Why English?

Confronting the Hydra

Pauline Bunce, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana, Ruanni Tupas, Pauline Bunce, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana, Ruanni Tupas

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783095865
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the ways and means by which English threatens the vitality and diversity of other languages and cultures in the modern world. Using the metaphor of the Hydra monster from ancient Greek mythology, it explores the use and misuse of English in a wide range of contexts, revealing how the dominance of English is being confronted and counteracted around the globe. The authors explore the language policy challenges for governments and education systems at all levels, and show how changing the role of English can lead to greater success in education for a larger proportion of children. Through personal accounts, poems, essays and case studies, the book calls for greater efforts to ensure the maintenance of the world's linguistic and cultural diversity.

Part 1

Hydra at Large

1The English Language in a Global Context: Between Expansion and Resistance

Alamin Mazrui

The spread of English globally is, of course, a direct product of the expansion of capitalism across national borders. In its initial phases in much of the world, however, this process of linguistic extension was by no means a spontaneous and peaceful one. It was often a violent course of development in which English itself became part of the imperial arsenal to subdue, inferiorise and conquer the colonial subject. Like many other aspects of colonialism, language featured prominently in the creation of new hierarchies and in the disfiguration and erasure of the history of the colonised. This dimension of colonial history came to find ample expression in the following verses of the South African singer, Johnny Clegg:

Bits of song and broken drums

Are all he could recall

So he spoke to me

In a bastard tongue

Carried on the silence of guns

It’s been a long long time

Since they first came

And marched through the village

They taught me to forget the past

And live the future in their language

Chorus:

They said I should learn to speak

A little bit of English

Don’t be scared of a suit and a tie

Learn to walk in the words of the foreigner

I am a Third World Child! (quoted by Pennycook, 1994: 2)

In other words, the violence that accompanied European colonial penetration alienated the colonised, weakened many of their languages and pushed some to the verge of extinction.

After independence, the relationship between Britain and its former colonies metamorphosed institutionally into the so-called Commonwealth. There are countries, of course, that were previously ruled by Britain but did not join the Commonwealth. These include countries like Egypt, Iraq and Kuwait − Arab countries in which the English language was more marginal than it was in other former British colonies. Among the reasons that influenced these former Arab colonies of Britain against joining the Commonwealth were (1) Arab nationalism was distrustful of continuing organisational links with the former imperial power; (2) the Commonwealth was viewed as a rival to the League of Arab States − a conflict between Pan-Britannica and Pan-Arabism; (3) British policies were viewed as pro-Israel, indirectly tarnishing the image of the Commonwealth; and (4) the head of the Commonwealth was also the head of the Church of England − in the eyes of Muslims, England’s Christian theocracy tarnished the Commonwealth.

The great exception among countries that did not join the Commonwealth but where, nonetheless, English became triumphant is, of course, the United States. The United States did not become a member of the Commonwealth partly because it became independent long before the Commonwealth was born and partly because, once it was formed, America’s anti-monarchical political culture would not have easily accepted the idea that the British monarch was the head of the Commonwealth. But although the United States (unlike Canada) is the grand exception to Commonwealth membership, it nevertheless became an even more influential carrier of the English language than Britain by the second half of the 20th century. People and whole societies began to experience the pull of English less and less because of Britain and more and more because of the United States.

Today it is possible to say that, as a direct result of the post-Cold War political economy of neoliberalism, a certain degree of spontaneous momentum has indeed accompanied the continued spread and consolidation of English. Having emerged as the only superpower in the post-Cold War period, the United States has naturally become central in this globalisation process. The globalisation of empire that the British attempted in the formal sense has been carried further by America in a more informal manner, constantly reproducing even more massive structures of inequality. As the single largest English-speaking country in terms of its number of native speakers, and with its economic, political and technological pre-eminence, the United States now is contributing to the expansion of the frontiers of the English language at an unprecedented rate. Due to American dominance in world affairs, the emergent global English may increasingly be assuming an American articulation.

In a sense, then, neoliberalism has provided an additional stimulus for the spread of English worldwide, giving the language a new and, to a certain extent, spontaneous momentum that has made it important in its own right for the consolidation of the American rule of cash-nexus on a global scale. Within the international capitalist market, the ‘centre’ (and America, in particular) has been serving as the ‘proprietor’, while the ‘periphery’ can be likened to the labour and consumer dimension of the transnational capitalist equation. And it is increasingly the English language that allows the proprietor nations of the centre to have contact with each and every extractive and consumer nation in a way that leads to the increasing consolidation of the global capitalist market. The US-Africa Leaders’ Summit that took place on 4–6 August 2014 in Washington, DC, designed to open up the African market even further for US investment, was yet another example of an economic agenda that has deep linguistic and cultural implications emanating from the neoliberal order.

