As World Knits Together, English Is Its Vital Thread

Down in the valley, Guthrum the Viking and his Dane invaders were massing for battle. Up on the lush green ridge, King Alfred and his weary army, armed with battle axes and spears, were ready.

Alfred, king of Wessex, wasn’t master of much, but he wanted to keep what he had. And maybe, if he prevailed, he’d even try to unite the loose patchwork of Anglo-Saxon dominions spread across this damp little island.

The Battle of Ethandun was fierce and quick. On that May day in 878, Alfred stopped the Danes from doing what conquerors do: absorbing the Anglo-Saxon culture into their own--including the young language, which could have taken a death blow right there.

But Alfred, an educator and statesman, had bigger plans for the kingdom and culture he helped save. He translated Latin texts from the Roman Empire into Anglo-Saxon. He recruited scribes to tell his people’s story, in their own tongue, for the generations to come.

Today, 1,122 years later, an estimated 1.5 billion human beings speak to one another in what Alfred’s tongue has become. It has grown into the dominant language of commerce, of science, of the skies--and of opportunity. It has spread culture--first British, then American--for good and for ill.

Against long odds, the fledgling language rippled across Alfred’s isle, then traversed the Atlantic Ocean to the New World and beyond. It matured as it flourished, swelling with fresh words imported from Earth’s farthest corners. It changed. It took root in remote outposts, carried first by conquering armies, then by invisible radio waves and satellite-borne images, finally by a vast web of connected computers.

And now: Africans and Asians and American Indians, Latinos and Maoris and Inuits--people the Anglo-Saxons could not have imagined--talking and loving, buying and selling, shouting and fighting.

Nearly a quarter of the human population, using what is fast becoming the world’s first global language. And the language they are speaking is the one you speak: English.

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At a tourist information center in Innsbruck, Austria, a local woman, a native German speaker, strains to decipher the heavily accented German spoken by a couple inquiring about hotel prices. Finally, in fluent English, she says, “Could you speak in English?” No problem, the tourists reply.

In the departure lounge of Murtala Muhammad National Airport in Lagos, Nigeria, Yang Bao Zhong, a contractor from Tianjin, China, wants to know when his plane leaves. He approaches a counter staffed by a Yoruba woman. “Yes? What is it?” she says in English. He grins, happy to be understood.

Along Copenhagen Harbor, an American tries to ward off a beggar with a bit of the native tongue: “Foerloev, jeg snakker ikke god Dansk.” (“Sorry, I don’t speak Danish well.”) Replies the panhandler, in English: “It’s very nice that you learned a little Danish; it’s not an easy language.”

Such interludes are hardly unusual. For English is moving around the world at a velocity utterly without linguistic or historical precedent.

The world’s English speakers-- those who speak it natively, as a second language in their own country and as a foreign language entirely--outnumber the population of China. English is an official language in more than 75 countries. An estimated 1 billion humans are studying it, many so they can leave home and succeed elsewhere.

“As people interact with more people in different ways, they need a language in common,” says Caroline Moore, a linguist with the government-funded British Council, which promotes and teaches English around the world. “And in many countries, to be seen as a player, you need English.”

Earth’s most famous man knows this. When Pope John Paul II arrived in the Middle East last month to retrace Christ’s footsteps and address Christians, Muslims and Jews, the pontiff spoke not Latin, not Arabic, not Hebrew, not his native Polish. He spoke in English.

The list goes on. Indonesian U.N. ambassador Makarim Wibisono addressing a multinational panel about East Timor. English. Pakistani Gen. Pervez Musharraf, fresh from overthrowing the government, announcing his coup. English. Dispatches from the often anti-American KCNA, North Korea’s official foreign news outlet. English.

Even at the height of the Roman Empire, Latin didn’t spread this far. And Esperanto, a synthetic tongue conceived in the 19th century to become a second language for a global-minded world, never caught on. What made English different--and why?

First, some history. English belongs to a linguistic grouping known as the Germanic languages; it is closer to German than to French or Spanish, which evolved from Latin.

