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These are difficult times for some languages—the small ones, the stateless ones, those of lesser-used or minority status, and so on. An exchange taken from a recent conference transcript is illustrative here:
“What do you think of Gallic now—be honest!”
“Well, it’s a language that may still do you some good in the Highlands and Islands, maybe still in parts of Cape Breton, but outside those little areas, it isn’t going to take you very far . . . ”
“Isn’t it used in any other settings, then?”
“No, it’s simple, really—no one to speak it with. Who did you have in mind?”
“Maybe Scots abroad . . . ?”
“Listen, outside Scotland, Gallic speakers hardly use the language at all, even amongst themselves.”
“OK, but what d’you think of the language itself—is it a good sort of language, or what?”
“Actually, I’m not too keen on it, as a language per se. It has become pretty bastardised, you know, bit of a mixture really—different dialects, English borrowings . . . ”
This little discussion surely has a familiar ring to it: a “small” language struggling against larger forces, a variety increasingly confined geographically and socially, a medium whose intrinsic status is often seen as degraded and impure. And, if it proves difficult to maintain such a language in something like its native state, what attraction does it possess for language learners elsewhere? Why would anyone study it at school or university? The elementary catch-22 operates here: How can you induce the learning of a language when its community of use is negligible, but how will that community ever grow unless more join it? The dreary downward spiral seems fated to continue, resulting in a native community that is small and a secondary community that may become the preserve of a tiny band of consciously committed enthusiasts.
I have been deceitful here. The exchange about Scots Gaelic never took place. It is modeled, however, on this earlier passage:
“What thinke you of this English tongue, tel me, I pray you?”
“It is a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Douer, it is woorth nothing.”
“It is not vsed then in other countreyes?”
“No sir, with whom wyl you that they speake?”
“With English marchants.”
“English marchantes, when they are out of England, it liketh them not, and they doo not speake it.”
“But yet what thinke you of the speech, is it gallant and gentle, or els contrary?”
“Certis if you wyl beleeue me, it doth not like me at al, because it is a language confused, bepeesed with many tongues: it takeaketh many words of the latine, & mo from the French, & mo from the Italian, and many mo from the Duitch [. . .].” (Yates 32)
This is taken from John Florio’s First Fruits; published in 1578, it is a textbook and manual for the teaching of Italian to English gentlemen. The fruits “yeelde familiar speech, merie Prouerbes, wittie Sentences, and golden sayings. Also a perfect Induction to the Italian, and English tongues [. . .]. The like heretofore, neuer by any man published” (as Florio modestly points out in his fuller title). John Florio was, of course, an exceedingly interesting character who played many different roles, language teacher and translator among them. He provided, for instance, an engaging—if sometimes rather loose—translation of Montaigne’s Essays, a translation read and used by Shakespeare. In his time (c. 1553–1625), French, Italian, and Spanish were the powerful international languages, widely studied in Tudor and Stuart England. Italian challenged the supremacy of French in both the cultural and the commercial worlds, and many prominent Elizabethans studied it. Indeed, the queen herself was a student, along with luminaries like Edmund Spenser and the earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesly—a literary patron to Florio and, more famously, to Shakespeare (Yates; Acheson).
Very few people in the sixteenth century would have predicted global status for English, a language with four or five million speakers and well back in the linguistic sweepstakes. The point is a simple one: the fortunes of language rise and fall; the variety that today wields international influence on a scale never before seen was once of very secondary importance and restricted utility. It is easy to lose sight of this immediately demonstrable fact—particularly, of course, at a time when historical knowledge and the contextualization of current events to which its application must inevitably lead are commodities of little priority. It is sometimes imagined that the global power of English represents a new phenomenon. It is, however, only the most recent manifestation of a very old one, although its strength and its scope are arguably greater than those possessed by earlier “world” languages: the difference, then, is one of degree rather than of principle. I don’t mean to argue that all this somehow lessens the impact of English on other varieties; I simply want to suggest that social and linguistic struggles to resist the encroachments of English are not battles against demons never seen before. I would also not wish to belittle the anxieties felt by those whose languages and cultures are under threat. I only wish to say that all these things have happened before and will no doubt happen again: it is an old play we are looking at here, a play whose plot endures while the cast changes.
