Behemoth , bully , thief : how the English language is taking over the planet No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today . Is there any point in resisting ? By Jacob MikanowskiThe GuardianFri 27 Jul 2018 06 . 00 BST On 16 May , a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish . He reacted with immediate fury , threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee : “ Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English … This is America . ” A video of the incident quickly went viral , drawing widespread scorn . The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one - star reviews , and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a “ fiesta ” protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building , which included a crowd - funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work . As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants , speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge . In some cases , it can even be dangerous . But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office , the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots . Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years . It ’ s a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt ’ s 1919 address to the American Defense Society , in which he proclaimed that “ we have room for but one language here , and that is the English language , for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans , of American nationality , and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse ” . As it turned out , Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards . A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America . If anything , its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago . Yet from a global perspective , it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages . It is the world that is threatened by English . Behemoth , bully , loudmouth , thief : English is everywhere , and everywhere , English dominates . From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago , it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence . Almost 400 m people speak it as their first language ; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue . It is an official language in at least 59 countries , the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more . No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe . It is aspirational : the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce , a parent ’ s dream and a student ’ s misery , winnower of the haves from the have - nots . It is inescapable : the language of global business , the internet , science , diplomacy , stellar navigation , avian pathology . And everywhere it goes , it leaves behind a trail of dead : dialects crushed , languages forgotten , literatures mangled . One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages . For a millennium or more , English was a great importer of words , absorbing vocabulary from Latin , Greek , French , Hindi , Nahuatl and many others . During the 20 th century , though , as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected , English became a net exporter of words . In 2001 , Manfred Görlach , a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English – he is the author of the collections Englishes , More Englishes , Still More Englishes , and Even More Englishes – published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms , which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages . A few of the most prevalent include “ last - minute ” , “ fitness ” , “ group sex ” , and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel . In some countries , such as France and Israel , special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail , for the most part . ( As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted : “ Does anyone really think that French teenagers , per the academy ’ s diktat , are going to trade out ‘ sexting ’ for texto pornographique ? ” ) Thanks to the internet , the spread of English has almost certainly sped up . The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction . The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured , international vernacular , shorn of country - specific references and difficult - to - translate wordplay or grammar . Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch , Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English , but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context . Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence . Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that , in the past 50 years , Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models , for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns . German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms , while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology . Within the anglophone world , that English should be the key to all the world ’ s knowledge and all the world ’ s places is rarely questioned . The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible . Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon . Outside the anglophone world , living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole , whose gravity warps everything in its reach . Every day English spreads , the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland . Until recently , the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages : it spread through a combination of conquest , trade and colonisation . ( Some languages , such as Arabic and Sanskrit , also caught on through their status as sacred tongues . ) But then , at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millenium , English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a “ lingua franca ” or “ global language ” truly captures . It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a “ hypercentral ” one . De Swaan divides languages into four categories . Lowest on the pyramid are the “ peripheral languages ” , which make up 98 % of all languages , but are spoken by less than 10 % of mankind . These are largely