It shows English is the dominantlanguage of intercontinental communication, if onlybecause of the massive traffic between English-speakingcountries and other parts of the world.

The dominance of English in the telephone conversa-tions of the world is unlikely to continue for long. Indeveloping economies the communications infrastruc-ture is generally insufficient to meet demand. One figure,often quoted, is ‘teledensity’: the proportion of house-holds with telephones. While the US has the greatestdensity of telephone lines – nearly 95% of householdshave a telephone – in China, the penetration is only3.4% (Wu, 1996). Even with a working telephone inChina, making a call at present is likely to be difficult:‘Long distance circuits in south and central China are socongested that only 15% of the calls dialled get through.The completion rate is only about 60%’ (Wu, 1996, p.703). Yet remarkable targets exist for China’s massivepotential market: one telephone per urban household bythe year 2000; by 2010 a digital network to be in placeand telephone coverage of 25 per 100 people nationally(Walker, Financial Times, 3 October 1995, p. 27).

Indonesia, likewise, is fast installing satellite capacityalongside mobile-phone systems. Rising incomes, greaterdemand for internal communications and a governmentthat in 1994 opened the industry to foreign investmentall promise a new infrastructure over which languageflows will be generated in the 21st century. Here, howe-ver, it is likely to be Bahasa Indonesia which benefits – alanguage currently spoken as a first language by less than20% of the population but as a second language byaround 70%. A high proportion of the increasedcommunication flows within Indonesia and betweenIndonesia, Singapore and Malaysia is likely to be madein the national language. Such contact may be onefactor in encouraging language shift towardsfirst-language Malay usage in the next generation.

Falling telecommunications costs (p. 31) are transfor-ming the relative distances between countries. Figure 32illustrates the new ‘telegeography’ by showing relative‘teledistance’ of countries from Britain in 1997: NorthAmerica is closer than France – which is about the samedistance from Britain as Australia. This shows how theEnglish-speaking countries have moved into close proxi-mity. The changing shape of telegeography, broughtabout both by technological developments and fallingcosts will continue to reshape patterns of language flowaround the world. As communications infrastructuresimprove and relative costs fall, more telephone conversa-tions around the world will be held in languages otherthan English.

Flows of financeLarge volumes of money flow daily across the world ascash, foreign exchange, gold, investment and shares.Foreign direct investment (FDI) has tended to flowbetween members of the Big Three regions: the largestever flow of FDI from one country to another wasrecorded in 1995 from Britain to the US. But TNCshave also contributed to a major flow from the BigThree towards Asia and Latin America, helping createcompanies which themselves export: companies fromBrazil and India are now active worldwide in consumerelectronics, aircraft and hotel management.

But perhaps the most significant flow in terms oflanguage is the increasing vortex of FDI which is occur-ring in Asia between Chinese business interests.Overseas Chinese in South-east Asia account for a muchlarger proportion of business than their numbers suggest:

In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up only 1%of the country’s population but control over half of the stockmarket. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75%respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand theoverseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth.Now they are pushing into Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,Myanmar (Burma) and, yes, mainland China, where theyaccount for about half the foreign direct investment.According to one estimate, the 51m overseas Chinese cont-rol an economy worth $700 billion – roughly the same sizeas the 1.2 billion mainlanders. Their liquid wealth (cash,gold, shares) may run to as much as $2.5 trillion. (TheEconomist, 9 March 1996, p. 4)

Growing intraregional trade and financial dealingsamongst Chinese-speaking business interests will undou-btedly strengthen the role of Mandarin or anotherChinese language such as Cantonese, shared by inter-locutors as a first language, as a regional lingua franca.

World citiesDespite growing urbanisation worldwide, some cities willbe more important nexus points than others for globalcultural, political and economic flows. Indeed, few citiesare likely to become ‘world cities’ in this sense. Knox(1995) suggests three cities are in the first rank of aglobal, urban hierarchy: London, New York and Tokyo.It is in these cities that key decisions which drive globali-sation are taken and through which the global elites pass:

Much of this change has been transacted and mediatedthrough world cities, the nodal points of the multiplicity oflinkages and interconnections that sustain the contemporaryworld economy. (Knox, 1995, p. 234)

World cities provide headquarters for TNCs; they arecentres of finance, focal points for social and technologi-cal innovation and key transport points. London andNew York are likely to remain key world ‘hubs’ throughwhich ideas, finance and people flow.


As communications infrastructures improve andrelative costs fall, more telephone conversationsaround the world will be held in languages other

than English.

Figure 31 Languages used inintercontinental telephonetraffic in 1994 in millions ofMiTTs (minutes ofinternationaltelecommunications traffic)

Figure 32 Teledistance ofselected countries from

Britain in 1997

Communication flows

0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000

EnglishEnglish (Spanish)English (Chinese)English (German)English (Japanese)

English (French)English (Others)

French

Britain(national)

USACanada

AustraliaFranceGermanyItaly

GreeceSingapore

AustriaJapan

MalaysiaTurkey

MoroccoChile

20p

RussiaIndiaNigeriaBrazil

ZimbabweMalawi

ThailandPakistan

IndonesiaUruguaySaudi ArabiaUganda

TanzaniaIran

China

BangladeshFijiIraq

15p

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100p

Hong KongVenezuelaMexicoPoland

60p

70p

AntarcticChadMyanmarN KoreaNigerRwandaVietnam

120p

English and social inequalityIn many parts of the world, English is regarded as alanguage of power, success and prestige:

The global language can be seen to open doors, which fuelsa ‘demand’ for English. This demand reflects contemporarypower balances and the hope that mastery of English willlead to the prosperity and glamorous hedonism that theprivileged in this world have access to and that is projectedin Hollywood films, MTV videos, and ads for transnationalcorporations. (Phillipson, 1996, p. 2)

If English brings wealth, is it also the case that thosewho have no access to English are rendered poor? Inmany countries English has become implicated in socialand economic mechanisms which structure inequality.Whereas in the past poverty has been largely a matter ofgeography, class, gender and ethnicity, now it may alsodepend on access to the lingua franca of a global elite.

Responses to the English 2000 global consultationquestionnaire suggest that most English languageteaching professionals believe English is essential forprogress but do not think that learning the languageleads to negative social consequences:

2.11 English is essential for progress as it will provide themain means of access to high-tech communication andinformation over the next twenty-five years (95% agreed).

1.2 Competence in English encourages elitism and increa-ses socio-economic inequalities (59% disagreed). (English2000, 1995, pp. 55, 43)

However, some linguists in the developing world doconnect English with inequality:

English is backed by international groups which treatEnglish as an instrument of colonisation and as a commo-dity for trade ... It interprets skill migration as brighteninglife chances, and it accentuates the divide between (1) ruraland urban, (2) the developing and the developed, and (3)

elites and masses. It permits better education for a minu-scule minority. At the same time, it inhibits interactionbetween science and society and it inhibits the creation ofappropriate technology. (Pattanayak, 1996, p. 50)

Proficiency in English is not merely an instrumentalaffair – it is too often used as a gatekeeping mechanism.The lack of an examination certificate, or signs, eventrivial, that a writer or speaker is not a native or fluentspeaker may be sufficient to bar access to certain jobs. Italso seems to be used as a screening mechanism for scho-lars submitting papers to international journals, whichare increasingly published in English. The editor ofScience recently commented:

If you see people making multiple mistakes in spelling,syntax and semantics, you have to wonder whether whenthey did their science they weren’t also making similarerrors of inattention. (Floyd E. Bloom, editor of Science, citedin Gibbs, 1995, p. 80)

The role of English-medium educationIn post-colonial countries, such as India and Malaysia,English-medium education provides one of the mecha-nisms of distributing social and economic power.English-medium education in such countries is oftenseen by both parents and children as a means to econo-mic success, but it has been argued that where teachersare not fully proficient in the English language andwhere there is little use of English in the community theaspirant language learner will be condemned to asecond-rate education. English-medium education isthus accused of undermining attempts to improve educa-tional provision and encouraging educational mediocrityamongst aspirant, non-elite groups.

Hong Kong provides an example of the dilemmafacing many parents and, indeed, countries. HongKong’s former status as a British colony establishedEnglish as the language of the judicial and legislativeexecutive. Yet the 1991 census results show that while29.4% of the population spoke English, only 2.2% did soas their usual language; 88.7% spoke Cantonese andanother 10.3% spoke other Chinese dialects. Despitethis, English became the official medium of instruction inHong Kong schools, meaning most of the populationhad to study from a young age through a second orforeign language. In practice, the language of the class-room became ‘mixed code’ – a mixture of Cantoneseand English.

It is widely believed in Hong Kong that this situationhelped the development of an elite group while giving apoorer educational experience to the majority. Mixedcode meant many children failed to improve theirproficiency in English yet compromised their learning ofother subjects. Long before the handover of Hong Kongto the People’s Republic of China, there was growingsupport for the idea of using Chinese as a medium ofinstruction, at least at primary level. A governmentreport explained the dilemma:

It is easier for students to learn through their mother tongueand to continue their secondary education without a switchto a second language. However if the aim of the educationsystem is to produce students with a high level of Englishlanguage proficiency, then English medium instruction canachieve that aim. Chinese medium instruction will not.(Hong Kong Education Commission, 1995, p. 10)

Global inequalities


As developing economies mature and per capita income rises, so social andeconomic inequalities also seem to grow: proficiency in English may be oneof the mechanisms for dividing those who have access to wealth andinformation from those who don’t. The global spread of English may also beassociated with decreased use of endangered languages.

WWWFOUNDATION FOR ENDANGERED LANGUAGES

http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Philosophy/CTLL/FEL/

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES

LISTSERV

http://carmen.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/ell-websites.html

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES FUND

http://sapir.ling.yale.edu/~elf/index.html

LANGUAGE DISTRIBUTION

http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/distribution.html

TERRALINGUA

http://cougar.ucdavis.edu/nas/terralin/home.html

Figure 33 About half theworld’s languages are found in

the rapidly modernising AsiaPacific region (highlighted).

The majority of theselanguages will be lost in the

next century

The social consequences of English-medium educationoften reflects local political and cultural histories anddiffering colonial legacies. In India, for example, Englishhas been accused of being associated with a social elitewishing to maintain its privileged position. Pattanayaksuggests:

there is a parallel between English as a colonial impositionsupported by a segment of the elite and receiving a stiffnationalist opposition, and, on the other hand, the currentelitist imposition acclaimed by a segment of the populationaspiring entry into the elitist privileges and opposed by alarger segment of population. (Pattanayak, 1996, pp. 150–1)

One of the reasons why English education is such asensitive matter in many countries is because the distri-bution of English proficiency may affect the ‘balance ofpower’ between ethnic groups and for that reason besubject to political management. Pennycook (1994)argues that in Malaysia the adoption of Malay as anational language was expected to benefit the dominantMalay community; when it was realised that continuedmultilingual competence amongst the Chinese was cont-ributing to their economic success, attitudes to the use ofEnglish in tertiary education relaxed. Now public debatesuggests a lack of access to English education may disad-vantage young Malays compared to their ethnic Chinesecounterparts. Such interaction of local cultural politicswith global trends can result in unpredictable politicalenthusiasm for English.

The growing provision and encouragement ofEnglish-medium education can upset the traditionalrelations of social power in similar ways. A study of thegender balance at university in Brunei Darussalam(Jones, 1997) showed that more women than men aregraduating with science degrees and obtaining highergrades. Men, on the other hand, form the majority forliterature courses. This reversal of the general trend ingender relations is explained by the fact that science istaught through English – a subject in which, from earlysecondary school, more Brunei girls than boys haveexcelled – whilst literature is taught through the mediumof Malay. This, as Jones points out, could have unpredi-ctable long-term consequences, particularly in a Muslimcountry: ‘increasingly, the male dominated governmentand professions in Brunei are having to make a choicebetween employing well qualified women or poorlyqualified men’ (Jones, 1997).

English and endangered languagesOne of the main linguistic issues facing the world in the21st century is the extinction of a substantial proportionof the world’s languages. Krauss (1992, p. 7), forexample, thought it plausible that ‘the coming centurywill see either the death or doom of 90% of mankind’slanguages’. Many endangered languages are in a regionof rapid economic growth, the Asia Pacific (Figure 33).Figure 34 charts geographical distribution of languages.

This trend towards reduced linguistic diversity is theoutcome of global demographic and economic trends:the local cultures and lifestyles which supported smallcommunity languages are disappearing and their spea-kers are usually those with least political or culturalpower. Table 13 lists some endangered languages inIndonesia, where there is likely to be a substantial shifttowards Bahasa Indonesia – the national language – inthe next few decades.

But it is not only the very small languages which arelikely to suffer from language shift. In Indonesia, thelarger languages such as Javanese (with around 85million speakers) are also likely to suffer. As Tickoo(1993) argued in connection with Kashmiri – one of thescheduled languages of India – such sub-nationallanguages have ‘to live in the shadow of larger languagesor, more truly, at the bottom of a hierarchy oflanguages’. There will be, in the 21st century, a majorshake-up of the global language hierarchy.

English is rarely the main, or direct cause of thislanguage loss, but its global high profile and its closeassociation with social and economic changes in develo-ping countries are likely to make it a target for thosecampaigning against the destruction of cultural diversitywhich language extinction implies. It would not besurprising if anti-English movements worldwide begin toassociate language loss with the rise of global English.

The new information poorThere is yet a further area in which English may beidentified with inequality – that of communications tech-nology. The Internet is not quite the global democraticresource it is so often claimed to be. For those in develo-ping countries, access to knowledge is a costly, proble-matic business and there is growing concern thatunequal access to information technologies will createnew distinctions between the information poor and theinformation rich. For example, the trend for online scho-larly journals, which circulate new research findingsfaster than traditional paper equivalents, may exacerbatethe difficulty which researchers in poorer countries havein gaining access to knowledge:

‘The huge danger is that the Internet might create a globalimpoverished class that doesn’t have access to informationsystems’, warns Martin Hall, an archeologist at theUniversity of Cape Town who often collaborates with rese-archers in other parts of Africa. ‘In five years we will bedealing with mostly paperless journals. Right now manyAfrican researchers depend on charity for their printed jour-nals; paperless journals will be completely denied to thesescientists.’ (Gibbs, 1995, p. 83)

The pattern of unequal access is partly a coloniallegacy: information is piped around the globe byfibre-optic and co-axial cables along the same routes astaken by the Victorian telegraph which linked the Britishempire. Although satellite technology is extending infor-mation access, the areas of the world closest to the infor-mation superhighway are those which the telegraph firstreached. Africa is notably poorly serviced, as are all loca-tions any distance inland from maritime cables. ManyAfrican universities have intermittent, fragile connec-tions to electronic mail which their budgets scarcelyallow them to maintain. It is one reason why, even asAfrican economies develop, many students will have tostudy overseas.


Whereas in the past poverty has been largely amatter of geography, class, gender and ethnicity,now it may also depend on access to the lingua

franca of a global elite.

Europe 3%

Asia 33%

Pacific 19%Americas 15%

Africa 30%Figure 34 Geographicdistribution of the 6,703living languages recorded byGrimes (1996). Over 50% ofthe world’s stock oflanguages are found in theAsia Pacific

Nusa TenggaraABUIADABEANAKALANGUATONI

MalukuALUNEAMAHAIAMBELAUAPUTAIASILULU

SulawesiANDIOARALLE-TABULAHAN

KalimantanAHEAMPANANGAOHENG

SumatraANDIO ARALLE-TABULAHAN

Irian JayaABUN AGHUAIRORANAMBAIANSUSANUSARANDAIARGUNIASASMAT, CASUARINA COASTASMAT, CENTRALASMAT, NORTHASMAT, YAOSAKORATOHWAIMAUYEAWERAAWYIAWYU, MIAROAWYU, NOHON

Table 13 Some Indonesianlanguages beginning withthe letter A which havesmall numbers of native

speakers and are likely tobe endangered

(based on Grimes, 1996)

The local politics of English

Summary


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1 Demographic trendsDemographic trends provide a basis for forecasting the likelyfuture populations of first-language speakers for all the world’smajor languages. With further research and a betterunderstanding of the nature of language shift towards nationallanguages, it would be possible to develop similar forecasts forsecond-language speakers.

2 A new order for the world economyThere is a marked shift in the balance of economic power in theworld which will transform the relative attractiveness to learnersof different languages. It is not just wealth, but the changingway it is created which will have a profound effect on the needfor international languages. The transition to a ‘weightless’economy increases the need for communication across nationalborders. More people will need to acquire a higher proficiencyin English.

3 TechnologyTechnological developments, such as the Internet, are changingthe way the world’s citizens communicate and the wayorganisations operate. But the demography of the Internet ischanging rapidly and the experience of the last 10 yearsprovides no guide to the future. Languages other than Englishare accounting for an increasing proportion of the traffic andcontent of the Internet.

4 Global inequalityIt is not just the pattern of wealth which is changing, but alsopoverty which is being restructured. English plays an indirectpart in the restructuring of inequality around the world as wellas in the loss of smaller languages. The social and politicalconsequences of these processes are unpredictable: together theypresent one of the many ‘wild cards’ in long-term forecasting.