Languages of “wider communication” have no special linguistic capabilities to recommend them; they are simply the varieties of those who have power and prestige. It seems necessary to repeat this truism quite frequently, and not merely for the benefit of those languishing in ignorance outside the academy. I find in the Fall 1999 ADFL Bulletin, for example, a piece that suggests that current linguistic dominance
lies very simply in the fact that English is more responsive than any other language to the growing knowledge base that is the hallmark of these postmodern times. It is this ability to be eclectically open to new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts that has predisposed English to be the major medium of modern communication. (Eoyang 27)
It is undoubtedly the case that, more than (some) other languages, English has been an open and “loose” medium—ready to take what was needed from other varieties, to be flexible in the face of modern necessity, and so on. It is an egregious mistake, however, to think that such “openness” accounts for its dominance. The truth is rather more brutal. (I note in passing here that one occasionally reads a defense of some threatened “small” variety that is based on its elegance of phrasing, its regularities, its linguistic “purity,” its marvelous literature: this language is just as good as the hulking neighbor next door. Unfortunately, as Mae West once said, apropos of diamonds, goodness has nothing to do with it.)
The reasons for the relative “openness” of English are not entirely transparent, but they certainly are entwined with many historical threads. There exist, today, a strength and practicality about English that make a relaxed stance easy; that is, a secure and powerful medium need not worry very much about borrowings and hybrids, about localizations and colloquialism, about purism and prescriptivism. But even if we go back to periods in which English was not dominant, back (say) to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when “standard” national languages were beginning to emerge in Europe, we find English linguistic reflexes to be unlike those elsewhere. The most notable example is the lack of a language academy whose purpose is to help standardize, yes, but usually also to protect, to keep out foreign influence, to manage neologisms, and so on. Some years ago, Randolph Quirk pointed to an “Anglo Saxon” aversion to “linguistic engineering,” a disdain for language academies and their purposes—goals that, he felt, were “fundamentally alien” to English speakers’ conceptions of language (68). This is putting things too strongly, perhaps, but it is certainly noteworthy that the United Kingdom and the United States are virtually the only countries not to have (or have had) formal bodies charged with maintaining linguistic standards. It is also interesting to consider that—given the obvious need for standardization, even in English—both countries essentially appointed one-man academies; the great lexicographers Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster produced dictionaries that became the arbiters of standards and of “correctness.”
One aspect of English “openness,” and another indication of its strength, can be found in the degree of its localization around the world, and—more important, perhaps—the attitudes attaching to this localization. Compare the recent history of English with French in this regard. The latter has seen its influence shrink dramatically, and it is unsurprising that the current stance is often one of protection and defense. Part of this involves a renewed vigor—for the basic tendency was always there—in what might be called linguistic centralism. French is certainly interested in expansion—in bringing Antoine Rivaroli’s language of clarity to more people—but this is to be accomplished in a guarded and centralist way. English, however, is much more decentralized, less guarded, and more expansive. Local varieties achieve considerable status (Indian English provides perhaps the single best example of a developing and accepted indigenized model) and, indeed, some predict an increasing divergence, reminiscent of the birth of the Romance languages; but it must be noted that there are strong countertendencies to this. In any event, a language once tainted by imperialism is rapidly becoming one of “our” languages in many parts of the world. It is suggestive that we see books devoted to the “new Englishes,” that there are journals called World Englishes and English World-Wide, and that these have essentially no equivalents in French scholarly circles.1
It is obvious that even “big” languages now worry about English—examples can easily be found of English usages common in France, in Japan, in Germany. It is worth noting, though, that these usages do not simply fill new needs or avoid translations for words in common international exchange; they can also push aside already-existing equivalents. It is one thing, then, to refer to das Web-Design or der Cursor, and perhaps another to employ der Trend or der Team or der Cash-Flow. External pressures often lead to internal division. “E-mail” is commonly used in French, for example, even though the Academie Française has endorsed message electronique (or mel, an abbreviated version), and Quebec’s Office de la Langue Française has plumped for courriel. It is not very surprising, either, that within the wider language community the more threatened sectors will tend to be the most linguistically watchful. Canada’s sovereigntist Parti Québécois recently accused France of not being French enough, of not sufficiently guarding the barriers, when it was announced that Air France pilots would now speak English to air-traffic controllers in Paris. This is in line with international practice, which makes English the norm in aviation, but French has been allowed in Quebec airspace for twenty years, and its place there has considerable symbolic importance. French pilots may inform ground control that they are about to commence le fuel dumping, but their Québécois counterparts are more likely to refer to délestage. All this suggests that there now exists a division in the ranks of “big” languages: English is the sole occupant of one category, while French, German, Spanish, Russian, and other languages jostle among themselves in the second.2
