Monday, 16 February 2004  
The widest coverage in Sri Lanka.
Features
News

Business

Features

Editorial

Security

Politics

World

Letters

Sports

Obituaries

Archives

Mihintalava - The Birthplace of Sri Lankan Buddhist Civilization

Silumina  on-line Edition

Government - Gazette

Sunday Observer

Budusarana On-line Edition





Is English a killer language?

by Dr. Wimal Wickramasinghe

As of today and even earlier, the English language is considered to be the foremost international language of the world. Or, to put differently, the English language has many more attributes to be the nearest to an international language that the world has ever had.

Today, English is the only official language (ignoring the countries in which English has auxiliary official status) in Antigua and Barbados, Australia, Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Cook Islands, Dominica, Falkland Islands, Fiji, The Gambia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guyana, Hawaiian Islands, Jamaica, Kiribati, Liberia, Marshal Islands, Mauritius, Micronesia, Namibia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

But in some countries many native languages are also spoken alongside the English language. They are also bilingual countries in which English performs as an official language; they are Botswana, Brunei, Cameroon, Hong Kong, Ireland, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Malta, Nauru, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, Swaziland, Venatu, Western Samoa.

What do language experts say of the English language? English, albeit its varieties, has evolved into the foremost international language, used in every continent by approximately eight hundred million people' (Loreto Todd and Jan Hankock, International English Usage (1988).

'The success of English in its function as international auxiliary language has often been regarded as a measure of its adequacy for the job'. (Manfred Gorlach, quoted from The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1996: 477). Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue: The English Language (1990: 03) cites a few but forceful factors for superiority of English as 'the common tongue'.

One is the richness of its vocabulary. He goes on to say that 'Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but it is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more.

Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000).

The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinctions unavailable to non-English speakers.'

Other factors cited are its flexibility, the relative simplicity of its spelling and pronunciation, and conciseness, despite for better or worse - its deceptive complexity'.

David Crystal in his The English Language (1988) says that "At present, English is the only language in a position to adopt the role of the world's first language. . . . At present, due primarily to the economic superiority of the United States, there is no competitor for English as a world language" (p. 262).

"The role of English has developed to such an extent, unprecedented in world history, that it is difficult to see how it can now be dislodged" (274). John Wilkinson's Introducing Standard English (1995: 49) says that the English language will enable a country to have access to networks of communication with other countries.

Standard English as the main medium of instruction in schools gives access to a mutually intelligible international language, and local English may become intelligible only within geographical boundaries.

What does Charles Barber, The English Language: A Historical Introduction (1993) say? "However, English has become a world language because of its wide diffusion outside the British Isles, to all continents of the world, by trade, colonization, and conquest" (235). . . .

This world-wide expansion of English means that it is now one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with well over four hundred million native speakers, and roughly the same number who speak it as a second language.

A Killer language?

It is in a way only an academic speculation which we make for analytical purposes. One would see from the foregoing how influential and widespread the English language is. It is true that the growth of some indigenous languages have either suffered a setback or been threatened to extinction to some extent.

There is also one other implication recently made as a result of the widespread use of English the world over. That is, 'English is a killer language'.

Some scholars argue that many languages of course there are many languages 'spoken by small groups of people who have little political and cultural power within the sovereign states in which they live' are on the verge of collapse or death due to the influence of factors including that of the English language.

There are many such observations. Let us, take for example, India though the real threat to some native languages prevails elsewhere, the languages spoken by between only 0.1 and 0.2 per cent of the world's population. India is linguistically a diverse country.

Quoting B P Mahapatra (1996), 'A demographic appraisal of multilingualism in India' in D P Pattanayak, ed., Multilingualism in India, Graddol in Sharon Goodman and David Graddol, eds., Redesigning English (1996: 181) gives a chart on the Indian language family: two national languages (Hindi and English), scheduled languages in order of size (Hindi, Telegu, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Assamese, Sanskrit), languages with widespread currency (41 languages used for education), 58 taught as school subjects, 87 used in media, and local vernaculars (over 190 recognized language varieties), 1,652 'mother tongues'; they were recorded in 1961 census.

Pattanayak (1996) argues that as a result of 'development' (or rather 'modernization'), the tribal communities present a tragic case of death of language and loss of culture. M Krauss (1992), 'World's languages in crisis', Language, Vol. 68, No. 1, observes,

"I consider it a plausible calculation that at the rate things are going the coming century will see either the death or the doom of 90% of mankind's languages. What are linguists doing to prepare for this or to prevent this catastrophic destruction of the linguistic world?".

However, Graddol ventures to dispel this kind of pessimism so far as it related to English: "The English language is rarely the direct cause of such language loss, despite the fact that English is an official language in many of the countries where endangered languages exist.

There exists in most of these highly multilingual countries a complex linguistic hierarchy. English may be at, or near, the top of that hierarchy but its influence may not be felt directly by speakers whose languages are at the bottom. . . . Language shift usually occurs from a small, low-status vernacular to one of the languages higher in the hierarchy, usually one with a lager number of speakers and wider currency in the region".

Despite observations quoted above to indicate that English is not a 'killer language', it is not totally true. On the other hand, it is our hunch that some African languages are under distress owing to (a) the existence of many local languages or dialects, most of which are not only confined to restricted localities but lacking any institutional support, and (b) the use of English, French, Spanish, etc. as official languages and lingua francas.

Owing to the restricted number of speakers and the absence of salient characteristics that qualify any dialect as a 'language' in the true sense of the word, some dialects are facing extinction. On the other hand, the English language has been no doubt a 'killer language' in Britain.

For example, we shall quote Granville Price, The Languages of Britain (1984): "For English is a killer. . . . It is English that has killed of Cumbric, Cornish and Manx. It is English that has not now totally replaced Irish as a first language in Northern Ireland.

Also it is English that constitutes such a major threat to Welsh and to Scottish Gaelic, and to French in the Channel Islands, that their long-term future must be considered to be very greatly at risk".

If English has been a threat to other languages in its own country, one cannot be all much too complacent about the fate of many other languages or dialects that now interact with English in their own countries.

But this expression of pessimism is not applicable to many languages that have taken root firmly in the past historically, linguistically, culturally and politically.

Despite the British rule for about one and half centuries in India and Sri Lanka, the main indigenous languages survived mostly due to the historical and linguistic traditions and the richness of these languages and their vocabularies; some of these languages have had a history very much older than that of the English language.

But the same cannot be said of some languages in Africa and Latin America that lack a historical and linguistic identity. We shall only leave it to the linguists and other scholars who can examine and comment on it.

www.lanka.info

www.continentalresidencies.com

www.ceylincoproperties.com

www.srilankaapartments.com

www.ppilk.com

www.singersl.com

www.crescat.com

www.peaceinsrilanka.org

www.helpheroes.lk


News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries


Produced by Lake House
Copyright © 2003 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager


Hosted by Lanka Com Services