I haven’t read James C. Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century yet. It’s newly published and I hope to soon. However, I’ve been saving up an observation about the advantages that English has by its history and nature over some of its competitors and this looks like an opportune time to mention it.
English arose as a lingua franca—a method of communication between people who didn’t speak the same language, in this case the Norman French and their Anglo-Saxon subjects. Ironic that, since lingua franca is Latin for “French language”. It has elements of Norman French, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and whatever else worked. English-speakers are pre-disposed to picking up useful words from other languages. English is naturally syncretistic.
Contrast this with French and German. Both are hostile to loan words. The French have taken active steps against it, the standards of L’Académie française. German by nature is inclined to rely on elaborate, multi-word circumlocutions rather than adopt foreign words.
English’s main competitors today are Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. Japanese is too idiosyncratic (it has no close relatives as a language), too few people speak it natively, and it’s too difficult for it to gain wide acceptance from non-native speakers despite Japan’s economic strength. There’s no intrinsic reason that Spanish couldn’t achieve linguistic world dominance and it may, yet. There’s much to recommend it. It’s reasonably regular, has fairly simple phonemes, and, most importantly, a perfect orthography.
But Spanish is today a language of peasants. That’s not a formula for worldwide acceptance. However, as the countries of Latin America gain in economic strength and influence I won’t be surprised if Spanish becomes more influential, too.
Arabic and Chinese each have a problem and it’s the same problem—they’re diglossic. Even native speakers have to learn a new language in order to become reasonably literate. It takes native speakers of Arabic and Chinese four years or more longer to become literate in their own languages than it does native speakers of English. It’s that much more difficult for non-native speakers. That’s a built-in cost that’s intrinsic to those languages and there’s no way to overcome it.
So English it is all around for the foreseeable future.
And, of course, America’s enormous economic, military, and cultural power does give English a home court advantage.
English does have its drawbacks and idiosyncracies: to me, once exposed to the “Romance” (ROman-derived) practice of putting adjectives after the noun rather than before it, it made sense.
But English-speakers, even chauvinistic ones, have one great diplomatic advantage rarely noted. Non-native speakers who phrase things according to their primary tongue – like adjective placement – are understood and not automatically sneered at. There is a recognition that English is such a hodgepodge it is difficult to learn (and Churchill’s “two great nations divided by a common language” falls in there somewhere: legalese “to table” in the US means the opposite of what it does in the UK). I once used “der Salz” (male gendered) for ‘salt’ with a German, who took some time to realize I meant “das Salz” (ungendered) and took me to task. The French actually have laws against loan words: if your language is that fragile, maybe you should put it in a museum instead of the streets.
I link in this old post to an essay by Mencken that makes much the same point you do. English has a lot of advantages structurally as well as historically.
As to Spanish being a language of peasants, I can only imagine the look on the face of some of my very NON-peasant Spanish friends. Oh my.
I’m on page 90 of the Bennett book. It is very good so far. Dense. We must all discuss it on our blogs, and unpack all the good ideas.
As to Spanish being a language of peasants, I can only imagine the look on the face of some of my very NON-peasant Spanish friends.
There’s an old proverb that covers this exactly: one swallow does not make a summer. I won’t dare to essay an explanation (race may be a significant component based on my experience) but the Spanish-speaking world is inclined to a very small aristocracy, a small middle class, and a large lower class. In Mexico much of that lower class are of non-European descent or mestizos who are mostly native American.