It has always been more difficult to teach and to learn foreign languages in North America than in Europe. Within Europe, the difficulties have—in recent times, at least—been greater in Britain than on the Continent. Do we observe here some genetic anglophone linguistic deficiency? Are the British and the Americans right when they say, “I’m just no good at foreign languages”? Are they right to envy those clever Europeans (or, indeed, Africans and Asians) who slide effortlessly from one mode to another? The answers here obviously involve environmental conditions, not genetic ones, but I present these rather silly notions because—to the extent to which they are believed or half-believed or inarticulately felt—they constitute a type of self-fulfilling prophecy that adds to the difficulty of language learning. I use the word adds here because the real difficulties, the important contextual conditions, the soil in which such prophecies flourish have to do with power and dominance. Anglophone linguistic laments perhaps involve some crocodile tears or, at least, can seem rather hollow: the regrets of those who lack competence, but who need not, after all, really bother to acquire it.
Given what I’ve said earlier about the status of English in Florio’s time, for instance, we could assume that English speakers, when not globally dominant, were actually assiduous language learners. This is a view endorsed by Norman Davies in his recent popular history: before the twentieth century, the idea that the British were somehow innately ill-equipped to speak foreign languages would have seemed ludicrous, and most educated people (not just the royals, not just Victoria and Albert chatting away in German) were, in fact, bilingual or better. There are counterindications, however, and, indeed, one of those takes us back exactly to Florio’s day. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia complains of Falconbridge, one of her suitors, that “he understands not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian” (1.2). All her admirers, including a Scot, are criticized, “but only the English one is slated for linguistic incompetence. (Nick Oulton provides the Shakespearean example here—noting that perhaps the pre-twentieth-century competence attributed by Davies to the “British” might exclude the English!)
Well, we need not take Shakespeare as an infallible guide to language abilities here, but, in any event, there is no real paradox. Educated English speakers were, at once, more broadly capable in foreign languages than they are now and increasingly less capable—because of the growing clout of their maternal variety—than their Continental colleagues. A related and relevant point is that as we approach the modern era we find that linguistic competence becomes more and more associated with formal educational instruction and less driven by mundane necessity. Of course, this is a very general statement, and there are all sorts of exceptions to it. Nonetheless, the correlation between the social, political, and economic dominance of the English-speaking world and the decline in its foreign language competence—for those reasons already touched on—means that language learning becomes more a matter of the classroom than of the street. And this has clear implications for both students and teachers.
These implications are, if anything, rather more pointed in North America than they are in Britain (or should I say England?), and they rest on an interesting point. It is commonly accepted that favorable attitudes and positive motivations are central to successful second-language learning. There is, indeed, a very large literature on this theme (see, e.g., Edwards, Multilingualism; Noels and Clément). The importance of favorable attitudes, however, varies inversely with real linguistic necessity. Historically, most changes in language-use patterns owe much more to socioeconomic and political pressures than they do to attitudes. Some have suggested that one sort of motivation may play a part here. A mid-nineteenth-century Irishman, for instance, could well have loathed English and what it represented, while still realizing the mundane necessity to change. This instrumental motivation is, of course, a grudging quantity and quite unlike what has been termed an integrative one—that is, one based on genuine interest in another group and its language, perhaps involving a desire to move toward that group in some sense. There might also be a useful distinction to be drawn here between favorable and positive attitudes (to cite the adjectives I used above). To stay with the Irish example, one could say that the language attitudes toward English were typically instrumental—and positive in the sense of commitment or emphasis—but not necessarily integrative or favorable. Of course, attempting to separate instrumentality from “integrativeness” may prove, in practice, to be difficult and, as well, the relation between the two no doubt alters over the course of language shift. But there is a distinction between, say, the English needed by Japanese engineers and that sought by Japanese professors of American literature; the difference is one of depth of fluency, to be sure, but it goes beyond that (Edwards, Language).
