Back in 1993, I decided to take an intensive language course to learn Welsh. I had various reasons. For instance, when I was hitchiking a lot in Africa, people who gave me a ride would often, on hearing that I was Welsh, ask me if I spoke the language. It started me thinking more about how language is tied up with national identity.
Anyway, in the early 90s, learning Welsh was certainly not going to help my job prospects. I had a number of arguments, often with monoglot Anglo-Welsh people, sometimes with English people over my plan to attend the course. Some of them seemed to take personal offence at my wanting to learn the language, and a few openly said that they thought the language should die out.
“Why do you want to learn it?”, they would ask, “It’s no use outside Wales – and everyone (meaning, around the world) speaks English anyway.” This was always presented as the the main point – there was no need to learn anything other than English because the world was learning English, and that meant people from the UK didn’t need any other language.
Well, in a way they were right – and totally wrong. Yesterday had a really interesting story in the Guardian about t how the world has indeed learned English – and done it so well that the Brits no longer have any advantage. In fact, in my experience, they may be at a disadvantage because, complacent at being ‘native speakers’, they simply don’t speak it very well. All those people who told me not to bother learning Welsh had better have something ele up their sleeve that makes them competitive….
I’m pretty sure that the experience of learning Welsh intensively is helping me to learn Chinese now (even though I need to make a lot more effort than I have done recently!). And the rest of the world, especially in the developing world, is starting to put the same effort into learning Mandarin as they have done with English. Is the UK? That Guardian article ends with a quote saying yes – but I don’t believe it: where on earth can they get enough teachers?
If the UK stays complacent, it’s going to have trouble staying competitive – which brings me to an interesting Newsweek article by Fareed Zakaria. He’s talking about Europe as a whole becoming globally uncompetitive, with the UK cited as being better than most,but still in trouble.
I don’t really buy his argument altogether – it sounds like typical American triumphalism, quoting productivity rates and innovation. Different social models (including higher taxation but cheap medical care in Europe vs lower taxes but individual medical insurance in the US) mean that many critics in the US have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Still – there are things to be concerned about. And for those monoglots in the UK – remember, lots and lots of people now speak better English than you do…
[...] Back in February, while I was still in Beijing, I wrote about the spread of English, and how the quality of spoken English worlwide is improving to the degree that native speakers from the UK, US, Canada, etc, no longer have any particular advantage – indeed, may be at a disadvantage due to never having actually studied the language formally, and not speaking any other languages that would give a context. ATOL has just published an article on the same topic. It doesn’t add much to what was said in the articles I linked to before, but it does give more supporting evidence. Apparently, the British Council – the body funded by the UK government to spread British culture and extend the UK’s “soft power” – has commissioned a global survey on English language usage. The results are in, and it seems that the English language is out of the control of its native speakers, and is being taken to new places by second-language speakers in China and elsewhere in India. “[C]urrently there are about 450 million native English speakers around the world distributed in about 70 countries. But as many as a billion people, most of whom are from China and India, are learning English as their second language“, says the report’s author. China Daily also discusses the report, from a more Chinese perspective. Another old post of mine, also from while I was in China, is Confucius Rising, which was quite popular for a while. Yesterday’s IHT wrote on how the current Chinese leadership is becoming more enthusiastic about Confucian principles, which isn’t really news any more, as people have been pointing this out for years now. More interesting was this story, which didn’t get much mainstream coverage: a school in Shanghai called Meng Mu Tang, which taught only Confucian material, according to the principles and practices of Imperial-era scholars’ academies. The government shut it down. [...]