Barbarians! That's what the Roman Empire,
in its latter days, called the Germanic tribes migrating south.
The Romans had borrowed the word from the Greek barbaros,
meaning 'unable to speak intelligibly', just well enough to
stammer 'bar-bar-bar'. In those days, you
either spoke Latin or did not exist. Almost two millennia later,
the descendants of the Germanic tribes have taken over the
civilised world, relocated it outside the Mediterranean, and not
speaking English is beyond the pale.
So, what fate awaits modern-day barbarians? By a number of
converging accounts, the non-English speaking hordes are in the
process of being assimilated: In a small book of grand
pronouncements [1] ,
the eminent linguist David Crystal puts the case for English as the
global language. He estimates that a total of up to 1,800 million
people – 30% of the world population - are already
"reasonably competent" in English, of whom "670
million have a native or native-like command" [2] of the language.
About one billion people are learning it. In the European Union,
according to a 2001 Eurobarometer survey, English – the mother
tongue of only 16% of the EU's population – is spoken as a
foreign language by a further 31% [3] . And when asked what language they find the most
useful besides their mother tongue, 75% of respondents answered
English.
The figures are overwhelming, but also deceptive. If there is
no denying the fact that English is widely used and taught, the
numbers above are educated guesswork at best, since most data on
foreign-language speakers is self-reported. And we'll never know
what it means to be "reasonably competent" in English.
But does it matter? What is more interesting certainly is the
fact that the seemingly inexorable advance of English is fuelled
by an unprecedented world-class status.
Over 85% of the scientific, technological or academic
production in the world today is done in English [4] . In most countries and
industries, a knowledge of English is an invaluable asset on the
labour market. Multinationals, whether France's Alcatel or AXA,
or Germany's DaimlerChrysler, use English as their corporate
language. Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian has recently
suggested making English the country's second official language,
and there have been similar exhortations in Japan. The European
Union's monetary policy is decided at Frankfurt, Germany, but in
English. In the corridors of power, whether in Brussels, Geneva
or New York, official discourse is produced in English first,
then translated. Anybody who's anybody speaks English, or they'd
be nobody.
And for the common people, English is simply prestigious. It
has become the glittering symbol of the affluence and modernity
of the technologically superior United States. From Tokyo to
Paris, from Moscow to Dakar, English is in. Nobody wants to be a
barbarian anymore.
But if English is in, does it mean that autochthonous
languages are out – or should be? Not at all. Some, like
Crystal, are quick to point out that English is merely fulfilling
a functional need for a lingua franca in this globalised
world. People will use English for business, but will naturally
switch back to their local vernaculars at home. The fact that
two-thirds of the world's children grow up in bilingual or
multilingual environments is evidence enough that using a
language for international communication does not imply
abandoning other idioms in more local contexts, nor indeed one's
cultural roots.
Others are not so sure. They see a threat to linguistic
diversity or even an open encouragement to linguicide. They fear
a process of acculturation.
Lingua Anglia
Many arguments have been levelled against the mainstreaming of
English as a communication language. On the political side, some
authors have questioned the fact that the spread of English is
simply a natural and rational process in this global village.
They recall that there are powerful reasons for the promotion of
English: centre-to-periphery free-market ideologies demand a high
level of homogenisation for the penetration of purportedly global
values and products. They insist that English is not
power-neutral: local elites trained in English in Western
universities and acculturated to Western values are often found
to be defending global capitalist interests against their
people's. In many former colonies, the continued use of the
coloniser's language in government only serves to consolidate the
elite's grasp on power and prevent popular participation in
public affairs. Also, one should not forget that English as a
Second Language (ESL) has become a multi-billion dollar industry
in the UK and the United States. [5]
Indeed, the very fact that English is so much associated with
power – whether economic, political or other – explains the
attraction it exerts on many in less favourable positions. For
them, learning English is simply an exercise in upward
mobility.
Communicative competence
But they're not out of the woods yet. Ultimately, the
usefulness of English, or any lingua franca for that
matter, depends on the communicative competence of speakers.
Communication is efficient only when a speaker says – and his
audience understands – what he means to say. Of course,
experience shows that the communication process itself has many
twists and turns even in monolingual environments and for
perfectly homogeneous groups, let alone in the type of situations
where the need for a lingua franca arises.
