Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940-1990 [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110872187, 9783110147544

Table of contents :
GENERAL BACKGROUND ISSUES
Introduction: Some empirical and theoretical issues
The international role of English: The state of the discussion
The ongoing spread of English: A comparative analysis of former Anglo-American colonies with non-colonies
THE AMERICAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
English in Cuba: From imperial design to the imperative need
The position of English in Mexico: 1940–1993
Post-imperial English in the Philippines
English under U.S. sovereignty: Ninety-five years of change of the status of English in Puerto Rico
The English language in Quebec 1940–1990
THE EUROPEAN UNION
The European Union (EU – formerly European Community): Status change of English during the last fifty years
THE BRITISH SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
A tale of two Englishes: The imperial language in post-colonial Kenya and Uganda
English in South Africa 1940–1996
English in Sudan
Post-imperial English in Nigeria 1940–1990
The swinging pendulum: English in Tanzania 1940–1990
The life-cycle of post-imperial English in Cameroon
Fifty years of English in Singapore: All gains, (a) few losses?
The status of English in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from 1940–1990
The post-imperial status of English in Sri Lanka 1940–1990: From first to second language
Post-imperial English in Malaysia
English in Israel after independence
The spread of English in India: Politics of language conflict and language power
English in Papua New Guinea
CONCLUSIONS
Summary and interpretation: Post-imperial English 1940–1990
Subject index

Citation preview

Post-Imperial English

W G DE

Contributions to the Sociology of Language 72

Editor

Joshua A. Fishman

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Post-Imperial English Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940-1990

Edited by

Joshua A. Fishman Andrew W. Conrad Alma Rubal-Lopez

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1996

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin

® Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Post-imperial English : status change in former British and American colonies, 1940-1990 / edited by Joshua A. Fishman, Andrew W. Conrad, Alma Rubal-Lopez. p. cm. — (Contributions to the sociology of language; 72) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-014754-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English language - Social aspects - Commonwealth countries. 2. English language - Social aspects — United States - Colonies. 3. English language — Social aspects Foreign countries. 4. English language - 20th century — Social aspects. 5. Communication, International. 6. Decolonization. I. Fishman, Joshua Α. II. Conrad, Andrew W. III. Rubal-Lopez, Alma, 1950IV. Series. PE2751,P67 1996 420.9' 171241'09045-dc20 96-30363 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication Data Post-imperial English : status change in former British and American colonies, 1940-1990 / ed. by Joshua A. Fishman ... - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1996 (Contributions to the sociology of language ; 72) ISBN 3-11-014754-8 NE: Fishman, Joshua A. [Hrsg.]; GT

© Copyright 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and Printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. - Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

And who in time knowes wither we may bent The treasures of our tongue, to what strange shores This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent. T'inrich vnknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the'yet vnformed Occident May come refin'd with the'accents that are ours? Samuel Daniel, "Musophilus" [1599], frequently quoted and used as a motto in R. W. Bailey—M. Gorlach [eds.] English as a world language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

Dear brothers: Do not be mislead by insincere voices that say that language is only an outer form, a secondary consideration; that we must not forget about more important matters just because of language and nationhood. These are voices of false, hidden enemies of the nation. Freedom, no matter how great, means nothing without nationhood, because without nationhood freedom is freedom for others, for our oppressors and lords, but not for us. Did English freedom help the Irish? ... What good does it do the Blacks in the Southern states of the United States? ... Wherever your language and your nationhood are disregarded you are oppressed, no matter how liberal the country may be. Karel Havlicek Borovsky (1821 —1856), a leader of the early years of the Czech national revival. Nase politika (Our politics). "Norodni noviny". April 1848; translated into English by Paul Garvin, SUNY-Buffalo.

So far, Swahili, the one that we have been using, has only been a lowly language, below the prestige of the European rulers' English, a servant of the foreign rulers of our minds and of his language, to fulfill some menial tasks which English did not bother to do. If Swahili is to be our national language, it must be an equal to English, a true language, on whose perfection countless generations have worked. Such a language must be learnt by hard effort. Let us sit down and do it! Abdallah Khalid, The liberation of Swahili from European appropriation, 194—195. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1977.

Contents

GENERAL BACKGROUND ISSUES Introduction: Some empirical and theoretical issues Joshua A. Fishman The international role of English: The state of the discussion . . . . Andrew W. Conrad The ongoing spread of English: A comparative analysis of former Anglo-American colonies with non-colonies Alma Rubal-Lopez

3 13

37

THE AMERICAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE English in Cuba: From imperial design to the imperative need . . . Dolores Corona and Ofelia Garcia

85

The position of English in Mexico: 1940—1993 Margarita Hidalgo, Bärbara Cifuentes, and Jose A. Flores

113

Post-imperial English in the Philippines Bonifacio P. Sibayan and Andrew Gonzalez

139

English under U.S. sovereignty: Ninety-five years of change of the status of English in Puerto Rico Carlos M. Ramirez-Gonzälez and Roame Torres-Gonzälez The English language in Quebec 1940-1990 Calvin Veltman

173 205

THE EUROPEAN UNION The European Union (EU - formerly European Community): Status change of English during the last fifty years 241 Ulrich Ammon THE BRITISH SPHERE OF INFLUENCE A tale of two Englishes: The imperial language in post-colonial Kenya and Uganda 271 Alamin M. Mazrui and Ali A. Mazrui

viii

Contents

English in South Africa 1940-1996 Daryl McLean and Kay McCormick

303

English in Sudan Anwar Wagi'alla

339

Post-imperial English in Nigeria 1940-1990 Ayo Bamgbose

357

The swinging pendulum: English in Tanzania 1940—1990 Saida Yahya-Othman and Herman Batibo

373

The life-cycle of post-imperial English in Cameroon Beban Sammy Chumbow and Augustin Simo Bobda

401

Fifty years of English in Singapore: All gains, (a) few losses? . . . . Makhan L. Tickoo

431

The status of English in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from 1940-1990 457 Fawwaz Al-Abed Al-Haq and Oqlah Smadi The post-imperial status of English in Sri Lanka 1940-1990: From first to second language Chitra Fernando

485

Post-imperial English in Malaysia Asmah Haji Omar

513

English in Israel after independence Bernard Spolsky

535

The spread of English in India: Politics of language conflict and language power Hans Raj Dua English in Papua New Guinea James Oladejo

557 589

CONCLUSIONS Summary and interpretation: Post-imperial English 1940—1990 . . 623 Joshua A. Fishman Subject index

643

GENERAL BACKGROUND ISSUES

Introduction: Some empirical and theoretical issues Joshua A. Fishman

This volume will attempt to raise (and, to some extent, hopefully, to answer) three interlocking questions. Even differentiating between these questions may, perhaps, be of some value.

Three interlocking

questions

Our first, frequently encountered question pertains to whether English is "still" spreading in the non-English mother-tongue world. Should our first question be answered in the affirmative, at least in connection with some societal functions, our second question pertains to whether that continued spread is in any way directly orchestrated by, fostered by, or exploitatively beneficial to the English mother-tongue world. In this connection we will examine with particular care the many changes in the status of English in various parts of the world that were British or American colonies, protectorates, or spheres of interest roughly at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, to ask who benefits by English there. Our third question, regardless of what the answer to the second may turn out to be, is whether there are forces or processes that transcend the English mother-tongue world itself and which may also be contributing noticeably to the continued spread and entrenchment of English in non-English mother-tongue countries. These three questions are not only arranged in logical order, the prior ones requiring answers before the latter ones can be tackled; they are arranged in ascending order of complexity as well, since the last mentioned is far more difficult to engage than the first. Andrew W. Conrad and I have once before been jointly engaged (together with Robert L. Cooper) in an attempt to provide a partial answer to the first question we are posing (again) at this time (Fishman—Cooper-Conrad 1977). We return to this question now, joined by Alma Rubal-Lopez, hopefully with more data and better analytic methods. As before, the entire world will be our oyster, and both theoretical essays and factual information derived from the broadest possible array of

4

Joshua A. Fishman

sources will be presented. Wherever the available data will permit, we will attempt not only descriptive but also explanatory formulations and relationships. As will become patently clear, providing answers even to this initial and most elementary of our three questions is, nevertheless, a quite daunting task. As for our second question, it is not enough, of course, merely to ask whether Great Britain and/or The United States — the world's demographically largest and economically mightiest predominantly English mother-tongue countries - consciously pursue policies of spreading English abroad, although, of course, that too must be examined. The industrial, commercial, cultural, and even political endeavors of their firms and of their citizens may have very definite English-language status consequences and may go far beyond formal governmental policy; indeed, they may even elicit governmental support without literally mentioning English either in legislation, in policy formulations, or in conventions of daily practice. Thus, if "the business of America is business", and if American business is generally conducted in English and almost exclusively so, throughout the world, then the power of the American economy may itself become a spearhead and an ongoing support system for the worldwide diffusion of English. While such a state of affairs is easy to suspect and suppose, painstakingly detailed country studies would be required to confirm or demonstrate it. Even more difficult to demonstrate or confirm is the third level of causality, namely the spread of English that may be going on based on the activities of multinational corporations whose pursuits can no longer be specifically related to any one country or another (Barnet-Cavanaugh 1993). The globalization of business and economic relations may preferentially utilize English simply "because it is there", because it constitutes a ready-made worldwide communication channel. Although such utilization may have initially rested upon Anglo-American econotechnological might, it may well now surpass or transcend such origins - depending more on Japanese, German, Gulf State or Southeast Asian investments than on Anglo-American ones. Ultimately, the spread of English — if such spread is documentable — may have more to do with the growing dominance of the richer countries over the poorer ones (and not merely economically or particularly politically, but also culturally) than with the English mother-tongue countries per se. To the extent that a non-ideological level of discussion and analysis is possible, it is intriguing to ask what causal empirical linkages need to be explored in order to disclose and evaluate the multinational contribution to the possible spread and the current worldwide functions and status of English.

Introduction

From Imperialism to

5

Neo-colonialism

One hundred former colonies acquired independence during the fiftyyear period (1940—1990) under purview in the chapters that follow.1 The Second World War may, therefore, be seen as a general turning point in the formal relationship between the early-modernizing Western European/American imperial orbit and the late-modernizing world. Of the above-mentioned 100, fully 56 were former British colonies and 1 (the Philippines) was an American possession. The years of their official decolonizations are shown in Table 1. However, although the lowering of one flag and the raising of another may indicate the end of colonial status, these acts do not necessarily indicate the end of imperialist privilege in neo-colonialist disguise. Furthermore, particularly in the American case, actual physical (military) conquest and occupation were not generally involved, as the cases of Cuba, Mexico, and Quebec clearly attest, yet no one can doubt that these areas have had to function within an American shadow or penumbra for well over a century. During the Cold War, a period which for all practical intents and purposes corresponds to the one we are examining, it was not uncommon for the United States and its capitalist allies and the Soviet Union and its communist allies to hurl charges and countercharges of imperialism at one another, and for "Third World" spokespersons to join in with accusations of their own. 2 But from the point of view of empirical research and the testing of hypotheses, "imperialism" is a much more slippery term than "Empire" and "neocolonialism" may be more slippery still. The term "imperialism" has long been argued about in the political science literature, and more than one political scientist has decried it as a rhetorical designation that should be dispensed with entirely in social science research (see, e. g., Etherington 1984; see footnote 6, below). At the very least, it denotes the exploitation of a colony for the benefit of an occupying power. "Neo-colonialism" denotes the continuation of the aforementioned exploitation even after the occupation has ended. 3 Both terms are handicapped by the fact that "exploitation" is a perspectival or judgmental term that leaves behind it the quandary of how to label the large number of cases in which colonies are not (or are no longer) beneficial to the occupying powers and when, therefore, the latter may be said to be exploited by the former, rather than the other way around. 4

6

Joshua A. Fishman

Table 1. The chronology of decolonization in the Anglo-American orbitΛ Year

Country

Year

Country

1946

Jordan Philippines Bhutan India Pakistan b Burma Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Palestine (Israel) Libya Sudan Ghana Nigeria Cyprus Kuwait Tanganyika (Tanzania) Jamaica Trinidad & Tobago Uganda Western Samoa Kenya Malaysia Singapore Zanzibar 0 Malawi Malta Zambia Gambia Maldives

1966

Barbados Botswana Guyana Lesotho Southern Yemen Mauritius Nauru Swaziland Fiji Tonga Bahrain Qatar Sierra Leone United Arab Emirates Bahamas Grenada Papua New Guinea Seychelles Dominica Solomon Islands Tuvalu Kiribati St. Lucia St. Vincent Vanuatu Zimbabwe Antigua Belize St. Kitts-Nevis Brunei

1947

1948

1951 1956 1957 1960 1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1967 1968

1970 1971

1973 1974 1975 1976 1978

1979

1980 1981 1983 1984

a b c

Based upon table in Taylor 1990, with some corrections Subsequently split into Pakistan and Bangladesh (1971) Incorporated into Tanzania (1964)

Linguistic imperialism and

neo-colonialism

The foregoing nuances, transitions, and conceptual puzzles in conjunction with the study of imperialism more generally deserve more than passing attention in connection with our sociolinguistic focus as well. Is the spread of a language invariably an indication of imperialism? If not, when has the spread of English been imperialistic and when not? And