Similarly, the language teaching of most interest here is something that goes beyond language training, although it must build on that and although some students are primarily interested in acquiring what we could now call an instrumental fluency. It has been argued that since attitudes (favorable ones, at least) are often of little consequence in real-life situations of language contact and shift, they are trivial elsewhere, too. My point is simply that attitudes may assume greater importance in many teaching settings: if the context is not perceived to be very pertinent in any immediate or personal way; if the participant is not there out of real, mundane necessity, then attitudes may make a real difference. In this way—leaving ability out of the equation, of course—language classes may become just like all others.
In a society that rewards narrow and immediately applicable learning, in educational systems that are increasingly corporatized, in the thousand-channel universe that confuses information with knowledge (awash in the former and inimical to the latter), and in a world made more and more safe for anglophones, language learning and all its ramifications lose immediacy. Not only does instrumental appeal lessen, but the more intangible and more profound attractions—to which instrumentality leads and with which it is entwined—also inevitably decline. These are the social constraints within which language teaching and learning occur, and they tend to dwarf more specific settings. At a recent seminar, Janet Swaffar made some suggestions (which were reprinted in the ADFL Bulletin) “to help foreign language departments assume command of their destinies,” and the usual suspects were pedantically rounded up: a redefinition of the discipline (“as a distinct and sequenced inquiry into the constituents and applications of meaningful communication”); more emphasis on communication and less on narrow grammatical accuracy; the establishment of standards, models, and common curricula (for “consistent pedagogical rhetoric”), and so on (10–11). All very laudable, no doubt, but why do I think of Nero? It has always been difficult to sell languages in Kansas; wherever you go, for thousands of miles, English will take you to McDonald’s, get you a burger, and bring you safely home again—and a thorough reworking of pedagogical rhetoric doesn’t amount to sale prices.
Broadly speaking, there are two paths through the woods, although occasionally they share the same ground. The first is for foreign language teaching to satisfy itself with that shrinking pool of students intrinsically interested in languages and their cultures. These are, after all, the students nearest to one’s own intellectual heart. The problem is that the natural constituency here might prove too small to support a discipline at desired levels, and it is hard to nurture it in any direct way. The other is to hope and work for a renewed instrumental interest, with whatever longer term fallout that might lead to. On the one hand, this is dependent on a context that extends well beyond national borders and on alterations in global linguistic circumstance that, while inevitable, are not always easy to predict. On the other hand, things might be done at home—a home that is, after all, culturally diverse, in which the loss of a hundred native languages to English is seen as uneconomic, in which the rights of immigrants (particularly those who are entitled to vote) attract social and political attention, and so on. In a word, we look at Spanish.
The importance of the study of Spanish in the United States is self-evident. It is a language that has a lengthy cultural and literary tradition with many interesting branches to the original trunk, and it remains a widely used variety around the world; with something like 300 million speakers, it runs fourth (behind Hindi, Chinese, and English) in the usage sweepstakes. Academically, then, it is the ideal second language. More immediately, recent reports show that there are over 30 million people of Hispanic background in America (about 12% of the population); that this group is the fastest-growing minority; and that in fifty years’ time its proportions will double, so that one in four Americans will be of this ethnic origin. (These are informed speculations, of course, and there is room for variation: Carlos Fuentes recently said that by 2050 three out of every five Americans will speak Spanish.) The figures, impressive as they are on their own, take on more weight when we consider their traditionally concentrated nature: millions of people living more or less together are a different sociological phenomenon than if they are scattered among others. At the same time, not all Hispanic people live in the Southwest or the Southeast. In the last ten years their numbers have more than doubled in Iowa (to take one example), and they are now more numerous than black Americans there (Bohrer; see also Fuentes). All in all, a powerful and growing population.