What makes some of the countries of Asia and Africa different from those of Europe in their experience of linguistic imperialism is the extent to which the spread and consolidation of English is given institutional support, primarily from Britain and the United States. Here we have seen organisations like the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the British Council constantly at work promoting policies that continue to demonstrate the interdependence between the corporate world and language development in favour of English. In Africa, the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions have had the particularly harmful effect of undermining the potential of African languages to become important linguistic partners to English in the educational process. Echoing UNESCO’s position on The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education (1953), the World Bank realises that ‘in the crucial, early grades when children are trying to acquire basic literacy as well as adjust to the demands of the school setting, not speaking the language of instruction can make the difference between succeeding and failing in school, between remaining in school and dropping out’ (Lockheed & Verspoor, 1991: 153). The World Bank is also aware that establishing the conditions of sustainable instruction in local African languages, which is crucial to the uninterrupted educational progress of a child, requires substantial government investment in the generation of educational resources. Yet, the World Bank and IMF prescriptions for revitalising African economies – that is, for embedding African economies more deeply into the world capitalist system − have placed heavy emphasis on the reduction of government subsidies in education, which are indispensable to the promotion of instruction in local languages. In the final analysis, then, under the World Bank-IMF structural impositions, the only avenue available to many African nations has been the adoption of English from the very beginning of a child’s education.

Expectedly, then, in countries such as Tanzania, which had been successful in challenging the supremacy of English, the British Overseas Development Agency (ODA) moved in immediately following the World Bank-IMF ‘austerity’ measures, essentially to reclaim the spaces that English in Tanzania had lost to Swahili. Towards this end, the ODA launched the multimillion-dollar English Language Teaching Support Project (Roy-Campbell, 1992), ostensibly to improve English teacher training and English-language skills in classrooms at the national level and to bridge the gap between Swahili-language instruction at the elementary level and English-based instruction at the high-school level. Together with the WTO and other bodies, then, the World Bank and IMF are some of the principal organisations through which the capitalist ‘West’ has managed to control the destiny of the rest of the world. And that imperialist control has relied in no small measure on the establishment and reconstitution of structural inequalities and cultural inequalities between and through English and other imperial European languages (Phillipson, 1992: 47).

These institutional efforts, as well as non-institutional processes, have made particularly rapid gains in areas/countries where linguistic nationalism is low, as is the case in many countries of Africa. We can define linguistic nationalism as that version of nationalism that is concerned about the value of its own languages, seeking to defend them against other languages and encouraging their use and enrichment. Many Africans south of the Sahara are nationalistic about their race, about their ethnicity and, often, about their land. For a variety of reasons that we need not get into here, nationalism about African languages is relatively weak compared with India or the Middle East or France. What is significant for our purposes is the idea that, because many sub-Saharan Africans are rarely strong linguistic nationalists, they are seldom resentful of their massive dependence on English or other imported languages. An African politician may speak six or more African languages fluently. Yet, if he or she does not speak the English language, he or she cannot become a member of the legislature. Dr Hastings Banda spoke only English and could become the president of Malawi. There is no example of a president of a former British colony of Africa who has been elected to the presidency without knowledge of English. It is this syndrome of self-abnegation that Okot p’Bitek’s poem, Song of Lawino (1962), seeks to capture. Here the female character, Lawino, laments about her husband who has been ‘properly’ schooled in English in the ways of the white men. In the words of Lawino,

Bile burns inside me!

I feel like vomiting!

For all young men

Were finished in the forest [of books]

Their manhood was finished

In the classrooms,

Their testicles

Were smashed

With large [English] books

Weak linguistic nationalism, then, has made much of Africa especially vulnerable to the imperialist linguistic penetration that is facilitated by economic and educational bodies in the service of colonialism and neoliberalism. Through a process of estrangement from the existential self, Lawino sees English-based education as one that has produced ‘docile bodies’, impotent and functionally ineffective in meeting the needs of production and in the development of their own societies.

While on balance, the English language has continued to impose its imperial might in different parts of the world, there is a tendency to overlook its setbacks within the grand picture. There is no doubt that French has been a bigger loser than English since World War II. Indeed, some recent proponents of Francophonie − the union of ‘French-speaking’ countries − have even claimed that the French language is endangered by English as ‘Francophone’ countries have become increasingly attracted to English due to the new international economic opportunities, real or imagined, that it seems to offer. New English-language centres are cropping up almost everywhere in the so-called Francophone zone. And seemingly in desperation, Francophonie now seems willing to enlist into its membership even ‘non-Francophone’ nations if only they would agree to promote the study of French in some way or other.

Nonetheless, there are developments in some areas of the world that constitute a definite challenge to the English language. Let us look at two such instances. First, there have been the postcolonial indigenisation policies in which some former colonies of Britain have attempted to try to reduce the role of English in their societies. Originally, the Indian constitution envisaged replacing English co...