Introduction

1

were the benefits entirely one-sided, i.e., by the imperialists and their coopted local associates alone, or were they more pervasive? What, if any, were the penalties paid, as trade-offs for the benefits, and who was penalized and in what ways? Basically, we need to ask whether linguistic neo-colonialism always characterizes the persistence of English after political decolonization has occurred, or whether there are settings in which such persistence might better be termed the democratization of a formerly elitist resource. And shall we entertain the notion of "English (language) cultural imperialism" even in Europe, where no Anglophone empire existed, and of "cultural neo-colonialism" there too, even where no colonies were to be found in the sense of former political and military dependencies? If so, then how are we to differentiate our field of focus from that of the study of the sociocultural consequences of power differentials between languages and cultures more generally? Is every case of power differentials between cultures and languages in contact ipso facto an instance of imperialism or neo-colonialism? In the huge literature on imperialism (probably as huge as that on either nationalism or internationalism), relatively little has been said, and even less has been empirically documented, about cultural-linguistic imperialism. Obviously, expatriate administrators, military personnel and economic "developers" used linguistic tools to their own purposes, to render their "posting" abroad more comfortable as well as more efficient and, all in all, to advance their own ends. English language newspapers, journals, schools, churches, hospitals, and stores and their associated managers, clergy, teachers, health personnel, etc., were later followed by radio broadcasts, films, television programs/videos, computers and their associated distribution, sales, training and repair personnel. These language-imbedded positions were ultimately opened to and subsequently inherited by local proto-elites who then rose to leadership and to apparent and, finally, to real power as well. These linguistically imbedded channels of empire challenge us to formulate a theory of cultural imperialism that will escape some of the puzzles and failures faced by theories of econopolitical imperialism more generally. The sudden collapse of the empires of the most modernized Western capitalist nations after World War II implies that the link between imperialism and economic development is rather weaker (or, at least, far different) than had been anticipated. The half century following the collapse of the former British, French, and American empires has been witness to one of the most vigorous and lasting periods of economic expansion in world history. What does this imply for the importance of economic factors vis-ä-vis the post-

8

Joshua A. Fishman

colonial status of English in the politically liberated areas? If we initially conceived of the expansion of English as being facilitated by the selfseeking capitalist economies of the metropolitan (i.e., the colonizing) "centers", might we not now ask whether the reverse direction of causality now obtains, such that English may now be facilitating the economic development of the formerly colonized regions, particularly by facilitating their participation in the world capitalist system (i. e., the total capitalist system, above and beyond that of their former metropolitan center)?5 Perhaps English should be reconceptualized, from being an imperialist tool to being a multinational tool. Multinationals are pro-multinational rather than pro one or another imperial or national metropolitan center, and English can serve them parsimoniously almost everywhere. In this sense, English may well be the lingua franca of capitalist exploitation without being the vehicle of imperialism or even neo-imperialism per se. Perhaps, just as neo-colonialism has become merely a form of the world capitalist system rather than a form of imperialism itself, so English may need to be re-examined precisely from the point of view of being post-imperial (as the title of our book implies, that is in the sense of not directly serving purely Anglo-American territorial, economic, or cultural expansion) without being post-capitalist in any way?6 Marxist theories of imperialism and neo-imperialism as the final stage in the collapse of combative and competitive capitalism, on the one hand, and dependency theory, its more stylish successor, on the other, both erroneously assume that the relationship between the advanced capitalist world and the developing world is, in a very fundamental sense, a zerosum game. In such terms, the exploitation and depletion of the developing world redounds to the benefit of the advanced capitalist world alone. The more the former loses, the more the latter gains. But what if the world economy (given GATT, NAFTA, and other such cooperative cross-national and cross-continental arrangements in Asia and Africa) has increasingly entered a new capitalist phase, one for which there is much evidence from the rising standard of living in various countries which were totally backward only 50 years ago, in which all gain, albeit not equally?7 If that were to be the case, then a growing need for English the world over might also not occur (only) at the expense of and via the displacement of local languages and cultures. Perhaps, indeed, there are certain vernaculars that are better established, via state-building functions as well as via functions in the local media and in the secondary or local economy, thanks to the needs of a more coordinated and harmonious capitalist world order, than they would otherwise be. Perhaps there are at least some settings in which the very imperialism which carried

Introduction

9

English with it to all ends of the world also led to the rise of local elites and counter-elites who became interested in both English and their local vernaculars in order to communicate with different constitutencies. Perhaps what we most need now, in order to advance our understanding of status change in non-mother-tongue English during the past 50 years, is to set aside worldwide catch-all theories for a while - not to mention trendy ideological labels and slogans with immediate political connotations - and to look for regional differences or clusters of countries (contiguous or non-contiguous) where the status change processes vis-ä-vis English have turned out one way, and others in which they have turned out another way (or ways). It is certainly high time that someone examined whether countries in the former American colonial orbit and countries in the former British colonial orbit have turned out in the same way or not vis-ä-vis their respective metropolitan varieties, since British imperialism and American imperialism differed so importantly. 8 Ultimately, comparisons with the former colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands are also obviously needed vis-ä-vis the post-imperial fortunes of their inherited metropolitan tongues. It may very well be that the latter languages are even more exclusively ensconced than is English in its particular former colonial sites. If that should be so, then processes vastly larger in scale and in ubiquity than Anglo-American imperialism must be investigated and revealed. If the cold war has, indeed, receded into history (every week brings its own confirmations and disconfirmations of such a devoutly desired end; therefore a conditional is still needed), then it is high time that our thinking on the spread of English also become more de-ideologized. Communism's own demise may not really be its greatest gift to humanity after all. Perhaps its greatest gift is that the West so exhausted itself in the struggle with communism that, as a result, it became more possible for several hitherto peripheral powers to rise economically and to attain the psychosocial security to seek greater cultural security as well.9 Even during the years of imperial occupation various new (i. e., nontraditional) elites had struggled valiantly against imperial economic, political, and cultural domination. The costs of this struggle were doubtlessly great, but just as, all in all, the "imperialist balance" was not entirely a negative one econopolitically, so the outcomes of imperialism may not have been entirely negative linguistically and culturally either. 10 While apologetics on behalf of imperialism have no place in social science, no apologetics are called for in order to carefully investigate the possibility that the impact of English on cultures and societies throughout the world has been a variable one, just as the degree of adoption of English itself has

10

Joshua A. Fishman

also been variable, rather than easily characterizable in simple moralistic terms.

The plan of this book We will start off looking at worldwide trends (trends in research on the spread of English, and trends in the spread itself). We will then visit 20 different former British and American colonies, dependencies, and spheres of influence. Finally, we will try to arrive at some conclusions, or at least to inquire as to whether any such are possible at this time, vis-άvis status changes in the spread and function of English in non-English mother-tongue countries. The country studies included in this volume were generally written by academics who were residents of and/or have long been specialists in the status of English in the settings which they have been asked to describe and analyze. Their points of view have not been orchestrated in any way. They were not asked to follow any particular outline, other than (i) to attend to status changes in as wide a variety of functions as possible during the 1940—1990 period, and (ii) to react, if they would and vis-ä-vis their own country insofar as the last 50 years are concerned, to the views of Phillipson (1992) that the spread of English into non-English mother-tongue areas is characterizable as linguistic imperialism. As is always the case when one works with a large number of authors scattered across the globe, some did and some did not do all that was expected of them, but all took their assignments seriously and produced material which I, as a co-editor of this volume, am very pleased to be able to bring to the attention of readers from various disciplines and walks of life in various countries the world over. It is my fervent hope that in the future the study of the status and functions of English worldwide will benefit from an international network of monitors - English being perhaps the first lingua franca in world history to be fairly continuously monitored in this fashion - and that this book will be (and will be remembered as) a worthy contribution in that connection.

Notes 1. Peter J. Taylor (1990: 1 6 - 1 7 ) lists these former colonies and (with some errors, unfortunately) specifies their former colonial masters. 2. For a sampling of this often partisan literature (limiting ourselves to English language publications only), see, e. g., Enteen 1979, Kierman 1978, Mamatey 1964, and Nkrumah 1951. Soviet and left-wing sources in this topic area are legion.

Introduction

11

3. The ubiquity of continuity between imperial and post-imperial policies is addressed by various contributors to Mommsen—Osterhammel 1986. 4. In this connection, see Semmel 1993. 5. For probing examination of the development of a "world capitalist system" see Wallerstein (1979) and (1974, 1980). A related, more recent and less economically focused examination of this same development is that of Robertson (1992). 6. My discussion here has been stimulated by the work of Etherington (1984). 7. Of all the socialist thinkers, the Viennese Karl Kautsky alone had the uncanny vision of a possible end to untrammeled competition in armaments and in commerce throughout the capitalist world and the institution of a more coordinated and harmonious worldwide capitalist system. Although he referred to this stage as "ultra-imperialism", it might better be termed "managed competition". See his (1914) Der Imperialismus, translated in New Left Review (1970). Interestingly enough, Kautsky also foresaw an Austro-Hungarian Monarchy characterized by national cultural autonomy arrangements permitting all of its ethnonational groups to live in harmony with one another. See his Nationalität und Internationalität [1908], cited in Rocker (1937). 8. On American imperialism see, in addition to Kierman (1978), Aron (1974). 9. In this connection see Fanon (1965). 10. For a discussion of the rise of uncompromising local elites, see Low (1982).

References Aron, Raymond 1974

The imperial republic: The United States and the world, 1945—1973. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Barnet, Richard J . - J o h n Cavanagh 1993 Global dreams: Imperial corporations and the new world order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Enteen, George 1979 Soviet historians and the study of Russian imperialism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Etherington, Norman 1984 Theories of imperialism: War, conquest and capital. London: Croom Helm. Fanon, Frantz 1965 The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Publications. Fishman, Joshua A . - R o b e r t L. C o o p e r - A n d r e w W. Conrad (eds.) 1977 The spread of English: The sociology of English as an additional language. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gifford, Proser-William Roger Lewis (eds.) 1982 Transfer of power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kautsky, Karl 1914 "Der Imperialismus", Die Neue Zeit, September 11. [1970] [Translated in New Left Review 59: 39-46.] Kierman, E. G. 1978 America: The new imperialism. London: Zed Press.

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Low, D. A. 1982

"The Asian mirror of tropical African independence", in: Proser G i f f o r d William Roger Lewis (eds.), 1—29. Mommsen, Wolfgang J . - J ü r g e n Osterhammel (eds.) 1986 Imperialism and after: Continuities and discontinuities. London: Allen and Unwin. Nkrumah, Kwame 1951 Neo-Colonialism. New York: International Publishers. Phillipson, Robert 1992 Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Roland 1992 Globalization: Social theory and global culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rocker, Rudolf 1937 Nationalism and culture. Los Angeles: Rocker Publication Committee. Semmel, Bernard 1993 The liberal ideal and the demons of empire: Theories of imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, Peter J. (ed.) 1990 World government. New York: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974, 1980 The modern world system, vols. 1—2. New York: Academic Press. 1979 The capitalist world-economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The international role of English: The state of the discussion1 Andrew W. Conrad Introduction An assessment of the status of English as an additional language in the world in 1994 is every bit as complex as it was when Dr. Fishman and I made our first attempt to document that role in 1976 (Conrad-Fishman 1977), this despite the substantial volume of work and serious attention devoted to these issues in the interim. While this volume revisits a number of issues we first discussed there, my intent here is not simply to document the presence of English throughout the world, social domain by social domain, but rather to discuss the future by looking critically at the state of the discussion and by asking what sort of information we need to discover and interpret trends that we can reasonably expect to continue in the future. Large questions remain, essential data are scarce and scattered throughout the libraries and archives of the world, and perhaps most tellingly, the view is often out of focus because of the intense feelings issues about the future of English continue to arouse. To what extent English is spreading, in what ways it is spreading, into what domains it is spreading, and the status of English relative to local languages are, finally, empirical issues, questions that will yield answers useful to planners with widely varying agendas. To answer such fundamental questions in a particular way because one outcome or another is the desired one is propaganda, not scholarship. Furthermore, how questions of this sort get answered depends in large measure on how the questions are framed, how central concepts (like dominance, imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, internationalism) are defined, and the disciplinary perspective from which they are approached. The task is formidable, but not impossible. After the publication of The Spread of English (Fishman—Cooper— Conrad 1977), the discussion both broadened to include more topics and deepened to analyze the topics more thoroughly. Interest in the status of English in the world was awakened anew by the claims in that book, and a discussion of general principles, specific country and topical studies,

14

Andrew W. Conrad

and more empirical studies followed. The last fifteen years have been fruitful indeed. While the bibliographic sources that supported the analysis in The Spread of English were only peripherally (for the most part) about the subject (see the bibliography of C o n r a d - F i s h m a n 1977), more and more monographs, articles, dissertations, and even entire periodicals have focused on the issues raised there. This chapter will assess that growing discussion noting changes, expansions, and new issues that are emerging as the community of scholars attempts to understand the emergence of English as far and away the principal language of international communication. I will also note some of the principal sources for the data such discussions require for the benefit of the serious student.

