How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

It may be surprising to hear that Churchill, an undisputed virtuoso of the English language, would so readily trade his Steinway grand for a toy piano. But he wasn’t the only one. Basic’s champions,28 besides Churchill, included Ezra Pound, Lawrence Durrell, and George Orwell. “In Basic you cannot make a meaningless statement without it being apparent,”29 Orwell noted. H. G. Wells predicted that Basic would “spread like wildfire”30 and that by 2020 there would be “hardly anyone in the world” unable to understand it.

  Britain’s most esteemed professor of literature, I. A. Richards, made Basic his calling. He had taught in China, which led him to worry about the spread of English. “The majority of Chinese students are never going to learn to understand much literary English,”31 he judged. Richards saw Basic as the best way to acquaint them with the “enormous number of ideas, feelings, desires, and attitudes that they can only gain through some form of Western language.”

  In 1937 Richards managed the extraordinary feat of getting the Chinese government to agree to teach Basic in its schools.32 This was almost immediately undercut by the Japanese, who launched their full-scale invasion of China that year. Still, Richards pressed on, and the war’s end saw him in Miami using Basic to train Chinese seamen at a naval facility.

  “It takes only 400 words of Basic to run a battleship,”33 Richards told Time. “With 850 words you can run the planet.”

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt took note. Basic “has tremendous merit in it,”34 he told his secretary of state, and might allow English to dislodge French as the language of diplomacy. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm didn’t prevent him from mocking Churchill, though. He wrote the prime minister to ask how well Churchill’s famous “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech would have gone down if it had been delivered in Basic,35 with Churchill offering his countrymen his “blood, work, eye-water and face-water.”

  “Seriously, however, we are interested,” Roosevelt hastily added.

  Still, as Roosevelt had intuited, dehydrated English was surprisingly difficult to use. Native English speakers struggled mightily to restrict themselves to Basic’s 850 approved words. Foreigners, for their part, were baffled by Basic’s tortuous circumlocutions, particularly around verbs. “The Koreans,36 Spaniards, and Russians have a right to ask why it is easier to say ‘I went in the air by jumping’ than ‘I jumped,’” one critic aptly wrote.

  *

  In the end, Basic never truly went in the air by jumping. Speakers didn’t take to it, and its advocates lost interest. Yet slimming English down wasn’t the only way to win it a global following. By the 1940s, eager reformers had proposed dozens of schemes to tame its irregular orthography.37 There was Anglic (“Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on dhis kontinent a nue naeshon”), the Fonetik Crthqgrafi, the Nue Spelling, the Alfabet for the World of Tomorrow, and a curiously vowel-stingy system advertised as “1 Wrld, 1 Langwij.”

  The boldest scheme came from a former senator, Robert Latham Owen.38 Part Cherokee (he was known as “Oconostota” among the Cherokees), Owen had been one of the leaders of the failed attempt to establish the largely Indian state of Sequoyah in 1905. After Congress rejected Sequoyah and admitted the larger (and whiter) state of Oklahoma instead, Owen got elected to the Senate. He and Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s future vice president, were the only Indians there.

  Owen’s hoped-for state of Sequoyah was named after the man who had designed a non-roman script for the Cherokee language, a script that Cherokees had learned rapidly and enthusiastically. Could something like that be done for English? Owen had toyed for some time with creating a new phonetic alphabet. On December 7/8, 1941, the day of Japan’s attack,39 he resolved to see it through.

  Owen’s “global alphabet,” as he called it, didn’t use roman letters. It looked more like Arabic or shorthand. By eschewing familiar letter forms, Owen could circumvent orthographic questions entirely. Words were spelled exactly as they sounded. This was the means, Owen insisted, “by which we can teach the English language to all the world at high speed.”40

  The global alphabet: Robert Latham Owen’s system

  He predicted that with the global alphabet, English could be made “the conversational language of the world within two or three years.”41 And, he added, his system was fully compatible with Basic.

  Owen’s idea made the rounds. FDR passed the scheme on to his secretary of state for consideration.42 The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held hearings on it (“I do not think any person could contribute more to humanity than by evolving a universal method of communication,”43 a senator from New Mexico exclaimed). The writer George Bernard Shaw was taken by it and willed part of his estate to fund the creation and promotion of a non-roman phonetic alphabet.44 The cautionary note came from Eleanor Roosevelt,45 who feared it was too hard to learn. Still, Owen was encouraged enough to build a special typewriter for his alphabet.46

  It was the first such typewriter, and it was the last—the alphabet never caught on. Yet that Owen got even this far is striking. So nervous were leaders in the United States and Britain about the prospects of normal English that they were willing to consider drastic measures to reform it. Housebroken English—reduced to eighteen verbs, written in squiggles—was a price they seriously entertained paying for Churchill’s hoped-for “empires of the mind.”

  *

  The challenges English faced went beyond the technical ones. Colonial rule, which had been one of the chief vehicles for spreading English, was visibly breaking down. Decolonization would ultimately release more than six hundred million people from rule by Britain and the United States. Would they stick with English?