References

Impacts on English


4

● The workplaceEarlier we described how trends in technology, the global economyand demography hold implications for our working lives. Here weexamine the implications of these trends for English language skillsrequired by the new globalised workforces.

● Education and trainingEnglish already shares the languages curriculum in Europe withFrench, German and Spanish, alongside a variety of other languagesfrom Russian to Urdu. Is the same true of schools worldwide? Andwhat role will English play outside school? English-medium teachingis permitting rapid internationalisation of higher education and adulttraining.

● The global mediaNot so long ago, the media industry was bound by the territorial li-mits of the nation state. Today, the media is an international industry,competing to reach audiences with disposable incomes in everyworld region. Is English required to reach these massive global audi-ences?

● Youth cultureThe ‘baby boom’ in the west gave rise to a demographic hump whichhad profound consequences in public policy, the economy and cul-ture. Now the baby boomers of the west are replaced by those inthe non-western world who may have different cultural orientationsand aspirations.

● Internet communicationComputer technology has transformed the way people interactboth locally and globally. Now we are at the edge of a new era ofpersonal and group communications. Will the Internet remain theflagship of global English? And if so, will it be English as we know ittoday?

● Time and placeDiscussions of globalisation emphasise the ‘annihilation of time andspace’ brought about by new communications technology, but thereare some respects in which both will continue to be significant fac-tors shaping economic, political and cultural formations in the 21stcentury.

Many of the general trends that are shaping our livescan be, as we have seen, identified, monitored andassessed using statistical surveys and forecastingmodels.

But what of the less direct ways in which economic,demographic and technological trends affectpeoples’ lives and, in particular, their everyday use oflanguage? There is virtually no context in human lifewhere language does not play an important part.Whether in employment, at home with the family, orenjoying oneself in leisure periods, language plays anintimate role in constructing relationships andidentities as well as enabling people to get thingsdone.

Establishing the practical consequences of generaltrends is an important part of social forecasting andalso the most problematic. It is a great deal easier toplay with numbers than to understand how theymight change the world. When we look more closelyat individual cases, we can see how global trends canhave many different, and contradictory, local effects.Development by no means takes a straight line andthe existence of counter-trends and the differentways in which global trends are accommodated andreshaped by local conditions and cultures, makesprediction hazardous.

The next section identifies selected contexts wherepatterns of language are changing and explores theimpact of the general trends identified in section 3.

English in a globalised workplaceOne of the significant changes taking place in the organi-sation of the workplace today is a rethinking of the wayin which activities are carried out and the way they aremanaged. The approach now experienced by manypeople has become known as ‘process re-engineering’. Itis a process that leads to organisational changes such as‘down-sizing’, management ‘delayering’ and‘out-sourcing’ of ‘sub-processes’ formerly carried out in-house. The final result is usually fewer people directlyemployed by the organisation, a management which isless hierarchical and operational units that are dispersed,each having greater autonomy to take decisions. Work isnow frequently arranged around teams who, instead ofpassing a problem ‘upstairs’ to a line manager, must

work out a solution themselves cooperatively.

Michael Hammer, a current guru of management change isquoted as claiming ‘Reengineering takes 40% of the laborout of most processes. For middle managers it is even worse;80% of them either have their jobs eliminated or cannotadjust to a team-based organisation that requires them to bemore of a coach than a task-master’. (Snyder, 1996, p. 10)

Process re-engineering is itself partly a result of theshift in economic activity towards services and screen-based labour (p. 35) and of the globalisation of bothproduction and markets – with the coordinated activitiesof several companies and complex production implied inglobal operations. Yet process re-engineering is notexperienced solely through transnational corporations.Small to medium-sized enterprises and even a two-person company are now affected. A small company, forexample, engaged in the intellectual property business,can itself sub-contract work to other suppliers, use newtechnology to work cooperatively with distant clientsand, with a World Wide Web page, develop a globalmarketing strategy.

These new forms of corporate organisation and part-

The workplace


Earlier we described how trends in technology, the global economy anddemography hold implications for people’s working lives. Here we examinethe implications of these trends for English language skills required by thenew globalised workforces.

Many books published for English-speaking markets,particularly those printed in colour, are manufactured inHong Kong, where skilled labour is sufficiently cheap tooffset the higher cost and time delays incurred in ship-ping the stock back to the UK, Australia or NorthAmerica. One such book was the first in a series on theEnglish language (Graddol et al., 1996). Here weexamine the process by which this book came to beprinted in Hong Kong, through a print brokers calledWorld Print. The very term ‘print broker’ hints at thecomplex mediating and negotiating role which is anecessary component of any international business.Printing, although part of the media industry, is in manyways like a classic import-export business. It involvesthe bringing together of raw materials and the manufac-ture of a finished product. Like other manufacturingenterprises it requires the physical movement of mate-rials and all the bureacracy which goes with the interna-tional movement of goods. The chain of initialnegotiation was as follows:

1 In the UK, all staff concerned with the book’sproduction (at the Open University and atRoutledge, the co-publisher) speak English. Thedevelopment and writing of the book require advan-ced ‘native-speaker’ skills.

2 Routledge production staff discuss the print contractwith the British representative of World Print (RB).RB is a native speaker who works from home inReading, using fax and telephone to communicatewith British publishers and the Hong Kong office.These detailed negotiations are conducted betweennative speakers.

3 RB discusses the contract with Peter Choy (PC) –the Hong Kong Director of World Print. PC is bilin-gual in English and Cantonese (the latter is his firstlanguage). This stage is conducted in English andlargely by fax. The time-zone difference betweenHong Kong and Britain is 8 hours – which means

that there is little overlap in working time. Butbecause RB is home based, he has greater flexibilityin his hours of work. PC deals with contacts in othercountries – France, Germany and Brazil also throughthe medium of English.

4 PC negotiates a contract with a local printer usingCantonese. The printer does not speak Englishfluently but is sufficiently proficient to accept thewritten contract in English. (This is necessarybecause contract law in Hong Kong is based onEnglish.)

5 The printer instructs his shop-floor workers inCantonese. Few of them speak English.

This procedure has, until recently, been typical of manyinternational business deals. Key intermediaries like PC,or interpreters supporting key negotiators, have supp-lied the bilingual skills necessary to permit communicat-ion between organisations which operate in differentlanguages. In the whole of this transaction, only oneperson required a full bilingual competence.

Increasingly, PC is placing contracts with printers andbinders in mainland China, because of the rising cost oflabour in Hong Kong. He acts as a key intermediarypermitting British publishers, without knowledge ofCantonese or Mandarin, to buy print services fromChinese enterprises. Local enthusiasm for English maybe (temporarily) waning, as Peter Choy explains:

The contracts have to be written in English so wecommunicate everything in English, even with theJapanese. But I think things are changing. Years ago,it was very important – if you couldn’t speak Englishyou weren’t able to get a job at all; if you didn’t passyour English subject, you’d never get a job. But thisis changing here because Hong Kong is going backto China, so more and more Hong Kong people arewilling to spend time learning Mandarin rather thanEnglish.

Case Study 1 World Print in Hong Kong

nership working have led to changes in the structure ofcommunication between workers within large enterpri-ses. Work of all kinds require higher levels of directcommunication – both within work teams and betweenmembers of different teams. The change in communicat-ion pattern was shown schematically in Figures 26 and27 (p. 33); below are two case studies, both in the publis-hing industry, which show how these patterns actuallyaffect the number of people who need English languageskills.

While more workers are expected to becomeproficient in English, changes in communicationpatterns mean they also need a wider range of linguisticabilities. Mercer (1996) distinguishes, for example,between two types of ‘working English’. The first kind isthe communication between other professionals andworkers within the same line of work. These people oftenhave specialised language needs, including a particularvocabulary. This type of working English is not, as it issometimes portrayed, a single, monolithic variety like aspecial dialect of English. Rather, such groups of workersform a community within which a variety of styles andlevels of formality, all distinctive of the occupation, are

used: exchanges between supervisor and factory handmay be different from those between middle and seniormanagement, but all may be said to belong to the samediscourse community.

The second type of working English relates tocommunication with people who are not members of thetrade or profession themselves. This style of interaction isa consequence both of the growth in service industriesand the numbers of employees now required to project acorporate image in their dealings with the public. Manyemployers indeed insist on particular ways of addressingand talking to clients and customers, since this languagehas become an integral part of the ‘service’ offered.

Employees today, as a result of new working practi-ces, have to adopt a wide variety of language styles. ThusEnglish must service a range of corporate roles and iden-tities and must be usable for both team working andservice interactions. Not surprisingly, demands on anemployee’s competence in English are rising. Educationand training programmes are only just beginning to betailored to employment trends.


English must service a range of corporate roles andidentities and must be usable for both team working

and service interactions. Not surprisingly, demandson an employee’s competence in English are rising.

Australia is acquiring a great deal of English languagebusiness from the growing economies of the AsiaPacific, particularly in the ‘knowledge-intensiveindustries’. The country has two immediate advantages;it is in an adjacent time-zone and has native-speakingEnglish workers. The Singapore Straits Times newspaperhas established a sub-editing office in Sydney,connected to Singapore by a leased fibre-optic line.From the base in Australia, editors take stories filed byjournalists in Singapore for the next day’s paper, sub-edit them and prepare page layouts. Despite thephysical distance, the sub-editors’ work is as closelyintegrated as if they were at an office in Singapore.Their work is online and every key stroke passesthrough the fibre-optic link to Singapore. And when thebromide is printed, from which the printing plate ismade, it emerges from a machine in the Singaporeoffice.

Teng Guan Khoo, the chef de bureau in Sydney,explains the process and the rationale behind the move:

In late 1994 the Straits Times set up this sub-editingoffice to provide subbing and layout services for theStraits Times in Singapore. Now the work we do here ispurely for the Singapore Straits Times and our journa-lists edit the stories and design the pages and outputthem in Singapore.

The Straits Times was on an expansion move andthey needed to hire subs for the plant and theylooked at India, Australia and maybe a bit of thePhilippines, but the company decided to come here,because the company felt that Australia providedthe people with the language skills and journalisticexperience. India also provided those skills, but Ithink the Indian infrastructure and technology wasn’tthat up to date – Australia’s telecommunicationsfacilities were much better. In considering thePhilippines we realised that they spoke American

English and because the Straits Times is a BritishEnglish newspaper we felt that the language, spellingand turns of phrase were not suitable for the StraitsTimes.

Our computers are linked to Singapore directly inreal time, we do not do processing offline, ourcomputers are on an optical-fibre link to Singaporefor every second and all the stories we get up onthe system come from Singapore. In other words,nothing is kept in Sydney. Our computers here arebehaving like computers in Singapore. It is like theSydney office is just another section, about 100metres away from the Singapore headquarters. It’slike the guy next door – there is no differentiation tothe computer.

There are advantages and disadvantages to thetime-zone difference. Working in Sydney we aresometimes 2, sometimes 3 hours ahead ofSingapore. That is a disadvantage if we were doingthe late-night shift, which means we would have tofinish at 3.00 a.m. when it is only midnight inSingapore. But if we do the early feature pages, it isan advantage because it means that when we startwork at 10.00 a.m. it will be 7.00 a.m. in Singapore.At that time the computers are very quiet, theresponse from the system is very fast and we do nothold anybody up. So the main computer inSingapore is being used very efficiently.

The Straits Times has traditionally hired sub-editorsfrom Australia to supplement its staff in Singapore,because Singapore has a shortage of skilled labourand Australia has a large pool of journalists who arenative speakers of English. Journalism requires agood command of English because subs have tocheck not only for grammar but also check for libeland they are expected to write good headlines toattract readers.

Case Study 2 Singapore Straits Times

Will English give Britaina special economic

advantage?p. 57

English in European schoolsEnglish is currently the most widely studied foreignlanguage in the European Union (EU): Figure 35 showsproportions of school students studying English againstother languages. It is a dominance unlikely to be challen-ged in the immediate future. The foreign language mosttaught at primary age is English and, as part of widerreforms, teaching of a first foreign language is nowtaking place earlier in a child’s education. In Spain andItaly, compulsory foreign-language teaching is beingphased in for students aged 8, while Greece and Franceare experimentally phasing in such teaching at age 9(Dickson and Cumming, 1996).

As yet there are no clear rivals to English. The posi-tion of French may seem secure, but over one-third ofpupils studying it as a foreign language are from English-speaking countries, where only a minority will ever use itas an international language. Figure 35 is based on datafrom the early 1990s. Since then the national curriculain many EU countries have been restructured, resultingin a rise in hours of modern-languages teaching and abroader range of languages offered. The enlargement ofthe EU itself, with association agreements with Poland,the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Romaniaand Bulgaria, has benefited not only English but perhapsmore particularly German, which is a popular secondforeign language in northern and eastern Europe.

English in schools worldwideA recent study of foreign-language learning in 25 count-ries (Dickson and Cumming, 1996) shows English to bethe most popular modern language studied worldwide.In the Russian Federation for example, 60% ofsecondary school students take English, 25% Germanand 15% French. English may remain the primarychoice, but there are four factors which might upset theseemingly universal trend towards English as the first

foreign language in the world’s schools.First there is growing competition from other langua-

ges outside Europe. The Hooke model forecasts, prima-rily on economic grounds, that by 2010 the languages ingreatest demand by students will be: (1) English, (2)Mandarin, (3) Spanish and (4) Indonesian. And, by2050, Vietnam is projected to be the fourth largest Asianeconomy – outstripping Japan – so it would not besurprising if Vietnamese also emerged as an importantlanguage for the region’s schools.

Second, the education system in any multilingualcountry must cater for several languages used within thatcountry. This may become a more sensitive factor as themovement towards universal ‘language rights’ – inclu-ding the right to a mother-tongue education – growsaround the world. Third, regionalisation may encouragethe use of a non-English lingua franca for trading purpo-ses. Greater use of Spanish in South America, forexample, may affect the popularity of English in Brazil,just as interest in learning English in Hong Kong hasrecently been affected by the perceived priority ofMandarin. And fourth, a new political spirit of‘neighbourliness’ may encourage the study of languagesfrom adjacent countries, rather than those from a diffe-rent cultural and economic region.

Problems of teacher supplyA key problem preventing the effective take-up ofEnglish in the world’s schools is that of teacher supply. Ifa country like Thailand decides to introduce Englishteaching at lower levels at primary age (as it has recentlydone) a massive teacher-training programme is required:there are simply too few primary teachers available withthe necessary language skills and those that do exist areconcentrated in urban areas. But even when teachereducation is effective, schools in developing economieshave difficulty in maintaining teaching staff. Teachersacquiring proficiency in English may gravitate to better-paid jobs at secondary level. And secondary teacherswith good English proficiency may seek jobs in thetertiary sector. Tertiary teachers, whose salaries lagbehind their fellow graduates in private enterprise, willtend to leave their public-sector employment. There isthus a ‘churning’ effect which prevents the achievementof adequate teaching of English at primary level.

Education and training


English already shares the languages curriculum in Europe with French,German and Spanish, alongside a variety of other languages from Russian toUrdu. Is the same true of schools worldwide? And what role will English playoutside school? English-medium teaching is permitting rapidinternationalisation of higher education and adult training.

Malaysia is traditionally thought of as a recipient ofEnglish language and educational services from Britainand other parts of the developed world. It sends manystudents abroad for study and Malaysian universitieshave extensive ‘twinning’ agreements with universitiesin North America, Britain and Australia which provideaccreditation for degree programmes taught onMalaysian campuses. Malaysia intends, however, to useits recent expansion of English-medium education tobecome a regional exporter of educational goods andservices. Here are three examples.

1 An early learning kit, designed to help pre-schoolchildren learn to read in English, has been sosuccessful that the Malaysian developers havedecided to export it to countries like Thailand,Taiwan, Hong Kong and Indonesia. (New SundayTimes, 30 March 1997, p. 41)

2 In 1994, the Malaysian government established aBachelor of Business Management programme inUzbekistan. The Uzbek students, used to studying inUzbek or Russian, required an intensive businessEnglish programme to help them follow lectures.(Malaysian Digest, October 1996, p. 7)

3 In 1997 a new private university (UniversitiTelekom) accepted its first intake of 1000 students,including students from South Africa, Malawi,Guinea, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh andCambodia. Malaysia is encouraging the developmentof such private universities, partly to ‘reduce theexpenditure incurred by Malaysians studyingoverseas’, but also to help position Malaysia in thefuture as an international source, rather than a reci-pient, of high-level educational services. (New StraitsTimes, 27 May 1997, p. 3)

Case Study 3 Internationalisation of education in Malaysia

How will the worldhierarchy of languageslook in the 21stcentury?p. 59

WWWWORLD DATABASE OF DISTANCE

TAUGHT COURSES

http://www-icdl.open.ac.uk/icdl/ICDLdb.htm

One of the most significant educational trends world-wide is the teaching of a growing number of courses inuniversities through the medium of English. The need toteach some subjects in English, rather than the nationallanguage, is well understood: in the sciences, forexample, up-to-date text books and research articles areobtainable much more easily in one of the world langua-ges and most readily of all in English. The move towardsEnglish-medium higher education is having a number oflong-term consequences. First, it accelerates and broa-dens the second-language use of English in both develo-ped and developing countries, creating a constituency ofcollege graduates, many of whom come to use Englishmore extensively for social communication amongstthemselves and some of whom raise their own childrenspeaking English as a first language. English-mediumhigher education is thus one of the drivers of languageshift, from L2 to L1 English-speaking status (p. 10).Second, English-medium education alters the pattern ofsocial privilege (p. 38) which may trigger wide-rangingsocial change. Third, the growth of English-mediumeducation has permitted a rapid internationalisation ofeducation and allows developing countries to repositionthemselves as exporters of educational services (CaseStudy 3).