Sources for the discussion after 1977 Alma Rubal-Lopez's dissertation (1991), prepared under the direction of Joshua A. Fishman for Yeshiva University, examined the spread of English in 121 non-English mother-tongue countries using sopisticated quantifiable indicators and regression analysis. Her paper (see also F i s h m a n Rubal-Lopez 1992) is a model of how the clustering of independent and dependent variables taken from sources not primarily designed to indicate the influence of English offers insight into the social and political contexts where English flourishes (or as the case may be, declines) as an additional language. She completed "four stepwise multiple regressions (each controlling for specific variables)" to conclude that such factors as colonialism, linguistic heterogeneity, and economic development are significant predictors of the influence of English. New factors which she identified and offered for study include the following: the degree of English-language institutionalization found in a nation, the lack of a developmental orientation, African rather than South American, and the percent of students in English mother-tongue nations from nonEnglish mother-tongue countries. (Rubal-Lopez 1991: 2)

The literature I have reviewed includes general discussions of the sociology of English as a world language, parallel studies of other international languages (like Ammon 1991 for German), area or country cases in point, and topical studies (English in education, English as an official language, etc.). The viewpoints range from those which view the universally acknowledged importance of English with great alarm to those which view it positively, as a potential means for growing world unity and

The international role of English

15

peace. I will look for those areas of communication between opposing viewpoints as well as explanations for the directions studies have pursued in the nature of the many disciplines represented in the research underway as well as in the terms in which researchers cast their questions and findings. My purpose is less to defend any approach than it is to clarify the issues we need to understand in order to proceed. Several important collections of papers on the subject of English around the world have appeared during the past decade and a half. John Pride edited New Englishes, published by Newbury House in 1982. That volume of 15 papers raises some foundational questions (as in Moag's important paper on "English as a foreign, second, native, and basal language: a new taxonomy of English-using societies" [1982]) while emphasizing emerging varieties of English and some of the problems that such development involves. Jenny Cheshire's English around the world (1991) emphasizes descriptive analyses of the differences among major varieties of English. Wolfgang Viereck and Wolf-Dietrich Bald edited English in contact with other languages, a substantial collection of papers discussing complex contact situations involving both domain-specific issues (like scientific publishing) and geographic contact. Larry E. Smith's (1983) book, Readings in English as an international language, brings together sixteen essays, including Braj Kachru's "Models of non-native Englishes", to bolster his interest in issues of mutual intelligibility among varieties of English, standards for written English, and "auxiliary language features". Another important collection is English as a world language, edited by Sidney Greenbaum and published by the Pergamon Institute of English in 1985. Greenbaum collects thirty-one papers, and in doing so, attempts to inaugurate a series of books "to demonstrate the multicultural and multilingual nature of the English using speech fellowships" (1985: vii). Another English as a world language, edited by Richard Bailey and Manfred Gorlach, was published in 1982. This is a remarkable book, including a substantial, carefully organized bibliography covering 13 pages, as well as a series of important articles which address issues at both the microand macro-levels of analysis. Several monographs have also played an important role in the conversation about English in more recent years. Wardhaugh (1987), for all its sweeping generalizations, discusses the dominance of English as an international language in intelligent, clear terms. Claude Truchot's L'Anglais dans le monde contemporain (1990), is thorough, comprehensive, and full of important documentation. By far, however, the most controversial book, and in its own way, the most interesting, is Linguistic imperialism

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by Robert Phillipson (1992). It has attracted comment, reaction, and renewed energetic discussion about the role of colonialism, indeed what Phillipson calls imperialism, in the spread of English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More on this later. Important periodicals devoted to issues raised by the spread of English include English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English, edited by Manfred Görlach; World Englishes, edited by Braj Kachru; and pertinent special issues of International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Joshua A. Fishman, general editor. (See for example Issue 107, edited by Ulrich Ammon.) Other important sources of discussion include books and periodicals devoted to academic discussions of language planning, languages in contact, bilingual education, and languages in contact. Suffice it to say that even a glance at the bibliographies of the aforementioned books and articles will convince us all that this discussion is both broad and deep. The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to discuss in a direct way those factors which impact the spread of English, but rather to raise basic questions about the discussion itself as it has emerged. I will ask how the formulations we use, how the narratives our language signals, how the disciplines out of which our questions emerge shape the answers we offer. Some definitions (of national language, official language, international language, etc.) are regularly used with too little attention to their potential ambiguity, though the troublesome nature of such basic concepts is more and more a topic of discussion, and with the publication of Phillipson's Linguistic imperialism, the role of ideology in the study of the sociology of language as well as in the spread of English has been questioned. The impact of the book has been felt in discussions throughout the wide interdisciplinary conversation about the future of English as an international language, an impact I will examine below.

English and other languages of wider

communication

As Fishman and I noted in 1977, English is by far the most widely used language of wider communication in the world. The details of that ubiquity are now widely known, if still less precisely known than many of us would like. Issues important to the description of the ascendancy of English include its relation to other languages of wider communication, like French, German, and Russian, as well as the extent to which English is used at various levels of society and for what purposes. William Gage,

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whose important work with Sirarpi Ohannessian (1974) Fishman and I relied on in 1977 for our estimates of English education in non-English mother-tongue countries, remains reasonably certain that English is now the "world language de facto" (1986: 371). That judgment seems secure enough now, nearly a decade after he made it, but his prescience about the probable influence of Russian has not proven to be nearly as accurate. The 1986 article displays Gage's sardonic wit at its best, but his prediction about the political volatility of the past decade could not have been more inverted. He called Russian "the other superlanguage", as it no doubt was just that short time ago. Gage notes that Russian is "second only to English as an avenue of access to modern science and technology" (1986: 372), and he comments, "The world political balance could shift, leading to the eclipse of English by Russian" (1986: 379). What we have seen, of course, is a most dramatic shift of an entirely reverse sort, and who can predict what seismic shift is just ahead as I write now in 1994? In fact, Isabelle Kreindler, writing in the International Political Science Review in 1993, predicts an English/local language multilingualism for the areas of former Soviet political influence, so quickly has Russian learning disappeared from the countries of Eastern Europe. (See the paper by Ulrich Ammon on this subject in the present volume.) Perhaps the most comprehensive study of the role of German in the world is Ammon (1991). Its detailed attention to domains (technical, academic, religious, economic, diplomatic, etc.) makes the study unparalleled in its usefulness, but all of its information and conclusions predate the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the resulting collapse of interest in Russian as a language of wider communication throughout Eastern Europe. It is certainly the case that many German students who once learned Russian as a second language are now learning English, and many students throughout Europe are interested in German in light of the size and influence of united Germany in the emerging European community. Ammon's concerns include difficulties posed for scholars long accustomed to ease of communication (in German) with their colleagues in scientific, technical, and other academic fields who now must be proficient in English if they are to participate in the international discussion. (The exhaustive 74-page [!] bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.) His conclusion, reiterated here in this volume, is that for the foreseeable future, English is likely to continue to be the most useful language of wider communication throughout the world, and particularly in Europe, with German a distant second, useful primarily in Europe. The issues surrounding the role of French in the world are many, and they are colored by attitudinal issues. While English has long since be-

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come the language of diplomacy, replacing French as the language heard in embassies throughout the world, French remains the language of the caricature "sophisticate", and French is often "liked" in a way English is not (see Fishman 1977). Relations between "francophones" and "anglophones" are complex, as Veltman points out in this volume (in the case of Quebec), and official French attempts to protect the use of the French language both in France and in the European Union are discussed in Ammon (this volume). Flaitz (1988) points out, further, that ideological questions play a major role in the dynamic between French and English, reminding us that the last word on these matters is yet to be written. In a review of Flaitz (1988), Margaret Winters comments, "Perhaps the most interesting of the results [of Flaitz's research] is that the attitude of the average Frenchman is for more positive toward the English language and American influence on French than we would believe from official and academic pronouncements of various sorts" (Winters 1989: 309). Perhaps the waning influence of French as an international language is in part the fault of policies which have tended to protect French and discourage the study of local languages in postcolonial situations, particularly in Africa. Bokamba notes, "French colonial administrations discouraged and neglected the study of African languages ... Centers for applied linguistics established in the mid-sixties in most of these countries (e. g., Centre de Linguistique Appliquee de Dakar, Institut de Linguistique Appliquee ä Abidjan) have focused their research on the improvement of French teaching materials, rather than on the description of the national languages" (Bokamba 1991: 204). (For a thorough discussion of the relations between French, German, and English in the European Union and in international communication in general, perhaps the best source is Ammon 1991.) The discussion of the "status" of English as an international language is replete with metaphors, some of which are not particularly illuminating. The notion of one language "overtaking" another, as if a race were on, is one such metaphor. Another is the notion of "powerful" language. At one level, surely, that metaphor has some resonance, as in "The language of the poem has the power to move me" or "He speaks powerfully". But relative to the discussion of the status of one language to another, the location of more power in one language than in another is more than a little problematic. Before approaching the discussion of language "dominance", particularly the "dominance" of English, I would like to pose some questions about the assumptions which seem to underlie many discussions of con-

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tact situations. The prevailing assumption is one of a "power" asymmetry; i.e., if two languages are in contact, one is more important, more functional, useful in more social domains, than the other. The theoretical possibility of a linguistic social symmetry is often regarded as quite simply inconceivable. The question then of parity is not an empirically possible one; it has been ruled out before one looks. I am not claiming parity in any particular situation; rather, I am claiming that one needs to understand the "power" of the metaphor one uses to limit the range of empirical questions one can ask. Cases become significant only when the question has been framed in a way that allows for the disqualifiying case, and that has not been possible in discussions involving English in contact situations. My claim here is that much of this discussion has subsumed the questions about the relative status of languages in the rhetoric of political science. Political science is about power relations, hegemony, conflict between dominant and dominated groups. Theories of conflicting nationalisms, imperialism, economic power, and contests of ideology are the products of a study of the political nature of human beings. It should not surprise us therefore to find such theories, or at least the language of such theories, finding their way more and more into a linguistics that is attempting to root itself in the social sciences. What is surprising is the power of such unexamined language. Contact studies become theories of conflicting languages, studies of dominations, and explorations of what Phillipson (1992) called "linguicism". It is customary, for example, to use the word "power" to mean "political entity having armies, capital, allegiance from compliant populations, etc." Ammon (1994), in a brief preface, refers no fewer than seven times to "powers", when speaking of "former colonial powers" (1994: 5—6). Ammon uses the word for "countries" or "nations", however, and never crosses the boundary which would ascribe "power" to the language; one presumes that the countries are world powers, connoting political, economic, and perhaps even cultural power — i. e., influence — in the world. Ammon does not go the next step, however, and speak of the languages of such countries as powerful languages. This, however, is an error Phillipson makes. For example, "The English language has become immensely powerful ..." (1992: 23). In this context, language spread policy comes to be understood as an instrument of social power, i. e., a means by which a "power" extends its "power" (i.e., its language) into the world. The metaphors we choose (in this case a metaphor of power) lead us past the empirical question of how a particular language is understood

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by those learning it (the attitude question), or how the language is used in a particular socio-cultural setting (the function question), or even how the teaching of the language may play a role in the intentions of those teaching it (the ideology question) to a study based on answers to these questions that we think are obvious and which we treat as given. If the language being learned is the language of a "power", surely the one learning it is responding to that power and is a less powerful person, and his language is, ergo, less powerful. To learn the language is to become "dominated" by it. Such a framework almost guarantees that the study will make empirical errors. A particularly egregious error deriving, I would claim, simply from excessive reliance on "conflict" language involves Phillipson's derogatory description of the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. His understanding of English as "an imperialist language" leads him to accuse SIL workers of a kind of ethnocentrism. "The language teaching programmes are transitional, literacy in the mother tongue being merely a stepping-stone on the path towards incorporation into mainstream society and literacy in the offical language of the state" (1992: 32). Somehow a program of literacy, rendering indigenous languages into writing, so that people can read the Bible in their own language, based on religious motives, has been stigmatized here as a propaganda arm of the evil, English-speaking empire. Without an empirical determination of the specific context, such assumptions about power inhering not in the social or historical peoples but in their language are nonsense at best, and, at worst, destructive. A second illustration (of the dozens one might choose) of how Phillipson's choice of words undermines the credibility of his argument is his abrupt dismissal of Wardhaugh's (1987) work on the dominance of English as "typical of native English-speakers who uncritically applaud the spread of English" (1992: 103). Surely Phillipson cannot mean here that Wardhaugh's work is to be disregarded simply because he is a 'native English speaker.' No one is automatically disqualified from doing good academic work merely because he/she is a first language speaker of a particular language. What is most surprising about Phillipson's use of this apparent misstatement to discredit a colleague's work is his critique of the way the language/dialect dichotomy is the analytical tool of oppression used by colonizers. This unfortunate slip underscores the care with which we need to choose the framework within which we think about the spread of English. A more functional approach allows the following sorts of observations. A young student of Tolstoy may study Russian for literary purposes and

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find the writings of Trotsky and Lenin far more interesting. Or she may study German to read Das Kapital and end up far more enamored of Goethe's poems. Or a student intending to do a Harvard MBA may come to the U. S. to perfect his English, and instead go to Berkeley to study International Law, interested ultimately in human rights abuses in emerging capitalist economies. Language, per se, is not ideology, and those who think it is vastly underestimate both its significance and the unpredictability of its issue in the minds and histories of the learners.

Issues in the discussion: Nationall international

language

Ideally ... a modern nation possesses a land of its own and a language of its own, and exercises independent sovereignty. Nationalities that have a 'consciousness of kind' rooted in a common past but lack one or another of the above attributes or possess them only in part have been prone in modern times to develop nationalist movements, aiming to acquire or recapture the missing elements and so to raise the people to the status of a nation in the full modern sense. (Halpern 1961: 20)

Clearly such a notion of "national language", i. e., a language tied to a people and a place and a historic moment in the larger scheme of things, is no longer an adequate way to deal with English. (Or for that matter with Arabic, for example, or Swahili.) English simply is not a "national" language any longer. It cannot now be tied exclusively (or even primarily) to any shared cultural past, any "ethnic" identity, any religion (as Arabic is to Islam), any racial group, or any ideology. One can be an anarchist, neo-Marxist, or Fascist in English as well as one can be a social democrat or post-industrial capitalist. While English retains the function of a national language, rooted deeply in the culture and historical consciousness of English people in Britain, it is also the language most strongly identified with the cultural mainstream, for example, in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and much of Canada, all former colonies of England no doubt. But more importantly, it is the "inter-national" language par excellence at the close of the twentieth century, and the first language of millions of people who are neither historically nor culturally related to Britain in countries where English is not the mother tongue of anything like a majority of speakers. Many people, further, of Africa, India, and Europe, are fully fluent in English, even speak it as their principal language, with no loss of their cultural identity as Ugandans, Nigerians, Indians, or Danes. It remains

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the world's lingua franca, and the principal working language of the United Nations. During the past year I had the opportunity of meeting a talented young man from India. A graduate student in physics at Princeton, he identified his languages as follows: Tamil is his "mother tongue", English is his "dominant" language, Hindi is his "national" language, French and Malay are his "other" languages. He is comfortable communicating in all five. He recounted to me that normal household conversation with his parents had always been conducted in English, and all his education was in English. But he is fluent in Tamil. He reads it, writes it, and has studied it. He dreams in it and in English. He is aware that during personal conversations with his mother, he often hears his English begin to mimic Tamil syntax. Hindi, however, is his "language of national identification". The complexities of this single case point up the care with which we need to define our terms and use labels. "Second" language is not a particularly useful term, for example, because it tells us nothing of the role the language plays for the speaker, whether home language, national language, or language of international communication. The term simply reports either the order in which it was acquired (after first and before third) or the rank the language has attained in the repertoire of the speaker, whether social rank or intellectual rank. Finally, I suspect, the term obscures more than it illuminates and it is perhaps best dropped. Designating nations and cultures with respect to language is never simple (unless it is Pitcairn where the handful of folks speak English). The United States, which Conrad and Fishman (1977) rightly called an English mother-tongue country, includes great linguistic diversity, and only as details of that multicultural diversity become more commonly known will the extent of that diversity be widely appreciated. Persons, not countries, are perhaps more easily described, so that if one were to say that 84 percent of the residents of the U. S. were English mother-tongue speakers, one would be closer to the truth. The ideology is that real U. S. citizens speak English, and the "Englishonly" folks often insist that many social problems would magically disappear if "those folks would just learn English and become real Americans". The simple reality is that most countries in this last decade of the twentieth century are linguistically diverse. I could comfortably write some 18 years ago that Australia was an English mother-tongue country and ignore the indigenous populations and their rich linguistic history. I can no longer do that.

