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3.8 What is a global language?
English is a global language and continues to be news around the world. What then does it mean that English is a global language? It would seem obvious to many that English is indeed a global language. You hear English spoken on television daily. When people travel they see signs and advertisements in English all the time. Language reaches a global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country in the world. But this special role has many different facets to it. This special role is more obvious in countries where English is the mother tongue like in England, or Canada or the United States. Being spoken as a mother tongue does not automatically give a language a global status. To achieve this global status a language must be taken up by other countries in the world. These countries must decide to give a language a special place even though there are few if any mother tongue speakers in that country. There are different ways that this can be accomplished. A language can be recognized as the official language used in the courts or for education or as the means of communication in that country. It then becomes essential to master this language as soon as possible if want to get ahead in that society. This language is often referred to as a “second language” because it complements your first language or mother tongue. English has a special status in many countries in the world today, including Ghana, India, Singapore, and Nigeria. In 1996 English became the official language of Rwanda.
Another way is to give priority to a language in the country’s foreign language teaching, even though this language may in fact have no special status in that country. Children are taught this language once they enter school and is a language that is readily available to adults who either learnt it or learnt it badly. English as a foreign language is now taught in over 100 countries
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including Egypt, Russia, and Germany among other countries. By 1996 English had replaced French in the former French colony of Algeria. It has been suggested that up to a quarter of the world’s population speak English and up to 1.5 billion people or more speak the language and the numbers keep growing.
Many people in the world are learning English today, and with that its global status grows as well.
English has established itself as the preferred international language in various global domains.
How did English spread over the world and gain such dominance? English likely became a Lingua Franca with the spread of British Colonialism. English has moved from the inner circle to the outer rim by displacing minority languages. Linguists refer to this movement as language shift. For example, English replaced Maori in New Zealand as the dominant language until Maoris’ recent resurgence. Language shift can lead to language death were a majority language like English can in effect a “killer language” eradicating minority languages. Language shift and death were responsible for the decline of some Aboriginal and North Amerindian languages. Language shift and death are signs of English Language Imperialism. Linguistic imperialism or language imperialism can be defined as the “transfer of a dominant language to other people.” In effect, this transfer is a demonstration of power, which has been traditionally military power, but more recently can be economic power and the aspects of a dominant culture that are transferred with the dominant culture.
Robert Phillipson’s in his book Linguistic Imperialism (1992) defines linguistic imperialism as
“the dominance asserted and retained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages.” Phillipson’s theory
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traces the spread of English as an international language and English as a dominant language in many post-colonial settings such as Pakistan, Uganda and Zimbabwe for example, and into neo-colonial settings found in places like Europe. Phillipson’s theory draws on the work of Johan Gultung’s imperialist theory and Antonio Gramsci’s social theory emphasizing the notion of cultural hegemony. Central to his theory is the complex hegemonic process which he argues sustains the preeminence of English. In his book Phillipson discusses the British Council’s rhetoric that promotes English and analyzes key views of both applied linguistics and English language teaching methodologies. These views hold that:
·English is best taught monolingually- the monolingual fallacy
·The ideal teacher is a native speaker- the native speaker fallacy
·The earlier that English is taught the better- the early start fallacy
·The more English is taught the better the results will be- the maximum exposure fallacy
·If other languages are used much English standard will decline- the subtractive fallacy
Phillipson argues that those organizations that promote the use of English such as the British Council, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and those that operate language schools basically use three arguments. The first argument offered is the intrinsic one. They describe English as providential, rich and noble and interesting. The intrinsic argument asserts what English is and what other languages are not. The second argument is the extrinsic one which points out that English as a language is well establish, and that there are many qualified teachers and that there is a vast quantity of teaching material available today. And lastly there is the
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functional argument that emphases the usefulness of English as a gateway to the world.
There are other arguments for English as well. English has an economic utility. English allows people to operate technology. English has an ideological function as well, English stands for modernity. English also acts as a symbol for material advance and efficiency. Another topic that Phillipson covers in his book is that of “linguicism” the species of prejudice that leads to endangered languages becoming extinct or losing their local appeal due to the rise and dominance of English. There are examples of this occurring in colonial settings where a dominant culture has tried to unify a region under its control. For example, in the Far East, and in Africa and South America there are regional languages that are being replaced or marginalized by the dominant cultures language. Tibetan languages and other minority Chinese dialects are being replaced by Mandarin Chinese and in the case of Quechua it is being replaced by Spanish. During the Middle Ages French was the dominant language in England after the Norman Conquest and French or Anglo Norman was the language of administration and thereby the language of status in England at the time. Latin was used by the church and for learning. The Holy Roman Empire established its control over much of what is now present day Germany and Central European countries, and German became the language spoken by many in the Central European nobility. German as a language spread over most of Central and Eastern Europe as the language of trade and status. In post-independence India many wanted to make Hindi the national language but many in the southern states where Kannada, Telugu and Tamil are spoken objected to this policy. Hindi and English are the official languages of the Indian Union Government. After 1991 with economic liberalization English has become a lingua franca for business, higher education and research.
