Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English

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social hardship at home, and the election of a Labour government in 1945), a retreat from empire was inevitable. The government was not only ideologically opposed to imperialism, but realized that it simply could not aVord the empire much longer (and in particular the Indian Empire). Independence was therefore granted to the nationalists in 1947, but to two countries, not one: a new primarily Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan. Immediately upon independence and the departure of British forces, sectarian conXict broke out during a massive exchange of populations. Although the two countries were at odds for decades afterwards, each continued to sustain English as a key administrative and legal language, making the subcontinent of South Asia one of the key Englishusing areas in the world.

In the decades that followed, many newly independent nations decided to sustain a link with the UK through what was at Wrst known as the British Commonwealth of Nations, then the Commonwealth of Nations, then simply the Commonwealth, whose head was not the British state but its monarch, whose interests and role were considered wider and more neutral than those of any politician. Apart from the vast suVering in India and Pakistan, and later troubles in Malaya, Cyprus, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Northern Ireland, the disassembly of empire was relatively bloodless. The Commonwealth grew as Empire shrank, and the new states generally had solid diplomatic and economic reasons for staying loosely (and non-politically) together. Currently, the Commonwealth not only sustains economic and cultural ties among its members but demonstrates how a linguistic default mode works, in a range of nation-states in which English is either the primary or a key secondary language. Even so, however, although English has remained one of the ties that bind, the Commonwealth as an institution did not directly serve as a means of promoting or sustaining English. Rather, English helped sustain the Commonwealth.

Although it might be supposed a close link exists in London between the Commonwealth OYce and the British Council (on the analogy of La Francophonie), the British Council is an entirely distinct organization, set up in 1934 not to strengthen empire but to counter Nazi and Fascist propaganda in Europe, as well as to promote a wider awareness (both there and elsewhere) of the UK, its culture, and of British English. Its Wrst overseas oYces were in Europe, Latin America, and West Asia, and only in the 1950s did it become involved in the Commonwealth, as the agent of what came to be known as the British Overseas Development Administration. In 1985, a speciWc statement was made that the Council did not ‘actively propagate British English as a commodity or as the proper model for foreign users . . . and has no tradition or policy of preferring or propagating any one accent over another’. However, the Council has generally

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been aware of the economic signiWcance of ELT. In 1989, for example, the then director general, Sir Richard Francis, noted that ‘Britain’s real black gold is not oil, but the English language’ (as quoted by William Greaves in The Times on 24 October 1989). By the century’s end, the British Council had oYces in over eighty countries and over Wfty teaching centres in thirty-Wve countries.

The British Council’s interest in mainland Europe proved entirely justiWed. One of the more remarkable linguistic developments in the decades after 1945 was the expansion of the English language ‘on the continent’, where it had never previously been signiWcant. This expansion was due both to the development of NATO and the world-wide export of US popular culture through Hollywood movies and popular music and dance, an output which greatly aVected younger generations in Europe and elsewhere, including those in the UK. Both the British Council and the BBC sustained a mainland European cultural presence, notably in such Anglophile nations as the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Portugal, but also behind the Iron Curtain. As a consequence, however, of the closeness of the two major varieties of English was a rueful post-war reconception in France of its American and British allies as a single often suspect entity, les Anglo-Saxons, a phrase that gave a novel twist to an ancient name.

It was left to German, however, to provide the word that best Wtted the conditions aVecting English throughout the century: realpolitik. The New Oxford Dictionary of English of 1988 deWnes this word as ‘a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations’. What shaped and strengthened English in the twentieth century (and led, by the end of the century, to such soubriquets as the global or world lingua franca) was not so much a cluster of cultural, literary, social, or educational attitudes and policies (however signiWcant these may have been), but a combination of war, economics, politics, and pragmatism. Although such matters have sometimes been couched in terms of high culture, Shakespeare did not in any serious sense triumph over Molie`re or Goethe, Cervantes, or Tolstoy.

english and the western hemisphere

It is, as the previous chapter has already indicated, entirely the case that the activities of the UK in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spread English world-wide in commercial and imperial terms, and that those of the USA in the twentieth consolidated its global role culturally, technologically, and militarily. It is, however, at least as important to note that the foundation stones of

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the English ediWce at the century’s end were laid not in the UK or the USA as such, but in terms of the perceived Europeanness, or indeed the Westernness, of the language.

English was only one of eight European languages that, at much the same time, and in varying degrees, became world languages. The others were Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish in the west, and Russian in the east. Any one of these, if the circumstances had been right, could have become the global lingua franca. They have all had comparable educational, literary, legal, administrative, and military dimensions, and the communities in which they emerged have generally had strong convictions regarding their ethnic, literary, and academic worth, if not indeed their outright superiority as well. There was, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no shortage of ethnic and nationalist chutzpah associated with each of them which, by and large, serves to conWrm that they are all from the same cultural matrix. As a result, with the exception of Russian (on geo-political grounds, and because it expanded by land rather than sea), these languages have been key elements in an evolving ethnic, social, and cultural complex that, in the course of the twentieth century, came to be called the Western world, or simply the West.