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Robert Phillipson (1992) includes probably the most complete assemblage of anecdotal data to date on the attempts of the English-speaking cultures (principally the UK) to spread their language primarily to colonially subject peoples or to their freed descendants. Phillipson's analysis, which is discussed in considerable detail throughout this paper, is based firmly in what Cooper (1989) calls "conflict theory". In an outline of theories of social change, Cooper makes a useful distinction between functional theories, which view the respective parts of a social system as structurally dependent so that a modification in one part of the system entails adjustments throughout, and conflict theories, which focus attention "on the tensions which disrupt [a system] and pull it apart" (1989: 178). Much of the tension between Phillipson's work, which I understand to belong to theories rooted in assumptions about structural inequality and the imbalances between exploited and exploiter, and the work of other students of English as a language of wider communciation, including my own thinking, results from the essential incompatibility of these approaches. An analysis based in conflict theories of social change may, as well seriously underestimate the present impact of English in the world relative to other languages of international communication. A more functional recent assessment (for example, Ammon 1991) shows the remarkable degree to which English no longer "belongs" to the people of Great Britain. The language is now home and hearth to people from Africa, India, North America, Malaysia, China, the Philippines, etc. Its presence in, say, Israel or Austria is no marker of an alien ethnicity. That English seems to be more and more "unmarked" for ethnicity, more and more unleashed from its own colonial yoke, is a significant, even astonishing, part of the story of the spread of English in this closing decade of the twentieth century. Central to Phillipson's thesis is the claim that the promotion of English implies - indeed, necessitates — the demotion of local languages (see, e.g., Phillipson 1994). Rather than demonstrating that demotion of the local language in particular cases, Phillipson (1992) asserts it because his definition of linguistic imperialism demands it. "A working definition of English linguistic imperialism is that the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages" (1992: 47, italics his). His argument seems to be as follows: 1) English is spread by linguistic imperialism. (Apparently only by imperialism.) 2) Linguistic imperialism means that English needs to maintain its dominance (as if

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a language were somehow conscious of its own status), and therefore, "interested" parties, i. e., exploiters, promote inequalities between English and local languages. Therefore, 3) English is spread at the expense of local languages. It seems fairly obvious that if the spread of English is everywhere only imperialistic, it would follow, as day follows night, that such an imperial imposition of a language would be at the expense of local languages. This is a standard logical fallacy; the argument assumes what it sets out to prove. Or perhaps, more understandably if equally objectionable, the theory of social change on which it is built anticipates that explanations will take a form which requires the division of languages, like the societies languages are associated with, into exploited and exploiter. In a recent paper, Phillipson (1994: 8) quotes Ivan Illich's reference to Nebrija's words as follows: "Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate." He then shows how Spanish (Castilian) was spread as an instrument of the Spanish Empire. "Monolingualism became the goal of most Western states, a position that has only recently been modified" (1994: 8). Extrapolation from this historical example leads inexorably to the specious conclusion that the "present distribution throughout the world of such major 'international' languages as Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish is evidence of conquest and occupation, followed by adoption of the invader's language because of the benefits that accrue to speakers of the language" (1994: 8). While it would certainly be an error to deny that languages have spread with historical shifts in the balance of political power, or to deny that from an obscure language of a few persons just 400 years ago, English has grown until it is now the major language of wider communication in the world today, through conquest, colonization, and political imposition, it is not clear, at least to this student, what one is to make of these facts. Are people forever in the clutches of a history they neither made nor can change? In the interests of righting the wrongs of the past, do we advocate that the people of Mexico renounce the use of Spanish and return to their pre-conquest languages? Should all citizens of India who speak English as a first language abandon their language, a language many have now spoken as first language for five generations? How far back must one go to locate the language that is purely a part of the "true" identity of a people? Such questions do not have obvious answers, as language planners have attempted extraordinary changes based on a shared understanding of history. Jews returning to Israel did, in this century, abandon a variety of first languages, to return to Hebrew. One won-

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ders whether such a belief in historical "primitivism" would require the sort of enforced monolingualism Phillipson imagines he sees in the growth of English as an international language. But that is another question. Phillipson is likewise sure that "continued use of English [in the former colonies] is clearly also in the interest of Britain and the USA" (1994: 10). This claim no doubt refers to economic interest, but the way such a continued spread of English benefits English-speaking economic interests is not explained. It is assumed. (See A. Rubal-Lopez's paper in this volume on imports and exports for some surprising conclusions about who in fact benefits.) The assumption contaminating Phillipson's argument, firmly rooted as it is in conflict theories of social change, results in his placing the argument in the unexamined narratives of imperialism; i. e., if a relation is "imperial", there is, by definition, a power differential between colonizer and colonized, between exploiter and exploited. That such a political power difference is real cannot be disputed; whether that political fact translates into a sociolinguistic fact is quite another question, the key question of this whole discussion. The citation of endless numbers of documents from foreign policy bureaucrats in the British Council or the U. S. Information Agency does little to clarify what is meant by a "powerful" language. To a social theorist working from a more functional theoretical base, such a concept is puzzling at best. Phillipson, however, has been developing the concept of linguicism for some time to account for this power differential between English (and presumably the other international languages) and local (or in his terms periphery) languages. "Linguicism" is defined "as ideologies, structures and practices that are used to legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language" (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988: 13, cited in Phillipson 1994: 20). This unequal distribution of resources results in dominant languages, which because they are associated with development, wreak havoc in the so-called Third World, displacing local languages. Phillipson again says, "English is by no means a 'second' language in countries in which it is used as the dominant language of education, government, and the 'modern' economy. It effectively replaces and marginalizes other languages" (1994: 20). This claim of course is hard to interpret in the light of his parallel claim, in the same article, that "in such 'English-speaking' countries as Kenya, Nigeria, or Pakistan, it is only a fraction of the population who actually speak the language of

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power — figures for India very between 2 percent and 4 percent" (1994: 10). If the agenda of these powerful countries is to displace local languages (or to replace them altogether), the policy has failed miserably, and is apparently a threat to no one (see below). Such a multilingual equilibrium is not a surprising outcome, at least according to Laitin (1993: 238). He concludes, "The maintenance of multilingual repertoires rather than the replacement of competing languages in all domains by English will be the mark of the emerging world language system." Such a conclusion is possible even while working from a conflict model of social change. De Swaan (1993) agrees, though his study of language in the new European polities relies on such questionable notions as "robustness". See, for example, his concluding remark: "[T]his diglossia is an equilibrium, predicated on the robustness of the languages involved, and therefore dependent on continuing state support and protection of the national languages" (1993: 252). One of the characteristics of the current situation in the European community which Phillipson notes as an "irony" in fact calls his thesis into question. "One of the ironies of this situation is that the national governments of such countries as France and Germany are contributing to the spread of English by assuring [sic] it a major place in the education system, while simultaneously they are anxious about the invasion of alien cultural norms via English" (1994: 20). Is it not equally plausible that however concerned France and Germany may be about the invasion of MTV culture (I live in the United States and fully share this aversion I have personally kept it quite out of my home and my life), no one fears that French people in Paris are likely to lose their Frenchness to an invasion of English. While there is loudly proclaimed official concern about the influence of English language and culture on French language and culture, in fact, apparently French citizens do not share that concern (see Flaitz 1988). Widespread efforts to preserve the French language in its purest form continue, and are widely accepted. French citizens who also speak English have not decided to read Shakespeare and Keats at the expense of Baudelaire and Proust, nor is there any great movement in France toward the purchase of English cuisine or, heaven forbid, English wine. The conclusion of the 1994 article is startling in that it poses as empirical questions issues which Phillipson has treated as settled throughout the article. Phillipson concludes, "Whether the spread of English has led to the marginalization and exploitation of other languages is an empirical question to which one can seek answers by analyzing the evidence of

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linguicism and linguistic imperialism in each specific context" (1994: 21). But the claim that the question is empirical does not make it so. What would be the disqualifying case? If the question is framed that way, the answer is already apparent. If one does empirical studies to discover what the long-term effects of the power asymmetry between languages have been, and whether the effects continue, one never needs to ask whether the question is well formed, whether in fact any power asymmetry ever existed between the languages themselves. I have little hope that a research enterprise has been defined by the invention of linguicism. The fundamental inadequacy of the conflict theory of social change, a kind of toothless Marxism, extends beyond our present discussion, and that extension likewise sheds light back in our direction. H. L. Gates writes about cultural imperialism, an animal from which linguistic imperialism is perhaps derived, as follows: "I do not know that much time has been spent thinking about what the phrase should mean. Should the global circulation of American culture always be identified as imperialism, even if imperialism by other means? In an era of transnational capital, transnational labor, and transnational culture, how well is the center-periphery model holding up?" (1992: 190) Not well, Gates concludes. He notes that those who argue for such a notion of imperialism fail to "acknowledge the specificity of cultural interactions" (1992: 191). And in doing so, they arrogantly assume America to be center-stage when in fact America may not be center-stage at all, either as villain or hero. He rather sees the new global culture as complex, disjunctive, and overlapping; he asserts that the "spatial dichotomies through which our oppositional criticism (i. e., center-periphery models) has defined itself prove increasingly inadequate to a cultural complex of traveling culture. Once more, the world itself has outpaced our academic discourse" (1992: 191) Whether Phillipson's thesis can be modified in ways which will make it useful as a framework for useful empirical research remains an open question. No one doubts that imperial ambition has scarred the history of nearly every country in the world today, in one way or another. How such a legacy of volatile power relations will influence the spread of English is a question Phillipson unfortunately cannot yet raise in a way that permits the issue to be examined. The relation of the language of wider communication to the local language needs to be answered contextually, empirically (by a marshaling of evidence) and historically (particular to specific, changing circumstances). What may be benign in one context or time may be malignant (imperial or colonial) in another. And perhaps the model of center-periphery is just too simple to account for reality as it is emerging.

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Sullivan (1991: 257) says 256.1 million people speak English as a "native" language, while 1.4 billion people live in countries which have English as an official language (1991: 256). Truchot's more recent figures estimate the mother-tongue users of English to be 350 million, with 1.6 billion people in countries which have English as one of the official languages. On the face of it, this would suggest that the replacement of local languages with English, in the context of substantial growth overall, has been somewhat less successful than Phillipson's thesis requires. If the promotion of monolingual, exclusive use of English has been the goal of the international imperial imposition of English, the effort has been failure on a magnificent scale.

Factors in the spread of English: Sub-Saharan

Africa

That the future of the spread of English is tied inextricably to the delicate balance of social and cultural conditions that have come together to produce the particular pattern of its spread today is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the situation in the forty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa. In 1977, I quoted Ali Mazrui's influential book The Political Sociology of English, where he claims that by the year 2000, there will be more first language speakers of English in Africa than there are in Britain. That prediction seemed quite secure in 1977, and while there is no reason now to claim that it will not be the case, the situation is certainly quite different. Today, the conditions that contributed to that prediction are compromised in substantial ways. In a recent series of articles for the New York Times, John Darnton documents the political, social, educational, and economic decline of this part of the world. Politically, there is widespread fear that the growth of more democratic forms of government will lead, in the absence of economic strength, to a growth in interethnic rivalry and bloodshed. The recent rise to power by democratic means of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa in a context of the mutual respect of rival interests is encouraging, but the massacres in Rwanda and the trouble in Somalia are but two examples of the potential of this phenomenon to destroy the social fabric undergirding social order. (Somalia also illustrates the failure of outside intervention, however well intentioned.) Perhaps the most frightening specter on the horizon today in Africa is the growing AIDS epidemic. The World Health Organization now esti-

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mates that 9 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (out of a world-wide total of 13 million) are already infected with HIV. The disease, now pandemic in some major urban centers, has created situations unprecedented in African history. The destruction of millions of people in their most productive years has created substantial numbers of AIDS orphans, so many in cities like Nairobi and Monrovia that the traditional social safety net, the extended family, has failed to find room for them. Spread heterosexually in Africa, the disease has already contributed to declines in per capita economic growth (as much as 0.6 percent per year in the 10 worsthit countries, according to Darnton). This plague knows no socioeconomic boundaries, but the urban areas are presently the hardest hit. Chin and Sato (1994) note "a marked differential between urban and rural HIV seroprevalence rates. In most instances HIV seroprevalence in rural areas was one-fifth the rate found in large urban areas" (1994: 253). Unlike the plagues throughout history which have had a disproportionate impact on the poor and disenfranchised, HIV/AIDS, as Ainsworth and Over (1994: 561) put it, "does not spare the elite. Levels of HIV prevalence among high-income, urban, and relatively well-educated African men are as high as among low-income and rural men, if not higher." Further, "in a study of urban women of child-bearing age in Rwanda, for example, [one researcher] found a significant positive correlation between women's seroprevalence rate and the education and income of their male partners" (1994: 261). This particular plague, of unprecedented proportions, promises to have a profound impact on the future of Africa, and hence on the future of English in that continent. Mazrui (1975) documented substantial growth in the number of families where English is the only language shared by well-educated bilingual parents as a means by which first-language competence would grow to include more and more children of a substantial, intellectual elite. That process continues, no doubt, but on a lesser scale than previously predicted, for a number of reasons. During the 1980s, "an estimated one third of all college graduates left the continent, according to figures from the United Nations Development Program and the African Development Bank." Infant mortality rates, in decline in the decade before 1980, have reversed themselves so that now the rates are more than 100 per 1000 live births in many countries, peaking at 159 per 1000 in Mali. The poverty rates are high and are growing, and the population rate, predictably, is soaring. More than 600 million people are now living in this part of the world, but the population "could reach 1.6 billion by the year 2030." The World Bank asserts that more than one-third of the people of subSaharan Africa live in "absolute poverty".