English is the language of instruction in many of the primary schools in rural India today.
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As well as arguments for English as an imperialist language there are counter arguments suggesting that those who learn English do so by choice and therefore not imperialistic. Those who hold to this argument suggest that there is no force involved and people accept to learn English.
They see English as both neutral and democratic.
There is little doubt that English holds a stronger position in the world, more so than other contemporary languages but also historical languages.
3.9 Conclusions
This chapter addressed several different issues including language policy, language preservation and the use and spread of English here on the island. Language ideology as outlined by Spolsky, Schieffelin and Woolard is the main theory adapted in this chapter and the entire thesis as the basis for why the Japanese and KMT adopted the language policies that they did on the island from 1895 to 1987 which is the period that this thesis focuses on. The Kuomintang, like the Japanese before them instituted several measures that promoted a national language policy in Taiwan from 1945 effectively until the lifting of martial law in 1987. The KMT came to Taiwan in 1945 just as the war was ending with the Japanese. The KMT effectively lost the Civil with the Communists and came to Taiwan for the KMT to regain its strength and eventually return to the mainland as the true Chinese government. The KMT held onto this belief for a long period of time, but eventually abandoned the idea of returning to China as the legitimate government on the mainland. This desire and goal to return to the mainland would affect government policy for years to come. One of the major policies that the KMT introduced in Taiwan was that of the concept of the National Language. Mandarin and Mandarin alone was the official language of Taiwan and despite efforts
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to lessen the influence of Mandarin on the island it is still the official language of the Republic of China here in Taiwan. The new government in 1945 instituted Mandarin as the e official language of the country. The KMT government believed that the local Taiwanese had been negatively influenced by 50 years of Japanese rule on the island and needed to be educated once again in the ways and language of the Chinese. The introduction of Mandarin on the island was swift and for the most part effective. Other languages like Southern Min, Hakka and the aboriginal languages were not permitted (at least at the public level) and the knowing how to speak Mandarin or not became a real struggling point once the new government arrived in 1945. Those who could not speak Mandarin were effectively shut out from any kind of government work on the island. With the introduction of Mandarin as the official language on the island other languages like Southern Min, Hakka and aboriginal languages have begun to decline on the island. There has been some effort to revitalize these minority languages, but for the most part Mandarin remains the dominant language on the island, especially in the public and government forums.
When the KMT regained its control over the island the new government believed that the local Taiwanese population (at least of Chinese descent) had become Japanized and needed to be re-educated as Chinese citizens. The language of Taiwan was in fact Japanese when the KMT arrived in 1945 with its new governor Chen Yi and most Taiwanese were totally unfamiliar with the new national language that was being promoted on the island that is Mandarin. Most of the population at the time was of Han heritage but most spoke either Southern Min which they brought with them hundreds of years before when they migrated from Fujian and Guangdong provinces in China or spoke Hakka or one of the many indigenous languages that were spoken. It was ideology then that influenced the new KMT government when they took over the island, Mandarin had been the
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lingua franca of China when the Republic of China was established in 1911 in China and the KMT simply brought with them the language policy that they had formulated and promoted on the mainland.
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CHAPTER IV
FINAL THOUGHTS AND CONCLUSIONS: REDEFINING THE MATRIX
Problems faced while writing this thesis
I have been thinking about this thesis for more than 3 years now, and the idea came to me to look at language policy in Taiwan after reading Professor Friedman’s dissertation on “local languages”
in Taiwan. So that was the original genesis of the idea behind my Master’s thesis. In Chapter Three of his dissertation Professor Friedman (Friedman: 1995) talks about language shift and maintenance in Taiwan, first under the Japanese, and then the Kuomintang when they arrived in Taiwan after 1945. His basic argument in that chapter was that the Taiwanese were subjected to monolingual language practices under both régimes. It was my hope to at least attempt to take that work a little further. In my class on Case Study I wrote a paper comparing Language Planning in Taiwan and South Africa. When I first started ed writing the thesis I originally planned on adding a chapter on this subject that is, comparing the situations found in Taiwan and South Africa, and the language policy that both countries eventually followed. As an intellectual exercise it may have been good, but as for writing a Master’s thesis it proved to be too challenging. For one, having a knowledge, or a better knowledge of South Africa, and its languages and its language policy would be critical for writing a cogent and intelligent argument regarding language policy found in South Africa. At the end the idea was eventually abandoned, and a more detailed discussion of language policy and planning found in Taiwan was eventually undertaken.
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