The rise of the adult learnerIn the 21st century the service sector of all economies isexpected to grow rapidly. Demand is likely to grow inthe tertiary sector and particularly in adult education,where the English language skills formerly taught touniversity students may no longer be sufficient to meetthe needs of new enterprises: widespread reform ofuniversity curricula in English language can be expectedin many countries. The ‘non-formal’ sector and busines-ses requiring in-service retraining are already proving tobe a major growth area. McRae (1997) suggests this maybe an transitional phenomenon: ‘while the key to thevery long-term future may lie in the nursery schools, thekey to the next decade lies in patching gaps in people’seducation and “retrofitting” us with new skills’. But theshift of emphasis from low-skill employment toknowledge-intensive industries means that educatedlabour will be in greater demand everywhere, yet therequired knowledge and skills will need regular upda-ting, creating a more flexible labour force seeking frequ-ent retraining.

The complexification of higher educationGus Hooke has argued that when any developing econ-omy achieves a per capita income of about $3000, thedemand for higher education outstrips the capacity ofthe country to supply. One result is expected to be acontinuing stream of students from developing countriesto those in the first world. The Hooke model forecaststhat the international demand for specialist courses ofEnglish as a second language (ESL) will multiply sixfoldby 2025 and that most of this will be satisfied by UK, USand Australian providers. Since much of the demandwill come from Asia, Australian providers are expectedto benefit more than the US and UK.

However, the higher-education market will becomeincreasingly complex, with growth in arrangements forcredit transfer, accreditation, hybrid courses (such as‘engineering through English’) and new forms of joint-venture enterprise between institutions in the developed

and developing world, alongside the expansion of boththe private tertiary sector and the entrepreneurial activi-ties of public-sector institutions.

These developments will allow a much greaterproportion of students to be educated within their homecountries. Furthermore, some ‘developing’ countries(such as Malaysia) which have expanded their provisionfor English-medium higher education (Case Study 3) willemerge as competitors to developed countries for inter-national students.

An electronic education?The Hooke model forecasts a rapid rise in off-campustraining in the coming decades by distance educationand the growth of English-medium education in manyparts of the world – effectively opening these markets todistance providers in native-speaking countries.However, it is likely to be the smaller educational enter-prises which benefit most. It is surprisingly difficult toprovide for large numbers of students entirely electroni-cally and without local support. The ‘mega-universities’such as the British Open University are more likely toproceed through joint ventures with local institutionsthan to attempt large-scale, long-distance programmes.

Some of this training may also be conducted throughthe ‘virtual universities’ which are now emerging, brin-ging together universities and corporate clients and ensu-ring that training is available to employees in theworkplace. There is widespread expectation that formsof distance education exploiting new technology will playan important role in workforce retraining and reskillingprogrammes in the next few decades. Some industryanalysts have tried to put figures to the trend:

Analysts expect that within three years, some 15 per cent ofcorporate education and training worldwide will be conduc-ted remotely via the more cost- and time-effective use of theInternet, intranet and other technologies. (Kline, 1997)

Such forms of training will allow institutions inEurope, the US and Australia to offer training provisionto the desktops of executives in other parts of the world,without the associated costs of travel and subsistence orloss of productive time. There are, however, severalfactors which may make this route unattractive to trai-nees: the issue of inequality of access (p. 38), which formany countries means technology will be available onlyto workforces of larger transnational companies; the factthat overseas travel is often regarded as an incentive toaccept training; and finally, the lack of a part-time trai-ning culture in many countries, where working practicesare built around the expectation that staff will study full-time for an agreed period.


The growth of English-medium education haspermitted a rapid internationalisation of education

and allows developing countries to repositionthemselves as exporters of educational services.

Figure 35 Proportions of allschool students studyingmodern languages in Europe

English (60.3%)

French (30.4%)

German (5.2%)

Spanish (3.5%)

Other (0.6%)

English-medium higher education

The global presenceUntil the 1990s, the BBC World Service was one of thefew broadcasting institutions with worldwide reach. Itscoverage today spans Europe, the Americas, Asia andthe Pacific, Africa, the former USSR and South-westAsia. In 1996 to 1997 its weekly audience was 143million listeners with the majority in Asia (Figure 36), apresence supported by BBC English, offering teachingprogrammes and materials to many local broadcasters.

The BBC World Service share is, however, a smallpart of a massive industry: many national media conglo-merations, including British television interests, are nowactive on a global scale. It is a business that has beentransformed in recent years by the merging of largemedia groups, one of the most notable being NewsCorp, whose media ownership has included TwentiethCentury Fox, Fox TV network, and two satellite systems,BSkyB and Star TV. US companies, with large domesticmarkets which have allowed the amassing of vastprogramme libraries, have been particularly prominent.In 1994, for example, just under a quarter of Disney’s$10.1 revenue billions came from outside the US. 1996returns should reach 30%. By 2006, it aims for 50% ofrevenue to be made overseas (Guardian, 30 November1996, p. 2). Recently the company merged with CapitalCities/ABC whose interests include 80% of the cablechannel ESPN. Such global expansion has caused manypeople to fear the Disnification of world cultures.

Localising the globalFears that satellite TV will help bring about a globallyuniform audio-visual culture based on US English mayprove unfounded. Satellite television, a technology whichhas the capacity to envelop the world audience with ahomogeneous product, will create greater linguistic andcultural diversity and be more supportive of locallanguages than previously supposed. When global satel-lite TV channels were first established, it was necessaryfor them to reach an audience spread over a large terri-tory: economic logic required the use of ‘big’ languages.And, although the audience would speak many langua-ges, it was the middle class with enough disposableincome to make associated advertising ventures worthw-hile whom the satellite operators targeted – an audiencewho could be reached through English.

Star TV, based in Hong Kong and owned by NewsCorp, was one of the first of the global operators.Launched in 1991 it used a satellite that covered 38nations and capturing a potential audience of 2.7 billionin a wide range of countries including China, Japan,India, Malaysia and Israel. Initially it was aimed at thetop 5% of the audience – well educated, wealthy, profes-sional, and often English speaking (Frendenburg, 1991,cited in Chan, 1994).

When Star TV first launched, the majority of itsprogramming was in either English or Mandarin – inorder to reach the elite audiences from eastern Asia toIndia. But more recently, local programming has beenintroduced:

As more international channels become available on Indiantelevision screens, foreign and Indian broadcasters havebegun to target specific audiences. Star TV, the HongKong-based satellite network which kicked off the Indiancable revolution in 1991, was the first to realise that Indiansdo not like watching serials in Mandarin, and that theChinese reacted equally negatively to South IndianMalayalam songs. ... Foreign broadcasters targeting India’spotential viewership of 500m-plus have realised that thereis no such thing as a pan-Asian market. (Financial Times, 17November 1995)

As the market developed and new channel capacitybecame available, Star TV has promoted local langua-ges. It has struggled with local regulations to offerCantonese programming for music, sports and news,while plans exist to develop its Hindi/Indian program-ming. The company now aims to introduce a new Hindiserial at ‘prime-time’ evening viewing to follow Hindinews (India Today, 30 November 1996, pp. 96–9).

CNN International is also moving into languagesother than English as it launches a 24-hour Spanishnews service for Latin America alongside plans for aHindi service (Financial Times, 9 December 1996, p. 19).Similarly, CBS is to develop a Portuguese language newsservice in Brazil (Independent on Sunday, 2 March 1997, p.2). Perhaps the most remarkable story in this connectionis that of MTV – often regarded as the vehicle forsubmerging the world’s teenagers with US English musicculture (Case Study 4).

The word ‘localisation’ is on the lips of nearly everymarketing manager in global corporations and the drivetowards greater diversity in provision comes from theneed to increase market penetration. It is well knownthat advertising, for example, needs to adapt to localculture, language and social values. But the means ofachieving localisation has come from technology: digitalsystems have expanded transmission capacity so greatlythat now multiple streams can be carried at high speedand at low cost. Compression technology allows 10 satel-lite channels to be carried in place of one analogue chan-nel. With such enormous capacity, most world regionswill be provided with 500 channels or more. For theviewer watching their digital TV system, that will meana greater choice of programming (though not necessarilyhigher quality), much of it tailored to niche audiences.

Linguistic diasporasEurope may be different from other world regions in theway that satellite TV is encouraging the use of English.While it is virtually impossible to know how many homesworldwide are watching what programmes in whatlanguages, the first market-research data is filtering intothe public domain. Table 14 charts European viewing ofinternational channels in a 30 day period in 1995. Froma sample of viewers, it emerged that throughout Europe,70.2% felt able to understand English well enough tofollow TV news or read a newspaper in the language,followed by 43.8% in French and 40.2% in German(EMS Survey, Cable and Satellite Europe, January 1997).Such widespread take-up of English has given rise to ananxiety about the impact on other, smaller languages.One researcher investigating the extent to whichSwedish children watched and understood English-language satellite programming speculated:

In one hundred years’ time, will we still speak Swedish? ...Or will we, few as we are, have become engulfed by the

The global media


Not so long ago, the media industry was bound by the territorial limits of thenation state. Today, the media is an international industry, competing toreach audiences with disposable incomes in every world region. Is Englishrequired to reach these massive global audiences?

0

20

40

60

S Asia

Africa

/ W A

sia

Euro

pe

America

s

Asia P

acific

Form

er U

SSR/

SW A

sia

Figure 36 BBC World Servicecoverage in 1996–7

(millions of listeners)

Arte 27.1BBC Prime 2.8BBC World 3.4CNN Int. 28.1Deutsche Welle 3.4Discovery 10.0Euronews 21.3EBN 2.8Eurosport 43.9MTV Europe 23.5NBC Super Ch. 11.6Travel Channel 4.1TNT 9.7TV5 10.8

Table 14 Percentage ofEuropean viewers

watching satellite TVchannels (30 day period)

‘English empire’ and keep Swedish in the family chest, aquaint relic to be dusted off, polished up and displayed onfestive occasions. (Findahl, 1989)

Yet the growth in satellite TV channels also permitsdiasporic linguistic groups to receive programming intheir first languages. Table 15 shows a range of thelanguages available on satellite channels in Britain in1996. Furthermore, it is not only English language provi-ders who can play the global-alliance game. The Arabiclanguage station MBC based in London has agreed tocooperate with Arab Network of the US in joint produc-tions. TV Asia shows Indian and Pakistani films withdaily news in 5 Asian languages on British satellite chan-nels. And ‘Bollywood’, India’s home film industry, is aready and successful supplier, turning out 300 Hindilanguage films a year and exporting many videos andfilms to expatriates in West Asia and Africa.

DubbingOne of the oldest forms of media localisation is thedubbing and sub-titling of films. In Britain, where theaudio-visual culture and production values require ‘lipsynch’, sub-titling is preferred to dubbing. But in manycountries (notably India) it is normal for locally producedfilms to add studio-recorded sound tracks after shooting;audiences have become used to the lack of lip synchroni-sation that this produces and are more accepting of filmsdubbed from other languages. Dubbing, apart from allo-wing the import of (primarily American) visual andthematic materials, has a linguistic effect. Dubbing ofAmerican TV programmes, for example, is affecting thepragmatics of other languages. Ross (1995) has docu-mented the way expressions like ‘hello’ are dubbed intoItalian. The Italian equivalents, ‘bon giorno’ or ‘ciao’ donot easily match lip movements or length of the Englishexpression. Hence ‘Salve’ has become popular andItalians have begun to use the expression spontaneously.There have been many such subtle effects on otherlanguages which arise from the dubbing of Englishlanguage films and television programmes.

Dubbing also allows the English language mediaindustry to maximise profits by selling to new audiences.Jurassic Park dubbed into Hindi ran for 25 weeks inIndia, grossing $6 million in 1994 (Financial Times, 11July 1996, p. 6). The airline industry too is a major

consumer of dubbed films for in-flight movies. AndEnglish is emerging as a ‘relay’ language for the marke-ting of films: a Hong Kong action movie, for example,may be dubbed into English to show at an internationalfestival. It will then be bought and translated into a thirdlanguage.

Fragmentation of cultureThe global media industry thus has complex effects onlanguages and cultural identities with its competingtrends towards cultural convergence and diversification.Whereas national broadcasting services have played animportant role in the creation of a national cultural iden-tity – through the provision of a shared experience ofrepresentations of the world and significant cultural andpolitical events – satellite TV may be encouraging acultural fragmentation. The programming schedules ofsatellite TV are quite unlike those of terrestrial broadcas-ting: instead of a mixed output held together by conti-nuity announcements, satellite channels offermono-thematic, repetitive schedules which encouragechannel hopping by the viewer. Programming thus nowresults from decisions by the viewer, not the broadcaster.When there are 500 channels to choose from – someshowing the same film but at different starting times,others showing the same film but in different languages –national viewers will no longer have a shared experience.

One source of uncertainty about the effects of satel-lite TV and cultural identity lie in the extent of cableTV. In some countries, cable is the most popular way ofreceiving satellite transmissions. For example, cable TVreached a penetration of 88.6% in Belgium by the early1990s (Paliwoda, 1993). It is not a technology limited tofully developed regions: in India, there are now over 16million homes with cable and an estimated 40 millionhouseholds to be equipped by 2000. Cable also providesa solution to a political as well as a technical problem.The transferring of satellite programming to terrestrialcable systems brings broadcasts under the regulatorycontrol of the state. And cable can offer local services,such as advertisements for local shops or announcementsof local events, blended into a global programming. Thismix of the global and local will provide a somewhatunpredictable context in which English languageprogramming will operate in the 21st century.


When there are 500 channels to choose from ... showing the same film but in different languages

– national viewers will no longer have a sharedexperience.

MTV, the music channel which has done more than any other stationto help create a global youth music culture, has in the past few yearsadopted a policy of localisation – a move which is significant becausemusic is widely regarded as being one of three content areas, alongsidesports and international news, which can operate globally in English.Music programming does ‘not require advanced linguistic skills on thepart of the audience’ (Chan, 1994, p. 120).

MTV currently has 3 world divisions: in Asia, Europe and the Americasreaching 268 million households worldwide (Financial Times Weekend,16–17 November 1996). The company began localising by establishingproduction centres in different world regions to draw on local talentsand aim at local audiences: MTV Europe is based in London, MTV Asiain Singapore. Both are now localising production further. The formeruses centres in Italy, Germany and London, aiming to provide 59%locally produced programming on 3 separate regional satellite ‘beams’.MTV Asia, using regional production centres established in India,

Taiwan and Singapore is guided by a policy of localisation, as DavidFlack, Senior Creative Director of MTV Asia, explains:

Localisation is actually helping build national identity. I’ve made it apersonal rule not to commission anything outside of a country forthat country. If we’re doing a show for Indonesia the title sequenceand all the rest has to be generated by people from that countryotherwise it’s not going to be relevant to them. For youth program-ming we have to mean something to the kids we’re broadcasting to.If we don’t they simply won’t watch us.

We’re not just a music video channel – we’re a place to go to andwe need to keep researching what our audience wants.Broadcasting Mandarin to the Philippines isn’t going to be success-ful, just as broadcasting an international youth programme toIndonesia isn’t going to be successful. English is a kind of hip factorbut it’s good to be talking in a local language.

Euronews English, French, German,

Italian, Spanish

CNN InternationalEnglish

CNBC English

AsiaNet English, Hindi, Gujarati,

Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu

Worldnet English

NBC Super Channel English, Dutch, German

MTV English

Table 15 Languagesavailable on British satellite

channels 1996

Case Study 4 MTV

Will satellite TV bringEnglish into every

home?p. 60

The global teenagerPeter Schwartz, in his classic account of scenario build-ing, describes the emergence of the ‘global teenager’ as a‘new driving force’. As the west’s previous baby boomershave passed through the generations they have requiredcontinual adjustment of public policies and resourcesrelating to education, housing and health policies. Ineconomic terms, they have influenced manufacturing ofclothing, motor vehicles, leisure and employment. And,culturally, they have brought new waves of music, worldoutlooks, affiliation networks and political attitudes.Clearly, surges in the youth population must figure inany strategic thinking about public services, highereducation or provision for foreign-language studies.Today we face a ‘baby boom’ of global proportions withchildren who will become tomorrow’s teenage force:

As the baby boom appeared (or should have appeared) as afactor in every scenario of U.S. behavior in the 1950s,1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, so the wave of global teenagerswill be a factor dwarfing other demographic factors inscenarios starting from 1990, through the next fifty years orso. (Schwartz, 1996, pp. 120–1)

In the non-western world – particularly India, Chinaand Brazil – there is an influential generation emergingequivalent to those that have passed in the west; a boomthat represents a major demographic shift in globalyouth. The populations of the ‘Big Three’ regions haveaged, but those in developing countries are becomingyounger.