A common assumption about language labels like English and French is that they relate Wrst to geography and ethnicity, and only then to culture, economics, and politics, as a result of which one may overlook the evolution of (and the senses inherent in) the labels themselves. In this regard, we can consider the apparently speciWc and stable meanings of three key place-related words: America, Europe, English. Technically (some would say ‘properly’), America refers to a continent. More often, however, it serves as an incomplete, informal, but potent label for one nation that occupies only the middle reaches of the northern part of the Americas. It was only in the later twentieth century that the term Europe took on a similar ambiguous duality. Formerly, the word Europe referred only to a continent, and not a particularly big one at that. In the later twentieth century, however, Europe acquired an additional sense that brought it into line with America: it now meant not only the whole continent, but served as shorthand for the European Union (EU), a politico-economic federation, which occupies only part of that continent. As a result, the world’s peoples can say America when they mean only the USA and Europe when they mean only the EU, and be understood: regardless of how the Canadians or the Swiss may feel about it. The word English is comparably polysemic. When used with a deWnite article, it designates the people of England (‘the English’ and not, say, the Scots or the French), but without the article (and used as an adjective) it may refer to England, its attributes and aspects (‘an English rose’), to the people of England

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(‘The English are a nation of gardeners’), and, importantly for our purposes, a language originating in England but extensively used elsewhere (‘the EnglishSpeaking Union’).

It can also be ambiguous. English literature, for example, can mean the literature of England alone, or of Britain, or of the many countries where the language is used, as in Indian English literature. However, many people worldwide who have grown up in English (as the language of their families and/or schooling, in, say, Newfoundland or Singapore) do not, and indeed cannot, in their daily lives give much thought to the Englishness of what they say and write in terms of England, which they may never have visited. The unyielding proof in this regard is that English could survive even if it ceased (an unlikely prospect, however) to be used between the Channel and Hadrian’s Wall, or indeed between Canada and Mexico.

The way in which the word West behaves is comparable, and like English it has close links with Europe. The language called English has long been a world language, but it is also the primary language of a psycho-cultural West, as opposed in particular to an East. Images of a geographical, cultural, and political West can be traced back over two thousand years to where the sun went down if you lived in Greece. After many centuries as an indivisible mass around the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire was divided into a Western Empire ruled from Rome and an Eastern Empire ruled from Constantinople. In this West the imperial language was Latin, while in the East it was Greek. However, as centuries passed, the Western empire shrank at the same time as its focus shifted north until it became, in the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire and later the Austrian or Austro-Hungarian Empire, by which time it was Central European and no longer Western at all. By then the West had become Atlantic Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain. In the sixteenth century, however, a larger West emerged through the discoveries of Columbus.

The Spanish and Portuguese, restricted in a Mediterranean largely controlled by Muslims, looked elsewhere for expansion, the Portuguese Wnding a sea route to a Far East beyond the Near East of Islam, while both Spanish and Portuguese vessels explored a ‘new’ far western continent that, because of the languages they spoke, became known in due course as Latin America, an ethno-linguistic transplant of the Iberian peninsula. Other Europeans followed, with speakers of Spanish, Danish, Dutch, English, and French exploring and exploiting the Caribbean and what lay beyond and to the north.

To this me´lange was added, in 1776, a sixth, entirely transplanted power: the United States, a group of thirteen ex-British colonies that saw themselves as American (and as potential defenders-cum-masters of the Americas). The British,

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however, controlled British North America (Canada), where they imposed their rule on French settlers already there, developed an English-speaking Ontario, and pushed towards the PaciWc, where Russians from Siberia were already establishing themselves in Alaska. In successive stages, the USA gained Louisiana from the French, Florida from Spain, and took from Mexico a vast territory they informally called the Wild West. At that point, Spanish became a secondary European language in Western North America, which was being steadily integrated, state by state, into the USA. And when the Americans bought Alaska from them, the Russians and their language were removed as potential competitors.