oral , and rarely have any kind of official status . Next are the “ central languages ” , though a more apt term might be “ national languages ” . These are written , are taught in schools , and each has a territory to call its own : Lithuania for Lithuanian , North and South Korea for Korean , Paraguay for Guarani , and so on . Following these are the 12 “ supercentral languages ” : Arabic , Chinese , English , French , German , Hindi , Japanese , Malay , Portuguese , Russian , Spanish and Swahili – each of which ( except for Swahili ) boast 100 million speakers or more . These are languages you can travel with . They connect people across nations . They are commonly spoken as second languages , often ( but not exclusively ) as a result of their parent nation ’ s colonial past . Then , finally , we come to the top of the pyramid , to the languages that connect the supercentral ones . There is only one : English , which De Swaan calls “ the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together ” . The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a “ universal language ” . For Mizumura , what makes it universal is not that it has many native speakers – Mandarin and Spanish have more – but that it is “ used by the greatest number of non - native speakers in the world ” . She compares it to a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency . The literary critic Jonathan Arac is even more blunt , noting , in a critique of what he calls “ Anglo - Globalism ” , that “ English in culture , like the dollar in economics , serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global . ” In the last few decades , as globalisation has accelerated and the US has remained the world ’ s most powerful country , the advance of English has taken on a new momentum . In 2008 , Rwanda switched its education system from French to English , having already made English an official language in 14 years earlier . Officially , this was part of the government ’ s effort to make Rwanda the tech hub of Africa . Unofficially , it ’ s widely believed to be an ｅxpression of disgust at France ’ s role in propping - up the pre - 1994 Hutu - dominant government , as well as a reflection that the country ’ s ruling elite mostly speaks English , having grown up as exiles in anglophone east Africa . When South Sudan became independent in 2011 , it made English its official language despite having very few resources or qualified personnel with which to teach it in schools . The Minister of higher education at the time justified the move as being aimed at making the country “ different and modern ” , while the news director of South Sudan Radio added that with English , South Sudan could “ become one nation ” and “ communicate with the rest of the world ” – understandable goals in a country home to more than 50 local languages . An English class at a government school in Bentiu , South Sudan . Photograph : Roberto Schmidt / AFP / Getty Images The situation in east Asia is no less dramatic . China currently has more speakers of English as a second language than any other country . Some prominent English teachers have become celebrities , conducting mass lessons in stadiums seating thousands . In South Korea , meanwhile , according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung - Yul Park , English is a “ national religion ” . Korean employers expect proficiency in English , even in positions where it offers no obvious advantage . The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung or “ English frenzy ” . Although mostly confined to a mania for instruction and immersion , occasionally this “ frenzy ” spills over into medical intervention . As Sung - Yul Park relates : “ An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better ; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease , a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans . ” There is no evidence to suggest that this surgery in any way improves English pronunciation . The willingness to engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me , though , as a potent metaphor for English ’ s peculiar status in the modern world . It is no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks , as it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission for Air Navigation . It is now seen as the access code to the global elite . If you want your children to get ahead , then they better have English in their toolkit . Is the conquest of English really so bad ? In the not - too - distant future , thanks to English , the curse of Babel will be undone and the children of men may come together once again , united with the aid of a common tongue . Certainly , that ’ s what English ’ s boosters would have you believe . After all , what a work is English , how copious in its vocabulary , how noble in ｅxpression , how sinuous in its constructions , and yet how plain in its basic principles . A language , in short , with a word for almost everything , capable of an infinite gradation of meanings , equally suited to describing the essential rights of mankind as to ornamenting a packet of crisps , whose only defect , as far as I know , is that it makes everyone who speaks it sound like a duck . Well , not really . ( OK , maybe a little – English , while not an ugly language , isn ’ t exactly pretty either ) . Mostly , I ’ m speaking out of bitterness – one that is old , and until recently , lay dormant . My first language was Polish . I learned it from my parents at home . English followed shortly , at school in Pennsylvania . I learned to speak it fluently , but with an accent , which took years of teasing – and some speech therapy , kindly provided by the state – to wear away . That , combined with the experience of watching the widespread condescension towards those who take their time learning English , left me a lifelong English - sceptic . ( I admit , also , that a strain of linguistic megalomania runs through many Polish speakers , one best summed up by the novelist Joseph Conrad , who , when asked why he didn ’ t write in his native language , replied : “ I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle . But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient . ” ) It ’ s not that English is bad . It ’ s fine ! A perfectly nice language , capable of expressing a great many things – and with scores of fascinating regional variants , from Scots to Singapore English . But it is so prevalent . And so hard to escape . And so freighted with buffoonish puffery written on its behalf : “ our magnificent bastard tongue ” ; “ the language that connects the world ” . Please . There is no reason for any particular language to be worshipped around the world like a golden idol . There is a pervasive mismatch between the grand claims made on English ’ s behalf , and its limitations as means of communication ( limitations , to be fair , that it shares with all other languages ) . Is English oppressive ? When its pervasive influence silences other languages , or discourages parents from passing on their native languages to their children , I think it can be . When you do know another language , it ’ s merely constricting , like wearing trousers that are too tight . That ’ s because while English is good for a great many things , it is not good for everything . To me , family intimacies long to be expressed in Polish . So does anything concerning the seasons , forest products and catastrophic sorrows . Poetry naturally sounds better in Polish . I ’ ve always spoken it to cats and dogs on the assumption that they understand , being simultaneously convinced that raccoons and lesser animals only respond to shouts . This isn ’ t quite as idiosyncratic as it sounds . Aneta Pavlenko , an applied linguist at Temple University in Pennsylvania , who has spent her career studying the psychology of bilingual and multilingual speakers , has found that speakers of multiple languages frequently believe that each language conveys a “ different self ” . Languages , according to her respondents , come in a kaleidoscopic range of emotional tones . “ I would inevitably talk to babies and animals in Welsh , ” reports a Welsh - speaker . An informant from Finland counters : “ Finnish emotions are rarely stated explicitly . Therefore it is easier to tell my children that I love them in English . ” Several Japanese speakers say that it ’ s easier to express anger in English , especially by swearing . Intuitive though it might be to some , the idea that different languages capture and construct different realities has been a subject of academic controversy for at least 200 years . The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was among the first to articulate it in a complex form . After studying Amerindian languages in the New World , he came to the conclusion that every language “ draws a circle ” around its speakers , creating a distinct worldview through its grammar as well as in its vocabulary . In the 20 th century , the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated this idea into a broader vision of how language structures thought . Both drew inspiration for their work from their study of North American languages such as Nootka , Shawnee and Hopi . This idea – now usually known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis , or Sapir - Whorf hypothesis – has had a checkered history in academia . At different times , it has been hailed by it proponents as foundational insight for modern anthropology and literary theory , and blamed by its detractors as the source of the worst excesses of postmodern philosophy . In recent decades , sociolinguists have arrived at a few startlingly suggestive findings concerning the influence of language on colour perception , orientation and verbs of motion – but in general , the more expansive notion that different languages inculcate fundamentally different ways of thinking has not been proven . Nonetheless , some version of this idea continues to find supporters , not least among writers familiar with shifting between languages . Here is the memoirist Eva Hoffman on the experience of learning English in Vancouver while simultaneously feeling cut off from the Polish she had grown up speaking as a teenager in Kraków : “ This radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy , draining the world not only of significance but of its colours , striations , nuances – its very existence . It is the loss of a living connection . ” The Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo described something similar in her recent memoir , writing about how uncomfortable she felt , at first , with the way the English language encouraged speakers to use the first - person singular , rather than plural . “ After all , how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first - person singular all the time ? … But here , in this foreign country , I had to build a world as a first - person singular – urgently . ” Li Yang teaches students his ‘ Crazy English ’ accelerated learning method in Nanjing , China . Photograph : China Photos / Getty Images In the 1970 s , Anna Wierzbicka , a linguist who found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish academia , stood the Sapir - Whorf hypothesis on its head . Instead of trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter - gatherers , she turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones . For Wierzbicka , English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other language . It ’ s just that in an anglophone world , that invisible baggage is harder to discern . In a series of books culminating in 2013 ’ s evocatively named Imprisoned in English , she has attempted to analyse various assumptions – social , spatial , emotional and otherwise – latent in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK . Reading Wierzbicka ’ s work is like peeking through a magic mirror that inverts the old “ how natives think ” school of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves . Her English - speakers are a pragmatic people , cautious in their pronouncements and prone to downplaying their emotions . They endlessly qualify their remarks according to their stance towards what is being said . Hence their endless use of ｅxpressions such as “ I think ” , “ I believe ” , “ I suppose ” , “ I