Tables 16 and 17 show the expected shift between1995 and 2025 in numbers of teenagers and youngadults speaking major world languages. These projec-tions, calculated by the engco model, must call intoquestion the extent to which global youth culture will befocused on the style and cultural trends of the Big Three

regions, where, since World War II, English has beenthe dominant language of youth style.

It is well documented that the teenage years aresensitive ones for adult identity development and are anage where language shift occurs, establishing patterns ofuse for later years. The future of English as a globallanguage therefore may depend, in large measure, onhow the language is taken up and used by young adultsin Asian countries. The numerical size of the groupapart, there is a significant difference in the new generat-ions of baby boomers from those that have gone before;identity in the future will be acquired and negotiated in acultural context which has global dimensions.

Young people with sufficient income are today beco-ming the target of a globalised industry in media, consu-mer products and fashion: they belong to what might becalled the ‘Sony-Benetton’ culture. Young people inIndia, in work rather than school, with income but nofamily responsibilities, may see themselves as havingmore in common with young people in Brazil than withcultures in their home country. In this way, the sense ofbelonging to a sub-cultural group may not change, butthe sense of where the group ‘is’ may undergo aprofound change. And, of course, the linking of disper-sed sub-cultures can be quickly achieved. Will ‘hangingout’ on the Internet become as formative as hanging outon the street? ‘Electronic media will become not just ameans of communication, but a generator of global style’(Schwartz, 1996, p. 125).

Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the WorldWide Web, recently imagined the future effect of theInternet on a teenage son:

The search engine has shown him a random selection of the643,768 people around the world whose personal readingprofile is identical to his own. ... For your son, the Web isthe gateway not to diversity but to conformity. To be on thetop of the normal curve, a kid his age has to surf the Webcarefully, always sticking to the popular output of the bigmedia companies. It takes a certain sensibility – a cyber-sense of hipness – to select only those places that he canguess the majority of his teen group will be choosing at thesame time. He knows that though he may live in a smalltown in the Netherlands, he is right in the centre of themain trend; he feels the strength of being exactly in tune

Youth culture


The ‘baby boom’ in the west gave rise to a demographic hump which hadprofound consequences in public policy, the economy and culture. Now thebaby boomers of the west are replaced by those in the non-western worldwho may have different cultural orientations and aspirations.

In the 1960s Britain became associated with a strongand vibrant youth culture, revisited in the 1970s withthe punk revolution. Now, perhaps once again, there isa new 90s wave of artistic creativity across a range ofcultural contexts: art, music, fashion and design.‘Britpop’ is one expression of an expanding andinfluential teenage population and both its stars andfollowers are able to enjoy a new global culture; one inwhich the semiotics of music and clothing style arecrossing national and language boundaries more easilythan ever before.

While British lyrics and British bands are highly success-ful overseas, so too are international stars from the US,Europe and Asia. In 1995, Polygram, the world’s largestmusic company, reported top selling international actsof British and American stars in Japan: Bon Jovi, DefLeppard and Janet Jackson amongst them. Polygram

also promotes Jacky Cheung, Faye Wong, Samuel Taiand Mavis Fan in Asia.

There is emerging an extraordinary vitality in this hybri-dity. The music world is now full of ‘cross-over’ genres.Several groups have been influenced by Hindi andKrishna music and have created new sounds and follo-wings. There is also a developing knowledge of musicdiversity in the global music industry: MTV channels (p.47) have a policy of promoting regional bands that arenot American or English. In the teenager’s future world,an appreciation of Britpop or American heavy metalmay sit easily alongside other tastes: ‘To be truly hip inthe world of the global teenager could mean knowinghow to recognise indigenous music from Senegal, NewZealand, Uruguay and the Yukon’ (Schwartz, p. 132).

Case Study 5 Sign of the times

Can anything be done toinfluence the future ofEnglish?p. 62

WWWBENETTON WEB MAGAZINE

http://www.benetton.com/benetton-web/colors.html

MTV ONLINE

http://www.mtv.com/

SONY

http://www.sony.com/

with all his seen and unseen colleagues. And he knows hewears the same sort of clothes and eats exactly what they do.(Berners-Lee, 1996, p. 141)

A branded consumerJust as terrestrial television once provided shared culturalexperiences and helped to construct a sense of nationalidentity for many countries, including Britain, nowglobal marketing is helping to establish a recognisableyouth culture worldwide. It is a culture based aroundownership and use of consumer durables, clothing andcultural products. Such marketing provides both thecomfort of a shared experience and, to some extent, ashared meaning to the products with the implied oppor-tunity for building lifestyles and identities around them.

English plays a complex function in this globalculture. Historically, English has played a key role in thebranding of products. But branding is now commonlyused to communicate not a single product but a set ofvalues and attitudes. Those values and attitudes, engine-ered to have a global appeal, may transcend cultural,religious or linguistic divides. Virgin is one example ofnew-style branding; from record sales to air transport,cola sales to financial services, the brand identity acts asan umbrella for a lifestyle and set of corporate values.

Benetton is typical of the transnational companiesnow targeting youth with clothing and related consumerproducts: the company has expanded its global reach toover 7,000 retail outlets in 120 countries – with 50 newstores in China. Like other companies selling ‘style’products, the World Wide Web and related magazinepublishing form an important part of the company’sstrategy in reaching young adults around the world.Respondents to a questionnaire published on Benetton’sWeb pages suggest nearly 80% of their audience are inthe 11–30 age group. Their magazine, Colors, runs alre-ady to 400,000 copies worldwide, but their communicat-ions policy is a multilingual one. The magazines arebilingual in English and another language: French,Italian, Spanish, German or Japanese. Future editions ofthe magazine will appear in Portuguese, Hindi, Koreanand Mandarin. But significantly, Benetton’s globaladvertising campaigns focus on visual images withouttext. Colors ‘is a visual magazine’.

Transnational companies selling style have no parti-cular loyalty to the English language: they will follow themarket. The logic of globalisation is to sell more widelyby localising products. New technology allows localisat-ion to be accomplished more rapidly and more cheaplythan ever before. With franchise agreements, licencesand the general extension of large companies into nichemarkets, it may be quite possible that the currency ofEnglish is eroded.

Diversity and fragmentationWallace and Kovocheva (1996) in a study of youth cultu-res in western and eastern Europe, before and after thefall of communism, argue:

Youth cultures and consumption have been at the forefrontof spreading new styles across geographical and linguisticfrontiers because they do not rely to any great extent onlanguage: music and sub-cultural styles are transnationaland travel easily across frontiers. Evidence of this can bedrawn from the ubiquity of MTV, a satellite TV channelthat broadcasts nonstop pop videos and to which televisionsets are tuned from Stockholm to Sofia, from Lisbon to Lviv.

… Have youths been absorbed into a generalized consumerculture? Does the ubiquitous presence of plastic chairs, fuckoff graffiti, and MTV indicate the general homogenizationof culture? The answer is no. Although youths across Europemay share similar cultural symbols and styles, thesignificance of these things is very different in differentplaces. (Wallace and Kovocheva, 1996, pp. 190, 211)

Wallace argues the cultural theorists’ point that evena homogeneous product would give rise to differenteffects in different cultures: the uniformity of a culturaltext does not guarantee a uniform reading. This to someextent explains why youth styles are notoriously difficultto predict. Youth culture can be seen as an accommoda-tion to the contradictions of the lifestyles and values ofthe older generation rather than a simple adoption orrejection of them.

Nevertheless, companies like Benetton are trying tomobilise a youth ‘agenda’ intended to unite youngpeople across the world. This agenda includes an aware-ness of the global environment, appreciation of diversityand human rights. ‘If the Earth has become a GlobalVillage, then Benetton is the Village clothing store. Andlike every good leading citizen, it feels an obligation tonot only succeed in business, but also to improve theneighbourhood’. Environmental and social issues mayprovide a better focus for global youth identity thanlanguage. The wearers of the ‘united colours ofBenetton’ may be encouraged to unite in a celebration ofcultural and biological diversity.

There is, therefore, alongside the trend towardsglobal homogeneity, a trend towards diversity. It may bethat the ability to speak languages, even partly, becomesa distinct style advantage. There may be a greater readi-ness to learn new languages in the streets of cyberspacethan in the classroom: Schwartz predicts, ‘In the twelveto twenty-two age group worldwide, knowing severallanguages would be commonplace, and world travelwould be a constant temptation’ (1996, p. 123).

Style and varieties of EnglishEnglish, of course, is not a single, unitary language and itis unlikely that young people accept or reject English onthe basis of its standard form. Young people withinnative-speaking English countries experiment with parti-cular varieties of English in order to present or experi-ence particular social identities: in schools in bothEngland and Australia, for example, children may adoptwords and characteristics from black American speech.Black English for many children is associated withAmerican culture but, perhaps more saliently, withmusic and sports cultures which form part of a globalisedspeech fashion which extends beyond native speakers.Or, as the Australian cultural theorist, John Hartley, hasastutely observed, such usages may appear in advertisingaimed at youth markets with greater frequency thantheir actual use among the young.

Non-native forms of English also may acquire iden-tity functions for young people. In Europe, for example,MTV has promoted the use of foreign-language varietiesof English as identity markers – a behaviour moreusually associated with second-language usage – byemploying young presenters with distinctive French,German and Italian English accents, alongside Britishpresenters with regional accents. Such cultural exploita-tion may indicate that standard, native varieties will bethe least influential for the global teenage culture.


Young people in India, with income but no familyresponsibilities, may see themselves as having more

in common with young people in Brazil than withcultures in their home country.

The engco model predicts ashift in the languages spokenby the world’s young peoplebetween 1995 (above) and

2050 (below)

20501 Chinese 166.02 Hindi/Urdu 73.73 Arabic 72.24 English 65.05 Spanish 62.86 Portuguese 32.57 Bengali 31.68 Russian 14.89 Japanese 11.3

10 Malay 10.511 German 9.112 French 8.9

Table 17 Estimated millionsof speakers aged 15–24

(engco model)

19951 Chinese 201.62 Hindi/Urdu 59.83 Spanish 58.04 English 51.75 Arabic 39.56 Portuguese 32.27 Bengali 25.28 Russian 22.59 Japanese 18.2

10 German 12.211 French 9.712 Malay 9.5

Table 16 Estimated millionsof speakers aged 15–24

(engco model)

The InternetThe Internet is regarded by many as the flagship ofglobal English. A frequently quoted statistic is thatEnglish is the medium for 80% of the information storedin the world’s computers, a figure quoted in McCrum etal. (1986). It is certainly true that growth of computeruse – and of the Internet in particular – has been specta-cular in the last few years. Computers have becomeextensively networked and the networks themselveslinked into the global structure of the Internet. With liveinteraction taking place between users and the store-and-forward messaging systems of the Internet blurringdistinctions between archived and ephemeral copies oftexts, the whole notion of ‘storage’ has been given ananachronistic air. Indeed, a major reconsideration ofintellectual property rights in connection with electronictexts has been provoked in part as a result of the wayinformation and ideas now circle the world.

Using the same infrastructure as the telephone, theInternet carries English language services into nearlyevery country and, with growing private subscriptions,into people’s homes. Data traffic, it is claimed, has nowovertaken voice traffic in the developed world(Independent on Sunday, 17 November 1996, p. 3). Thesystem has its origins in the academic and, in particular,scientific community, which is the longest connectedcommunity of all. English is deeply established amongscientists as the international lingua franca and, from thisbeginning, English appears to have extended its domainof use to become the preferred lingua franca for themany new kinds of user who have come online in the1990s:

The electronic media that bind the world together areessentially carriers of language. To work efficiently, theyneed a common standard. ... The English language is nowthe operating standard for global communication.’(Geoffrey Nunberg of Stanford University, cited in TheEconomist, 21 December 1996, p. 37)

But is it true that the Internet will remain a majordriver of English? At present, the language most widelyused is English, but this reflects the fact that 90% of theworld’s computers connected to the Internet are based inEnglish-speaking countries, as are the computers thathost the publicly accessible World Wide Web sites. Inthis light, it is perhaps not surprising that the majority ofboth traffic and Web sites are rooted in English: atpresent, users in other countries, working in otherlanguages, find that if they are to communicate throughcyberspace, they must do so in English.

Internet growthThe overall shift in predicted Internet use is similar tothat outlined for the economy: the number of computerhosts in Asia eventually will outstrip those in the BigThree countries. Furthermore, the Internet, from itsorigins as a tool for international communicationbetween a global academic elite, will increasingly servelocal, cultural and commercial purposes. And as theInternet becomes more widely used, it is natural toexpect a wider range of languages will be employed.

One issue in monitoring Internet growth is knowingwhat a ‘user’ is. There are many who have access to theInternet for whom it forms only an infrequent or casualmeans of communication. For numbers of those who usethe system, we might find a guide in the plethora ofmarket surveys – a result of growing commercial exploi-tation of the Internet – which seem to suggest, overall,that around 50 million people used the Internet at thebeginning of 1997, of whom around 20% are in Europe.Here, the largest Internet community is expected to bebased in Germany, followed by the UK, the Netherlandsand Sweden. Elsewhere, connections to the Internet arerising rapidly: there were an estimated 100,000 users inChina in 1996, a figure that may have already increasedmarkedly due to a growth in private subscriptions.

As access to the Internet expands in any country, sothe profile of its users changes, as do the functions itserves and the range of languages conveyed across it.Typically, usage focuses initially around the workplace,with the academic community often the first wired, buteventually accounting for a small proportion of users.Surveys tend to suggest most users at present are male,young and middle class. Hence, in many parts of theworld, the demography of the average Internet user

Internet communication


Computer technology has transformed the way people interact both locallyand globally. Now we are at the edge of a new era of personal and groupcommunications. Will the Internet remain the flagship of global English? Andif so, will it be English as we know it today?

Automatic translation of texts was once a far-fetcheddream but has become a practical reality remarkablyquickly. New software is becoming available for themajor languages which operates on desktop PCs andwhich can be embedded in email and computer confe-rencing applications. Thus it may not be necessary foran Internet user to be able to write in English in orderto exchange messages with the English-speakingcommunity. One such message (right) was submitted toa US-based discussion list concerned with adult educat-ion by an Italian correspondent. It shows the possibili-ties (and linguistic hazards) of routine machinetranslation. But what would this mean for the popula-rity of English? And what kinds of discourse communitymight emerge around such machine-mediated English?

Hi. First of all, I apologize for my (bad) English: I am Italian and,as it’s known, nobody is perfect. ... (I’m writing this messagewith the help of a software of automatic translation and there-fore not all the demerits are due to my person. ...)My name is — . I’m a new affiliate to the list and I absolve theinvitation gladly to send a short professional profile.I am concerned with Education & Training from more than 10years. During these years I have taught in classroom, I havedeveloped and projected tens of self-trained courses onvarious topics.Currently I conduct plans of formation for firms of big dimensi-ons and I’m particularly taken an interest in the problematictied up to the Education through the net.You will have a particularly attentive reader in me (I don’t knowif it is a promise or a threat. ...).Kindly, could anybody give me a judgment on the quality of thesoftware of translation done? (in other terms, is it comprehen-sible what do I have written?). Thanks in advance.

Case Study 6 Automatic translation

WWWNUA INTERNET SURVEYS

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi

ENGCO WEB MONITOR

http://www.english.co.uk/future/web.html

INTERNET SOCIETY WEB

LANGUAGE SURVEY

http://www.isoc.org:8080/palmares.html

differs from the population at large: only 25–30% arewomen (12% in Japan) and most users have access to theInternet through their work. It may be that as accessbecomes easier, the demography of the Internet will lookmore like that of the national population, with leastaccess by the rural, poor and unemployed.

The growth of local communitiesThe growth of the Internet has not followed the geog-raphical pattern of spread to which the world has beenaccustomed for centuries. It is moving from a widelydispersed, global network towards one with denser local‘hubs’, rather than starting from a central point andbecoming more dispersed. Hence, although the Internetis usually thought of primarily as a global communicat-ions network, the action on it is likely to be increasinglylocal: ‘intranets’ (Internet-like networks within organisat-ions, often ‘fire walled’ against the outside world) areexpected to grow more rapidly over the next few yearsthan the Internet itself. These intranets will createemployment-based communities which, in the case oftransnational corporations, may extend over nationalboundaries. This may encourage English, but it may alsopermit, say, a Swiss-based company to maintain aGerman-speaking culture amongst its employees. Actionwill be local also in the sense that most communicationsand access will become local in nature. Electronic mailwill be used to contact someone on the other side oftown rather than the other side of the world. Databasesand Web sites are also rapidly emerging which serve thelocal rather than the global community. And as thenumber and density of locally based communicationgroups rises, so will the use of local languages. Yet on theInternet, ‘locality’ will be always a virtual one, allowingmembers of the community, temporarily or permanentlydistanced, to maintain close links.