As a consequence of the enlargement of the USA and the consolidation of Canada, English became the most powerful language in North America, with Spanish second (in the USA, in Mexico, and the Caribbean), and French third (in Canada, Louisiana, and the Caribbean), followed by a host of European settler languages that include Danish, Dutch, German, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, and Ukrainian, all of which co-habit with a dwindling range of Amerindian languages. Apparently, the currents of multilingualism were strong, but in terms of dominance and prospects the only language on a par with English in the western hemisphere was Spanish, in its Mexican, Puerto Rican, Central American, and South American forms. Inevitably, over decades, there arose between the two (notably in the twentieth century) kinds of Hispanicized English and Anglicized Spanish, in a continuum from espan˜ol through englan˜ol and Spanglish to English proper. The English in this hybridizing cline includes not only the more-or- less standard language of the US schoolroom and media but also what is widely known as both Black English and Black English Vernacular (BEV), the usage of the large African-American minority that (together with Afro-Caribbean people in the USAand the Caribbean) descends from Africans transported in times past into New World slavery. Such complexity has endowed nineteenthand twentieth-century American and Caribbean English with an immense range, variety, and vitality, much of it informal, slangy, and inventive.

As a national language, American may well be more heterogenous [AmE] or heterogeneous [BrE] than British which, because of the range of its rural and urban dialects (as well as big-city varieties inXuenced by immigrant languages), has tended to be regarded as the most varied English anywhere. However that may be, by the end of the twentieth century the sum total of kinds of English, and the numbers using them in the USA, Canada, and the Caribbean, made the Western Hemisphere the primary focus of the language, much as had been happening with Spanish in Central and South America and Portuguese in Brazil. All of this has, in eVect, served to make the Americas the primary world focus of three European languages.

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In this respect, it is therefore worthy of note that the USA, often portrayed as the most monolithic English-speaking country on Earth (and a place where learning other languages has low priority), has a foot in both linguistic camps, which in fact makes it both the most signiWcant English-speaking nation at the same time as it is a signiWcant Spanish-speaking nation. Thus, of the three largest language complexes in the world—Chinese, English, and Spanish—two have their centres of gravity in the Americas, one in East Asia, and none in Europe. At the same time, while English has always been dominant in the USA, Spanish became increasingly signiWcant there as the twentieth century advanced, especially because of migrations north from Latin America, while English made further headway as a language of business in Latin America. In consequence, Europe, which at the beginning of the century had been so signiWcant politically, culturally, and linguistically, had by the century’s end lost a great deal of linguistic, as well as economic and military, ground to the New World.

Each of the Western European languages considered in this review has a proWle and place, as it were, in a world-wide peck order [AmE] or pecking order [BrE] of languages. Western European languages have, over the last Wve centuries, had their sea-borne diasporas, through colonies established by their speakers (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch) or by emigration from other European territories to those colonies. In addition, although many emigrants established homes in non-English-speaking territories, such as Quebec (French), Venezuela (Spanish), and Brazil (Portuguese), many settled in the USA and English Canada, and (while some sustained communities in which the mother tongue continued to be used) most were assimilated into North American English, in the process often losing what came to be thought of as their heritage languages. The ultimate outcome for the Americas as a whole has, however, been two-fold:

1The extinction, decimation, and displacement of the aboriginal languages of the hemisphere, notably Quechua in Peru (still relatively strong in relation to Spanish), Maya in Guatemala (sustaining itself), Sioux and Cherokee in the USA (weak, but stronger than many others), and Mohawk and Kwakiutl in

Canada (marginal).

2 The chequerboard [BrE] or checkerboard [AmE] establishment of various European languages, at the top of whose hierarchy have been English in North America and the Caribbean, Spanish in South, Central, and North America, Portuguese in Brazil, and French in Quebec, Louisiana, and the Caribbean. Although this pattern is unique to the New World, comparable

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clusters exist elsewhere, such as English and French in West Africa, and English, Portuguese, and Afrikaans (from Dutch) in southern Africa, as well as Spanish and English in the Philippines.

Asian languages may now be following. Arabic has long been widespread as both a religious and a national language from the Gulf west to Morocco and, as a religious language, east as far as the Philippines. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, its presence in both Western Europe and North America was greatly increased by emigration from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Chinese has been signiWcant in and beyond China for centuries and in diasporas around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably including the USA and Canada. Large numbers of speakers of Hindi-Urdu in northern India and Pakistan emigrated in the later nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, initially as indentured labourers in many parts of the British Empire, later often in such middle-class roles as doctors and shopkeepers in Europe and North America. In a serious sense, the Americas in general and North America in particular have become a socio-cultural and linguistic melting pot for not only Europeans but the entire world, with English and Spanish in the key positions.

english and ‘the global west’

While the West is primarily a direction and a point of the compass, in the twentieth century it also served to label a culture that was noted, among many other things, for science, technology, mass-marketing, hi-tech modes of communication, modernity and post-modernity, and for such languages as French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and ever-increasingly English. Yet, the twentieth-century range of English went so much farther than the West (properly so called) that by the 1990s it could only be discussed on planet-wide terms. Indeed, as the opening sections of this chapter have already indicated, by this point, no fewer than three labels were available to scholars, journalists, and others when describing and discussing the language at its most comprehensive: English as a world language or, more succinctly, world English; English as an international language or international English; and English as a global language or global English (see further Fig. 13.1).