As all conference interpreters know, speakers with a poor
command of the language will use various coping mechanisms to get
the job done: reading prepared statements aloud in a thick accent
and in total disregard for the prosody of the language instead of
speaking extemporaneously, borrowing heavily or even calquing
from their mother tongue, over-simplifying the message at the
risk of being infantilised. As far as form is concerned, the
result ranges from the extremely comical to the extremely
painful. As for substance, it is often thin on the ground. Simply
because it is difficult to be at one's best in a foreign
language. Non-native speakers will often find that they cannot
put their points across as well as they would want to. And when
the ordeal's over, there comes question time. I'll always
remember the compunction of a French director – who had
laboured in Badly Spoken English over his company's production
capacity problems – after having his increasingly fast and
furious American boss repeat the same question for the third
time, and still not getting it. The New Yorker roared again,
using the exact same words as previously, only faster:
- "Did I get it right that you just don't
have the HR bandwidth to go into that production space right
now?".
- "Eer.., yes", articulated the
Frenchman, finally groping for the neatly cellophaned pack of
earphones on his table and looking despairingly at the
interpreters in the French booth.
- "OK. You're fired!", answered
the American, and left the room.
Whatever the lingua franca, the rule is invariable. You
don't say as much as you would want to but only as much as your
language skills allow. This can be particularly tough when you're
dealing with unrelenting native speakers. So much for the promise
of unfettered second language communication.
However, language problems are not the whole picture. Cultural
differences can trip you up when you least expect it, even if the
interlanguage is mastered to near-perfection by all sides.
A recent European Commission report on the "Impact of
Multicultural and Multilingual Crews on Maritime
Communication" [6] quotes
the following example that took place during a period of military
tension between Egypt and Greece:
Egyptian pilots radioed [in English] their intention to
land at an airbase on Cyprus and the Greek traffic
controllers reportedly responded with silence. The Greeks
intended thereby to indicate refusal of permission to land,
but the Egyptians interpreted silence as assent.
The result of the misunderstanding in this case was the loss
of a number of lives when the Greeks fired on the planes as
they approached the runway.
Mutual intelligibility
Yet, it is fair to say, the casualties will not always be in
the camp of non-native speakers. Global English will not
necessarily make it easier for native speakers to understand the
wider world's murmur – if ever they should want to. As the
language is taught and used all over the world in so many
different communities and for so many different reasons, learners
and users are inevitably influenced by local varieties of English
that can impede efficient cross-border communication. In the
words of a disenchanted British regular at international events:
"When everyone speaks English, I'm never sure they've
understood exactly what I've said, and I never know if they're
saying what they mean".
It works both ways. Some years ago, a European professional
association operating in English, French and German decided to
cut costs and considered adopting a lingua franca. There
was some dilly-dallying, on the part of the French especially,
but in the end everybody accepted that you have to speak English
in a single European market. In the newsletter that announced the
new policy, the association's president, a German, explicitly
called on the British to dumb down their language so that
everybody could understand them without interpreters.
In fact, international English is a misnomer. World Englishes
would be a better term. Such are the hard realities of authentic
language usage: in the day-to-day interactions between speakers
of various social, occupational or cultural backgrounds, every
language is drawn into a centrifugal spiral of heteroglossia.
People do not speak by the book. Words acquire new meanings.
Like-minded groups develop their own repertoire and jargon.
Accents go native. Local vernaculars interfere. Soon the
resulting hybrid becomes the received linguistic standard. In a
homogeneous speech community, those centrifugal forces will be
checked by the unifying effects of the mass media, the education
system or official language use. But World English has no world
guardian. And for someone in Singapore, or Nigeria, the
linguistic norms cannot come from Britain or the USA alone.
Nobody wants 'their' language taken away from them.
Babel has come back to haunt us though the back door.
International Auxiliary Languages
Is there no other way to overcome the language barrier? Nobody
can dispute the need for efficient international communication in
today's world, and few will dispute the validity of the arguments
against Global English: the difficulties inherent in the language
itself, such as the mismatch between spelling and pronunciation,
the language's strong ideological ballast, or the inevitable
mutual intelligibility problems.
Lateral thinking is required. In Europe, some have been
promoting the cause of Esperanto. They claim that, as an
artificial language, it is ideologically neutral and would give
no one an undue first-language advantage. Moreover, fluency could
be achieved at a much lower cost. Claude Piron, who has written
extensively about Esperanto, asserts that it "can be learned
in an eighth of the time required to be able to communicate in an
acceptable way in another foreign language, and in a thirtieth of
the time required to have an actual mastery of another foreign
language." [7]
The case is compelling, but many remain unconvinced. Most
people do not learn a language for the fun of it. Who will spend,
say, 500 hours of their time learning a language on which there
is no visible premium? Who will there be to emulate? And how
different from international English will Esperanto behave when
used not only just by benevolent humanists serving the cause of
cross-cultural understanding, but you and me pursuing our own
interests?