  Very likely not. Many complained bitterly of the havoc English had wreaked on their countries. Mohandas Gandhi regarded India’s reliance on English as a “sign of slavery.”47 The Kenyan author James Ngugi judged the “psychological violence of the classroom”48 to have been just as harmful as the “physical violence of the battlefield.” He recalled his own childhood in a mission school, when students caught speaking their native Gikuyu were beaten, fined, or made to wear signs reading i am stupid or i am a donkey. After decolonization, he changed his name to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and gave up writing novels in English.

  Manuel Quezon complained, too. Even though few adult Filipinos spoke English fluently by the time the Philippines became a commonwealth and Quezon became its president, the looming presence of English in the schools and government had blocked local languages from taking root. The result was, after hundreds of years of colonial rule (counting Spain), the Philippines had no indigenous language spoken throughout the archipelago.

  “When I travel through the provinces and talk to my people,49 I need an interpreter,” Quezon lamented. “Did you ever hear of anything more humiliating, more horrible than that?”

  The Philippines needed “a language of her own,” he insisted. It must be indigenous to the Philippines and taught nationally. Without such a language, Quezon continued, “a national soul cannot exist.”

  Having gained some autonomy from Washington with the establishment of the commonwealth in 1935, Quezon founded a national language institute. Its task was to develop a local language—it chose Manila-based Tagalog—into a national one. Turning a vernacular into an official language and promulgating it would take time (the National Council of Education suggested Basic Tagalog,50 patterned on Basic English, as a bridge). But Quezon hoped that it would eventually undo the anglicization of the colonial era.

  As decolonization proceeded, it became clear that many countries shared that goal. At independence, India took Bharat as an official name and Hindi as its official language, demoting English to subsidiary status and promising to drop it entirely by 1965. The British colony of Singapore set Malay as its official language in 1959, when it gained self-governance. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 did the same for Sinhalese.

  In 1949 the United Nations General Assembly resolved that member states should teach primary and secondary st
udents in their native languages. That year, Mao Zedong took power in China; his Cultural Revolution would prohibit English and make English-language teachers targets of violence. In the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union sought to ban English as a “decadent”51 subject and to promote Russian throughout its realm.

  The Organization of African Unity declared that European languages would be “only provisionally tolerated”52 in independent Africa and set up an Inter-African Bureau of Languages to replace them with indigenous ones.

  Perhaps this could be done. In the British mandate of Palestine, Jewish settlers had revived the ancient scriptural language of Hebrew and taught it to their children as a mother tongue. They got far enough with Hebrew that in 1948, when Palestine gained independence as the State of Israel, it dropped English as an official language. A language that, in living memory, had counted no native speakers had nonetheless beaten English into retreat.

  I. A. Richards watched all this with alarm. Third World nationalism, he warned, could “wreck all hopes for English.”53

  *

  How did English prevail? In the forties, FDR and Churchill expected that they’d have to drastically alter English to turn it into a global language. Decolonization, by placing men like Manuel Quezon in power, only worsened English’s prospects. Yet English surmounted these obstacles and became a true world language. How?

  Part of the story, some linguists have insisted,54 is the foreign policies of the United States and Britain. Even as Anglophone powers lost political control over much of the world, this explanation goes, they found ways to impose their language on weaker countries.

  They did that in large part through education. The hundreds of thousands of foreign students streaming into U.S. universities (120,000 a year by 1969) didn’t just study math and sociology.55 They studied math and sociology in English. They then carried English back to their home countries, where they ranked among the most educated and powerful. Add to those students the nearly half a million foreign military trainees who studied at U.S. military academies, schools, bases, and special facilities.

  While students rushed in, English oozed out. By the 1960s, at least forty U.S. government agencies sponsored English teaching abroad,56 most notably the Peace Corps (an instrument of “Western psychological warfare,”57 charged the president of Ghana). The radio stations, too, beamed English into foreign countries. In 1959 the Voice of America adopted a limited-vocabulary “Special English,”58 reminiscent of Basic, for some broadcasts. Textbooks, comics, and movies all poured from the Anglophone countries into the rest of the world, sometimes with governmental subsidies.

  But was that enough? It couldn’t have been. English had muscle behind it, yes, but non-Anglophone countries had formidable defenses. They set curricula in their schools, granted languages other than English official status, and broadcast their own radio programs. With children learning Swahili or Sinhala in school, what could a hundred Peace Corps volunteers do?

  What is more, the Anglophone governments didn’t ultimately place much priority on language export.59 Though agencies like the Voice of America and the Peace Corps promoted English, that wasn’t their main mission. It wasn’t until 1965 that the U.S. government even set the promulgation of English as a foreign policy objective.60

  It’s helpful to look in the other direction. Global English isn’t really, in the end, the product of a few big decisions made in Washington or London. It’s the product of a billion or so smaller ones made all around the world. Those billions of decisions have been, to be sure, profoundly influenced by the predominant position of the United States in the world. But ultimately the language wasn’t imposed from the top down. It emerged from the bottom up.61

  That’s the thing about standards; they work differently from other kinds of power. Governments can tax, enlist, and imprison their subjects. They do those things all the time. But standards are harder to impose, languages especially so. Colonial authorities spent fifty years trying to drum the English language into Puerto Ricans’ heads yet managed to get only a quarter of the population even conversant in it.62 They had such a hard time because, in the streets and in the home, Puerto Ricans still spoke Spanish.

