What Will Globalization Do to Languages? A Freakonomics Quorum




“The Internet has helped curtail English language domination.”




The big loser? Grammar.












third language.














































Thomas B.

#5 has a great point. McWhorter should be sought out and included in any future quorum on a similar subject.

I also think McWhorter provides a far superior view of the evolution of language than "The big loser? Grammar."

The idea that languages are some sort of fixed ideal is at best naive, and at worst, disparaging to those outsider groups using pidgins and creoles every day. Soon enough, Singlish and Manglish will be mutually unintelligible to the English spoken in Exeter or Idaho. It's silly to think that that will be a sad day for English, just as it would be silly to pine for the return of Middle or Old English.

Languages evolve, that evolution is driven by their "worst" speakers. In so doing, they better serve the needs of our descendents. (This is true even of French, mon frere.)


There are more people in China learning English than there are speak English in the US.

This fact will mean English being the dominant world language for a long time. So, for example, when Chinese do business with other countries they will communicate in English, the effect being that anyone wanting to do business with China will have to speak English. It will continue to spread in such a manner.


Eurovision was interesting because almost all the songs were in English, but the UK still came last!

One of the areas where more study would be interesting is the whole area of the former Soviet Union. In all of these countries, the language of the educated middle class is local plus Russian. This is historic in much the same way as it is in India and Algeria. Many are of course learning English, but Russian clings on because it is still taught in schools, and because it is where the money is - so many from Central Asia go up to Russia to work that they need the language.

raquel samper

to dub or not to dub.
that was the question.
dubbing into ones local language has 2 negative results-
1.it prevents people from really learning the other language..be it english or spanish,or whatever.Listening to the original language would help kids learn it quickly.
2.it makes buying foreign tv shows easier than creating local product. this causes cultural penetration.what kids see what adults see, they want..the hollywood shows clothes way of life.
By not dubbing, you get people to learn english more quickly which is good for everyone today,and at same time you create a need for national productwhich promotes national styles ideas.

we are inglesgarantizado.com in murcia

Mark Liberman

A correction: Matthew Stuckwisch has informed me that Basque and Galician were given co-official status by the Spanish constitution of 1978.

I think that my general point remains valid, which is that the "globalizing" development of the European Union has increased rather than decreased speakers' interest in many minority languages, and has also made national governments more tolerant of linguistic diversity.

Stephen Jones

A long post by Roger. Some good points and some tendentious ones. The increase in Hindi newspapers represents an increase in literacy amongst the lower classes rather than a decline in English. And the Times of India still sells many more copies than the New York Times.

It is interesting to look at the circulation figures for the world's top 100 papers. http://www.wan-press.org/article2825.html
It is interesting that the circulation of the top papers in Japanese dwarf those of any other country or that there is not a single English speaking newspaper in the top ten (though the Sun is just outside at eleven).

It is quite wrong to use Japan as an example of the penetration in Asia, as Roger does. Probably because of a long tradition of universal education in Japanese going back to the eighteen-sixties the standard of English amongst Japanese is considered low both by the Japanese themselves and the long-suffering gaijin that are there teaching them.

Where English does stand out is when there is a need to use it as a bridge language. Years ago for a short period of time I had to take a job that involved cold-calling most countries in the world. The non-English speaking country where you got the best English at the end of the phone was by a long shot Malaysia (better even than Denmark). The reason of course is that you have three language groups living cheek-by-jowl: Bahasa Malay, Chinese, and Tamil. English is necessary as the bridge language between them.

Roger is correct to say Hindi is becoming somewhat more accepted in non-Hindi speaking parts of India as a result of Bollywood. There is still not the remotest chance that it will be accepted as the lingua franca of colonial administration by the Dravidian language speaking South. Indeed even Bollywood stars have limited penetration there. One of the reasons for the immense amount of advertising revenue that cricket attracts is that cricketers, unlike film stars or television personalities, do not have their recognition limited by language.

History teaches us that language change occurs in varied and unpredictable ways. What we are likely to see as a result of 'globalization' is a combination of creoles, pidgins, language change, stable and unstable diglossia, and in countries with a large number of native speakers of another language, good old-fashioned monolingualism.