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Andrew W. Conrad

Social disintegration and the accompanying decline in education do not predict a viable, growing place for English. English is taught primarily in schools, and while social relief agencies, United Nations personnel, world health officials, and agents of the World Bank keep an Englishspeaking foreign presence nearly ubiquitous, the primary agent of the spread of English is the school. As teachers leave [or die — a study by the World Bank cited in Ainsworth and Over (1994: 271) predicts that by 2010, Tanzania (alone) "will have lost 14,460 teachers to AIDS. By 2020, some 27,000 teachers will have died"], classes swell, and schools close for lack of funding, fewer children are receiving even a primary education. Now more than one-third of the children of sub-Saharan Africa receive no primary education. Debates about vernacular versus English medium seem less and less important as fewer and fewer children go to school at all. The health crisis, in the context of widespread social and economic problems, predicts a widespread disaster for much of sub-Saharan Africa. The catastrophe, occurring as it is in unpredicted ways, points up the difficulty inherent in a study of language spread outside a richly informed and thoughtful attention to the multilayered complexities of human life. In the same ways that political upheaval can change the future spread of a world language (like Russian), so a health crisis makes problematic every scenario we attempt to construct about the future of language planning and the spread of languages of wider communication in Africa.

Conclusion My review of the conversation that has grown up among a growing number of interested scholars has identified several points of convergence as well as the major issues of divergence on which much of my attention here remains focused. Such a review points out the need for a careful history of that conversation in the sociology of language, sociolinguistics, and political sociology based on the insights developed among practitioners of the history of science and the social context of intellectual work. When historians of science began to understand that knowledge is constructed rather than merely accumulated, they were bringing about a significant shift in disciplinary self-understanding. Accounts of the history of linguistic reflection have all too often been simply "inside" histories, written by persons whose training is in linguistics. The older sciences

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benefit greatly from the self-understanding generated by histories written by persons trained as well in fields like the history of science. I was struck, as I struggled to understand my own reluctance to find merit in Phillipson's thesis, with the fundamental incommensurability between functional theories of social change and conflict theories (Cooper's terms). Incommensurability is a notion first developed in the discussions over the work of historian of science Thomas Kuhn and his groundbreaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to account for the virtual absence of communication between theorists operating out of mutually unintelligible theoretical assumptions - what Kuhn dubbed "paradigms". If what we have in Phillipson (1992) is the sociology of language operating out of an opposing paradigm of how study of social change works, much of my concern about the posing of genuinely empirical questions is accounted for. I am fully aware that Kuhn resisted the application of his work to fields other than the "hard" sciences, the history of which Kuhn has struggled to understand. Paradigms were identified by Kuhn to account for particular histories, and he was dubious of their value in accounting for the ongoing conversation among practitioners of newer "sciences", particularly social sciences. It is therefore all the more important that a look be taken at the sociology of language, and that an attempt be made to clarify the status of such notions as "paradigm" and "incommensurability" in such a history. Such work might profitably take note of the work of Berger and Luckmann (1966) and Ravetz (1971). An extraordinarily interesting book which might point the way to a methodology is Danziger (1990). This book seems a particularly interesting model for the discussion of the sociology of language since its subject, the history of psychology, has some of the same characteristics as the sociology of language (competing schools of thought, exploding areas of interest, similar theoretical histories, etc.). Further, Danziger's book makes use of concepts like those from the sociology of knowledge and from students of the social construction of science, ideas which seem to me particularly productive in understanding just what is now developing, and has developed over the last several decades, during the time when the sociology of language came self-consciously to the fore. Perhaps then the most important issue facing students of the worldwide spread of English is the understanding we bring to our work of its place in the wider world of academic discourse. As I wrote this chapter, I became aware of the metaphorical load carried by even our most basic terms. When I use the word "language", for example, I may

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use it to refer to the particular language (like English, Spanish, French, Hausa) or I may refer to a particular universe of discourse (like the language of political science, or the language of criticism), subsuming of course the Saussurean distinction among langue, langage, and parole. A discipline hoping to make continued progress (as our conversation on the matters of concern in this volume attempts to do) needs to be fully self-conscious of these issues lest we turn a page one day and discover how seriously we have misunderstood one another. Phillipson's book may turn out to be just such a juncture.

Note 1. I would like to acknowledge the work Yaakov Perry did for me during the early stages of the preparation of this paper. He was my research assistant, paid by funds made available to me for this work by Mercer County Community College's faculty support program. His work was invaluable, as was the financial support of the college.

References Rather than offering a complete bibliography on this subject, I refer readers to the bibliographies of the following sources: Ammon 1991; Cheshire 1991; Phillipson 1992; ViereckBald 1986. There seemed to be little reason to duplicate the efforts represented in these listings. I have noted here only the principal sources consulted in preparing this brief article and some relevant materials published since the preparation of the bibliographies noted above. Achard, Pierre 1988 "The development of language empires", in: Ulrich A m m o n - N o r b e r t D i t t m a r - K l a u s J. Mattheier (eds.), vol. 2: 1541-1551. Adams, Karen L . - D a n i e l T. Brink (eds.) 1990 Perspectives on official English: The campaign for English as the official language of the USA. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ainsworth, M a r t h a - A . Mead Over 1994 "The economic impact of AIDS on Africa", in: Max Essex et al. (eds.), 559— 588. Ammon, Ulrich 1991 Die internationale Stellung der deutschen Sprache. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 1994 "Editor's preface", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 107, 5-6. Ammon, Ulrich—Norbert Dittmar—Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.) 1988 Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

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Berger, Peter L.—Thomas Luckmann 1966 The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. Berns, Margie 1992 "Sociolinguistics and the teaching of English in Europe beyond the 1990s", World Englishes 11(1): 3 - 1 4 . Bokamba, Eyamba G. 1991 "French colonial language policies in Africa and their legacies", in: David F. Marshall (ed.), vol. Ill: 175-213. Cheshire, Jenny (ed.) 1991 English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chin, James—Paul A. Sato 1994 "Estimates and projections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa", in: Max Essex et al. (eds.), 251-257. Conrad, Andrew W.-Joshua A. Fishman 1977 "English as a world language: The evidence", in: Fishman—Cooper—Conrad (eds.), 3 - 7 6 . Cooper, Robert L. 1989 Language planning and social change. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Cooper, Robert L. (ed.) 1982 Language spread: Studies in diffusion and social change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in cooperation with The Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D. C. Coulmas, Florian (ed.) 1991 A language policy for the European Community: Prospects and quandaries. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Danziger, Kurt 1990 Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darnton, John 1994 "Survival test: Can Africa rebound?" New York Times. Series of three articles beginning June 19, 1994. de Swaan, Abram 1993 "The evolving European language system: A theory of communication potential and language competition", International Political Science Review 14(3): 241-255. de Vries, John 1991 "Towards a sociology of language planning", in: Marshall, David F. (ed.), 37-52. Essex, Max—Souleymane Mboup—Phyllis J. Kanki-Mbowa R. Kalengayi (eds.) 1994 AIDS in Africa. New York: Raven Press. Fishman, Joshua A. 1972 Language and nationalism. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 1977 "Knowing, using, and liking English as an additional language", in: Fishm a n - C o o p e r - C o n r a d (eds.), 302—326.

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"Sociology of English as an additional language", in: B. Kachru (ed.) 15— 22.

1987

"English: Neutral tool or ideological protagonist? A 19th century east-central European Jewish intellectual views English from afar", English World-Wide 8(1): 1 - 1 0 . 1988 '"English only': its ghosts, myths, and dangers", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 74: 125—140. Fishman, Joshua Α.—Robert L. C o o p e r - A n d r e w W. Conrad (eds.) 1977 The spread of English. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Fishman, Joshua A . - A l m a Rubal-Lopez 1992 "Cross-polity analysis of factors affecting English language spread: predicting three criteria of spread from a large pool of independent variables", World Englishes 11(2/3): 309-329. Fishman, J. A . - A . Tabouret-Keller-M. C l y n e - B h . K r i s h n a m u r t i - M . Abdulaziz (eds.) 1986 The Fergusonian impact. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Flaitz, Jeffra 1988 The ideology of English: French perceptions of English as a world language. (Contributions to the Sociology of language 49.) Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. Gage, William 1986 "The world balance of languages", in: J. A. Fishman et al. (eds.), II: 3 7 1 383. Gage, William-Sirarpi Ohanessian 1974 "ESOL enrollments throughout the world", The Linguistic Reporter (November), 13-16. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1992 Loose canons: Notes on the culture wars. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.) 1985 The English language today. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Institute of English. Grillo, R. D. 1989 Dominant languages: Language and hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halpern, Ben 1961 The idea of the Jewish state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kachru, Braj B. et al. 1993 "Symposium on linguistic imperialism", World Englishes 12(3): 335-373. Kachru, Braj B. (ed.) 1982 The other tongue: English across cultures. Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press. Kennedy, Chris (ed.) 1983 Language planning and language education. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. Kreindler, Isabelle T. 1993 "A second missed opportunity: Russian in retreat as a second language", International Political Science Review 14(3): 257-274.

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Kuhn, Thomas 1962 The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Laitin, David D. 1993 "The game theory of language regimes", International Political Science Review 14(3): 227-239. Leitner, Gerhard 1991 "Europe 1992: A language perspective", Language Problems and Language Planning 15(3): 282-296. Lowenberg, Peter H. 1987 Language spread and language policy: Isues, implications, and case studies. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Marshall, David F. (ed.) 1991 Language planning: Focusschrift in honor of Joshua A. Fishman on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. Mazrui, Ali 1975 The political sociology of English: An African perspective. The Hague: Mouton. Moag, Rodney 1982 "English as a foreign, second, native, and basal language: New taxonomy of English-using societies", in: J. Pride (ed.), 11-50. Nadkarni, Mangesh V. 1992 "On liberating English to be a world language", World Englishes 11(2/3): 331-339. Phillipson, Robert 1992 Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994 "English language spread policy", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 107: 7 - 2 4 . Pride, John B. (ed.) 1982 New Englishes. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Ravetz, T. R. 1971 Scientific knowledge and its social problems. New York: Oxford University Press. Rubal-Lopez, Alma 1991 English language spread: Predicting three criteria. [Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University.] SchifTman, Harold F. 1992 '"Resisting arrest' in status planning: Structural and covert impediments to status change", Language d Communication 12(1): 1 - 1 5 . Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove 1988 "Multilingualism and the education of minority children", in: T. S k u t n a b b K a n g a s - J . Cummings (eds.), 9 - 4 4 . Skutnabb-Kangas, T.-J. Cummings (eds.) 1988 Minority education. Clevedon: Multilingual maffers. Smith, Larry (ed.) 1983 Readings in English as an international language. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Institute of English.

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Sullivan, M. 1991 Measuring global values. New York: Greenwood Press. Truchot, Claude 1990 L'Anglais dans le monde contemporain. Paris: Collection L'ordre des mots Le Robert. Viereck, Wolfgang-Wolf-Dietrich Bald (eds.) 1986 English in contact with other languages. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Wardhaugh, Ronald 1987 Languages in competition: Dominance, diversity and decline. Oxford: Blackwell. Winters, Margaret E. 1989 "Review of Flaitz, JefFra, The Ideology of French", Language Problems and Language Planning 13(3): 308-311.

The ongoing spread of English: A comparative analysis of former Anglo-American colonies with non-colonies1 Alma Rubal-Lopez

In the past twenty years, the study of English-language spread has evolved from an area of investigation that generally has focused on one particular polity using descriptive methods to examine "who speaks what language to whom" to one that is currently employing quantitative methods to study this phenomenon on a global level. In this chapter, the evolution of this process from an area of study that was mainly descriptive in nature to one which is currently inferential will be examined via a brief look at the investigative works done in this field, with particular emphasis on findings derived from recent statistical research.

