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Myths and realities of ‘global’ English

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Abstract

The expansion of English worldwide tends to be both seen and marketed uncritically, as a universally relevant lingua franca and medium of education. The post-1945 expansion of English was a deliberate policy of the US and UK governments, foreseen in a speech by Churchill. Elsewhere Churchill endorsed university academic freedom and autonomy, which neoliberal forces currently constrain. Imperial languages are promoted by means of linguicism, which many contemporary policies exemplify. Increased use of English results in a macro-sociolinguistic tension between national linguistic capital accumulation or dispossession. European colonisation was legitimated by the fraudulent myth of terra nullius. Americanisation worldwide is furthered by projecting US norms and lifestyle as a cultura nullius for all. English is marketed as a lingua nullius, for instance in British promotion of English worldwide, as though English is a universal ‘basic skill’. This is false argumentation that echoes colonial discourse. Privileging English intensifies the gaps between the world’s haves and have-nots. This is also now in effect in the countries of the European Union. Critical scholarship is needed to connect macro-level analysis with micro-level conceptual myth-making promoting global English.

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Notes

  1. ‘Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio’. In Prólogo a la Gramática de la lengua castellana en http://www.antoniodenebrija.org/prologo.html. All translations are mine.

  2. “Entgegen dem Wortlaut der Bologna-Erklärung dient also die Studienreform dem Ziel, die dort beschworene sprachliche und kulturelle Vielfalt Europas durch ein englisches Sprachmonopol zu ersetzen” (Meyer 2011: 61).

  3. In a survey article on English-medium teaching in European higher education (2006:11). For further examples, see Phillipson (2015).

  4. From an anthology probing the links between the worldwide English teaching industry (TESOL) and contemporary Christian missionary organisations (Wong and Canagarajah 2009, pp 156–157).

  5. From a book on the future of German as a scholarly language, see Oberreuter et al. (2012: 108).

  6. ‘Comment lutter contre ces abus de pouvoir linguistiques qu’autorise l’hégémonie linguistique et contre l’impérialisme symbolique ?… Et il faut réfléchir sur ce modèle pour voir si et comment il est possible d’accepter l’usage de l’anglais sans s’exposer à être anglicisé dans ses structures mentales, sans avoir le cerveau lavé par les routines linguistiques.’ (Bourdieu et al. 2001: 47–48).

  7. The citation is in the original French (Bourdieu 1989: 486) as a reminder that the vocabulary of French and English have many roots in common. The essence of the citation is covered in the opening paragraph following the citations.

  8. This quote is often cited incorrectly as ’The business of America is business’, see http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/01/business-of-america-is-business.html.

  9. Maximen und Reflexionen, Aus Kunst und Altertum, 1821.

  10. The European occupiers of Mexico in 1519 destroyed heathen idols (Diaz 1963) with the same barbarity as the Taleban and ISIS destroy artefacts in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The US and its willing partners have perpetrated well-documented crimes of cultural genocide and cultural cleansing in Iraq, with massive consequences for local languages (al-Ani and al-Ani 2015).

  11. Terra nullius in international law signifies land to which no-one holds legal title. My use of cultura nullius and lingua nullius does not detach what is referred to from its original owners or inhabitants, i.e. US culture and the English of the UK and USA. Cultural and linguistic expansion do not occupy vacant space but are necessarily in competition and conflict with local practices. The culture and language are no more empty than the land of the ancestral inhabitants of non-European continents was. They are vulnerable in the same way as bastard offspring have been treated as filius nullius (Kayman 2009).

  12. http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill/118-the-price-of-greatness.

  13. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/28/remarks-president-united-states-military-academy-commencement-ceremony.

  14. http://www.thatchercenter.org.

  15. http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150421162549400. Wachira Kigotho, 24 April 2015 Issue No:364.

  16. www.britishcouncil.org.

  17. http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/04/push-to-privatise-education-in-global-south-challenged/.

  18. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-22/macmillan-publishers-must-pay-18-million-for-africa-corruption. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/03/world-bank-sanctions-oxford-university-press-corrupt-practices-impacting-education-projects-east-africa.

  19. Details are often provided in the monthly online http://mag.digitalpc.co.uk/Olive/ODE/ELGAZETTE/.

  20. www.britishcouncil.org. When Educational Testing Services of Princeton NJ (famous outside the US for the TOEFL test of language proficiency) established a European office, its first director was recruited from the pharmaceutical world. It now has six ‘global offices, one of which is for ‘Europe, the Middle East, and Africa’, reflecting trends of the past 15 years. Its ‘Global Institute’ is all about marketing its US services worldwide. Its explicit goal is to influence and be used throughout education worldwide, www.ets.org.

  21. For data on the world’s languages, see www.ethnologue.org.

  22. A follow-up to Graddol (2006).

  23. Drèze and Sen’s book does not cover language policy, probably because of lack of familiarity with the research on bilingual education. Sen’s focus on capability deprivation correlates precisely with how English-medium education in India impacts on children (Mohanty and Skutnabb-Kangas 2013).

  24. See the typology of fifteen factors contributing to the increased use of English in Europe, grouped as structural and ideological (Phillipson 2003: 64–65).

  25. A Declaration on a Nordic Language Policy was approved in 2006 by the Nordic Council of Ministers, and promulgated in Danish, Faeroese, Greenlandic, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Saami, Swedish, and English. The document specifies the language rights of all residents in a Nordic country, and sets out goals for language policy. It encourages key institutions to develop long-range strategies for choice of language, the parallel use of languages, and language instruction, www.norden.org.

  26. Resolution of the German Rectors’ Conference of 22 November 2011, in English at www.hrk.de.

  27. This reality is confirmed in the latest implementation report, European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice (2015).

  28. See http://www.welcomeurope.com/extract-comprehensive-guideline.html.

  29. http://ec.europa.eu/education/library/reports/modernisation_en.pdf.

  30. The French is concise and subtle: ‘… le français tend à devenir une langue de traduction et non plus de conception’.

  31. A contemporary of Churchill, the distinguished economist Keynes, denounced love of money as a pathological evil, and recommended that economists’should get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists’ (Keynes 2015: 75–86, written in 1930). For Keynes the ideal economist combined the talents of the mathematician, historian, statesman, and philosopher (ibid: xxvi).

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  1. Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Robert Phillipson

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Correspondence to Robert Phillipson.

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I am sincerely grateful for suggestions for improving an earlier version of this article from the journal’s reviewers and editors, Hartmut Haberland, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas.

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Phillipson, R. Myths and realities of ‘global’ English. Lang Policy 16, 313–331 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-016-9409-z

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