Considering both the global and the national presence of Spanish, it is little wonder that the language is the linchpin of modern language teaching in the United States. The whole discipline, however, remains weak: even though recent (1998) MLA statistics suggest an overall increase of about 5% in foreign language enrollments since 1995, only 1.2 million college students are represented here, fewer than 8% of the total. There have been, indeed, steep declines in some quarters; enrollments in German were reportedly down by 7.5% (90,000 students altogether), and those in French decreased by 3% (to about 200,000). But for Spanish, the figures are better: enrollments are up by about 8%, which translates to some 660,000 students. And to complete this part of the story one can see that students of Spanish thus constitute 55% of all language students. Is Spanish learning in a healthy situation, then, or does it only seem so in comparison with weaker sisters?3
This may be an impossible question to answer. How many students ought to be studying Spanish—or archaeology, or quantum mechanics, or sculpture? Still, one might expect that language study would be more immediately related to extraeducational factors, for example, jobs, mobility, and opportunity, and, if that is so, then one might wonder why the strength of the American Hispanic community does not bolster the educational effort more.
In fact, despite America’s multiethnic status in general, and its powerful Hispanic components more specifically, the country remains resolutely anglophone in all important domains and, indeed, the chief supporter of English as a global language. Historically, the melting pot has been most effective at the level of language, that is, while aspects of cultural continuity can be discerned in various groups, languages other than English typically last no longer than the second or third generation, and the normal pattern has meant moving from one monolingualism to another. This is true, even for the two special cases, francophones in New England and hispanophones in the Southwest—special, inasmuch as they, unlike all other arrivals, remain close to their heartlands, the borders of which are easily and frequently crossed. The timing of language shift is naturally dependent on such variables, but the overall shape of the curve is remarkably similar across groups.
All this makes Carlos Fuentes’s remarks rather naive, even though they are eminently understandable, reflective of the views of many, and, indeed, attractive in their impulse. He asks why most Americans know only English and sees their monolingualism as a “great paradox”: the United States is at once the supreme and the most isolated world power. Why, he continues, does America “want to be a monolingual country?” (4). All twenty-first-century Americans ought to know more than one language in order to better understand the world and deal with problems. And so on and so on. Obviously, monolingualism is not a paradox, and to say that Americans “want” to be monolingual would seem to miss the point—it is simply that English serves them across domains.
In more subtle ways, though, it could be argued that Americans do “want” to be monolingual—or, to put it more aptly, see no reason to expand their repertoires. They therefore resist the institutionalization of other languages. In a climate like this, especially a long-standing one, such an outlook—arguably based on perceived practicality—can expand on less immediate and more unpleasant levels. Not only do languages other than English appear unnecessary, their use can be seen as downright un-American, their speakers as unwilling to throw themselves wholeheartedly into that wonderful pot, their continuing linkage to other cultures as a suspect commodity. It is surely not surprising that, given the right context, these sorts of views would find formal expression, that organizations like U. S. English would flourish, that many states would enact English-only legislation, that bilingual education would be progressively deemphasized and, in one or two notorious cases, scrapped entirely. Nor is it surprising that the central part of that “right context” would be an increasingly worried sense that the nonanglophone “others” are becoming too potent. English only, therefore, typically means not-Spanish. And so another circle is completed: the very language community that, by its power and numbers, ought logically to blaze the way in foreign language teaching and learning, is under attack by powerful bodies that are either nostalgia-ridden yearners for some selective status quo or, worse, carriers of the most abhorrent social virus. And, even if these bodies were absent from the political landscape, one could only expect from the public at large a lukewarm and uninformed stance.
I have aimed here only at some slight elucidation of the social context relevant to languages and language learning. Large forces and weighty histories are at work, and their presence should be acknowledged and thought about. I didn’t intend to write a jeremiad although I know that, for many, English is a lowering villain depriving other mediums of their rightful inheritance. I would simply reiterate that the factors at work here are neither unfamiliar nor unpredictable. We have seen transitional linguistic and social times before—and transition is, almost by definition, a painful and wrenching experience for those whose lives are directly affected.