  Standards reflect power, but the real compulsion rarely comes from the state.63 It comes, rather, from the community. Take a textbook case of standard setting: the rival formats for videocassette recorders. In 1975 Sony put out the first consumer VCR, which used a tape format called Betamax. The next year, Sony’s rival JVC began selling VCRs that used a different format, VHS. Each had virtues—Betamax offered better image and sound quality, VHS tapes played longer. In 1980, consumers might have had good reason for choosing either.

  But not in 1990. By then, something had happened. Enough people had chosen VHS for it to acquire a critical mass. Rental stores stopped stocking Betamax; new movies came out only on VHS. Sony itself reluctantly decided to start making VHS-compatible hardware. “Speaking frankly,64 we didn’t want to manufacture VHS,” its deputy president confessed. “However, you don’t conduct business according to your feelings.”

  Sony hadn’t been compelled to give up on Betamax, exactly. It’s just that the cost of sticking with it had become prohibitively high. Too many people had already chosen VHS.

  Something similar has happened in language. As distant cultures have come into closer contact, the need for common tongues has grown. Yet which language to use hasn’t exactly been a free choice for everyone. You pick the language others have chosen, the language you think will get you the furthest. And once a critical mass has been reached, that choice becomes practically mandatory.

  Different people have undergone this process at different paces. The international communities on globalization’s leading edge were the first to feel the need for a uniform language. They latched on to English early, and as each one adopted it, the language’s momentum grew, eventually dragging whole countries along for the ride.

  The first group to fully go in for English was the air traffic controllers. Aviation, being technically complex and profoundly international, is an area where standards are vital. A common language is especially so, given the paramount importance of clear communication in the skies. In the 1950s a Soviet plane carrying the USSR’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko,65 to London twice overshot Heathrow Airport and nearly crashed because the pilot struggled to understand the control tower’s instructions.

  Yet such misunderstandings are happily rare, for when the rules of the international aviation system were agreed upon in 1944, a standard language was chosen for international flights. It was, not surprisingly, English. This wasn’t a choice made because of a desire to turn the world Anglophone. It was made from necessity: there had to be one language, and the United States at that point was responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles.66

  Non-English speakers chafed at this. In the 1970s, Francophones in Quebec sought to use French in the air for local flights when convenient.67 They weren’t demanding that French be the main language of the skies, just that it be an option. Yet pilots and air traffic controllers fought back. They were generally of a global ilk and had adapted themselves to English. They went on strike, crippling aviation in Canada for nine days until the government agreed to prohibit French in the air.

  The world community of pilots has grown dramatically more diverse over the subsequent decades, but English has stuck. Korean, German, Brazilian, and Algerian pilots all speak it. In large single-language regions, such as Latin America, they might bend the rules and switch to their native tongues. But they must snap back to English when Anglophones are present.

  The next group to go in for English was the scientists.68 Modern science has always been international, and scientists were accustomed to having to learn one another’s languages to read the latest research. In the twentieth century, they seriously considered adopting invented languages to speed their work. They were particularly interested in a postwar bridge language called Interlingua, designed especi
ally for science. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association printed abstracts in it (“Velocitates de conduction esseva determinate in 126 patientes qui presentava con disordines neurologic”). A journal of molecular spectroscopy appeared entirely in the language.

  Such internationalist ambition, though laudable, couldn’t overcome the gravitational force of the United States. In the first decade and a half following the Second World War, 55 percent of the Nobel Prizes in science went to scholars at U.S. universities,69 and 76 percent of laureates were at Anglophone ones. By the 1960s, more than half of publications on natural science in the world were in English.70

  Again, a tipping point was reached. With half of the publications in English and more than half of the Nobel laureates speaking it, what were the odds that Interlingua or any other language could hold out? Scientists from non-Anglophone countries had to learn English to read cutting-edge scholarship in their field. Increasingly, they had to write in it, too. The proportion of scientific publications in English shot up as more and more non-Anglophone scientists made the switch. Today it is well over 90 percent.71

  In Israel, scientists joke that God himself couldn’t get tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—he only has one publication,72 and it’s not in English. They’re not wrong. Of the 1,921 research publications listed on the websites of the faculty members at Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics, every one is in English.

  Air traffic control and scientific research turned out to be mere preludes. The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet. It has promoted international communication, but it has set English proficiency as the price. The web was invented in the United States and has been disproportionately Anglophone ever since. In 1997 a survey of language distribution found that 82.3 percent of randomly chosen websites,73 from all over the world, were in English.