Germanic tribes repeatedly invaded the island the Romans called Britannia between 400 and 800. First, waves of Frisians, Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea, subjugating and absorbing Celtic cultures. Viking incursions, beginning in 787, brought another linguistic invasion. Christian missionaries introduced Latin words.

By the 800s, Anglo-Saxon, a.k.a. Old English, had emerged from this stew and was flourishing in various forms--Mercian, Kentish, Northumbrian and Alfred’s dialect, West Saxon.

Over the centuries, English (Alfred was the first to use the word) evolved as England did.

The Norman Conquest, in 1066, placed England under a king who spoke a different language, a precursor of French. The Norman rulers imposed that language upon Old English as it evolved into Middle English, the language of Chaucer’s 14th century “Canterbury Tales.” That in turn evolved into Modern English around Shakespeare’s time, the end of the 16th century.

English had become a major European language, one among many.

A language, linguists like to say, is “a dialect with an army and a navy.” Beginning in the 18th century, it was the military that carried English beyond England’s shores for good.

As European colonizers swept across the globe, the British Empire spread: North America. Australia. India. Southeast Asia. Africa. The Caribbean. English ships carried English passengers to English outposts, where the tongue of the realm was English. British subjects--more than a quarter of the world’s population by 1900--had little choice but to learn English to communicate in the countries that formed around them.

Then came the 20th century and its burst of technology. Suddenly people were talking across oceans, flying across continents, hearing broadcasts that reverberated around the planet. Language spread faster than ever. The world wars carried American and British soldiers around the world, pollinating English as they went.

When World War II ended, the balance shifted. The British Empire was crumbling, its subjects gaining independence--India, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore. America, driven by an unheard-of postwar prosperity, was becoming a global force, making it English’s primary spear carrier in the second half of the 20th century.

No longer were just king and empire nudging the language ahead. Instead, it was barreling forward on the shoulders of American capitalism--McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, Rambo and MTV, munitions and computer technology.

And now the Internet, where English has been the lingua franca since the beginning. English speakers represented 54% of Internet users in 1999, although their dominance is expected to wane a bit, according to Computer Economics, an Internet research firm.

Communicating across cultures is no longer a goal; it’s a mere starting point. In an information age, Alfred’s language has become one of the most crucial commodities of all.

An Idiom That Transcends Nations

They hear it all over the world. The Bangkok man who listens on the way to work. The Afghan who tunes in surreptitiously from Kabul. The Japanese housewife who studies faithfully over her shortwave radio even though “doing domestic chores one after another prevents me from concentrating.”

China. Burma. Cuba. Iraq. Rwanda. All tuning their shortwaves to the Voice of America’s 1,500-word-vocabulary Special English program, gobbling up English lessons and rhapsodizing about words they’ve learned and opportunities they seek.

English, and the desire to know it, is rewriting the rules of language and its role in society, transcending governments, maps and cultures-- sometimes to other nations’ chagrin.

The European Union uses English alongside French at its informal gatherings, even though Europe has more native German and Italian speakers. Virtually all scientific organizations use English, partly because most relevant literature and terminology is in English and partly because scientists want to spend time on science, not translation.

“We mix a more powerful cocktail by having Italians, Japanese, Americans, Brazilians tackling the same problem,” says Neil Calder, a spokesman for CERN, the Switzerland-based European Laboratory for Particle Physics, where scientists from 82 countries do business in English.

“Scientists understand that the number of people who are going to read their paper is dramatically reduced if they don’t use English,” Calder says.

When the BBC’s German Service closed shop last year because most Germans listened to English broadcasts, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper explained it this way: “We all now speak English well enough. And anyone who doesn’t isn’t worthy of the BBC.”

Other Languages Step to the Rear

Pilots from sundry countries request clearance to land at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport, as they do at most international airports, in English. Hockey players from Europe’s every corner communicate in NHL locker rooms using English--albeit colorful English.

“When you’re with a team that has guys who speak seven different languages, you usually communicate in two ways,” Vancouver Canucks coach Marc Crawford says. “First, you start in English. And second, you end in profanities.”