Non-statistical

studies

Such studies as Conrad-Fishman (1977), Nadel-Fishman (1977), Seckbach-Cooper (1977), Rosenbaum et al. (1977), and Hofman (1977) are non-statistical studies that examine the extent of English use and/or attitudes toward English. Although these descriptive studies and studies of language attitudes provide researchers with valuable information regarding sociolinguistic behavior and the sentiments of its speakers, they do not provide answers to questions regarding what forces may be impacting on the spread of English. Studies that do examine some of the forces which have impacted on English-language spread have examined the roles of language policy (Kachru 1983; Sibayan 1986), education (Ekka 1984; Khubachandi 1978; Pride-Ru-Shan 1988; Huebner 1985; Spencer 1974), science and technology (Ammon 1990a), economic incentives (Cooper—Seckbach 1977; Lewis 1978; Commins 1988; Kallen 1988; Kashoki 1982), class neutralization (Kachru 1986, 1983; Sridhar 1983), and international agencies (Ammon 1990b). Unlike descriptive studies that merely describe or measure

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language use, these studies examine the causes of this linguistic behavior. Although these studies are quite informative regarding a particular social or economic factor in a particular country and its role in the spread of English in that specific locality, they do not employ the use of all these variables simultaneously in many countries. Therefore, comparisons regarding the importance of each variable and the cumulative power of these forces are not addressed by these investigations. More recent studies by Phillipson (1992) and Medley (1986) do examine the spread of English in more than one country. However, their primary focus on the relationship between colonialism and English-language spread results in the exclusion of potentially significant variables that may be affecting the spread of English in former colonies as well as elsewhere. As a result, variables that are strongly and directly related to colonialism are not differentiated from those factors which may be remotely related or not at all related. The result of such an approach is a general knowledge about the spread of English and the role of colonialism or imperialism without details about the characteristics of nations in which this spread has and has not occurred. Also, these studies do not make comparisons between colonial and non-colonial countries, resulting in more information being generated about former British and American colonies and no corresponding information about non-colonies. The use of such an approach does not provide answers to such questions as: D o colonial and non-colonial polities have any variables in common? If so, what are they and what is the strength of these factors in the spread of English? Furthermore, if colonialism is in fact the most powerful force in the spread of English in former colonies, a contention not yet proven, then what is the factor with the greatest predictive power in non-colonies? In addition, is the role of this variable in non-colonies as powerful as colonialism purportedly is in the spread of English in former colonies? Comparative studies of colonial and non-colonial countries could reveal the existence of common variables found to be significant in both situations. Such a finding may be an indicator of a non-colonial related factor which is impacting on both categories of countries, and an indication that colonization is not the major force that has impacted on the spread of English in former colonies. In essence, has English spread differently in colonial and non-colonial polities? If so, what factors explain these differences? China is a perfect example of a polity in which the spread of English has not been extensively studied even though this area of the world is one in which English is currently spreading most rapidly. Little is known

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39

about the spread of English in this nation because, as previously mentioned, studies of English-language spread are usually conducted on former colonies of the United States or Britain rather than on a nation like China which, although it has had economic ties with both the United Kingdom and the United States, cannot by any means be considered a colony of either of these two world powers. China's plans for economic development and modernization, for example, are variables which might be of equal or greater significance for the spread of English in that nation than colonialism has been in parts of Africa. However, in the absence of comparative studies such a determination is not possible. Although finding answers to all the above questions is beyond the scope of this paper, attempts will be made to address some of the posed questions.

The present

study

This chapter will present the latest statistical study of the spread of English, and will compare these findings with those of past studies. This research examines this phenomenon in 117 nations using new interdisciplinary measures never before used in the study of English-language spread, as well as variables found to be predictors of the spread of English in previous statistical studies. The uniqueness of this research is founded in the combination of variables used. Furthermore, this is the first study of its kind to look at the spread of English in former colonies of the United States and the United Kingdom, and to compare these findings to nations which have never had such a relationship with an Anglophone country. For purposes of this paper, former Anglophone colonies will be referred to as "colonies" or "former colonies", while nations that have not had colonial ties with an Anglophone nation will be referred to as "noncolonies". In essence, this study will address two major sociolinguistic issues: namely, it will detail the differences and similarities between the spread of English in former colonies and in non-colonies; and it will identify the variables that have emerged as important predictors in the global spread of English in past, recent, and current research. This chapter will be divided into four sections that will first, discuss the variables selected to be studied; second, describe and discuss findings of the research presented within; third, compare and analyze current findings with past findings; and fourth, summarize these findings.

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Alma

Rubal-Lopez

Variables Independent variables The independent variables selected to be examined in this study are derived from the works of Sivard (1977), Gurr (1972), Banks-Textor (1963), Feierabend-Feierabend (1972), Sullivan (1991), World Bank Social and Economic Indicators (1992), International Monetary Fund (1992), UNESCO (1992), World Organization on Tourism (1993), Europa (1993), and CIA (1993). These variables have been selected for this study because they satisfy one of the following two criteria: (1) they have been found to be predictors of the spread of English in previous statistical studies of this phenomenon, or (2) previous research has recommended the examination of such variables. These variables are 81 interdisciplinary measures of linguistic, economic, political, military, and religious characteristics of nations. Furthermore, four of these variables were also used as dependent variables. Dependent variables Two of the four dependent variables (foreign students and English-language newspapers) were used in Fishman-Rubal-Lopez (1992) and Conrad—Fishman (1977). The dependent variables are as follows: (1) the percent of tertiary level students studying in English mother-tongue countries who originate from non-English mother-tongue countries; (2) the percentage of English-language newspaper circulation in non-English mother-tongue countries; (3) the percentage of dollars in printed matter (books, magazines, newspapers, manuscripts, etc.) exported from the United States to non-English mother-tongue countries; and (4) the percentage of English book titles published in non-English mother-tongue countries. Foreign students Findings reveal, as in Fishman-Rubal-Lopez (1992) and Rubal-LopezFishman (1990), that the number of tertiary students around the world is on the rise (Appendix, Table 1). This population has increased from 28 429 000 in 1977 to 54 853 981 in 1987, to the present total of 65 037 530 tertiary level students throughout the world (UNESCO 1992). This growth in the number of students in higher education has been accompanied by a growth in the number of students who are studying in a country other than their own. UNESCO (1992) lists the number of foreign stu-

The ongoing spread of English

41

dents in 50 host countries as 1 168 075. Of these students, 549115, or approximately 47 percent of the world's foreign student population, is studying in six English mother-tongue countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, and Ireland (Appendix, Table 2). (Barbados, previously listed as one of the host countries, is no longer listed). The overwhelming majority of the foreign students in these English-speaking nations comes from countries where English is not a mother-tongue. Approximately 495 985, or slightly more than 90 percent of the foreign students found studying in English mother-tongue countries, originate from countries in which English is not their mothertongue. Of these host countries the one with the largest number of such students is the United States, with approximately 373411 of its foreign students originating from non-English mother-tongue countries, followed, in descending order, by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. A comparison with past findings shows that the number of foreign students presently studying in English mother-tongue countries has increased by slightly more than 100000 students within the past five years. The English mother-tongue countries that have the largest increase in the number of students from non-English mother countries are Australia, Ireland, and Canada, with an average increase of 3.3 percent of foreign students originating from countries in which English is not the mother tongue. On the other hand, this same population of students from non-English mother tongue countries in the United States and New Zealand remained about the same, while that of the United Kingdom reflected a decrease of approximately 4.0 percent. Asia, the place of origin for the greatest number of foreign students in the world, is also the place of origin for the greatest number of nonEnglish mother-tongue foreign students throughout the world (Appendix, Table 3). Asian students make up approximately 44.0 percent of the world's foreign student population, followed by European and African students representing respectively 20.9 percent and 17.2 percent of the world's foreign student population. Significantly lower percentages of foreign students are found coming from North America with 7.3 percent, South America with 3.6 percent, and Oceania representing less than 1 percent of the world's foreign student population. Of the overwhelmingly large number of Asian students throughout the world, 307 719 (or 59.3 percent of its foreign students) have chosen to study in English mother-tongue countries, contributing to the spread of English (see Tables 1 and 3). The number of Asian students has increased

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Alma

Rubal-Lopez

225.5 percent since 1977 on the tertiary level in English mother-tongue countries. One area of interest, former territories of the USSR, reflects much smaller figures in the number of its foreign students being educated in English mother-tongue countries. Figures show only 1 123 foreign students from former territories of the USSR in English mother-tongue countries. However, this is an overwhelming proportional increase of approximately 1 000 percent since 1987. Both Africa and South America show a decrease in the number of students studying in English mother-tongue countries. Since 1977, there has been a steady decrease from a total of 30 357 students from South America in English mother-tongue countries to the current population of 19 317 such students as documented by UNESCO (1977, 1992). Unlike this decrease, which has occurred over a period of approximately two decades, the decrease of approximately 7 000 students from Africa studying in English mother-tongue countries has been rapid and has occurred within the last six years (see Conrad in this volume for information about social and economic decline in Africa). English-language newspapers The production of English-language newspapers has increased not only when measured by the number of countries in which English-language newspapers exist but also in terms of the circulation of such newspapers. In 1977 fifty-five nations were listed as producing English-language newspapers. In 1987 this number increased to 78 such nations; the current total is 84 non-English mother-tongue countries that produce Englishlanguage newspapers. The definition of a newspaper used for purposes of this study parallels that of UNESCO (1992). A newspaper is defined as one which is published at least three times per week. Therefore, these estimates exclude all newspapers listed with periodicities of less than three times per week. In addition, publications listed without circulation figures and/or periodicities were also excluded. As in the case of foreign students, the increase in the circulation of English-language newspapers is greater than the population increase of the areas in which English-language newspapers are found. Findings show (Appendix, Table 4) that the percent increases of English-language newspaper circulation since 1977 in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe were 224 percent, 591 percent, 19.7 percent, and 29.2 percent, respectively. In comparison the population increases for Africa, Asia,

The ongoing spread of English

43

Latin America, and Europe were 54.9 percent, 31.6 percent, 40.4 percent, and 8.6 percent, respectively. Only in Latin America did the rate of population growth exceed that of the circulation of English-language newspapers. Surprisingly, although Latin America shows an increase since 1977 in English-language newspaper circulation, its figures reflect a decrease in the production of such newspapers from 1987—1992. As noted before, this part of the world also reflected a decrease in the number of its students studying in English mother-tongue countries, possibly indicating that the use of English has had very little impact in these countries despite the geographic proximity to the United States and its dominant position in that hemisphere. In contrast, Africa is the region of the world that shows the greatest and most recent growth in the proportion of English-language newspapers. In only five years, the proportion of English-language newspapers on this continent has shown an overwhelming increase of 96.3 percent. Asia follows Africa as the region of the world that shows the most recent and greatest numbers in the circulation of English language newspapers, with a proportional increase of 31.6 percent of such newspapers from 1987-1992. Printed matter Printed matter exported from the United States to non-English mothertongue countries has never been used as a measure of English-language spread. These data are derived from the National Trade Data Bank (U. S. Department of Commerce 1993) and represent the amount in dollars of printed books, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, etc. exported from the United States. Country by country measurement of printed matter is expressed by the percent in dollars of materials exported to all non-English mother-tongue countries. This percentage is derived by taking into account the total dollar amount of exported printed matter from the United States to all non-English mother-tongue countries, and calculating what percent of that total is exported to each non-English mothertongue country. English-language book titles The proportion of English-language book titles is another variable which has not been utilized in the measurement of English-language spread in studies of this phenomenon. The country by country measurement of this variable is derived by taking the total number of book titles and calculating what percent of this number is represented by English book titles. Data are derived from UNESCO (1992).

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Alma Rubal-Lopez

Description of experiment Stepwise multiple regressions were conducted on all four dependent variables and on both categories of countries (colonial and non-colonial) for a total of eight regressions (see Tables 6 and 7). The total number of polities examined was 117 non-English mother-tongue countries (30 former colonies of the United States and/or the United Kingdom and 87 non-colonies). Following Conrad—Fishman (1977), an English mothertongue country will be considered one in which 40 percent or more of its population claims English as a mother-tongue. The 30 countries examined and identified as former Anglophone colonies that are not English mother-tongue countries are: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Botswana, Cameroon, Cyprus, Gambia, Ghana, India, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, South Yemen, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Findings

The four stepwise regressions conducted on colonies yielded very high correlations for those conducted on English-language newspapers and printed matter as opposed to relatively low results for those conducted on foreign students and English-language book titles. Corresponding stepwise regressions conducted on countries that were never under the dominance of the United Kingdom or the United States resulted in moderately high correlations for the regression conducted on printed matter; moderate results for the regression conducted on percent of English book titles and relatively low findings for those conducted on foreign students and the proportion of English-language newspapers. In essence, results obtained from the regressions conducted on former colonies explain to a greater degree how English has spread in these nations than findings from regressions conducted on non-colonies explain the same in these respective nations. Stepwise multiple regressions on foreign students Stepwise multiple regressions conducted on the proportion of foreign students in English mother-tongue countries yielded relatively low R2s of .13812 and .26364 for former colonies and non-colonies, respectively. Colonies The regression on former colonies yielded a negative relationship with the number of political prisoners in a country and the proportion of its

The ongoing spread of English

45

students in higher education who are studying in English mother-tongue nations, indicating that this political characteristic is the only variable within the subset of independent variables that can account for the spread of English in former colonies, explaining 14 percent (R2 = .13812) of the variance. Non-colonies Unlike the regression on former colonies, which yielded only one variable representing a political characteristic of a nation, the one conducted on non-colonies yielded three indicators of a country's economic well-being and development. These predictors are (1) dependence on an English mother-tongue nation as a source of Overseas Development Aid (ODA), (2) a government's deficit as a percent of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and (3) the population per physician. Dependence on an English mother-tongue country as a source of ODA (Overseas Development Aid) explained 16 percent of the variance, while the remaining two predictors contributed, respectively, 6 percent and 4 percent to the optimal subset of predictors. In essence, non-colonies in which English has spread via foreign students are not very wealthy as reflected in their dependence on foreign aid, a large deficit, and their population/physician ratio. Unlike former colonies in which a political characteristic was found to play a role in the spread of English via foreign students, economic considerations in non-colonies were found to take precedence when predicting the proportion of its students studying on the tertiary level in English mother-tongue countries. Stepwise multiple regressions on English-language newspapers Former colonies Unlike the regression conducted on foreign students in former colonies that yielded a low correlation, the one conducted on English-language newspapers resulted in an optimal subset of ten predictors accounting for 93 percent (R2 = .92913) of the variance. The first four predictors explained approximately 72 percent of the variance, with the remaining six variables accounting for 20 percent. Examination of the principal predictors shows that countries where English has spread via newspapers tend not to have a high degree of facilitation (the social and environmental conditions that may be present to facilitate the outbreak and persistence of strife); are linguistically heterogeneous as measured by the percent of the population who are speakers of the major mother-tongue; and spend a significant percent of their CGE (Central Government Expenditures)

