English Next
Davis Graddol
The triumph of English
The history of English is conventionally divided into three parts: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English.Now, we are talking about a fourth period in the history of English: after Modern English comes the period of ‘Global English’. Rhetorically inconvenient though a fourth period would be, it would allow an exploration of the new status of English as a global linguafranca and the new cultural, linguistic, political and economic issues surrounding English as it is used in a postmodern world.
There is, however, a great danger in simply adding a new historical period to cater for global English. The traditional history of English, as taught in all the main textbooks, was largely created in the 19th century and reflects 19th-century values and world views. Just as archeologists and historians have argued that our modern understanding of medieval life
has been distorted through a 19th-century lens, so some linguistic historians are now urging a reappraisal of the history of English.
The traditional history is constructed as a grand narrative. It provides a myth of national origins as a rags-to-riches folk tale in which our hero, the English language, emerges from humble and obscure origins and flowers in Old English times–both as a literary language and as the foundation of a new Anglo-Saxon political awareness (presaging the role of English in establishing a future national identity).
Now comes the complication in the story; the point at which the villain appears and disrupts the status quo. In the grand narrative of the history of English, it is French which is positioned as the villain, with whom the English language does battle – and eventually triumphs. According to this account, the linguistic and cultural integrity of Old English was all but destroyed after the Norman invasion, not least by relexification from French. The whole business of recreating a literary language and national identity had to begin anew. Hence the modern era – starting in the 16th century – represents the final triumph of Engli
sh. The language now overcomes its historic villain and re-emerges as a national language, with a literature provided by the likes of Dryden and Shakespeare; scientific writing by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries in the Royal Society (17th century); regulatory apparatus provided by the kind of dictionary first compiled by Samuel Johnson (18th century) and, most monumentally, by the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th centurytransform英文.
The values that permeate this conventional story of English are those of the 19th century, including Victorian concepts of modernity. As we have seen, modernity was a discourse about progress and growth and about constructing modern nation-state identities. Linguistic modernity was not just about constructing national monuments to the language such as the Oxford English Dictionary, but also embraced the need to shoulder the “English speaker’s burden” of taking English, as a civilising force, to the furthest reaches of empire.
If you take the view that the traditional history of English reflects a very national, modernis
t, 19th-century view of the world, then tacking on a new chapter entitled ‘Global English’ may be a serious mistake. It dangerously continues the grand narrative by adding a coda, suggesting that English, which in modernity triumphed as a national language, has now triumphed as a global language, overcoming its arch rival yet again, but this time in the global arena by displacing French as the preferred international linguafranca, or as the preferred working language of Europe.
This view of global English is altogether too ethnocentric to permit a broader understanding of the complex ways in which the spread of English is helping to transform the world and in which English, in turn, is transformed by the world.
The world languages system
The number of languages in the world has been falling throughout modernity, and may be accelerating. The spread of global English is not the direct cause of language endangerment. The downward trend in language diversity began before the rise of English as a global linguafranca. English has greatest impact on national languages, high
er up the linguistic “food chain”.
The Ethnologue, which provides one of the world’s most comprehensive gazetteer of languages, currently lists almost 7,000. However, these are extremely unevenly distributed amongst the global population, with the top 12 languages accounting for 50% of the global population.
Whilst the majority of the world’s languages are spoken by very small communities of speakers, most of the top languages, including Chinese, English and the large European languages, are spoken as first languages by a declining proportion of the world population.
In terms of native-speaker rankings, English is falling in the world league tables. Only 50 years ago it was clearly in second place, after Mandarin. Estimating the number of speakers for the very large languages is surprisingly difficult, but it seems probable that both Spanish, Hindi-Urdu and English all have broadly similar numbers of first-language speakers. Some commentators have suggested that English has slipped to fourth place,
where its position will become challenged by Arabic in the middle of the present century.
English challenged

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