Millions want to speak it; millions more are finding they have to, whether they like it or not. And many don’t like it at all.

The Indonesian government said it was being pragmatic last year when it decreed that some school subjects could be taught in English. But the decision annoyed some Indonesians, who thought it a harbinger of Western domination.

And in the Dutch-speaking Netherlands last year, some officials proposed switching the language of education to English--the language of most reference works.

“But if they drop Dutch at the university, then the Dutch community will merge into the international English community,” warns Bertrand-Romain Menciassi, a linguist at the European Bureau of Lesser-Used Languages. “People are starting to forget about their own languages without really realizing it.”

Such trepidations are understandable, given English’s expansionist, occasionally bloody, history. H.L. Mencken was acknowledging it as early as 1935. “The English-speaking peoples,” he wrote, “have dragged their language with them, and forced it upon the human race.”

Today, apprehensions abound from Singapore and India, where English is an official language, to France and Iceland, where it isn’t. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn’t help matters last year by invoking language as a nationalistic tool. “In my lifetime, all of the problems have come from mainland Europe,” she said, “and all of the solutions have come from the English-speaking world.”

What, then, are the good things about a global language? Communication, whether to make peace or money. Sharing knowledge with fewer obstacles. Granting more people access to the world at large.

“In today’s dangerous era, we have to have some language in common. It looks like it’s English,” says linguist Anne Soukhanov, U.S. general editor of Microsoft’s Encarta World English Dictionary. “And if it brings us together and avoids misunderstanding, that’s all for the good.”

And what are the bad things? That potential for cultural arrogance. The loss of smaller languages trampled by an English juggernaut, homogenizing cultures and reducing the ways humans can express themselves. The chance of Western and American dominance, of language forcing upon people a way of life they don’t want.

Valid opinions all. But ultimately moot.

Arguing whether English should spread is as fruitless as trying to force “correct” grammar onto people’s tongues. Language can’t be controlled by governments, linguists or anyone else.

The speakers--diplomats and gangsters, beggars and bishops, farmers and financiers--are the ones who make the rules.

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“This rain. It’s done nothing for the last week but throw it down,” cabby David Baker grouses as he drives through the drizzle along Route B3098 into Edington, near where King Alfred defeated the Danes.

If Guthrum the Viking had won that long-ago battle, Baker might have been saying something like this: “Det regner. Det har ikke gjort andet i den sidste uge.”

Instead, he speaks in English-- his town’s tongue, his country’s tongue, a tongue that has traveled the world.

With it, he can be understood by his queen in London and the pope in Rome, by the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism, by the president of the United States and by Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings, the leader of Ghana. By radiologists from Russia, pilots from Paraguay, chemists from Cameroon.

In Nigeria, he’d be understood by Ifeyinwa Omojeva, 13, studying English in a small northern town so she can work for the government. In Beijing, he’d be understood by Li Yang, whose frenzied “Crazy English” classes are designed to make 300 million Chinese fluent in the language. In Pine Ridge, S.D., he and thousands of Oglala Sioux could find common ground.

David Baker, taxi driver from south-central England, can be understood by more people than anyone in history.

And if they came to Edington, they’d understand more of his world than ever before. They could read the quotation from Psalm 100 posted at the Priory Church of St. Mary, St. Katharine and All Saints: “Serve the Lord with gladness.” They’d be able to avoid parking in the space that says “Reserved for Vicar.”

English is not everywhere; it’s just closer to being everywhere than any language in history. A seed was planted long ago, and through education and violence, understanding and imperialism, it has germinated. English speakers communicate across cultures and oceans, creating a blueprint for the future of human interaction.

Words give shape to ideas. Language produces understanding and contains identity. In a world sewn together as never before, with common destinies and common dangers, English has become a crucial thread of connection.

Perhaps, with a lot of sensitivity, it can do something more. With all the cultures that flow into it, maybe English can strengthen the human tapestry for a new century that contains only one certainty: We’re going to have to deal with each other.

And we’re probably not going to be doing it in Danish.