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on health. Furthermore, there is a negative relationship with the proportion of English-language newspaper circulation found in these countries and the population per physician indicating that former Anglophone colonies in which English has spread via English-language newspapers will have a relatively favorable ratio of population per physician. Less powerful predictors indicate that these nations have large populations. In addition, their gross domestic investment as a percent of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is negatively related to the proportion of Englishlanguage newspaper circulation found in these nations, indicating that domestic investments are not very great in colonies where English has spread via newspapers. Also, there is a negative relationship with the number of students from these nations studying in English mother-tongue countries. This inverse relationship may be due to the fact that these nations spend a significant percent of their CGE on education. However, despite their investment in this domain, they still have a high population per nursing person, indicating a scarcity in the training of nurses. Finally, the religion of these countries is diversified with a population which is mixed Christian, literate, non-Christian, and non-literate. In summary, the strongest predictors in this regression indicate that these nations are linguistically heterogeneous and do not have the conditions that will facilitate strife. These nations spend a considerable percentage of their CGE on health as reflected in their low population per physician, and have relatively large populations. Non-colonies The regression conducted on the proportion of English-language newspapers in non-colonies, like that conducted on former colonies, yielded a diversity of economic, political, and social indicators. However, the regression on non-colonies yielded relatively low correlations with an optimal subset of five predictors accounting for only 33 percent of the variance. Findings indicate that the percentage of English-language book titles published in a country is the strongest predictor, accounting for 13 percent (R2 = .12535) of the variance, with the remaining predictors contributing an average of 5 percent each to the optimal subset of predictors. English-language book titles was found to have a positive relationship with the proportion of English-language newspaper circulation in that nation. However, a negative relationship with the total circulation of newspapers (English and non-English newspapers) was found, indicating that nations with English-language newspapers do not have a large circulation of other newspapers. In essence, English-language newspapers

The ongoing spread of English

47

are being used more frequently than other newspapers, attesting to their importance in these countries. In addition, a positive relationship was found to exist between the percentage of English-language newspapers and the percentage of the GNP spent on public health, the population per hospital bed, and the number of television receivers per population found in these nations. Although these countries spend a significant percentage of their GNP on health, they continue to have a large population per hospital bed, indicating that quality hospitalization may not always be readily available. Interestingly, of the five predictors found to play a role in the spread of English via newspapers in non-colonies, three — namely, newspapers, books, and television receivers — are related to the dissemination of information, indicating that the choice of medium can, ultimately, affect how English has spread throughout the world. In this case, books, newspapers, and television have played a role in this phenomenon. In essence, a comparison of these two regressions shows that the spread of English via newspapers is better explained in former colonies than it is in non-colonies, in which only 33 percent of the variance was accounted for as opposed to 93 percent in former colonies. Nevertheless, two clusters of variables - namely, the use of media and medical-related expenditures - emerged as significant variables in the spread of English in noncolonies, whereas linguistic heterogeneity, facilitation, and health-related variables of development emerged as those with the strongest predictive power in the regression conducted on former colonies. Stepwise multiple regressions on proportion of printed matter exported from the United States to non-English mother-tongue countries Colonies The stepwise multiple regression conducted on the proportion of printed matter from the United States found in former colonies yielded an extremely high R2 of .95568, with three out of seven predictors accounting for most of the variance. These three predictors are: (1) the number of soldiers per 1,000 square kilometers, (2) the percentage of tourist arrivals in EMTC from non-EMTC, and (3) facilitation. Of these, the number of soldiers per 1,000 square kilometers is overwhelmingly the strongest, with a predictive power of 54 percent, with the percentage of tourists contributing an additional 25 percent to the predictive power of the subset followed by 8 percent of the variance being explained by the degree of facilitation found in a nation. These findings indicate that military, economic, and political considerations have played a major role in the spread of

48

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English in former colonies, but the role of the military is dominant. These nations have a high military presence, and a significant percentage of the tourists departing from their country to travel to English mother-tongue countries. These nations are also characterized as having a high degree of facilitation (the soical and environmental conditions that may be present to facilitate the outbreak and persistence of strife). Additional but significantly less important characteristics include a two-party system, a literacy rate of 10-50 percent, a significant percentage of dwellings with access to electricity, and a low proportion of English-language newspapers. Non-colonies Results of regressions conducted on printed matter exported from the United States to non-colonies yielded an optimal subset of four predictors accounting for 61 percent (R2 = .60573) of the variance. The percentage of tourists traveling to English mother-tongue countries is undoubtedly the strongest predictor, explaining 42 percent (R2 = .42283) of the variance followed by a two-party system with a contribution of 11 percent to the optimal subset of predictors. Less powerful predictors include imports from English mother-tongue countries and a literacy rate below 10 percent, each contributing, respectively, 5 and 3 percent. In essence, these nations have an economic relationship with the United States which has led to the spread of English via printed matter imported from the United States. This relationship is characterized by a flow of tourists from these nations to the major English-speaking nations and the importation of goods from the same. It follows that in nations with freedom to travel there also exists a degree of freedom in other domains, as reflected in a two-party system. However, these nations are not modern industrialized nations, as reflected in their literacy rate of below 10 percent. A comparison of these findings revealed that military presence in former colonies is undoubtedly the most powerful predictor of the percentage of dollars in printed matter from the United States. However, after consideration of this predictor, three variables (namely, the percentage of foreign tourists in English mother-tongue countries, a two-party system, and the literacy rate in these countries) emerge as predictors in both colonies and non-colonies. It should be mentioned that in former colonies the literacy rate is between 10—50 percent as opposed to non-colonies, where this rate is below 10 percent, indicating that former colonies in which English has spread via printed matter are somewhat more devel-

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oped than those classified as non-colonies. Another predictor common to the two categories of countries is a two-party system, a democratic characteristic. In essence, similar economic, political, and social forces (military presence in colonies notwithstanding) have impacted on the spread of English in non-colonies and colonies in nations in which this spread has occurred via printed matter from the United States. Stepwise multiple regression on proportion of English-language book titles published in non-English mother-tongue countries Stepwise multiple regressions conducted on the proportion of Englishlanguage book titles published in former non-English mother-tongue countries resulted in an optimal subset of two predictors which accounted for only 29 percent (R2 = .28578) of the variance in former colonies, whereas that conducted on non-colonies accounted for 47 percent (R2 = .46738) of the variance with five predictors. Colonies The only two significant variables yielded by the regression conducted on colonies are economic indicators, each contributing approximately 14— 15 percent to the predictive power of this equation. These predictors indicate that former colonies in which English has spread via the proportion of book titles are economically dependent on an English mother-tongue country as a major export purchaser and are characterized by persisting economic deprivation. Non-colonies Economics has played a role in the spread of English via English-language book titles not only in former colonies, but also in non-colonies. A country's caloric intake, a measure of relative development, was found to have a negative relationship with the proportion of English-language book titles published in non-colonies, accounting for 21 percent of the variance. In essence, these nations are poor. They are also densely populated, with a low percentage of population in the 0 - 1 5 age cohort, indicating a relatively older population. Furthermore, these nations engage in the circulation of English-language newspapers, and their religious composition is diverse as refelcted in it being mixed Christian, literate, non-Christian, and non-literate.

Analysis and comparison with past findings Prior to the current research, only two additional studies of the global spread of English had ever been conducted using an interdisciplinary and

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Alma Rubal-Lopez

multivariate approach. The findings of these studies (namely, Fishman— Cooper-Rosenbaum 1977 and Fishman-Rubal-Lopez 1992 will, therefore, be compared and analyzed to those of our current research. However, the use of different but related variables in the three studies to be addressed, as well as the absence of any past study which compares former Anglophone colonies to non-colonies, impedes an exact comparison, oftentimes resulting in an analysis of related measures rather than replica ones. Nevertheless, such a comparison will give us a better understanding of the major categories of predictors to emerge from the above-mentioned studies: namely, military, language, economic, well-being, development, political, and religious factors (see Table 8). Military

Military or police presence — whether imposed by an external power, as in the case of colonization, or the result of governmental policy, as in the case of a national military or police state — has been found to be a force in the spread of English. In Fishman—Cooper-Rosenbaum (1977), a country's former Anglophone colonial status was used as an indicator of military imposition and found to be the best predictor of English-language spread in the non-English mother-tongue world, with a predictive value of up to 59 percent. In Fishman-Rubal-Lopez (1992), the coercive force size, as well as the population per soldier of a country, were found to be factors in the spread of English via English-language newspapers and Model 1 and 2 (constructs which measured the embeddedness of English), with relatively small predictive contributions of 2—3 percent by each of these two variables. However, when countries in the current study were divided into colonies and non-colonies, the role of the military changed from being a relatively weak predictor to having a predictive power of 54 percent as measured by the number of soldiers per 1,000 square kilometers in former colonies. Although one can argue that coercive force size, the proportion of soldiers per territorial unit, and the imposition of colonization are not one and the same variable, their relatedness cannot be denied. Thus, the underlying police and military presence in a country does appear to be characteristic of countries where English has spread. The role of the military in the global spread of English could possibly be the result of an English-speaking military tradition left by former Anglophone colonizers, resulting in a substantial English-speaking civil servant population. Also, the training of this military population may be a

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force in the spread of English. The United States is currently one of the world's major centers for the training of military personnel. Not only is training conducted in various locations throughout the United States, but the use of English is necessary for completion of such training. The use of highly sophisticated weaponry as used by the Saudi Arabian Air Force and other former Anglophone colonies undoubtedly requires the use of English in order to understand manuals and other instructional materials not readily found in all languages. Furthermore, the use of English as the most commonly used language for air traffic control activities also contributes to the spread of English in highly militarized nations having air military capabilities. Language Linguistic heterogeneity is one variable which has repeatedly emerged as a predictor of English-language spread in current and previous research conducted on this phenomenon. Fishman-Cooper—Rosenbaum (1977) found this variable to be the most important predictor of the criterion variables after former Anglophone colonial status had been considered. They also found it to be a predictor of the use of English as a medium of instruction in primary and secondary schools, and a predictor of the use of English as a subject of instruction in elementary schools. Furthermore, it was found to be a predictor not only in all countries combined but also in countries that have never been Anglophone colonies. Linguistic heterogeneity also emerged as a predictor of the spread of Englishlanguage newspapers and the embeddedness of English in F i s h m a n - R u bal-Lopez (1992). Its predictive power in past research was found to be the greatest of all variables after colonial status was considered (Fishman-Cooper—Rosenbaum 1977) or after colonial-related variables were excluded (Fishman—Rubal-Lopez 1992). Current research has also found linguistic heterogeneity as expressed by the percentage of speakers of the major mother-tongue to play a role in the spread of English in former colonies via the circulation of English-language newspapers. This variable was found to have a predictive power of 14 percent second only to facilitation in the regression conducted on English-language newspapers in former Anglophone colonies. Conversely, linguistic heterogeneity has not emerged as a predictor in non-colonies, indicating that issues of linguistic diversity in former colonies are often resolved by the use of English while in non-colonies this is not usually the case. Such a finding may indicate that issues of language diversity in non-colonies are probably resolved by

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the use of a non-English colonial language in countries that have been formerly colonized by a non-Anglophone nation, or maybe by the use of an indigenous language as a language of wider communication. Furthermore, this may also indicate a low degree of linguistic heterogeneity in these nations. Economic

Economic factors have undoubtedly played a role in the spread of English throughout the world. This very broad category, however, encompasses an array of different measures which includes indices of a country's development, trade, and economic well-being. Some of these variables have been repeatedly used in the study of this phenomenon, while others have only been examined in a single study. One variable which has been repeatedly found to be a predictor of the spread of English is the trade conducted between non-English mother-tongue countries and the major Anglophone nations. In Fishman-Cooper-Rosenbaum (1977), exports from the non-English speaking world to Anglophone nations were found to contribute up to 7 percent to the incremental prediction of the use of English in secondary and primary schools as well as to the incremental prediction of a composite score composed of different measures of English use. In current findings the predictive power of exports to English mothertongue countries doubled, explaining 14 percent of the variance in the regression conducted on percentage of English book titles in colonies. However, this relationship was confirmed only for former colonies; no relationship between exports and non-colonies was found. Interestingly, the relationship between the colonized and the imperialist, usually seen as one to benefit the colonizer via the increase of markets for its exports, does not appear to be valid in this case. On the contrary, the spread of English in former colonies has occurred as a byproduct of material incentives in the form of markets for the colonized rather than markets for the colonizer. The emergence of this finding puts into question Phillipson's (1992) position that the spread of English has occurred as a means to benefit the colonizer without the sharing of these benefits by the colonized. Nevertheless, the use of the buyer's language to increase sales is not a phenomenon which occurs only with the use of English. As stated in Fishman—Cooper-Rosenbaum (1977), this is reminiscent of the finding that in Ethiopian markets, sellers accommodated themselves to buyers by using the latters' language (Cooper-Carpenter 1969).

