Speaking Of Words: World Languages

By Michael Ferber, InDepth NH

English is undeniably the primary world language today, but not because more people speak it as a first language than any other. Mandarin Chinese leads in that category by a large margin: nearly a billion people speak it as their mother tongue, compared to nearly 500 million Spanish speakers and nearly 400 million English speakers. What makes English the prevalent language on our planet is the huge number of people who speak it as a second language: at least 1.1 billion, whereas only about 200 million can speak Mandarin as a second language, and only 75 million Spanish.

These numbers conceal some complications, however. Is English one language? There are numberless dialects of it, some of which are unintelligible to speakers of other dialects. I once spent twenty minutes in the company of two talkative teen-age boys in Glasgow and didn’t understand a word they said. I thought they were talking Gaelic, but I was corrected by an older man who knew them and explained, in perfectly understandable Scots English, that they were talking in Glaswegian boys’ slang, hard even for him to decipher. Mandarin too, I understand, has mutually unintelligible dialects, so to be strict we should not consider it one language.

Another complication is the range of competency or fluency we presume when we say someone speaks English as a second language. I have had students in my UNH classes from, say, Nepal or Ukraine, who spoke English better than some of the New Hampshire natives; they made mistakes, of course, that a local student would not make, and they had accents, but they had a greater vocabulary and syntactic sophistication than the average student of the class, or so it seemed. Walk around Reykjavik or Amsterdam or Copenhagen and you’ll meet people whose English sounds superior to your own, English that they did not absorb cum lacte (with their mother’s milk) but probably started learning in kindergarten. And of course America has millions of recent immigrants whose English is very limited and hard to penetrate but still functional and therefore counts as a second language.

These numbers, then, must be taken with some skepticism, but they will still serve as evidence of the prevalence of “English.” But what makes English the main global tongue is also its global reach. The great majority of native Mandarin speakers live in China, but the great majority of native English speakers live outside England: they live in the United States and Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, and in South Africa, all settler states. The British empire left behind English speakers in great numbers in Asia and Africa, mainly second-language speakers, but also quite a few first-language speakers. In India, I have heard, many children grow up speaking English and at least one Indian language—Hindi or Bengali, for example—so they can count as first-language anglophones. And then there are forms of simplified and/or specialized Englishes that are spoken when, for example, a Chinese airplane pilot talks to the control tower at the Tokyo airport.

So the British empire until World War II and the American empire after it made English the world language. Was there an earlier one? Well, the Spanish were all over the place, and so were the French, until the last century. Except for Brazil, Spanish is spoken in a continuous swath from southern Texas to Tierra del Fuego, as well as parts of Africa and the Philippines. French is spoken as the dominant first tongue in Quebec and as a second language, and sometimes first, in several African countries. Portuguese is not only the language of Brazil, with 200 million speakers, but, like Spanish and French, a second language in Africa. Even Dutch has a modest claim as a world language, mainly because of Afrikaans, but also because it has native speakers in Surinam and some second-language speakers in Indonesia.

Even though Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch had worldwide ranges, however, none of them ever dominated the way English now does. In the heydays of their empires they were all competing with each other, and with the British. In Europe, on the other hand, French was the dominant intellectual, literary, and diplomatic language from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. The aristocracy from Dublin to Moscow all spoke it. It is not out of whimsy that the first few pages of War and Peace are largely in French! Even in my lifetime I think I can detect the slow and grudging acceptance of the fact that French has had to yield to English as Europe’s common second language. When I visited Paris in 1966 and spoke my high-school French, sometimes the locals would stare at me as if I had just farted. But nearly fifty years later, my French, not much improved, drew friendlier responses, often in pretty good English.

Before French, of course, Latin was the common scholarly and legal language of Europe, in large part because of the Roman Church but also because of the great pre-Christian Latin texts that were revered for their preservation of ancient knowledge. But of course French is really just modern Latin as it is spoken in France, while Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and dozens of other “Romance” languages might just as well be called “Latin,” just as we call “Greek” every version of the language from 1450 BCE (Mycenaean) to now. So we could say that “Latin” is the world language today, with close to a billion speakers (as a first language!) all over the planet, but of course with quite a few mutually incomprehensible varieties.

Before the Romans conquered the Mediterranean shores, Greek was prevalent. The Greeks, Plato said, sat around the Mediterranean “like frogs around a pond,” and they were known as far east as India, thanks to Alexander. In the eastern part of the Roman empire, Greek remained the lingua franca. In the Judaea that Jesus knew, the second language, after Aramaic, was Greek, not Latin. The New Testament is in Greek, except for a few phrases spoken by Jesus himself in Aramaic.

As for Aramaic, a Semitic language akin to Hebrew, it was itself an international language, widely used in the empires of Persia, Assyria, and late Babylon. In the far east, meanwhile, Sanskrit began spreading out of India, often as sacred Buddhist texts, into China, Japan, Indo-China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. A little later, Arabic followed the Muslim conquests into Spain in the west and India in the east, though in many countries it did not replace the local language but was confined to the study of the Koran and to scholarly writing, not unlike Latin.

What can we conclude from all these world languages? Only with the global empires of western European countries, first of all, do we see truly worldwide languages, and only with the American conquests in World War II, underscoring the effect of the British empire, do we see the contenders reduced to one: English. Second, the spread of languages has nothing to do with the virtues of the languages themselves, or of their speakers. Languages, and the cultures bound to them, follow armies, navies, and merchants. Finally, as we see American political and cultural dominance recede from the world, we might expect a new world language to arise. What will it be? A polyglot pidgin invented by teenagers who live on-line? My English professor’s heart shudders at the thought, but I won’t have any say in it. Hold onto your hats … and your Shakespeares.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.

This story was originally published by InDepth NH.