One of the dislocating features of the Internet is theway it provides access to the ‘local’ by people who arephysically remote. Connecting to a local FM RealAudioradio site in Texas and hearing news of downtown trafficjams, reading the Shetland Times on a Web site anddiscovering the outcome of a neighbourhood dispute,viewing a street scene through a security camera placedon the other side of the world – these provide a means oftemporarily viewing and listening to the world from alocal perspective, as if joining another community. Thiscapability may encourage informal language learning infuture amongst young ‘surfers’ by providing access to a‘live’ local community using the target language.

Internet communication A great deal of communication on the net is not in thepublic domain and therefore difficult to monitor.Electronic mail, for example, is expected to be a domi-nant activity, even when the Web has matured, for itsupports communities much in the way that newsgroupsdo. List servers, sending messages out automatically, alsocreate considerable traffic between members of self-selected groups. The software needed to manage anddistribute such messages once required an institutionwith a large machine permanently attached to theInternet. Now it is possible for an international mailinglist to be managed via a home computer. This is one ofthe ‘democratising’ trends on the Internet: the break-down of gatekeeping and the shift of control to ordinaryusers, in turn leading to informal, vernacular or in-grouplanguage in public places.

This ambiguity and fluidity about the status ofInternet communication is reflected in ongoing tensionas to whether it is conceived of as a form of ‘publishing’or a ‘conversation’. A consensus is needed, not least forlegal purposes. As court cases in different parts of theworld have shown, the Internet has thrown up proble-matic issues regarding intellectual property rights andlibel. But it is clear from research by linguists that newgenres and forms of English are arising on the Internet.The system is not simply encouraging the use of English,but transforming it.

Languages on the WebAs computer usage spreads, it is predicted that Englishcontent on the Internet may fall to 40% of the totalmaterial. The English Company (UK) Ltd has devised acorpus linguistic method for estimating the proportion oflanguages on the World Wide Web which suggests theEnglish language content is now around 8 billion words.The technique will be refined and used to monitor theWeb’s changing linguistic composition. Meanwhile, theInternet Society has reported preliminary findings(Table 18) in a survey of the language of ‘home pages’using a different methodology. The main conclusion isthat languages other than English are now being used onthe Internet and this trend is likely to be of growingimportance. In 1996 the Internet Society published newprotocols for Web browsers which will facilitate the useof Web pages in different languages. In future, browsersoftware will transmit ‘language preference’ informationwhen contacting a remote site. If a page is available inthat language it will be automatically retrieved in prefe-rence to one in English. This means, for example, thatthe Web will appear to be in Spanish to a Spanish spea-ker and in French to a French speaker, provided thehosts contacted maintain pages in these languages.

Software support for automatic language translationis also improving. There is a widespread expectation thatsuch aids will become common, according to a recentDelphi study of the social impact of technology.

The Delphi form ... asked about machines for the translat-ion of texts into different languages, voice recognition tech-nology for translation of speech into different languages,and interactive software for English as a foreign languagecontrolled by the learner. Between 50% and 60% of respon-dents believe that these will be practicable by 2004.(Technology Foresight, para 4.21)

Some of these technologies are, in fact, already avai-lable. In future, it may not be necessary for providers tocreate pages in different languages. The Internet, or theuser’s own computer, may provide an ‘invisible’ translat-ion service. Operated by the Internet, this would workwhen a page is retrieved by a user’s computer, automati-cally submitted to another Internet site (possibly in adifferent part of the world) and then translated by apowerful mainframe computer, before being passed inthe required language to the user who requested thepage. Translation software for major languages is alreadyavailable on PCs and is now used in ordinary communi-cation on the Internet, as the case study (left) shows. Suchlanguage technologies, widely available, maysignificantly reduce the need for learning English for thecasual Internet user, although many linguists remainsceptical whether they provide a reliable means ofcommunication between speakers of different languages.


Browser software will transmit ‘language preference’information when contacting a remote site. If a pageis available in that language it will be automatically

retrieved in preference to one in English.

What impact will theInternet have on theglobal use of English?

p. 61

Language Estimated %servers

1 English 332,778 84.32 German 17,971 4.53 Japanese 12,348 3.14 French 7,213 1.85 Spanish 4,646 1.26 Swedish 4,279 1.17 Italian 3,790 1.08 Portuguese 2,567 0.79 Dutch 2,445 0.6

10 Norwegian 2,323 0.6

Table 18 Languages of homepages on the Web

RegionalisationAlthough GATT and WTO promote international freetrade, much of the growth in today’s trade is emergingwithin regional blocs. Some 76 regional trade agre-ements are listed by WTO, over half of which have beenestablished since 1990 (The Economist, 7 December 1996,p. 27). This rise in regional trade is not simply a conse-quence of the emergence of trading blocs, such as Naftaor the EU; the likely cause and effect is the other wayaround, with economic development brought about, inpart, by the globalised activities of transnational corpora-tions stimulating the formation of regional trade. Giventhis circumstance, as the economies of Asian countriesmature, markets in adjacent countries will look moreattractive than those far away. Such ‘adjacency’ may infuture include ‘cultural neighbourhoods’ as much asgeographical ones. The likely consequence of economicregionalisation, therefore, is the emergence of regionallingua francas other than English.

There are indications that this phase of globalisationis beginning. An international report on language educa-tion (Dickson and Cumming, 1996), shows the popula-rity of English in Thailand is increasing, as in manySouth-east Asian countries. But the author of the profilefor Thailand reports:

Thailand’s role in Indochina has become increasingly moreimportant with the democratisation of the political systemsin Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and possibly Mianmar, andThai businessmen and academics have been participating inthe affairs of these neighbouring countries by serving asbusiness investors, partners, and advisers. At present,English is used as the medium of communication in most of

these situations, but there is a growing perception thatknowledge of these neighbours may be critical in enhancingbetter cross-cultural understanding, a perception that mayhave a future effect on policies for language education inThailand. (Wongsothorn, 1996, pp. 122–3)

This suggests that economic modernisation may beparticularly favourable to English only in its ‘first wave’.As countries rise in economic status, they themselvesmay become the source of skills and technology forneighbouring countries. And as labour in such countriesbecomes more expensive and threatens a country’scompetitive edge in the global economy, they will findthemselves well placed to relocate production in less-developed neighbouring countries. There is evidencethat this is already happening in Hong Kong (relocatingproduction to mainland China) and Singapore (involvedin joint ventures in China, Philippines and India).

Another potentially significant example is Mercosur –a common market established in 1991 between Brazil,Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. It seems that thetrade agreement may be helping to establish Spanish asthe regional lingua franca and may be giving rise to apolitical expectation, as in Thailand, that the languagesof neighbouring countries should be more prominentlystudied:

English became Brazil’s second language in the 1970s. Nowthe challenge is from Spanish. ... Mercosur’s boosters rightlyclaim that language is its secret weapon: where theEuropean Union must haggle in a dozen tongues, Mercosurspeaks in just two and they are enough alike to allow thegroup to dispense with interpreters. ... Mercosur has promp-ted a belated interest on both sides in learning theneighbour’s language. The entire foreign-trade departmentof Brazil’s National Industrial Council, the manufacturers’lobby, is taking Spanish lessons. Portuguese classes run bythe cultural arm of the Brazilian embassy in Argentina areattracting record numbers. Diego Guelar, Argentina’sambassador to Brazil, is encouraging Argentine languageschools to set up there. Within the next two years, the

Time and place


Discussions of globalisation emphasise the ‘annihilation of time and space’brought about by new communications technology, but there are somerespects in which both will continue to be significant factors shapingeconomic, political and cultural formations in the 21st century.

The British Open University has, since 1994, offered anundergraduate degree programme in Singapore whichis jointly managed with local partner institutions. Inrecent years, 2 distance-taught courses in the Englishlanguage have been collaboratively developed withauthors, administrators and editors based in Singapore.The process of project management and exchange ofdraft materials within the UK institution has, in the lastfew years, become based on a mix of email andelectronic document exchange, reducing the depen-dence on face-to-face meetings. This is a process whichlends itself to globalisation: members of course teamswho are currently distributed across the campus inMilton Keynes and who communicate electronicallymight just as easily be dispersed across the world.Messages and draft materials can be exchanged electro-nically over such distances as easily as on the campusnetwork. Indeed, it sometimes happens that messagesbetween Singapore and the UK arrive sooner thanthose sent across the campus, such are the vagaries ofthe ‘store- and-forward’ process which messagingnetworks employ.

But two factors make close integration of working prac-tices problematic: one relates to time zone and theother is cultural. The British working day starts just asthe one in South-east Asia closes. It is therefore impos-sible to take coordinated complex decisions quickly – afull working day elapses between each response andtransporting hard copy and discs by courier remains amore reliable and almost as rapid a method of docu-ment exchange. These limitations are mitigated only bya corresponding trend towards more flexible workinghours on both sides: the working hours of academicstaff overlap and in both locations authors are able tosend and receive electronic messages from home.

The second factor is cultural. It is well known thatAsian, British and European business cultures differ inkey areas, such as patterns of negotiation, approachesto project management, orientation to time andexpectations of working-role relationships. Althoughsome of these ‘cultural’ problems may be institutionalrather than national, they form as effective a barrier toclose integration as time-zone differences.

Case Study 7 The UK Open University’s Singapore programme

Will a single worldstandard for Englishdevelop?p. 56

WWWOUDP PROGRAMME

http://www.sim.ac.sg/infgd/PROGRAM2.NSF/Web/Partner/UKOU?Openview

Brazilian state of Sao Paulo and the Argentine province ofBuenos Aires – Mercosur’s two largest population centres –plan to offer the other country’s language as an optionalsubject in their school curricula. (The Economist, 9 November1996, p. 88)

What this analysis suggests is that the present phaseof globalisation has favoured the English language,primarily because flows and relationships have beenbetween Big Three countries and developing economies.The next phase, however, may favour regional langua-ges. National language curricula in schools may becomemore diversified as the need arises to teach a regionallingua franca together with the languages of neighbou-ring countries. English may be simply crowded out fromits present prime position and demand for English maynot rise as fast as might be predicted from the growth inlocal economies.

Time zonesThe logic of globalisation has led to closer integration ofworking practices of dispersed teams (Case Study 7). Thesame logic has also increased the economic benefits ofbeing located in the same time zone. Technology cannotovercome difference in time as easily as distance. Acommunication may be transmitted instantly to theother side of the world, but action may not be taken on ituntil the next working day. In the late 20th century,three major ‘business’ zones have emerged, based on thetime zones within which the Big Three trading blocsoperate: the United States, Europe and Japan. Thezones are presently based on the main financial centres:New York, London and Tokyo.

The ‘centre of gravity’ of these business zones isexpected to shift slightly in the coming decades,reflecting the changing centres of business. As China andIndia become more important in the global economy,the Asian zone may be expected to shift westwards,between time zones 5 and 8. The European zone mayshift eastwards, reflecting increase in economic impor-tance of eastern European countries. This will placeGermany to a more central time location (Figure 37).

Each of these major zones may develop its own regio-nal language hierarchy. The Americas, for example,might become more prominently Spanish-English bilin-gual. In which case, the Spanish-speaking population inthe US will become an important economic resource. InEurope, the present hierarchy, which positions English,French and German as the ‘big’ languages, may conti-nue, with French gradually being squeezed as the exten-sion of the EU favours English and German. In Asia,complex patterns of regional difference may arise, withIndia projecting the use of English on the western sideand the extensive ‘bamboo network’ of Chinese busines-ses promoting Chinese to the east. However, the factthat Mandarin is a second language for many engaged ininternational trade may complicate its position as aregional lingua franca.

Help or hindrance?The division of the world into three major time zoneswill give rise to new patterns of advantage and disadvan-tage for countries, depending on their geographical loca-tion, time zone, language and culture. Some globalcorporations operating in the services sector, forexample, are able to exploit their dispersion across timezones:

We seem to be moving to a three time-zone world, a worldwhere economic activity is passed from one on to the next,maybe to the next, before being handed back to zone one.One zone performs the night-shift for the other. We talk ofEuropean countries having a time-zone advantage. Londoncan trade with East Asia and North America. (McRae,Independent, 24 September 1996, p. 24)

Thus British Airways is able to switch its Europeanenquiries desk from north-east England to New York atthe close of business each day (customers are said to be‘flown over’ to New York), avoiding the need for night-shift working. Indeed, the telecommunications linkbetween the US and the UK carries more traffic thanany other international channel. But the dominant effectof time zones in a period of globalisation will be to bringcountries within similar zones into closer integration. Inother words, the economic relationship between northand south will become restructured, with countries in thesouth increasingly providing cheaper labour and back-office services for those in the north. North America willdevelop a closer relation with Latin America, perhapseventually forming a single trading bloc. Europe, howe-ver, may find Africa an increasingly important tradingpartner and service provider. Asia will, again, be themost complex region. Australia is well placed to pick upthe English language benefits in the Asia Pacific region,but the role played by Russia is as yet unpredictable.

Russia [...] has a time-zone advantage, in that it runs twotime-economies: if Europe provides only slow growth, it canbenefit from the Asian boom. Only politics can hold it back.(McRae, Independent, 24 September 1996, p. 24)

Following the death of Deng Xiaoping, China hasannounced its intention to develop a closer economicrelationship with the Russian Federation. The linguisticdynamics of any ‘north Asia’ zone which may emergewould be different from those in the south east. Englishis likely to serve functions in all these regions, but it willenter into a deeply complicated system of relationshipswith other languages.


The division of the world into three major time zoneswill give rise to new patterns of advantage anddisadvantage for countries, depending on their

geographical location, time zone, language and culture.

NEW YORK

LONDON

TOKYO

11 10 9 8 7 6 4 3 1 02 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 125

Asian zoneEuropean zone

American zone

Russian zone

Figure 37 The trading days of the three global financial centres span the world. In the comingdecades three major zones of economic activity may emerge. Russia will be in a unique position

in spanning two of them

Summary


Berners-Lee, T. (1996) Europe and the info age. Time, Winter, pp. 140–1.Chan, M.J. (1994) National responses and accessibility to Star TV in Asia.

Journal of Communication, vol. 44. pp. 112–31.Dickson, P. and Cumming, A. (1996) Profiles of Language Education in 25 Countries.

Slough: NFER.Findahl, O. (1989) Language in the age of satellite television. European Journal of

Communication, vol. 4, pp. 133-59.Kline, D. (1997) Net predictions for 1997. http://www.upside.com/McCrum, R., Cran, W. and MacNeil, R. (1986) The Story of English. London:

Faber & Faber. McRae, H. (1997) How will Labour deal with real life? Independent, 7 May, p. 17.

Mercer, N. (1996) English at work. In J. Maybin and N. Mercer (eds) UsingEnglish: from conversation to canon. London: Routledge/Open University.

Paliwoda, S. (1993) International Marketing. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.Ross, N.J. (1995) Dubbing American in Italy. English Today, vol. 11, pp. 45–8.Schwartz, P. (1996) The Art of the Long View. New York: Doubleday.Snyder, D. (1996) What’s happening to our jobs? The Futurist, March–April, pp.

7–13.Wallace, C. and Kovocheva, S. (1996) Youth cultures and consumption in

Eastern and Western Europe. Youth and Society, vol. 28, pp. 189–214.Wongsothorn, A. (1996) Thailand. In P. Dickson and A. Cumming (eds) Profiles

of Language Education in 25 Countries. Slough: NFER.

1 New working patternsGlobalisation affects the ways that organisations are structuredand the patterns of communication between members of theworkforce. There is more communication required; more workis language related and the growth in screen-based labourallows working groups or teams to be internationally dispersed.Two consequences of such changes are that workers in manysectors require a deeper command of English than hitherto anda larger proportion of the workforce need to operate in aninternational language. These developments in working practiceare likely to represent a major driver towards English-languagetraining in the future.

2 Internationalisation of educationGlobalisation is also affecting education – particularly highereducation – and corporate training. Patterns of provision arebecoming so complex that it is difficult to identify purelynational interests. English will provide a means for second-language countries to internationalise their education systemsand thus become major competitors to native-speakingcountries in English-medium education. A second significanttrend is towards distance education. This may benefit theinstitutions of Western countries who will be able to supplyhigh-value training and accreditation services in-country atlower cost than traditional residential courses. However, anexplosion in distance education is already visible in developingcountries, driven by the need to educate more people, morecheaply, with fewer qualified teachers.

3 LocalisationOne of the most significant trends in both satellite TV and themarketing departments of large TNCs is the tailoring ofproducts and services to suit local markets. Language provides akey strategy in achieving localisation. The visual element of USTV programmes, for example, may not change but dubbingpermits the programme to reach a local audience. Localisationincreases the role of languages other than English in domainsformerly associated with English.