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In current findings and in Fishman-Cooper-Rosenbaum (1977), a relationship was found between imports and the spread of English in the non-English-speaking world. In current findings this relationship was found for non-colonies but not for former Anglophone colonies, refuting the belief that colonization usually results in an increase of markets for the colonizer. At least in countries where English has spread, this is not the case. However, the strength of the predictive power, and the correlation found in these mentioned studies are substantially less than those found for exports in former colonies, making this variable a comparatively less important predictor. Thus, the economic gain of the imperialist in the form of new markets in non-colonies has resulted in the spread of English, but one cannot consider this a major force in this dispersion. Prior to the current study, tourism, a subcategory of trade, had never been examined in relation to the spread of English. However, its substantial predictive power in both categories of nations cannot be overlooked as possibly a new variable to consider in the future. The percentage of tourists traveling from non-English mother-tongue countries to English mother-tongue nations was found to be an important factor in the spread of English via printed matter in the stepwise regressions conducted on colonies and non-colonies. Results reveal that this variable accounted for most of the variance in the regression conducted on printed matter in non-colonies - 42 percent (R2 = .42) - and contributed 25 percent to the incremental prediction of English-language spread via printed matter in former colonies. In essence, it was found that the flow of tourists from former colonies and non-colonies to English mother-tongue countries is undoubtedly a powerful force in the spread of English in nations in which this spread has occurred via printed matter exported from the United States. Economic

well-being

The economic well-being of a nation has been represented by different indices in both past and present studies of English-language spread. Nevertheless, results reveal a relationship between a country's financial status, expressed as "very high", "high", "medium", or "low" financial status, and the proportion of its students studying in English mothertongue countries. This predictor contributed 5 percent to the accounted for variance in Fishman—Rubal-Lopez (1992). Other variables related to a country's economic well-being which have been found to have a relationship with the proportion of foreign students studying in English

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mother-tongue countries are a country's reliance on foreign aid and the magnitude of its deficit. Current research shows that in non-colonies these two forces (foreign aid and a country's deficit) impacted on the proportion of its students in English mother-tongue countries. In essence, it was found that a country with low financial status is more likely to have its students study abroad than one with high financial status. This was interpreted by F i s h m a n - R u b a l - L o p e z (1992) as perhaps due to the fact that those nations with high financial status are industrialized, with highly developed university systems. Unlike poorer nations, they do not have a strong need to educate their youth abroad. Other measures of economic well-being which emerged as forces in the spread of English included a country's gross domestic investment as a percent of its gross domestic product. This variable emerged as a predictor in the regression conducted on newspapers in colonies, contributing 7 percent to the optimal subset of predictors. Its negative beta indicates that English has spread via English-language newspapers in nations with low domestic investments. Development Caloric requirement, an indicator of development, is one characteristic that has been repeatedly found to be a predictor of English language spread. In F i s h m a n - C o o p e r - R o s e n b a u m (1977), percentage of calorie requirements was found to have a negative relationship with the use of English after former colonies were excluded. This relationship was once again found to be true in current findings in the stepwise regression conducted on the percentage of English book titles in non-colonies, in which 21 percent of the variance in this equation was explained by caloric intake. Furthermore, this same indicator was found to be significant in several regressions conducted in Fishman—Rubal-Lopez (1992), with predictive contributions ranging from 3 to 7 percent in regressions of English-language embeddedness as measured by the use of English in various domains and the existence of non-native varieties of English in non-English mother-tongue countries. In essence, this is one of a few variables found by all statistical studies conducted on English-language spread to be a predictor of this phenomenon. In one of these studies, this variable was found to have a negative beta in non-colonies, indicating that one of the characteristics of these countries in which English has spread is poverty. However, when countries are not differentiated as former colonies or non-colonies, this relationship is a positive one, indicating a more

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55

favorable caloric intake and, thus, a better degree of development in nations where English has spread. Literacy, still another indication of a country's development, has also been found to be relative to the spread of English in all studies addressed and in both categories of nations. However, its relatively small contribution of up to 3 percent in these studies does not make it a very strong predictor. It should be noted, though, that former colonies where English has spread via printed matter from the United States have a literacy rate of 1 0 - 5 0 percent, as opposed to non-colonies with literacy rates of below 10 percent, indicating a greater degree of development in former colonies where English has spread via printed matter. In these nations with very low literacy rates, the export of printed matter from the United States, in all probability, is to a well-educated intelligentsia rather than to the general population, which is virtually illiterate. This population is possibly educated abroad and employs English in various professional domains. The quality of health services and the amount of money allocated in this domain are indices of a country's development. Population per physician is an example of such a measurement, and is found to play a role in the spread of English via foreign students in non-colonies, and in the spread of English via newspapers in colonies. In former colonies this relationship was a negative one, contributing 12% to the variance, suggesting that these nations have a favorable ratio of population per physician. In non-colonies, this relationship was a positive one with a predictive value of 4 percent, suggesting that there are proportionally fewer doctors in these countries where English has spread via foreign students. By these measures, colonies in which English has spread seem to be better developed than non-colonies. Other measures of a country's development as measured by the quality of its health services have been repeatedly found to have a relationship with the spread of English. In Fishman—Rubal-Lopez (1992), the population per hospital bed emerged as a predictor in several regressions conducted on Models I, II, and III (three measurements of English embeddedness), adding approximately 1 percent to the predictive power of the optimal subset of predictors. Current findings indicate a contribution of 11 percent to the optimal subset of predictors by this very same variable (population per hospital bed) in the regression conducted on newspapers in non-colonies, suggesting that in these nations there is a scarcity of hospital beds further attesting to poor medical services. In essence, the quality of medical care as measured by the ratios of population to doctors and population to hospital beds has been found

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to play a role in the spread of English. Nevertheless, the ratio of population to doctors is slightly stronger, accounting for 12 percent of the variance in the regression conducted on newspapers in former anglophone colonies. Two new health-related variables never before used but found to be valuable in explaining how English has spread around the world are the percent of CGE (Central Government Expenditures) on health in former colonies, and the percent of a country's GNP spent on health in noncolonies. These variables contributed 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively, to the regressions conducted on English-language newspapers in colonies and non-colonies. Finally, the proportion of the population per nurse was another related variable found to be a predictor in the spread of English via newspapers in colonies, but with significantly lower predictive values. In essence, indicators of development as measured by healthrelated variables have played a role in the spread of English in both categories of countries. However, in former colonies this role has been significantly stronger as reflected in the predictive power of these variables. Although the reasons why health-related indices of development have impacted on the spread of English is not certain, one can only speculate about the importance of English in many countries as a tool for the training of medical personnel. English currently leads the world as the language of science and technology. Its use in medical textbooks, medical journals, and as a medium of instruction in higher education is unsurpassed by any other language. It is no surprise then that the greater the expenditures and the greater the number of medical personnel, the greater the impact these variables will have on the spread of English. When this relationship is an inverse one, as in the regression conducted on the proportion of foreign students in non-colonies, the spread of English is manifested in the training of these professionals in an English mother-tongue country. Still another measure of development found to be relative to the spread of English is the total number of newspapers (English and non-English) produced in a nation. In Fishman—Rubal-Lopez (1992), and in current findings, this variable was found to have a negative relationship with the proportion of English-language newspapers. In essence, nations with a relatively small newspaper circulation will have a greater proportion of English-language newspapers than those with a significantly greater circulation of newspapers. This was found to be true of non-colonies, where

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this variable contributed 5 percent to the optimal subset of predictors, as opposed to its contribution of 1 percent in regressions conducted on all nations combined in Fishman-Rubal-Lopez (1992). Political

The political climate of a nation, more so for former colonies than noncolonies, has been found to impact on the spread of English throughout the world. Specifically, the degree of democratization found in a nation has been found to have an impact on the spread of English. Facilitation is one such variable found to be a force in the global spread of English in current findings and in Fishman-Rubal-Lopez (1992). Both studies found this variable to have a negative relationship with the spread of English via English-language newspapers, indicating the absence in these nations of the social and environmental conditions to facilitate the outbreak of strife. Findings indicate that this is true for colonies, in which facilitation accounted for 28 percent of the variance, and in all countries combined, in which 9 percent of the variance was accounted for by this variable. Although this relationship is a favorable one, the opposite is true in colonies in which English has spread via printed matter. In these countries, facilitation has a positive relationship with the criterion variable, indicating that the conditions necessary to facilitate an outbreak of stife are present in these former colonies. Interestingly, these colonies are also highly militarized, possibly indicating a need for a large army in order to suppress such an uprising. In essence, former colonies without the conditions to facilitate an outbreak of strife have succeeded in spreading English via English-language newspapers, while those characterized as having these unfavorable conditions have had the spread of English occur by way of printed matter from the United States. Degree of democratization as measured by a two-party system has been found to be common in countries (colonies and non-colonies) in which English has spread via printed matter from the United States. Interestingly, tourism has also emerged as a predictor in both regressions conducted on the percentage of dollars exported from the United States in printed matter, suggesting that in these nations where English has spread, there exists a degree of democratization as evidenced by the freedom to travel and the freedom of choice in government. Furthermore, these democratic ideals are not restricted to former Anglophone colonies where one may expect to find a system of government that emulates that

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of their colonizer, but also obtain in nations that have never been under the dominance of an Anglophone colonial power. Still another democratic related variable is the number of political prisoners found in that nation. This indicator was found to have a negative relationship with the proportion of foreign students from colonies studying in English mother-tongue countries, accounting for 14 percent of the variance. Findings suggest that in these nations in which there is freedom to study abroad there are also other freedoms, as indicated by the low number of political prisoners. In essence, countries with a greater tolerance for political opposition will have a lower number of political prisoners and will also allow student populations more freedom to study abroad. Freedom of speech and freedom to travel are, possibly, in the case of former colonies, ideological byproducts of a past relationship with the United States or the United Kingdom. Religious

affiliation

A country's religious composition has been found in all studies to be related to the spread of English. In Fishman-Cooper-Rosenbaum (1977), the use of "traditional beliefs" as a measure of local systems of folk beliefs as distinguished from universal religions or religions such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam yielded correlations between traditional beliefs and the use of English as a medium of instruction in primary schools (r = .62) and secondary schools (r = .53). The only religious characteristic from a list of several in the independent subset to emerge as a predictor of the criterion in both Fishman— Rubal-Lopez (1992) and in current findings was mixed-Christian, literate, non-Christian and non-literate. This characteristic was also found in the present study to be significant in former colonies, in which English has spread via newspapers, and in non-colonies, in which this spread has occurred via printed matter exported from the United States. However, the relatively low predictive power (3—4 percent) of this variable makes it relatively less important.

Summary Current and past findings of English-language spread show that certain variables have emerged as dominant predictors of the global spread of English. The variables confirmed as major predictors of this linguistic

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dispersion by all three studies addressed are: linguistic heterogeneity (former colonies) and caloric intake (non-colonies). Other such variables with significantly lower predictive powers are religious composition and literacy rate (colonies and non-colonies). Variables which have emerged as major forces in the spread of English that have not been examined in all studies and/or appear in two of the three studies addressed are: colonial status and facilitation (colonies), and two-party system (colonies and non-colonies). The percentage of tourists from non-English mother-tongue countries arriving in English mother-tongue countries (colonies and non-colonies) and soldiers per square kilometer (non-colonies) are two new predictors never before used to study this phenomenon.Their strong predictive powers, however, indicate that these two measures should be explored in future research in order to substantiate their importance in the global spread of English. Furthermore, if one examines the different patterns that have emerged when countries were divided into former colonies of the United States or the United Kingdom and non-colonies, it becomes apparent that the strongest predictor prior to this categorization — Anglophone colonial status - was partialed out and does not emerge as a predictor. Results show that after countries were divided into the two categories mentioned, military presence in colonies emerged as the variable with the strongest predictive power. In non-colonies, the percentage of tourists from nonEnglish mother-tongue countries arriving in English mother-tongue countries emerged as the strongest predictor. Another, more general pattern shows that political characteristics have played a more important role in the spread of English in former colonies than they have in non-colonies. Indices of a nation's political climate reveal that to some extent a greater degree of democratization exists in former colonies with an English-language press than in nations in which English has spread via printed matter. Although political forces have impacted on the spread of English in both colonies and non-colonies, the power of these forces is greater in former colonies. Furthermore, many more measures of development have impacted on the use of English in non-colonies than in former colonies. However, the ones that have impacted on colonies have had stronger predictive contributions. These variables of development indicate that colonies in which English has spread are more developed than are respective noncolonies. Also, linguistic heterogeneity, found in previous studies to be the strongest predictor after former Anglophone colonial status, was also

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found to be an important variable in the spread of English. However, the impact of linguistic diversity on the spread of English is only significant in former colonies. Finally, the role of economics in the spread of English cannot be denied. Economic incentives as expressed in exports, expenditures in health, and monies received in foreign aid have undoubtedly impacted on the spread of English. However, political and military variables in former colonies have played a more important role in the spread of English in these nations, whereas economics and development have had a greater impact on the spread of English in non-colonies. This document has attempted to review the factors, colonialism notwithstanding, that have led to the spread of English throughout the world. This approach does not attempt to minimize the roles of colonialism and imperialism; rather, the aim has been to recognize their importance and go beyond these forces for answers. The variables examined and found to be predictors of this phenomenon should provide some answers to this inquiry. Nevertheless, future research that focuses on the general categories of variables outlined within, and that addresses these categories with greater specificity, is needed in order to enhance our present knowledge about how English has become the world language that it is.

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Appendix Table 1. Foreign students from non-English mother-tongue countries Foreign students latest year showing number in and from countries of the world and the number in English mother-tongue countries by area of the world with percentages Area

No. of tertiary level students

Africa North America South America Asia Europe b Oceania Former USSR Stateless Unspecified

2175312 18493 676 5019685 21381212 12025 722 688 835 5 253 088

Totals 1990 1987 1977

65037 530 54853 981 28429000

Foreign students in area countries

Foreign students from area countries

21 141 447478 a

93015 507047 32588 66806

1 168075 1063 619 505 907

No. foreign students from area in English m-t c

% Foreign students from area in English m-t-c

201 103 85 647 41622 519062 244882 8 826 3954

37294 56667 19317 307 719 70512 7 677 1 123

18.5 69.7 46.4 59.3 28.7 87.0 28.4

62979

48 806

1 168075 1063 619 505 907

549115 463 504 208 127

47.3 41.0 41.1

a

UNESCO (1992) does not specify this number Europe does not include former USSR states Sources: UNESCO Yearbook (1977, 1987, 1992) b

Table 2. Foreign students in English mother-tongue countries showing percentage and number from English mother-tongue countries and from non-English mother-tongue countries Country of study

No. of students in country at 3rd level

Total foreign student in countries listed

No. of foreign students in country from Eng. Μ. T.

%

No. of foreign students from non E.M.T.

Australia Canada New Zealand U.K. U.S.A. Ireland

534538 1942814 128087 1258188 14360965 90296

28 993 35187 3 595 70717 407 529 3 094

1 178 5 880 82 10423 34118 1449

4.1 1.6 2.3 1.4 8.4 4.6

27815 29307 3513 60294 373411 1645

Totals: 1992 1987 1977

18313879 14925 654 10400 568

549115 436 504 208 127

53130 41200 39816

9.7 9.4 19.0

495 985 395 304 168311

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