English adapts like a virus to any way of life

World Englishes and Culture Wars Braj Kachru Border Crossing

There have been nearly 700 attempts to create a synthetic global language, the best known being Esperanto. None has made much headway — and now none is needed. Humanity’s long-held dream of a language that people could speak to each other regardless of their nationality or culture has come true.

Over the past 50 years, English has spread more widely, penetrating more deeply than any language. None of the previous cross-frontier lingua francas — Greek, Latin, Sanskrit — had anything like its currency.

How many people speak English? Although the British Council has suggested a figure of close to 2-billion, Braj Kachru says we cannot really know. What, after all, do we mean by speaking English? What command would someone need to elevate them from a semi-knower to a knower of the language?

What is certain is that there are many more people speaking English as an additional language than as a native tongue. Non-natives outnumber native speakers possibly by as much as four to one. It is, Kachru says, “a unique phenomenon in the history of language diffusion”.

Kachru completed this book just before his death in 2016 at the age of 84. Born in Srinagar, India and a native Kashmiri speaker, he spent much of his career teaching linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is known particularly for his description of English’s three “circles” - the Inner Circle of the UK and the transplanted British communities of the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; the Outer Circle made up largely of former British colonies, such as India, Malaysia and Nigeria; and the Expanding Circle, which takes in the rest of the world, including China, continental Europe and Latin America.

As a child of the Outer Circle, Kachru saw himself as writing on behalf of “those of us who represent the developing world”. He does not go as far as some in accusing a vast conspiracy, headed by the British Council and supported by the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, of imposing English on the world.

But he does bristle at how the spread of English has resulted in “an attitude of triumphalism about the language”. Few in the UK and US realise how far English has spun out of their control. Those who speak English in Kachru’s Outer and Expanding circles did not learn it to communicate with Brits, Americans or Australians.

Most learnt it to talk to each other, either within their vast multilingual countries in Asia or Africa or to people in their continental region. Kachru says that not only do these English users hardly ever learn English from a native speaker, they rarely encounter them.

There is substantial movement between these countries not just of doctors and engineers, but of English teachers too. “Sri Lankans, Malaysians and Indians … are now involved in academic planning and teaching of English in, for example, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Gulf countries and Southeast Asia, in addition to their own countries,” he says.

These world Englishes are often markedly different from those spoken in the Inner Circle. At a local level, in Nigeria or India, for example, as people go about their daily business, they incorporate local words and switch between tongues in ways that make their languages incomprehensible to outsiders.

As people move up the ladder of prestige, and interact with English speakers elsewhere, they adopt the internationally comprehensible world language of today’s global business, scientific and cultural exchanges. But that is often markedly different from British and American English.

With the UK preparing to retreat from the EU and Donald Trump promising to clamp down on free trade, we could see the rest of the world taking even greater control of the language they have adopted and made their own.