understand ” , “ I suspect ” . They prefer fact over theories , savour “ control ” and “ space ” , and cherish autonomy over intimacy . Their moral lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture - specific concepts called “ right ” and “ wrong ” , which they mysteriously believe to be universal . Wierzbicka ’ s description of English ’ s subconscious system of values hardly holds true for the billion or more speakers of this most global of tongues . But it is also a reminder that , despite its influence , English is not truly universal . Its horizons are just as limited as those of any other language , whether Chinese or Hopi or Dalabon . For if language connects people socially , it also connects them to a place . The linguist Nicholas Evans has described how Kayardild , a language spoken in northern Australia , requires a speaker to continually orient themselves according to the cardinal directions . Where an English speaker would orient things according to their own perception – my left , my right , my front , my back – a speaker of Kayardild thinks in terms of north , south , east and west . As a consequence , speakers of Kayardild ( and those of several other languages that share this feature ) possess “ absolute reckoning ” , or a kind of “ perfect pitch ” for direction . It also means removing one ’ s self as the main reference point for thinking about space . As Evans writes of his own experiences learning the language , “ one aspect of speaking Kayardild , then , is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are . Kayardild grammar literally puts everyone in their place . ” Kayardild and its kin are truly local languages , with few speakers , and modes of ｅxpression that are hard to separate from the places in which they are spoken . But that should not lead us to think that they are lesser . The world is made up of places , not universals . To speak only English , in spite of its vast vocabulary and countless varieties , is still to dwell in a rather small pool . It draws the same circle Humboldt described around its speakers as each of the other 6 , 000 human languages . The difference is that we have mistaken that circle for the world . Because English is increasingly the currency of the universal , it is difficult to express any opposition to its hegemony that doesn ’ t appear to be tainted by either nationalism or snobbery . When Minae Mizumura published the Fall of Language in the Age of English , in 2008 , it was a surprise commercial success in Japan . But it provoked a storm of criticism , as Mizumura was accused of elitism , nationalism and being a “ hopeless reactionary ” . one representative online comment read : “ Who does she think she is , a privileged bilingual preaching to the rest of us Japanese ! ” ( Perhaps unsurprisingly , Mizumura ’ s broader argument , about the gradual erosion of Japanese literature – and especially , the legacy of the Japanese modernist novel – got lost in the scuffle . ) Those of us troubled by the hyperdominance of English should also remember the role it has played in some societies – especially multi - ethnic ones – as a bridge to the wider world and counterweight to other nationalisms . This was especially keenly felt in South Africa , where Afrikaans was widely associated with the policy of apartheid . When the government announced that Afrikaans would be used as a language of instruction in schools on par with English in 1974 , the decision led in 1976 to a mass demonstration by black students known as the Soweto uprising . Its brutal suppression resulted in hundreds of deaths , and is considered a turning point in the anti - apartheid struggle . Similar protests have periodically racked southern India since the 1940 s over attempts to enforce official use of Hindi in place of English . A sign for English lessons in Nawalgarh , Rajasthan , India . Photograph : Alamy Stock Photo In other parts of the world though , English still carries the full weight of its colonialist past . Since the 1960 s , the celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong ’ o has advocated on behalf of African languages and against the prevalence of English - language education in postcolonial countries . In his landmark 1986 book Decolonising the Mind : the Politics of Language in African Literature , he describes the corrosive effect of English language instruction , comparing it to a form of “ spiritual subjugation ” . Colonial education , in which pupils were physically punished for speaking their native languages while at school ( something also done to the Welsh into the early 20 th century ) was necessarily , and deliberately , alienating , “ like separating the mind from the body ” . Since publishing Decolonising the Mind , Ngũgĩ has worked to put its dictates into practice . He renounced his baptismal name , James , and with it Christianity , and ceased to write fiction in English . Since the 1980 s , he has written all his novels and plays in his native Gikuyu , only using English ( and occasionally Kiswahili ) for essays and polemics . This last decision is one that many people still question . As he said in a recent interview : “ If I meet an English person , and he says , ‘ I write in English , ’ I don ’ t ask him , ‘ Why are you writing in English ? ’ If I meet a French writer , I don ’ t ask him , ‘ Why don ’ t you write in Vietnamese ? ’ But I am asked over and over again , ‘ Why do you write in Gikuyu ? ’ For Africans , the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African language . ” Part of the paradox of Ngũgĩ ’ s situation is that while he may be the world ’ s foremost advocate for writing literature in African languages , his novels have won acclaim and gained international recognition through the medium of English . The hegemony of English is now such that , in order to be recognised , any opposition to English has to formulated in English in order to be heard . Today it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks . Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90 % of the world ’ s 6 , 000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century . For even a fraction of these to survive , we ’ re going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving , but as equals worth learning . In most of the world , it ’ s already too late . In California , where I live , most of the languages that were spoken before the arrival of Europeans are already extinct . on America ’ s eastern seaboard , thanks to long proximity to Anglo settlers , the situation is even worse . Most of what we know about many of these vanished languages comes in the form of brief word lists compiled by European settlers and traders before the 19 th century . Stadaconan ( or Laurentian ) survives only from a glossary of 220 words jotted down by Jacques Cartier when he sailed up the St Lawrence River in Canada in 1535 . Eastern Atakapa , from Louisiana ’ s Gulf Coast , is known from a list of only 287 , gathered in 1802 . The last fragments of Nansemond , once spoken in eastern Virginia , were collected from the last living speaker just before his death in 1902 , by which time he could only recall six words : one , two , three , four , five and dog . The great Malian historian and novelist Amadou Hampâté Bâ once said that in Africa , when an elder dies , a library burns . Today , across the world , the libraries are still burning . In his marvellous book , Searching for Aboriginal Languages : Memoirs of a Field Worker , the linguist Robert MW Dixon describes travelling across Northern Queensland in the 1960 s and 70 s to record indigenous languages , many of which had already dwindled to a handful of speakers . It ’ s hard to remain an oral language in an increasingly text - dependent world . All the forces of modernity , globalisation , industrialisation , urbanisation and the rise of the nation - state are arrayed against the small and local as opposed to the big and shareable . In this past century , the Earth has been steadily losing diversity at every level of biology and culture . Few deny this is a bad thing . Too often though , we forget that these crises of diversity depend , to a great extent , on our own decisions . Much of what has been done can also be undone , provided there is the will for it . Hebrew is the most famous case of a language brought back from the dead , but linguistic revitalisation has been proven to be possible elsewhere as well . Czech became a viable national language thanks to the work of literary activists in the 19 th century . on a much smaller scale , endangered languages such as Manx in the Isle of Man and Wampanoag in the US have been successfully pulled back from the brink . Coming face - to - face with the current onslaught of linguicide , I find myself wanting to venture a modest proposal . What if anglo - globalism wasn ’ t a one - way street ? What if the pre - contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools ? What if British schoolchildren learned some of the languages spoken by the actual residents of the former empire ? ( This is a utopian project obviously . But how much would it actually cost to add a linguistic elective to larger high schools ? one jet fighter ? A few cruise missiles ? ) Current educational discourse is full of talk about the need to bolster children ’ s cognition . In the culture at large , experts have been trumpeting the cognitive benefits of everything from online brain games to magic mushrooms . Why not try Hopi instead ? The point of this education wouldn ’ t necessarily be to acquire fluency in an extinct or smaller language – it would be to open a door . And think of the vistas it might open up . For generations , a huge percentage of philosophy and social science has been conducted in and about English speakers . Humankind , as imagined by the academy , is mostly anglophone . This has even been true in linguistics . Noam Chomsky ’ s idea of a universal grammar underpinning all languages was based on a rather narrow empirical base . More recent research into dozens of smaller languages , like Kayardild and Pirahã , has been steadily whittling away at his list of supposed universals . We now know there are languages without adverbs , adjectives , prepositions and articles . There seems to be hardly anything that a language “ needs ” to be – just thousands of natural experiments in how they might be assembled . And most of them are about to be lost . In some ways , the worst threat may come not from the global onrush of modernity , but from an idea : that a single language should suit every purpose , and that being monolingual is therefore somehow “ normal ” . This is something that ’ s often assumed reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English , but historically speaking , monolingualism is something of an aberration . Before the era of the nation - state , polyglot empires were the rule , rather than the exception . Polyglot individuals abounded , too . For most of history , people lived in small communities . But that did not mean that they were isolated from one another . Multilingualism must have been common . Today , we see traces of this polyglot past in linguistic hotspots such as the Mandara mountains of Cameroon , where children as young as 10 routinely juggle four or five languages in daily life , and learn several others in school . ‘ Is this what the west is really like ? ’ How it felt to leave China for Britain Residents of Arnhem Land in northern Australia routinely speak half a dozen or more languages by the time they are adults . Multilingualism , writes Nicholas Evans , “ is helped by the fact that you have to marry outside your clan , which likely means your wife or husband speaks a different language from you . It also means that you parents each speak a different language , and your grandparents three or four languages between them . ” A resident of another linguistic hotspot , the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea , once told Evans : “ It wouldn ’ t be any good if we talked the same ; we like to know where people come from . ” It ’ s a vision of Babel in reverse . Instead of representing a fall from human perfection , as in the biblical story , having many languages is a gift . It ’ s something to remember before we let English swallow the globe .