Language in use
It's easy to get off track in the language debate. Scholars
have long entertained very conflicting views about what language
is. Chomsky for one has held that, for all their apparent
diversity, the world's 5000 languages can be boiled down to a
number of universal rules hard-wired in the brain. If that's the
case, then little is lost if the whole world evolves towards a
single language. At the other extreme, Whorf believed that human
beings are totally at the mercy of the particular language which
has become the medium of expression for their society to the
point of moulding their thought processes. If so, people from
different backgrounds can only talk at cross-purposes, whatever
the language.
The problem with such linguistic theories is that –
paradoxically enough – they do not see it as their brief to
explain the actual dynamics of language use [8] . They're only interested in
language as an abstract, autonomous, system. But in the end what
matters is the real language, how individuals use it in
particular contexts. Consider this:
A French company with global outreach is introducing a new IT
system. The technology is brand new and probably beyond the grasp
of many in some national IT departments, and there are rumours
that the changeover will usher in outsourcing of all custom
software development.
The top IT man, an American, is flown in to Europe to present
the vision and the technology to IT engineers and developers in
individual countries. In France, the meeting is attended by the
company's CEO and its human resource director.
Even though the multinational's official language is English,
interpretation into French is provided. Not many people take
headsets from the hostesses upon entering the room but – two
minutes into a coarse Texan accent – most get second thoughts
and fetch some for them and their neighbours. When his last
Powerpoint slide is over, the American packs up and leaves for
the next country.
The CEO then stands up and announces – in English – that
the discussion is open. People may ask questions in French if
they must. "En francais aussi si vous voulez, il n'y a
rien de mal a cela". Remember that all 300 people in
the room are French, and that their only half valid reason for
continuing in English has left the room. No one says anything. To
break the ice – the CEO and his HR director start a double act
– in English – on the merits of the new system. Their English
is appallingly bad. The phraseology is anglified French. The
vocabulary is repetitive to the extreme and often inaccurate. Not
one word is stressed correctly. Their speech is peppered with the
usual corporate buzzwords: shareholder value, strategic
disinvestments, core business, headcount (id'coont), total
customer satisfaction, etc., as so many filler phrases you can
rely on when the language collapses under your feet. But most of
it is Alice-in-Wonderland English: it means what you want it to
mean.
There comes one question from the floor – in English also
– but it is too technical for them to answer. Then an elderly
man in the back of the room hesitantly asks for the mike and
starts "heu… Je m'excuse, je vais parler
francais". This time, the question is not about
technology but its likely impact on the workforce, and the
attendant need for better training programmes. The HR director
answers back, in English, reciting the list of in-house training
schemes and confirming that they will be expanded. Visibly not
satisfied with the answer the elderly man stands up again and
asks – in basic and slow but clear English this time – what
assurances management can give that this new system will not be a
total waste of time and resources as was the case with a similar
initiative a while back. This time the CEO answers… in French.
The question was tough, and providing a firm yet elegant and
diplomatic answer is essential. There are times when you don't
want to lose your tongue. Having done that, he switches back to
English, thanks all participants for coming and listening,
encourages them to provide feedback, and closes the meeting.
Enough is enough.
In order to understand what happened at that meeting, you need
to focus on language in action, on the actors in this language
game, and on the power relations between them. As J.L. Austin
said in How to Do Things With Words, "the issuing of
an utterance is the performance of an action." [9]
In the process, you realise that what people say, how they say
it, their tone of voice, accent and intonation, the choice of
words, what they have in mind for their listeners, who the
audience is and how they want to relate to them, all play a big
part in how the message will be received and understood, in how
meaning will be negotiated.
So power – or ideology – is vested not in particular words
nor in the use of a particular language over another, but in the
– conscious or unconscious – choice of language, words,
style, accent, you name it, in particular situations. As
Bourdieu has shown in a remarkable analysis of such games,
language wields symbolic power [10] by virtue of the system of social relations which
bears on the production and reception of discourse in a
particular socio-historical context.
A useful reminder also is that linguistic capital is unevenly
distributed in every society. And that not everybody is a CEO who
can impose the working language and change it when it suits them
better.
This has to be borne in mind in the World English debate.
The Mediators
Translation – in the broadest sense of the word – is
probably the unsung hero of international communication. For all
the buzz about Global English and the need for a lingua franca,
remarkably very little has been said or written about the
extraordinary contribution of translation to the exchange of
ideas, the dissemination of human knowledge and, ultimately,
cross-cultural understanding.
This is probably because of its low profile as a purely
intellectual activity, or at best, and until very recently, a
cottage industry that has stood in the way of the modern world's
drive for homogeneity and rationality.