4 Youth cultureThe changing demography of the world, in which most Westerncountries are experiencing a decline in numbers of youngpeople whilst those in Asia and Latin America are experiencinga ‘baby boom’, suggests that the focus of a global youth-culturemight shift in the next decade or so from Europe and the US.Although the English language has been associated with aglobal youth-culture, the language does not seem to play assignificant a role as sometimes appears. Clothing and musicmay be more important. English lends a ‘hip’ factor – it will be‘in the mix’ – but other languages will be increasinglyimportant to the world’s young, who are encouraged tocelebrate diversity by the advertising strategies of companiessuch as Coca-Cola and Benetton.

References

English in the future


5● World English

Will a single world standard for English develop?

Will English give Britain a special economic advantage?

Will the British ‘brand’ of English play an important role in the world

in the 21st century?

● Rival languages

Which languages may rival English as a world lingua franca in the

21st century?

Which languages will benefit from language shift? Which languages

will lose speakers?

What gives a language global influence and makes it a ‘world

language’?

● English as a transitional phenomenon

Will the demand for English in the world continue to rise at its

present rate?

Will satellite TV channels bring English into every home, creating a

global audio-visual culture?

Will English continue to be associated with leading-edge technology?

Will economic modernisation continue to require English for tech-

nology and skills transfer?

What impact will the Internet have on the global use of English?

● Managing the future

Can anything be done to influence the future of English?

A ‘Brent Spar’ scenario for English

The need for an ethical framework for ELT

Ways forward

This book has tried to establish a new agenda fordebate, not simply on the future of the Englishlanguage in the 21st century, but also on the role ofits native speakers, their institutions and their globalenterprises.

This final section brings together some of thearguments put forward in the book and shows howthey might help address key questions about thefuture of English. The ‘rush’ to English around theworld may, for example, prove to be a temporaryphenomenon which cannot be sustained indefinitely.Languages other than English are likely to achieveregional importance whilst changed economicrelations between native-speaking English countriesand other parts of the world will alter the rationalefor learning and speaking English.

The ELT industry may also find itself vulnerable toshifts in public opinion, like other global businessenterprises now experiencing ‘nasty surprises’ intheir world markets. An increasing concern forsocial equity rather than excessive benefit for thefew is one expected social value shift which likely toinform both public policy decisions and personal life-choices and this will have unpredictableconsequences for the popularity of learning Englishas a foreign language.

The English language nevertheless seems set to playan ever more important role in worldcommunications, international business, and socialand cultural affairs. But it may not be the native-speaking countries who most benefit.

World English


One question which arises in any discussion of globalEnglish is whether a single world standard English willdevelop, forming a supranational variety which must belearned by global citizens of the 21st century. Like mostquestions raised in this book, this demands a morecomplicated answer than those who ask probably desire.

There are, for example, at least two dimensions tothe question: the first is whether English will fragmentinto many mutually unintelligible local forms; the secondis whether the current ‘national’ standards of English(particularly US and British) will continue to compete asmodels of correctness for world usage, or whether somenew world standard will arise which supersedes nationalmodels for the purposes of international communicationand teaching.

The widespread use of English as a language of widercommunication will continue to exert pressure towardsglobal uniformity as well as give rise to anxieties about‘declining’ standards, language change and the loss ofgeolinguistic diversity. But as English shifts from foreign-language to second-language status for an increasingnumber of people, we can also expect to see Englishdevelop a larger number of local varieties.

These contradictory tensions arise because Englishhas two main functions in the world: it provides a vehi-cular language for international communication and itforms the basis for constructing cultural identities. Theformer function requires mutual intelligibility andcommon standards. The latter encourages the develop-ment of local forms and hybrid varieties. As Englishplays an evermore important role in the first of thesefunctions, it simultaneously finds itself acting as alanguage of identity for larger numbers of people aroundthe world. There is no need to fear, however, that trendstowards fragmentation will necessarily threaten the roleof English as a lingua franca. There have, since the firstrecords of the language, been major differences betweenvarieties of English.

The mechanisms which have helped maintain stan-dard usage in the past may not, however, continue toserve this function in the future. Two major technologieshave helped develop national, standard-language forms.The first was printing, the invention of which provided a‘fixity’ in communication by means of printed books.According to scholars such as Anderson (1983), suchfixity was a necessary requirement for the ‘imaginedcommunities’ of modern nation states. But with increa-sing use of electronic communication much of the socialand cultural effect of the stability of print has alreadybeen lost, along with central ‘gatekeeping’ agents such aseditors and publishers who maintain consistent, standar-dised forms of language.

The second technology has been provided by broad-casting, which in many ways became more importantthan print in the socially mobile communities of the 20thcentury. But trends in global media suggest that broad-casting will not necessarily play an important role inestablishing and maintaining a global standard. Indeed,the patterns of fragmentation and localisation, which aresignificant trends in satellite broadcasting, mean thattelevision is no longer able to serve such a function. Howcan there be such a thing as ‘network English’ in a worldin which centralised networks have all but disappeared?

Meanwhile, new forms of computer-mediated

communication are closing the gap between spoken andwritten English which has been constructed laboriouslyover centuries. And cultural trends encourage the use ofinformal and more conversational language, a greatertolerance of diversity and individual style, and a lesse-ning deference to authority. These trends, takentogether, suggest that a weakening of the institutions andpractices which maintained national standard languagesis taking place: that the native-speaking countries areexperiencing a ‘destandardisation’ of English.

The ELT industry, however, may play an importantrole in maintaining an international standard, asStrevens (1992) suggested:

There exists an unspoken mechanism, operated through theglobal industry of ELT teaching, which has the effect ofpreserving the unity of English in spite of its great diversity.For throughout the world, regardless of whether the norm isnative-speaker or non-native speaker variety, irrespective ofwhether English is a foreign or second language, twocomponents of English are taught and learned withoutvariation: these are its grammar and its core vocabulary.[...] the grammar and vocabulary of English are taught andlearned virtually without variation throughout the world.(Strevens, 1992, p. 39)

However, second-language countries are likely todevelop their own curricula, materials and teachingresources which they will seek to export to neighbouringcountries. In some parts of the world, this may helpbring new, non-native models of English – supported bydictionaries and pedagogic materials – into competitionwith the older standard varieties. There is no reasonwhy, say, an Asian standard English may not gaincurrency.

Smith (1992) carried out an experiment using spea-kers of 9 ‘national varieties’ of English – China, India,Indonesia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines,Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States – inorder to discover whether ‘the spread of English is crea-ting greater problems of understanding across cultures’(Smith, 1992, p. 88). He concluded that there was noevidence of a breakdown in the functioning of English asan international lingua franca but that, interestingly,‘native speakers (from Britain and the US) were notfound to be the most easily understood, nor were they, assubjects, found to be the best able to understand thedifferent varieties of English’ (Smith, 1992, p. 88).

Since the ELT publishers from native-speakingcountries are likely to follow markets – most of the largepublishers already provide materials in several standards– it will be non-native speakers who decide whether aUS model, a British one, or one based on a second-language variety will be taught, learned and used. At thevery least, English textbooks in countries where Englishis spoken as a second language are likely to pay muchmore attention to local varieties of English and to loca-lise their product by incorporating materials in localvarieties of English.

The most likely scenario thus seems to be a continued‘polycentrism’ for English – that is, a number of stan-dards which compete. It will be worth monitoring theglobal ELT market for signs of shifting popularitybetween textbooks published in different standards.

Will a single world standard for English develop?

It has been suggested that the English language willprovide the key to Britain’s economic prosperity in thefuture. After all, if much of the world’s business isconducted in English, this surely will be of advantage tonative speakers. This book presents arguments whichchallenge this idea and suggests that in future Britain’smonolingualism may become a liability which offsets anyeconomic advantage gained from possessing extensivenative-speaker resources in the global language.

There are several reasons why monolingualism maynot be the most advantageous strategy in a world thatincreasingly is bilingual and multilingual, and trade issignificant among them. A greater volume of trade willoccur within Europe in a context where trilingualcompetence (in English, French and German), or at leastbilingual competence, is widely regarded as necessary,especially for trade with peripheral countries. As the‘core’ of Europe moves eastwards, there is a danger thatBritain’s peripheral position will be felt more acutely andits monolingual status may become an economic liabi-lity. In other regions of the world, regional languagesmay become important in business – such as Chinese inEast and South-east Asia, and Spanish in the Americas.The inability to field staff competent in these languagesin addition to English may prove a hindrance as marketsbecome more competitive. The likelihood is that Englishmay be so prevalent in the world that Britain obtains nospecial benefit in having so many native speakers: theadvantage may shift more clearly towards bilingualism.

At present, the English language helps make Britainattractive to Asian companies wishing to invest in facto-ries with direct access to European markets, since manyAsian countries use English as their international linguafranca. But if a country such as the Netherlands canprovide English, German and Dutch-speakingemployees, why establish an enterprise within a mono-

lingual English-speaking area which is peripheral geog-raphically, politically and economically? Britain’slinguistic advantage in attracting investment from Asiamay decrease as English becomes more widely used inother European countries.

English will no doubt remain an important asset toBritain in terms of the production and marketing ofintellectual property; English language materials willcontinue to be important economic resources for nativespeakers. But intellectual property in English willbecome more widely produced and marketed in otherparts of the world.

The global ELT market, similarly, is likely to becomemore complex. As in other global industries, the strategicimportance of alliances and cooperative ventures willgrow. International networks of language schools maytake an increasing market share. Competitors to Britainwill arise in Europe, some of whom will employ Britishnative speakers on a contract basis, while others willestablish offices in Britain. These trends may make it lesseasy to identify distinctively British goods and services.

There is also a likelihood that new ELT providersbased in European and Asian second-language areasmay prove more attractive to some clients than native-speaker institutions. There is a rising demand for cour-ses, materials and teachers which cater for the needs andexperiences of second-language users. Non-native-speaking teachers are not necessarily regarded as ‘secondbest’ any more. More people are asking, ‘How canmonolingual British teachers best understand the needsof second-language users of English?’

Such developments make it difficult to argue thatBritain will have an intrinsic economic advantage basedon language. If Britain retains an edge with regard to theEnglish language, it will be largely because of widercultural associations and its international ‘brand image’.


The likelihood is that English may be so prevalent inthe world that Britain obtains no special benefit inpossessing native speakers: economic advantage

may shift more clearly towards bilingual countries.

Will English give Britain a special economic advantage?

The conventional wisdom is that US English is the mostinfluential variety worldwide. Recent American studiesof the cultural consequences of globalisation suggest:

The global culture speaks English – or, better, American. InMcWorld’s terms, the queen’s English is little more todaythan a high-falutin dialect used by advertisers who want toreach affected upscale American consumers. AmericanEnglish has become the world’s primary transnationallanguage in culture and the arts as well as science, techno-logy, commerce, transportation, and banking. ... The waragainst the hard hegemony of American colonialism, politi-cal sovereignty, and economic empire is fought in a waywhich advances the soft hegemony of American pop cultureand the English language. (Barber, 1996, p. 84)

By 2000, English was the unchallenged world lingua franca.... This language monopoly bestowed upon the UnitedStates an incalculable but subtle power: the power to trans-form ideas, and therefore lives, and therefore societies, andtherefore the world. (Celente, 1997, p. 298)

It will be clear from the discussion elsewhere in this bookthat these commentaries already have a slightly old-fashioned feel to them. The hegemony of English may

not be so entrenched as writers such as Barber andCelente fear. But Barber may also be dismissing the posi-tion of British English too readily. Much of the negativereaction to English in the world is directed towards theUS; most territories in which English is spoken as asecond language still have an (ambiguous) orientation toBritish English (Figure 5, p. 11); British publishers have amajor share of the global ELT market and there aresigns that even US companies are using the British vari-ety to gain greater acceptance in some world markets.Microsoft, for example, produces two English versions ofintellectual property on CD-ROM, such as the EncartaEncyclopedia: a domestic (US English) edition and a‘World English edition’ based on British English.

The future of British English in the world will dependin part on continued, careful management of its ‘brandimage’. Some useful groundwork has already beenundertaken. The support of ‘British Studies’ courses inoverseas universities, for example, has helped shift thefocus from cultural heritage to a more balanced under-standing of Britain’s place in the modern world. There isalso a growing appreciation of the importance of Britishaudio-visual products in projecting an image of Britainas a leader of style and popular culture.

Will the British ‘brand’ of English play an important role in the world in the 21st century?

Rival languages


Which languages will benefit from language shift? Which languages will lose speakers?

This book has identified language shift – where individu-als and whole families change their linguistic allegiances– as a significant factor in determining the relative posi-tions of world languages in the 21st century. Althoughsuch shifts are relatively slow – often taking several gene-rations to fully materialise – they are surprisingly difficultto predict. Most research in this area has focused onmigrant and minority communities who gradually losetheir ethnic language and adopt that of the majoritycommunity. Little research has been conducted onlinguistic migration between ‘big’ languages, such asfrom Hindi or Mandarin to English. But in the next 50years or so we can expect substantial language shift tooccur as the effects of economic development and globa-lisation are felt in more countries. This takes us into newterritory: there has been no comparable period in whichcan provide an indication of what is to come.

First, the loss of at least 50% and perhaps as much as90% of the world’s languages means that the remaininglanguages will acquire native speakers at a faster ratethan population increase in their communities. English isnot the direct cause of such language loss, nor is it thedirect benefactor. As regional language hierarchiesbecome more established, there will be a shift towardslanguages higher in the hierarchy. One of the concomi-tant trends will be increased diversity in the beneficiarylanguages: regional languages will become more diverseand ‘richer’ as they acquire more diverse speakers andextend the range of their functions.

Second, processes of internal migration and urbanisa-tion may restructure residential and employmentpatterns in multilingual communities on lines of socialclass rather than ethnolinguistic community. Parasher(1980) showed, for example, how the rehousing of ethnic

groups brought about by redevelopment created neigh-bourhoods in which English became the language ofinter-ethnic friendship and communication.

Third, economic development is greatly enlarging thenumbers of middle class, professional families in theworld – those who are most likely to acquire and useEnglish in both work and social forums.

Fourth, the growth of English-medium tertiaryeducation worldwide has created a significant transitionpoint in late adolescence for many second-languagespeakers at which English may take over from their firstlanguage as a primary means of social communication.The nature of English bilingualism in many L2 countriesthus suggests that for some speakers English maybecome a first language during the course of their lives,which would upset the assumption that such languageshift can only occur between generations. Migrationtowards L1 use of English by middle-class professionalsmay thus take place more rapidly than has hitherto beenthought possible. India and Nigeria may experiencesubstantial increase in numbers of first language speakersof English in this way and it is worth remembering thateven a small percentage change in these countries wouldgreatly increase the global number of native Englishspeakers.

The languages which might benefit most, in terms oflarger numbers of native speakers, are Hausa andSwahili in Africa, Malay, regional languages in Indiaand Tok Pisin. Russian, Mandarin and Arabic may alsoprofit. English, at the apex of the hierarchy, is certainlyimplicated in this ‘upgrading’ process and will probablycontinue to act as a global engine of change, encoura-ging users to shift upwards from small communitylanguages to languages of wider communication.

Which languages may rival English as a world lingua franca in the 21st century?

There is no reason to believe that any other languagewill appear within the next 50 years to replace English asthe global lingua franca. The position of English hasarisen from a particular history which no other languagecan, in the changed world of the 21st century, repeat.

We have argued, however, that no single languagewill occupy the monopolistic position in the 21st centurywhich English has – almost – achieved by the end of the20th century. It is more likely that a small number ofworld languages will form an ‘oligopoly’, each with parti-cular spheres of influence and regional bases.

As trade, people movement and communicationbetween neighbouring countries in Asia and SouthAmerica become more important than flows betweensuch regions and Europe and North America, so we canexpect languages which serve regional communication torise in popularity. But it is actually very difficult to fore-see more precisely what will occur.

For example, we have noted that economic activity,telecommunications traffic and air travel between Asiancountries will greatly increase. But there are at leastthree possible linguistic scenarios which may developfrom this. One is that English will remain the preferredlanguage of international communication within Asia,since the investment in English may be regarded as toogreat to throw away, or the social elites who have

benefited from English in the past may be reluctant to lettheir privileged position become threatened. Or it maysimply be the most common shared language. A secondscenario is that Mandarin becomes regionally moreimportant, beginning as a lingua franca within GreaterChina (for communication between the regions of HongKong, Beijing, Shanghai and Taiwan) and building onincreased business communication between the overseasChinese in South-east Asia.

The third scenario is that no single language willemerge as a dominant lingua franca in Asia and a grea-ter number of regional languages will be learned asforeign languages. If intraregional trade is greatestbetween adjacent countries, then there is likely to be anincreased demand for neighbouring languages. In thiscase the pattern of demand for foreign languages willlook different in each country.

The position of Russian in Central and North Asia issubject to similar problems of prediction. But it doesseem clear that the global fortunes of Spanish are risingquite rapidly. Indeed, the trading areas of the south(Mercosur, Safta) are expected to merge with Nafta inthe first decade of the new millennium. This, takentogether with the expected increase in the Hispanicpopulation in the US, may ensure that the Americasemerge as a bilingual English-Spanish zone.