All three labels are currently used (at times confusingly) either for all varieties of English, wherever used, or for the standard variety as used and understood

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world-wide. It is English in this planet-wide sense which parents everywhere (whatever their backgrounds and circumstances, and regardless of whether they themselves know the language well or at all) seek, or would seek if they could, for their children. In eVect then, by the fourth quarter of the twentieth century (in part because of immediate US inXuence, in part as an aftermath of the British Empire) a ‘third West’ had come into existence, extending the Atlantic West just as the Atlantic West had extended the original Greco-Roman and Medieval West. This time, the extension was, incongruously but logically enough, into the southern hemisphere: most notably to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Falkland Islands. The Wrst European settlers in these regions were predominantly English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish, and English was predominantly the language they took with them. In Australia in particular such migrants have, entirely appropriately, been identiWed as Anglo-Celtic. English is the dominant but by no means the sole language in Australia and New Zealand, is one among a range of languages in South Africa, but is the sole language of the Falklands and other British island groups in the southern Atlantic. It is also, incidentally but signiWcantly, a key inter-communal language in the various nationally-controlled segments of Antarctica.

In eVect, the West had by the last quarter of the century become the name, not simply of a particular region of the world, but of a Western European core together with other areas massively colonized in two sea-borne diasporas, Wrst to the Americas, then to the southern hemisphere. The identiWcation of this vastly expanded space relates to both colonists of Western European stock and the languages they used, some of which were widely acknowledged to be ‘world’ languages (as with French and Spanish), while one in particular—English—had by the closing decades of the twentieth century become the world or international or global language, even though it remains far from being a universal language.

This expanded West inevitably has its anomalies, the most unusual of which is the identiWcation of Japan as a Western rather than a Westernized nation, at least in an economic, industrial, and technological sense—and despite its ancient epithet, ‘the land of the rising sun’. Remarkably, and with little fuss, Japan has been cited in Western news media as Western. Thus, a 1987 editorial in the British daily newspaper the Independent (24 August 1987) noted that ‘[d]espite its Asian roots, Japan has become suspended in the Western world’. In a similar way, in the US International Herald Tribune (1 June 1990) David Sanger wrote about ‘tension between the West’s two biggest economic competitors’, noting that ‘American corporate executives and members of Congress have complained that Japan has acted as a sponge for technologies developed in the United States’.

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In the earlier twentieth century, the Westernizing acculturation of Japan was towards Britain and British English, but after World War II [AmE and BrE] the Second World War [BrE], as the result of military occupation, it shifted towards the USA and American English, although a strong interest in the UK and British usage survives. The Japanese have absorbed, re-created, and exported the products of Western-style technology and art, and have adopted into everyday Japanese expressions primarily from English and other Western languages, virtually on an industrial scale, as with takushi (‘taxi’), purutoniumu (‘plutonium’), and seku hara (an abbreviated version of ‘sexual harassment’). However, although the Japanese have given the English language a key role in their national curriculum, they have not become widely Xuent or even comfortable in the language. Yet, even so, from time to time home-grown proposals are made that Japan adopt English as a second national language.

No other non-Occidental country has opted so unreservedly to ‘join the West’, at least in socio-technological terms. There is, however, a range of comparable territories whose contact with the West was Wrst commercial (principally in the nineteenth century), then through absorption into one or other European empire, then (in the later twentieth century) by on-going contact, in varying degrees of closeness, with their former imperial state, as independent nations. This was the case, for example, with both India and the Malay states (now Malaysia and Brunei) in relation to Britain; Indo-China (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) with France; Venezuela with Spain; the Philippines with Spain then the USA; East Timor and Macau with Portugal; and the East Indies (now Indonesia) with the Dutch.

Singapore, a small island nation with four oYcial languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil), occupies a category all its own. English is the most used, the government in fact intending that its citizens should speak and write ‘internationally acceptable English’. The Lion City is highly Westernized along mainly British lines, but has neither an Australian-style sense of ‘kith and kin’ with Britain (and Ireland) nor social, commercial, or military closeness to the USA, nor a Japanese approach to out-doing the West on its own terms—even though Singapore is materially and in business terms highly Western (and not simply ‘Westernized’). The city-state may yet, however, succeed, in the process showing others how to create a long enough spoon to sup with the devil. Certainly, and uniquely, by the end of the twentieth century Singapore had become an English-speaking country in its own right, but without (as in the case of South Africa) an indigenous native-speaking minority to serve as a template. A kind of Britishness remains evident in Singapore, but there are not enough Brits or indeed Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders to have a serious impact on Singaporean socio-political style or private