While the economic, military and technical dominance of the US in the second half of the twentieth century and the rise of the Internet from the US is what propelled English to its present position, I think it's adaptability is what will keep it dominant. English is both complicated (to, too, two|bark-dog, bark-tree, barque-ship) and incredibly adaptable taking words and grammar from all languages. Since even its native speakers barely understand it, there is not that much resistance to non-native speakers creative use of pronunciation, spelling and grammar. However, its dominance will not be US English. It will be an English with new words and new grammar (see the 2nd Amendment for the impact of grammar changes over time) contributed from all over the world. Not that the other major languages will be going bye-bye anytime soon, but I could see a world with Internet or business or technical English that is widely understood and a whole host of local dialects plus original native languages.



Christianity had this effect on runes and barbaric languages, didn't it?

The germanic survived but not without being latinized.

Personally. I see English turning into a different type of character language. Hey, it gives new work to typographers.


Nobody "owns" English any more, least of all the English. The fact is that English is the most convenient medium available, and easily the most flexible. The note about the Indian experience is telling indeed: most Indians recognize that the best way to get ahead includes mastering English. As a result, educated Indians speak several languages and usually think of both English and their "mother tongue" as their native languages. In addition, most educated Indians also speak Hindi, other Indian languages, and one or two European languages (French, Spanish, German, etc.). It's no big deal if you start early.

The mistake usually made in the U.S. is the nonsensical "bilingual education" model. What works is immersion, as the Canadians and others have proven. Globalization won't kill other languages, but perhaps it will make English the standard tool of communication--which won't be bad at all--a standard tool is always a good thing. Besides, it allows the English to feel as if they still rule the world in something!



I think we're underestimating technology's impact on language. I have seen demo's of devices that will translate from English to Mandarin and back again. When computers get fast enough, real-time translation will occur (where I can call up someone in China and they'll hear me in their local dialect). This kind of thing is probably much closer than we realize.

Shawn Russell

The person who makes the assessment about there being a lot of bilinguals seems to have misunderstood the original post by Hitchings. Half the people in the world (call that 3.5 billion) speak one of eleven langauges. Half the world's languages (approx. 3,000) are spoken by fewer than 5,000 people - so the total number of speakers of those 3,000 languages cannot exceed 15 million.


All that matters is what a kid speaks with his friends. A language that a kid speaks with his grandparents becomes at best half-understood; a language he speaks with his parents may survive a generation more.

Deb Morrissey

There are already quite a few books on the topic (several of which I'm planning to read).

in fits of print

one of the (numerous) successes of the show "Firefly" was that rather than following, say, "Star Trek"--which attempted to convey "progress" by having its characters speak english with exaggerated formality and exactitude--"Firefly"'s characters speak a far more probable amalgamation of bad english and mandarin chinese.

[/daily required gratuitous Firefly reference]


What ever language prevails, I hope a word sounds like it is spelled.


As an American, I know from personal experience that learning one or more foreign languages can be a huge boost to one's career in today's global economy.

I worked for three years as an English-language speech writer at the global headquarters of a European multinational where I put my German skills to good use.

That job would not have been possible if English weren't the global language of business. On the other hand, if I hadn't studied German in the first place, it's unlikely I would have ever gotten that job---so it can cut both ways.

Incidentally, I'm hoping my son will start learning foreign languages soon. Except this time, my hope is that he develops an interest in Mandarin. Times change.


As with the first expert, English will continue to be the global language - a creole because English itself is a creole, formed from the pidgin that developed between, first speakers of Anglo-Saxon, the original language, and Old Norse, and between the post-Norse English tongue and Norman French, after the Battle of Hastings.

This is why English is so easy to learn - and hard to master.


follow the money. right now more money made using english, when and if it will change, so is the language.


Over at the Kamusi Project there's a really interesting blog post from a few weeks ago, called "The End of English?", where the project editor lays out a pretty convincing argument that English may be reaching its global peak:



My comment submitted earlier (L.H.O.O.Q.) is too far off topic to merit inclusion, and should therefore be omitted from consideration.

One of the problems with the NYTimes blogs is that they do not give the poster the opportunity to remove blogs for any of a number of reasons, including precision of argument, grammar, spelling and topicality.