English is dead, vive le English

This book is a must-read for English-speaking Indians""all of us who believe that English is here to stay as the medium of global communication, and are thus smug about the advantage, economic and social, that our hold over the language brings us over the less fortunately brought up and educated. Policymakers who hardsell India's large English-speaking population while bidding for an ever-larger chunk of the world's outsourced services business, will also find a lot to mull over in David Graddol's wonderfully nuanced and layered analysis of global language politics.

This book, English Next is not a "'state of the art' account of global English". It is simply meant as an update to his 1997 work, The Future of English?, in which Graddol had broadly concluded that "the future development of English as a global language may be less straightforward than has been assumed".

In this book, Graddol looks at all that has happened since""political events, demographic changes, new educational trends, and technological, economic, and social developments""to assess what impact the future course of the language will have on the two groups that have, perhaps, the biggest stake in its promotion""native speakers and early adopters of the language (a category in which Indians would figure).

And Graddol's conclusions? With English becoming inextricably caught up in the spread of globalisation, more people than ever want to learn it and will want to learn it in future; and also that English learners have grown in number and decreased in age over the years. But instead of rejoicing in these developments, native speakers have reason to be wary of them.

With greater democratisation and informality in the spoken language, native speakers""bearers of the "standard language"""may well be a hindrance in the global spread of English. The rise of India and China, the declining use of English on the internet, the rise of powerful regional television channels such as Al-Jazeera, the re-alignment of the knowledge economy thanks to BPO and KPO trends, and growing global antipathy towards America and all things American""Graddol reads in all these a sign that the process of marginalisation of native speakers of English has already begun around the world. But the two trends that native speakers of English need to watch out for most are the current fads to learn Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Mandarin; and the ascendance of bi- or multi-lingualism, which puts the largely monolingual native speakers of English at a severe disadvantage, with access to just one thought stream. Already, many countries that want their citizens to pick up English are not looking to native speakers, but "a fluent bilingual speaker who retains a national identity in terms of accent, but who also has the special skills required to negotiate understanding with another non-native speaker". The Chinese, for example, have used Belgian teachers, while India is trying to leverage its traditional expertise in this area in southeast Asian markets. Considering that English language teaching brings in £1.3 billion to the British exchequer in invisible exports and education-related exports earn up to £10 billion, the stakes are high indeed.

But the scenario is not uniformly bleak. Using the "Gartner hype cycle" that breaks up innovation diffusion into five stages""breakthrough, frenzy of publicity, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity""Graddol concludes that English is somewhere between stages three and four, or in some cases may even be working towards stage five, depending on where a particular country is on the scale of modernity.

But even in cases where it is reaching the "plateau of productivity"""where the benefits of the innovation become widely known and accepted""there is not much that native speakers would be comfortable with. For, the English that is gaining currency is far removed from the language of Shakespeare: it is a new language, one that emphasises international intelligibility rather than any specific variety, even if it is the original one. The only people who might gain are the early adopters, the second-language users, who might find themselves increasingly in demand as English use becomes something that goes from giving a clear comparative advantage to being just another baseline""without it, you're not even in the race. But with it, and only it, you don't get very far.

In other words: English is dead, vive le English.

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ENGLISH NEXT

David Graddol
British Council
Pages: 128