One of the main arguments against translation is that it is
too expensive. A figure often bandied about is that the European
Union's eleven official languages cost about ˆ 700 million.
That's around 40% of the EU's administrative budget, which itself
is just about 5% of its total budget. Mind you, that's still
about ˆ 2 a year for each European citizen.
But the picture is incomplete. A more scientific cost-benefit
analysis of translation versus the lingua franca model
should take account of other cost factors. For example, has
anyone tried to compute the costs of misunderstandings
attributable to deficient communicative competence in lingua
francas? What about the costs of having to send half-baked
experts to international meetings because they speak the
language, whilst their more savvy but monolingual colleagues stay
at home? What about the costs of thousands of hours of individual
language learning or in-depth exposure to become reasonably
fluent and competent in a foreign language? And what about the
wastage caused by decades of utterly incompetent foreign language
teaching in most education systems? A more fruitful debate would
probably be on how to improve translator and interpreter training
so that they become better mediators between cultures and
languages.
This being said, it is easy to understand that language
professionals also make a living out of occupying the middle
ground between languages and cultures. Needless to say, theirs
can be a rather uncomfortable position when it comes to getting
involved in a public debate about the role, function and value of
languages. And when they do, they often end up using words
deceptively. When interpreters make the case for continued
multilingualism in the EU for instance, what they actually
support is a regime whereby all national languages are recognised
as official and working languages. In practice, they affirm the
right of every EU citizen to speak their own language, i.e. to
remain strictly monolingual…
But that sort of answer, I believe, owes less to corporatist
instincts than to the actual nature of the debate in the EU,
where political arguments are forever thrown back and forth
across the table from the sole perspective of states clinging to
their national language as a potent attribute of their
sovereignty. And now that the 'hard' sovereignty issues like
monetary policy or trade have been devolved to Brussels, national
language or identity carry even more weight than before.
It will be difficult to find any solution to the language
problem through the national prism. If we cast aside for a moment
the rigidities of institutions and consider cross-language
communication in practice, a striking thing is that there are
multiple planes of practical arrangements where exchanges can
successfully take place between people.
They range from a-la-carte translation to asymmetrical
interpretation and the promotion of passive language
comprehension or even a total overhaul of national education
systems to make way for determined and efficient language
learning policies in every country and across all classes of
society.
Hopefully, one day the EU will find its proper role as a
network mediating between multiple levels of institutions and
actors.
In the meantime, translators and interpreters must continue to
fight for linguistic equality, in the EU and elsewhere.
They should not be afraid to participate, even though, as we
have seen, any debate about language or translation is eminently
political.
If the trend towards Global English continues, they will be
relegated to mere localisers of dominant ideologies.
Hopefully, many will remember that their real mission is to
facilitate multilateral exchanges between languages and
cultures.
The world is a richer place when it speaks with many voices,
and it will be a more peaceful place if all can be heard.
Further reading:
A useful bibliography on lingua francas is available at
http://www.sw2.euv-frankfurt-o.de/Doktoranden/ling.franca.html
[1] David Crystal
(1997) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. In the preface, Crystal acknowledges that the
book was inspired by US English (http://www.us-english.org/),
one of the largest organisations behind the US English-only
movement. [2] Op. cit., p. 61 [3] EUROBAROMETER 54
Special, February 2001, Europeans and Languages, [4] Eugene Garfield
(1990) "The Languages of Science Revisited: English (Only)
Spoken Here?", Current Comments, # 31, pp. 280-294. [5] See for instance,
Robert Phillipson (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford:
OUP; Alastair Pennycook (1994) The Cultural Politics of
English as an International Language. London: Longman and
(1998) English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London:
Routledge. [6] MARCOM, Final
Report [7] Claude Piron,
"The Hidden Perverse Effects of the Current System of
International Communication".
See also Claude Piron (1994), Le defi des langues, Paris:
L'Harmattan. [8] Investigating la
parole is the task that sociolinguistics, and especially
discourse and speech acts theory, have set themselves in
opposition to Saussure's fixation with la langue as an
autonomous system disconnected with society and Chomsky's ideal
speaker-listener. For a comprehensive and politically committed
review, see Robert de BEAUGRANDE, "Language and society: The
real and the ideal in linguistics, sociolinguistics, and corpus
linguistics".
A condensed version appeared in Journal of Sociolinguistics
3/1, 1998, 128-139. [9] Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1962, p. 6 [10] Pierre Bourdieu
(2001) Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Seuil.
Vincent Buck is a Brussels-based freelance interpreter. He
keeps a weblog on language at http://www.vincentbuck.com/weblog/