No single language will occupy the monopolisticposition in the 21st century which English has –

almost – achieved by the end of the 20th century.

No one has satisfactorily answered the question of whatmakes a language a ‘world’ language. It is clear fromearlier discussions in this book that sheer numbers ofnative speakers do not in themselves explain the privile-ged position of some languages.

David Crystal suggests that ‘a language becomes aninternational language for one chief reason: the politicalpower of its people – especially their military power’(Crystal, 1997, p. 7). Historically that may have beentrue: in the future, it will be less clearly military powerwhich provides the international backing for languages,because of changes in the nature of national power, inthe way that cultural values are projected and in theway markets are opened for the circulation of goods andservices.

What we need is some sense of what makes alanguage attractive to learners, so that we can identifylanguages which newly meet such criteria in the future.This would also allow us to chart and ideally anticipate,the decline of erstwhile popular languages.

In this book we have focused on economic anddemographic factors. Some combination of these mightusefully form a starting point for an understanding ofwhat makes a language acquire importance. The engcomodel provides an illustration of the kind of approachthat can be taken. The model calculates an index of‘global influence’ taking into account various economicfactors which have been discussed earlier, includingGross Language Product and openness to world trade(Traded Gross Language Product). The model alsoincludes demographic factors, such as the numbers ofyoung speakers and rates of urbanisation. Finally, ittakes into account the human development index (HDI)for different countries. This is a composite figure produ-ced by the UN, which combines measures of quality oflife with those for literacy and educational provision. Inthis way, HDI provides an indicator of the proportionof native speakers who are literate and capable of gene-rating intellectual resources in the language.

The engco model of global influence thus generatesa new kind of league table among languages, whichweights languages not only by the number and wealthof their speakers, but also by the likelihood that thesespeakers will enter social networks which extend beyondtheir locality: they are the people with the wherewithaland ambition to ‘go about’ in the world, influence itand to have others seek to influence them. The calculat-ions for the mid 1990s for the ‘basket’ of languages wehave surveyed in this book are as shown in Table 19.

No strong claims are made for the validity of thisindex, but it does seem to capture something of the rela-tive relations between world languages which otherindices, based crudely on economic factors or numbersof native speakers, do not convey. It shows that Englishis, on some criteria at least, a long way ahead of allother languages, including Chinese.

The advantage of the engco index is the way it canbe used to generate projections. As the model is refinedand the full demographic and economic projections forthe countries concerned are taken into account, leaguetables will be published for the decades up to 2050.Preliminary results indicate that on this basis Spanish isone of the languages which will rise most quickly. Thenearest rivals to English – German, French and

Japanese, will grow much more slowly. The relativepositions of the ‘top six’ are likely to change during thecoming decades, but it is unlikely that any otherlanguage will overtake English.

The changing status of languages will create a newlanguage hierarchy for the world. Figure 38 shows howthis might look in the middle of the 21st century, takinginto account economic and demographic developmentsas well as potential language shift. In comparison withthe present-day hierarchy there are more languages inthe top layer. Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish andArabic may join English. French and other OECDlanguages (German, Japanese) are likely to decline instatus. But the biggest difference between the present-day language hierarchies and those of the future willresult from the loss of several thousand of the world’slanguages. Hence there may be a group of languages atthe apex, but there will be less linguistic variety at thebase. The shift from linguistic monopoly to oligopolybrings pluralism in one sense, but huge loss of diversityin another. This will be offset only in part by an increa-sing number of new hybrid language varieties, manyarising from contact with English.

Compare the hierarchy (left)with the one for the presentday. p.13

➤

Figure 38 The world language hierarchy in 2050?

What gives a language global influence and makes it a ‘world language’?

ENGLISH, SPANISH, ARABIC

The big languages

Regional languages(The languages of major trade blocs)

ARABIC, ENGLISH, CHINESE, MALAY RUSSIAN, SPANISH

National languages Around 90 languages serve over 220 nation states

Local languagesThe remainder of the world's 1000 or less languages

CHINESE, HINDI/URDU

with varying degrees of official recognition

1 English 1002 German 423 French 334 Japanese 325 Spanish 316 Chinese 227 Arabic 88 Portuguese 59 Malay 4

10 Russian 311 Hindi/Urdu 0.412 Bengali 0.09

Table 19 ‘Global influence’ of major languages according tothe engco model. An index score of 100 represents the

position of English in 1995

English as a transitional phenomenon


Satellite TV has been regarded as a major driver ofglobal English. Star TV in Asia, for example, usedEnglish and Mandarin in their start-up phases, becausethese are the ‘big’ languages which reach the largestaudiences. MTV is frequently credited with bringing USEnglish to the world through music and popular culture.Thus English language programmes reach the middleclasses in South and South-east Asia in whom thecompanies who pay for advertising are most interested.But the extensive use of English language material alsoreflects the easy availability of English language producton the world market. However, as satellite operatorsdevelop, they need to expand their audiences by increa-sing their reach in individual countries – this meansgoing beyond English-speaking audiences. As theirincome streams develop and as technological innovation(such as digital transmission) make additional channelsavailable, operators will be able to finance and operatechannels more suited to local and niche audiences. Sucheconomic and technological logic explains why Englishprogramming has been so prominent in the 1990s.Evident now is the same logic driving an increase in thenumber of languages and community interests servicedby satellite and cable TV. English language programmeswill remain, particularly in certain content areas (such assport and news), but they will become one of many offe-rings, rather than the dominant programming.

National networks in English-speaking countries willcontinue to establish operations in other parts of the

world, but their programming policies will emphasiselocal languages. CBS, for example, intends to establish anews and entertainment channel in Brazil, broadcastingin Portuguese, not English; CNN International is laun-ching Spanish and Hindi services; Star TV and MTVare rapidly localising – introducing programming in anincreasing number of languages (p. 46).

National networks based in other languages will alsoestablish a greater presence in the global audio-visualmarket. Ray and Jacka (1996), for example, note thatDoordarshan, the Indian state-television company, willlease transponders on a new satellite with a footprintstretching from South-east Asia to Europe. Theycomment, ‘this signals two major changes: the looseninggrip of Murdoch on global satellite broadcasting and theentry of Doordarshan into global broadcasting to Indiandiasporic audiences. [...] there can be no doubt thatIndia will become an even stronger force in world televi-sion in the very near future’ (Ray and Jacka, 1996, p.99). Spanish television networks in Mexico are similarlyestablishing a global presence, producing programmingfor Europe as well as for Spanish speakers elsewhere inthe Americas.

It is thus clear that two trends will dominate thesecond wave of satellite broadcasting: other major worldlanguages will increase their global reach and the largerproviders will localise their services. Both trends indicatea more crowded and linguistically plural audio-visuallandscape in the 21st century.

Will satellite TV channels bring English into every home, creating a global audio-visual culture?

Although the position of English seems entrenched, it ispossible that the extraordinary interest in the languagein recent years will prove to be a temporary phenome-non associated with the ‘first-wave’ effects in a period ofglobal change: the transitional nature of a global econ-omy, the current state of telecommunications networks,the immaturity of satellite television markets, and edu-cational curricula which lag behind the needs of workersand employers. These pages examine why the currentglobal wave of English may lose momentum.

Figure 39 shows the projections made by the engcomodel for speakers of English to 2050. The dotted lines

represent speculative curves for second-language andforeign-language speakers. There is, as yet, no basis forestimating these groups safely – although it is thesecommunities who will in practice determine the future ofglobal English. Nevertheless, the curves are locatedapproximately correctly for the present time (the verticaldashed line) and the speculative curves demonstratesome ideas developed in this book.

First, L1 speakers of English will soon form a mino-rity group. Second, at some point the increase in peoplelearning English as a foreign language will level out. Thisis a demographic necessity, but may be hastened by a‘leakage’ of EFL speakers to L2 status. The key questionis, at what point will the numbers of learners decline?

The dotted line, ‘market share’, indicates a specula-tive projection of the global ELT market open to theELT industries of native-speaking countries, whocurrently dominate global ELT provision. The curvebegins with a notional 50% share, which takes accountof the present closed nature of many national textbookmarkets. The actual share of the market taken by publis-hers and educational providers from Britain, Ireland,US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is at presentimpossible to estimate – but it is the shape of the curvewhich is important. Here it shows a declining marketshare, as providers from L2 territories become moreactive. That British and other native-speaking ELTproviders will find the global market much more compe-titive, will lose market share and may even experience adecline, is entirely compatible with the idea that morepeople in the world are learning and using English.

Will the demand for English in the world continue to rise at its present rate?

0

200

400

600

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050

EFL speakers

L2 speakers

L1 speakers

700

Spea

kers

(m

illio

ns)

Market share

Figure 39 Estimates offirst-language speakers of

English from 1950 to 2050 ascalculated by the engco

model, together withspeculations regarding L2 and

EFL communities


British and other native-speaking ELT providers willfind the global market much more competitive

... and may even experience a decline.

Currently, English is to be found at the leading edge ofeconomic modernisation and industrial development (p.32). The typical pattern of economic modernisationinvolves technology and skills transfer from the BigThree regions (North America, Europe and Japan) as aresult of investment by TNCs, often via joint-venturecompanies: a process associated closely with English.

But as countries benefit from such transfer and ‘comeup to speed’, there develop local networks of smallcompanies supplying the large TNC enterprises. Sincemany such suppliers use local employment, thissecondary economic activity does not stimulate Englishto the same degree as primary activity around TNCs.

There is yet a third wave to be expected in economicdevelopment. Just as the Big Three TNCs transfer tech-nology, not simply to produce goods more cheaply butalso to create new markets, so countries like Thailand

and Malaysia are looking towards their neighbours,including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, as futuretrading partners. The development of such regionaltrade, in which no Big Three country is directly invol-ved, may diminish the primacy of English as thelanguage of technology transfer: the necessary level ofexpertise can be obtained closer to home and morecheaply. Sources of management and technology trans-fer in Asia now include Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan,Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. This third-wave techno-logy transfer – often associated with less than leading-edge technology – may be less reliant on English. But itis equally possible that English provides the means forsuch countries to extend into regional markets.

There is no doubt that it would be extremely helpfulto have a better understanding of how the next phases ofglobalisation will affect the use of English.

The Internet epitomises the information society, allo-wing the transfer of services, expertise and intellectualcapital across the world cheaply, rapidly and apparentlywithout pollution or environmental damage. At present90% of Internet hosts are based in English-speakingcountries. It is not surprising, therefore, that the majorityof traffic and the majority of Web sites are based inEnglish and that those users based in other countries andwho normally work in other languages, find they have tocommunicate with others in the cyberspace communitythrough the medium of English.

Many studies, however, have shown how well theInternet supports minority and diasporic affinity groups.Although early studies of ‘nationally oriented’ Internetnewsgroups (containing discussions of national or regio-nal culture and language) seemed to indicate a prefe-rence for using English (for example, soc.culture.punjabi)others which have become more recently active (such assoc.culture.vietnamese) extensively use the nationallanguage. It is not yet clear why some groups use Englishless than others, but an overall trend away from thehegemony of English in such groups is visible and oftensurfaces as an explicit topic of discussion.

One reason may be that the Internet user base is

developing rapidly in Asia and non-English-speakingcountries. And software technology, such as browser andHTML standards (which govern the HyperText Mark-up Language in which Web pages are written), now alsosupports multilingual browsing (p. 51).

The quantity of Internet materials in languages otherthan English is set to expand dramatically in the nextdecade. English will remain pre-eminent for some time,but it will eventually become one language amongstmany. It is therefore misleading to suggest English issomehow the native language of the Internet. It will beused in cyberspace in the same way as it is deployedelsewhere: in international forums, for the disseminationof scientific and technical knowledge, in advertising, forthe promotion of consumer goods and for after-salesservices.

In the meantime, local communication on theInternet is expected to grow significantly. This, and theincreasing use of email for social and family communica-tion, will encourage the use of a wider variety of langua-ges. English is said to have accounted for 80% ofcomputer-based communication in the 1990s. Thatproportion is expected to fall to around 40% in the nextdecade.

What impact will the Internet have on the global use of English?

Leading-edge technology, particularly computers andinformation technology, has been largely English basedin several respects. First, its research and development isfocused in the US, though often in close collaborationwith Japanese transnational companies (TNCs). Second,the literature and conferences in which research findingsare reported and through which researchers keep up todate with developments elsewhere, are English based.Third, communications technology and document-handling software have developed around the Englishlanguage. Indeed, the notorious history of the asciicoding set which has plagued the use of computersystems for non-English languages for many years, is oneexample. Fourth, the installed user base of new techno-logy is primarily located in the US, resulting in support

manuals, help lines, on-screen menu systems and so on,appearing first in English.

The close association between English and informat-ion technology may prove a temporary phenomenon. Assoftware and technology become more sophisticated,they support other languages much better. Desktoppublishing and laser printing are now capable of hand-ling hundreds of lesser used languages and a wide rangeof scripts and writing systems. Computer operatingsystems and software are now routinely versioned formany languages. In many cases the user can furthercustomise the product, allowing even very small langua-ges, unknown to the manufacturers, to be accommoda-ted. So whereas English speakers used to enjoy the bestand latest technology, this is no longer so true.

Will economic modernisation continue to require English for technology and skills transfer?

Will English continue to be associated with leading-edge technology?

Managing the future


Shell Oil is renowned for its use of scenario planning inthe 1960s, which allowed it to weather the disruptionsfollowing the oil crisis more easily than rival companies(pp. 22–3). But its corporate scenario planning has hadsome signal failures in recent years – it failed, forexample, to ensure policies were sufficiently robustagainst the real-life scenario provided by the Brent Sparoil platform. Shell wished to dispose of the redundantstructure by sinking it in the North Sea. It was aware ofthe environmental issues – there is evidence that, inhindsight, the environmental case was on Shell’s side.But this did not prevent a major public-relations disasterwhich, through boycotts of Shell products in theNetherlands and Germany, hit the corporation’s profitsand brought its reputation under public scrutiny.

Shell’s experience is just one of many recent examp-les of how the international business environment canspring ‘nasty surprises’, often resulting from shifts inpublic opinion. There are two reasons why public attitu-des now have a powerful impact on whole industrieswhose profitability and even viability can be destroyedremarkably quickly.

First is the increasing complexity of global business: ifone sector or product line is hit, then it may have amuch wider and unpredictable impact worldwide.Transnational corporations have discovered that there is‘no hiding place’. An incident in a small, jointly mana-ged subsidiary in a remote part of the world can havemajor consequences for the parent company and otherrelated businesses. Second, globalisation affects not justlarge business enterprises but also the way public opini-ons are formed and disseminated: public attitudes andchanging social values now have a much greater effecton the business environment. In this respect, globalmedia and Internet technologies are helping bring abouta new form of ‘people’s democracy’, of which policymakers of all kinds need to take more serious account.

There are several lessons here for English and those

who supply English language goods and services. Publicattitudes towards massive language loss in the next fewdecades, for example, is unpredictable. It would be easyfor concerns about this issue to become incorporatedinto the wider environmental consciousness which seemsto be spreading around the world. The spread of Englishmight come to be regarded in a similar way as exploita-tive logging in rainforests: it may be seen as providing ashort-term economic gain for a few, but involving thedestruction of the ecologies which lesser-used languagesinhabit, together with consequent loss of global linguisticdiversity. The Shell experience suggests that a direct linkbetween the spread of English and language loss wouldnot have to be proven. Indeed, counter-evidence couldbe brought forward by linguists and yet have littleimpact on global public opinion.

There are other ideological movements which aretravelling in a similar direction. There is, for example, agrowing demand for linguistic rights, within a human-rights agenda, arguing that educational provision in achild’s mother tongue should be regarded as a basichuman right. Such arguments may be carried to theheart of the political process in countries experiencingdemand for regional autonomy or repositioning them-selves as regional hubs for trade and services.

These trends suggest a ‘nightmare scenario’ in whichthe world turns against the English language, associatingit with industrialisation, the destruction of cultures,infringement of basic human rights, global culturalimperialism and widening social inequality.

Clinging to the idea that the presently dominant‘economic rationality’ will continue to direct the futureof English without hindrance during the next centurymight be similar to Shell’s failure to anticipate publicreaction to Brent Spar. But even if economic rationalismlingers, there may come a time when more realisticassessments are made by governments of the long-termeffectiveness of mass English teaching.

A ‘Brent Spar’ scenario for English

Can anything be done to influence the future of English?

Can anything be done by institutions and decision-makers to influence the future of English?

