English’s demise as the world’s dominant language

December 23, 2010|Joseph Peschel, Globe Correspondent

Using numerous examples from history and making observations of other widespread contemporary languages, British linguist Nicholas Ostler challenges the current popular view that English will remain the world’s lingua franca forever. Instead, he contends that the world, despite the preeminence of English, is headed toward a diverse, multilingual future.

In making his case, Ostler compares English to historical languages once used on a large scale: Greek, Latin, Persian, classical Arabic, and Sanskrit. He describes how these and other languages became lingua francas, and in careful, sometimes excruciating and repetitive detail, recounts their histories and the reasons for their rise and fall.

Many lingua francas started as mother tongues, vernaculars or “ ‘home-bred’ languages.’’ Latin, for example, which was once the mother tongue of central Italy, branched out all over Europe as a second language. It spread, as other lingua francas, due to military conquest, religious conversion, and commerce. Latin was the language of science during the Renaissance, and the scientists of the time wrote in Latin. If you wanted to partake of the wealth and advantages of the ruling class, you learned Latin. Spreading across Europe over several centuries, Latin spawned such romance languages as French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, but never took root as a new mother tongue.

English, on the other hand, spanned across the world in only four centuries. It became not only a lingua franca, but also the mother tongue of the American colonies and the United States, as well as Australia and other parts of the former British Empire. Ostler looks at Persian, Sanskrit, and other languages, but some are so obscure that reading about the historical and linguistic examples gets tedious. We don’t just get a heavy dose of Arabic, Turkic, and Persian language history, but we’re forced to read far too much of the pronunciation details about bygone speakers, say, of Chagatay Turkish, and does the nonlinguist reader really need to know translations of Old and Middle Persian?