It is a truism to say that the teaching and the learning of languages are influenced by the state of affairs outside the walls of the academy. It would be heartening—in a world in which, for all the power of English, bilingual or multilingual competences are still the norm—if the North American academy were dealing with a constituency that acknowledged and accepted such repertoires. The products on offer would not then require such advertising; the demand would arise naturally and would not itself have first to be suggested to the consumers. But this is a setting in which some linguistic analogy of Gresham’s law seems to operate. As well, one recalls the (perhaps apocryphal) remark of that school superintendent in Arkansas who steadfastly refused to have foreign languages taught at the secondary level: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for you” (qtd. in Ricks and Michaels xvii).
We should recall, though, that there remains on this continent a rich linguistic and cultural diversity, and in many instances this continues to be a visible and powerful quantity. We have also engaged, over the last few years, in an unprecedented debate about multiculturalism and pluralism, about identity and citizenship. The field here remains terribly disputed and highly politicized, but the debate is far from over and the valuable middle ground has yet to be charted. Although the most active participants in the discussion have not been those whose primary concerns are linguistic, the latter have a role to play and a contribution to make.
The author is Professor of Psychology at Saint Francis Xavier University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 1–3 June 2000, in Tempe, Arizona.
1On academics, dictionaries, Rivaroli, and journals devoted to “Englishes,” see Edwards, Language and Multilingualism.
2For recent French and German developments, see Séguin, “France,” “Reverse Role”; Freeman; Gagnon; Ribbans. See also Edwards, “Language.”
3See recent editorials in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 Dec. 1999, commenting on the meetings of the MLA: “German—Fewer than 100 Jobs,” and “Literature Moves to a New Latin Rhythm.”
Acheson, Arthur. Shakespeare’s Lost Years in London, 1586–1592. London: Quaritch, 1920.
Bohrer, Becky. “U.S. Hispanic Population the Fastest-Growing Group.” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 13 May 2000: 12.
Davies, Norman. The Isles: A History. London: Macmillan, 1999.
Edwards, John. “Language and the Future: Choices and Constraints.” Conference on Language in the Twenty-First Century. Whitney Center, Yale U, June 1999.
———. Language, Society and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
———. Multilingualism. London: Penguin, 1995.
Eoyang, Eugene. “The Worldliness of the English Language: A Lingua Franca Past and Future.” ADFL Bulletin 31.1 (1999): 26–32. [Show Article]
Freeman, Alan. “The English Patience of France.” Globe and Mail 1 Apr. 2000: 22.
Fuentes, Carlos. “A Cure for Monolingualism.” Times Higher Education Supplement 17 Dec. 1999: 4.
Gagnon, Lysiane. “Back in the Trenches of the Language War.” Globe and Mail 3 Apr. 2000: 18.
“German—Fewer Than 100 Jobs.” Times Higher Education Supplement 17 Dec. 1999: 6.
“Literature Moves to a New Latin Rhythm.” Times Higher Education Supplement 17 Dec. 1999: 4.
Noels, Kimberly, and Richard Clément. “Language in Education.” Language in Canada. Ed. John Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 102–24.
Oulton, Nick. Letter. Times Literary Supplement 17 Mar. 2000: 21.
Quirk, Randolph. Style and Communication in the English Language. London: Arnold, 1982.
Ribbans, Elisabeth. “Germans Bemoan Popularity of English.” Globe and Mail 27 Apr. 2000: 11.
Ricks, Christopher, and Leonard Michaels. The State of the Language. London: Faber, 1990.
Séguin, Rhéal. “France Not French Enough, PQ Says.” Globe and Mail 29 Mar. 2000: 4.
———. “Reverse Role Model Made in Canada.” Globe and Mail 1 Apr. 2000: 22.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. The Riverside Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton, 1974. 254–85.
Swaffar, Janet. “The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline.” ADFL Bulletin 30.3 (1999): 6–12. [Show Article]
Yates, Frances. John Florio. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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