This is a difficult question to answer. There is anargument that global processes are too complex, toooverwhelming in their momentum and too obscure intheir outcomes to permit the activities of a few peopleand institutions, even with coherent policies, to makeany difference. David Crystal suggests that the Englishlanguage may have passed beyond the scope of any formof social control:

It may well be the case ... that the English language has alre-ady grown to be independent of any form of social control.There may be a critical number or critical distribution ofspeakers (analogous to the notion of critical mass in nuclearphysics) beyond which it proves impossible for any singlegroup or alliance to stop its growth, or even influence itsfuture. If there were to be a major social change in Britainwhich affected the use of English there, would this have anyreal effect on the world trend? It is unlikely. (Crystal, 1997,p. 139)

Even if the English language cannot, in any compre-hensive sense, be managed, there is an argument thatcomplex systems have an unpredictability in their beha-viour which needs to be taken into account by strategicmanagement. The institutions and organisations whichwill best survive the potentially traumatic period ofglobal reconstruction which has only just begun, andeven thrive during it, will be those which have the bestunderstanding of the changing position of English inlocal markets, which can adapt the products and servicesthey offer most quickly and effectively and which knowhow to establish appropriate alliances and partnerships.

But the function of strategic management can extendbeyond ensuring either survival or the exploitation ofchanging conditions in the marketplace. In complexsystems, small forces, strategically placed, can lead tolarge global effects. There is no way, at present, ofknowing what nudges placed where will have whatconsequences. But careful strategic planning, far-sightedmanagement, thoughtful preparation and focused actionnow could indeed help secure a position for BritishEnglish language services in the 21st century.


The ELT industry will have to respond to changinginternational social values ... to ensure that the

reputation of Britain, of the British people and theirlanguage, is enhanced rather than diminished.

The need for an ethical framework for ELT

This book has aimed to establish a new agenda fordebate, not simply on the future of the English languagein the 21st century, but also on the role of its nativespeakers, their institutions and their global enterprises.For this reason the book identifies some of the keyquestions and has drawn attention to a number of areaswhich will repay further investigation and development.

● Supporting a debate on the future of English. Many of thetopics raised briefly in this book would repay furtherdiscussion and consultation with experts in thevarious areas of concern (such as economists, techno-logists, cultural theorists, business managers). Thiscan be taken forward in a variety of ways: seminars,further publications or Internet discussion groups.

● Building better forecasting models. The forecasting modelsupon which this book draws (such as the engcomodel) show the value of modelling for certainpurposes. There is more that can be done in thisdirection to understand better the patterns oflanguage shift and to model the future populations ofsecond-language speakers.

● Scenario building. It is suggested that building scenariosfor English in different parts of the world would helpto explore further the impact on the Englishlanguage of the complex interaction of global econo-mic and technological trends. This is not a project tobe undertaken lightly, but it is likely to repay theinvestment by providing a structure within whichlocal knowledge and experience can be centrally

coordinated. The ‘Brent Spar’ scenario is only onepossibility. Others relate to the future language useand loyalties of the global teenager and the impact ofthe growing middle and professional classes in Asia.

● Brand management. One way of managing the complexattitudes and responses to English by the worldpublic to the benefit of Britain is through more care-ful ‘brand management’. A debate would be timelyon how Britain’s ELT providers can cooperativelyprepare for the need to build and maintain theBritish brand and how the promotion of Englishlanguage goods and services relates to the widerimage of Britain as a leading-edge provider of cultu-ral and knowledge-based products. The way Englishis promoted and marketed may play a key role inpositioning Britain as one of the 21st century’sforward-thinking nations.

The indications are that English will enjoy a specialposition in the multilingual society of the 21st century: itwill be the only language to appear in the language mixin every part of the world. This, however, does not callfor an unproblematic celebration by native speakers ofEnglish. Yesterday it was the world’s poor who weremultilingual; tomorrow it will also be the global elite. Sowe must not be hypnotised by the fact that this elite willspeak English: the more significant fact may be that,unlike the majority of present-day native English spea-kers, they will also speak at least one other language –probably more fluently and with greater cultural loyalty.

Ways forward

There is a growing appreciation that the business envi-ronment of the next century will require global enterpri-ses to meet three ‘bottom lines’: economic prosperity,environmental protection and social equity. Public trustin the institutions and organisations which provide goodsand services may in the future represent a more impor-tant component of brand image than the quality of theproduct itself. Hence ethical, as well as environmental,values are likely to come under increasing public scru-tiny and significantly influence customer loyalty.

However, one of the problems facing the proponentsof an ethical approach to English teaching is that no oneis sure where the moral high ground lies when it comesto the export of ELT goods and services. English has forlong been seen as a ‘clean’ and safe export, one withoutsome of the complex moral implications associated withthe sale of products such as weapons or military vehicles.The ELT industry has been portrayed as one whichbenefits both producer and consumer and both export-ing and importing countries. It has been a major compo-nent in overseas aid as well as a commercial enterprise.

How then, can the teaching of English be broughtwithin a more ethical framework? What social responsi-bilities are associated with the promotion and teaching ofEnglish? There is a growing concern about endangeredlanguages but very little debate about the management

of large languages, of which English is the largest.A more sensitive approach will be needed in the

future, which recognises that English is not a universalpanacea for social, economic and political ills and thatteaching methods and materials, and educational poli-cies, need to be adapted for local contexts. The world isbecoming aware of the fate of endangered languages andmore anxious over the long-term impact of English onworld cultures, national institutions and local ways oflife. Perhaps a combination of circumstances – such asshifting public values, changed economic priorities andregional political expediency – could bring about a seri-ous reversal for British ELT providers at some point inthe future. The development of a ‘Brent Spar’ scenariofor English might help explore possible chains of events.

Whether such a discussion is held in terms of global‘brand management’, the need to adapt to a changingbusiness environment, or a moral requirement to workwithin an ethical framework, the ELT industry will haveto respond to changing international social values. Thiswould bring a major exporting activity into the sameframework which is now expected to regulate tradingrelations with other countries and would help to ensurethat the reputation of Britain, of the British people andtheir language, is enhanced rather than diminished inthe coming century.


References (section 5)Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Barber, B.R. (1996) Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine Books.Celente, G. (1997) Trends 2000: how to prepare for and profit from the changes of the 21st

century. New York: Warner Books.Crystal, D. (1997) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Parasher, S.N. (1980) Mother-tongue English diglossia: a case study of educated

English bilinguals’ language use. Anthropological Linguistics vol. 22, pp. 151–68. Ray, M. and Jacka, E. (1996) Indian television: an emerging regional force. In J.

Sinclair, E. Jacka and S. Cunningham (eds) New Patterns in Global Television:peripheral vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, L.E. (1992) Spread of English and matters of intelligibility. In B.B.Kachru (ed) The Other Tongue: English across cultures. Urbana: University ofIllinois Press.

Strevens, P. (1992) English as an international language: directions in the 1990s.In B.B. Kachru (ed) The Other Tongue: English across cultures. Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press.

The engco modelThe engco forecasting model has been designed by The EnglishCompany (UK) Ltd as a means of examining the relative status ofworld languages and making forecasts of the numbers of speakers ofdifferent languages based on demographic, human development andeconomic data. The figures reported in this document are based ondemographic projections from World Population Prospects 1950–2050(1996 Revision) and Sex and Age Quinquennial 1950–2050 (1996 Revision) inmachine-readable data sets made available by the United Nations in1997, on economic data for 1994 from the World Bank, and from esti-mates of proportions of national populations speaking different langua-ges taken from national census data and a variety of reference sources.

The main purpose of the model is to explore the potential impact ofurbanisation and economic development on the global linguistic lands-cape of the 21st century. Further explanations of the assumptions madeby the engco model, together with any other reports and revisedprojections, can be found from time to time on The English Company(UK) Ltd’s Internet site (http://www.english.co.uk).

Tables page1 Major world languages according to the engco model 82 Major international domains of English 83 Disciplines in which German academics claim English as their

working language 94 Native speakers of English 105 Second-language speakers of English 116 Countries in transition from EFL to L2 status 117 Native-speaker numbers for major world languages in 2050 278 The 10 largest cities in the year 2000 279 Estimated economic strength of languages 29

10 Estimates of Gross Language Product of major languages 2911 Major languages by Traded GLP 2912 Seven ages of the technological economy 3113 Indonesian languages likely to be endangered 3914 Percentage of European viewers watching satellite TV 4615 Languages available on British satellite channels 1996 4716 Estimated millions of speakers aged 15–24 1995 4917 Estimated millions of speakers aged 15–24 2050 4918 Languages of home pages on the Web 5119 ‘Global influence’ of major languages 59

Figures page1 Will English remain the world’s language? 22 The proportion of the world’s books annually published 93 The three circles of English according to Kachru 104 Showing the three circles of English as overlapping 105 The branches of world English 116 A language hierarchy for India 127 A language hierarchy for the European Union 138 The world language hierarchy 139 Lexical diffusion of a sound change 18

10 Singular verbs used with collective noun subjects 1811 Projected increase in Internet users 1912 Cyclical patterns in student enrolments 1913 Monthly electricity consumption 20

14 Young native speakers of English and Malay, 1950–2050 2115 Forecast of social value shifts amongst ‘trend setters’ 2316 Forecasting, scenario planning and hope 2317 World population growth 2618 Demographic estimates of first-language speakers 2619 The ethnic composition of the US population 2620 Length of time taken to double per capita income 2821 Proportions of world wealth in 1990 2922 Estimated shares of world wealth in 2050 2923 Language-engineering products available for major languages 3024 Falling cost of making a transatlantic telephone call 3125 Distribution of the 500 largest global corporations 3226 Traditional import-export model of English 3327 Post-modern/globalised model of English 3328 US employment by sector 3429 Composition of Gross World Product 1990–2050 3530 Development of world tourism 1950–1990 3631 Languages used in intercontinental telephone traffic 3732 Teledistance of selected countries from Britain in 1997 3733 Half of the world’s languages in the Asia Pacific region 3834 Geographic distribution of the 6,703 living languages 3935 Proportions of all school students studying modern languages 4536 BBC World Service coverage in 1996–7 4637 The trading days of the three global financial centres 5338 The world language hierarchy in 2050? 5939 Estimates of first-language speakers of English to 2050 60

Case studies page1 World Print in Hong Kong 422 Singapore Straits Times 433 Internationalisation of education in Malaysia 444 MTV 475 Sign of the times 486 Automatic translation 507 The UK Open University’s Singapore programme 52

The English Company (UK) LtdThe Future of English?

has been produced forthe British Council by

The English Company (UK) Ltd.

Sources OverviewFigure 1 based on data from the British Council English 2000 Global Consultation

Report. The report highlights the results of a questionnaire completed by 2000English language teaching specialists in all parts of the world; the BritishCouncil press release was issued at the launch of the English 2000 project inMarch 1995.

Section 1Figure 2 based on data in Unesco statistical yearbook (1995); Figure 3 based on

Kachru (1985) with figures from Crystal (1997); Figure 5 after Strevens (1992);Table 1 data from the engco model of The English Company (UK) Ltd,compared with data from the online edition of Grimes (1996); Table 3 afterSkudlik’s work presented in Viereck (1996); Tables 4 and 5 based on figuresgiven by Crystal (1997). Table 6 based on McArthur (1996); IRC data,collected for a paper given to the International Pragmatics Association,Mexico, July 1996 by Simeon Yates and David Graddol.

Section 2Figure 9 based on Chambers and Trudgill (1980) p. 179; Figure 10 based on

Bauer (1994) p. 63; Figure 11 loosely based on survey data reported by NUAInternet Surveys showing total world users in 1996 as 35 million andprojections of 250 million in 2000, with most rapid growth in Asia Pacific;Figure 12 loosely based on quarterly International Passenger Survey data for1984 and 1990 reported in English 2000 (1995), showing 615,000 Englishlanguage course visitors in 1990; Figure 13 drawn from Al-Zayer and Al-Ibrahim (1996); Figure 14 from the engco model of The English Company(UK) Ltd; Figure 15 based on Wilson (1982); Figure 16 drawn from Van derHeijden (1996).

Descriptions of the Hooke model are based on notes of interviews made byDavid Graddol in January 1996 with Gus Hooke, then Director of TertiaryStudies at the Australian Academy, Sydney, during a visit supported in part bythe British Council and a later unpublished manuscript (Hooke, 1996). Some ofthis material is available in an audio-cassette recording made by the BBC for anOpen University course, U210 The English Language: past, present and future.

Section 3Figure 17 data from the online Population Information Network (Popin) of the

UN Population Division; Figure 18 from the engco model of The EnglishCompany (UK) Ltd; Figure 19 data from the US Commerce DepartmentCensus Bureau, cited in McRae (1994); Figures 20, 21 and 22 drawn from theHooke forecasting model; Figure 23 data from Hearn and Button (1994);Figure 24 based on Financial Times, 23 December 1996; Figure 25 based oninformation from Fortune; Figures 26 and 27 based on information prepared forthe British Council by David Graddol, June 1996; Figure 28 based on TheEconomist, 28 September 1996; Figure 29 from the Hooke forecasting model;Figure 30 data from the World Tourism Organisation (1992) Compendium ofTourism Statistics; Figure 31 based on data on traffic flows from TeleGeographyInc; Figure 32 based on an analysis of prevailing rates of independent UKcarriers; Figure 33 drawn from Grimes (1996).

Table 7 from the engco model of The English Company (UK) Ltd; Table 8information based on Girardet (1996); Table 9 based on Ammon (1995);Tables 10 and 11 from the engco model of The English Company (UK) Ltd;Table 13 based on information from Grimes (1996).

Section 4Figure 35 based on data from Eurydice, the education information network in

the European Community (1992); Figure 36 data from the BBC AnnualReport (1996–97).

Table 14 data from Cable and Satellite Europe, January 1997, p. 36; Table 15compiled from the Blue Book of British Broadcasting, 22nd edition, 1996; Tables 16and 17 from the engco model of The English Company (UK) Ltd.

Section 5Figure 39 from the engco model. Table 19 from the engco model.

AcknowledgementsThis book has benefited from many interviews and discussions withcolleagues in Britain and overseas during the period of its research andproduction. In particular, the author would like to thank the followingfor sharing their experiences and ideas:

Australia: Gus Hooke, Australian Academy. Brunei Darussalam: GaryJones, UBD. China: John Hilton, British Council. Denmark: RobertPhillipson, University of Roskilde. Hong Kong: Peter Choy, WorldPrint; Rod Pryde, British Council. Malaysia: Tony Crocker, BritishCouncil. Singapore: David Flack, MTV Asia; Joe Foley, NUS. UK:Julian Amey, Canning House; Roger Bowers, World of Language;Anne Diack, BBC/OUPC; Paula Kahn, Phaedon Press; TomMcArthur, English Today. Perri 6, Demos.

We are grateful for comments on draft materials from the following:

Professor Jenny Cheshire, Queen Mary and Westfield College,University of London; Professor David Crystal; Professor NicCoupland, University of Cardiff; Dr Anthea Fraser Gupta, Universityof Leeds; Professor Theo van Leeuwen, London College of Printing;Dr Tom McArthur, English Today; Professor Ulrike Meinhof,University of Bradford; Dr Robert Phillipson, University of Roskilde.

Production teamThe English Company (UK) Ltd

David GraddolMargaret Keeton

Design consultantCarlton Larode

Editing consultantChristine Considine

English 2000Caroline Moore

Tony O’BrienIan Seaton

World Wide WebFurther information about

English 2000 is available on theBritish Council’s Internet site:

http://www.britishcouncil.org

Updated information related to The Future of English? can be

found at the Web site ofThe English Company (UK) Ltd:

http://www.english.co.uk

Email newsletterThe Global English Newsletter (GEN)

offers a means of keeping up to date with developments in English as a global language.

To start receiving the newsletter send ablank email message with the

SUBJECT line: SIGNON GENto [email protected]

Contents

Introduction...............................................1

Overview...................................................2Book highlights.......................................................................4

1 English today..........................................5The legacy of history..........................................................6English in the 20th century.............................................8Who speaks English?........................................................10Language hierarchies ......................................................12Summary and references..............................................14

2 Forecasting ..........................................15Futurology..............................................................................16Making sense of trends ..................................................18Predictability or chaos?...................................................20Scenario planning ..............................................................22Summary and references..............................................24

3 Global trends ......................................25Demography ........................................................................26The world economy........................................................28The role of technology ..................................................30Globalisation.........................................................................32The immaterial economy..............................................34Cultural flows ......................................................................36Global inequalities.............................................................38Summary and references..............................................40

4 Impacts on English...............................41The workplace ..................................................................42Education and training....................................................44The global media ...............................................................46Youth culture........................................................................48Internet communication................................................50Time and place ...................................................................52Summary and references..............................................54

5 English in the future.............................55World English ......................................................................56Rival languages ...................................................................58English as a transitional phenomenon ...................60Managing the future.........................................................62

Tables, figures, case studies...........................................64Sources ...................................................inside back cover

The Future of English?David Graddol

English 2000The Future of English? has been commissioned byEnglish 2000 to facilitate informed debate about thefuture use and learning of the English languageworldwide.

English 2000 is an initiative led by the British Councilwhich seeks to forecast future uses of Englishworldwide and to help develop new means ofteaching and learning of English. The project teamworks to position British English language teachinggoods and services to the mutual benefit of Britainand the countries with which it works.

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