It’s not just that English users dominate the internet. The medium itself favors English. Its programming languages are derived from English, so anyone seeking to master Python, C++, or Java—to name three popular coding languages—will have a much easier time if they speak English.
Residing at a deeper level are the encoding schemes that translate bits (ones and zeroes) into characters. The encoding most frequently used in the early days of the internet was ASCII,74 a scheme designed to support English. ASCII makes no provision for non-roman languages such as Arabic and Hindi. It can’t even handle frequently used symbols in European languages, such as ø, ü, ß, or ñ. ASCII nudges everything toward English.
Today there are more accommodating encodings, covering languages from Cherokee to Cuneiform, but they aren’t universally supported. That means there’s no guarantee that a non-English email or text will display correctly. Web addresses are still nearly all in ASCII, which is why the most popular website in China is accessed by typing baidu.com, not . And even if it did have a Chinese web address, users would still have to use QWERTY keyboards—the global standard,75 designed in New York around the English alphabet—to type it.
Roman characters are featured first on the search engine Baidu, the most visited web page in China.
The dominance of English on the internet is, in a way, the result of free choices. No government commanded it, no army enforces it. Yet many who have chosen to work in English have done so reluctantly, in the way a Betamax fan might bow to inevitability and purchase a VHS system. They use English because there is no other viable choice.
“It is the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism,”76 sighed the director of an internet provider in Russia. “The product comes from America so we must either adapt to English or stop using it. That is the right of business. But if you are talking about a technology that is supposed to open the world to hundreds of millions of people you are joking. This just makes the world into new sorts of haves and have nots.”
The president of France, Jacques Chirac, deemed the English-dominant internet “a major risk for humanity.”77
*
Air traffic controllers, then scientists, then internet users. As each increasingly large technical community adopted English, the momentum grew. Whole countries—some containing hundreds of millions of people who have never attended a scientific conference and may not even use the internet often—were dragged into the vortex.
This process now appears inexorable, but it took a while to become so. In 1969 a prominent linguist at Columbia University noted that a world language was probably inevitable. Yet even at that late date he wasn’t sure English would be it. Yes, some 60 percent of the world’s radio and television broadcasts were in English.78 But resistance to the language was strong enough that he earnestly considered the possibility that the artificial language of Esperanto,79 which was easier to learn and had little of English’s cultural baggage, might prevail.
Betamax, in other words, was still an option.
Yet the period of choice lasted only so long, and 1969 was pretty near to the end. The following decades saw country after country succumbing to English. Even as they tried to escape from it, they fell into its growing gravity well.
India had, at its independence, temporarily allowed English to remain a “subsidiary official” language, with the understanding that the government would switch entirely to Hindi in 1965. But not only did English persist, it grew. Today, advertisements are in English, higher education is in English, and Bollywood movies feature generous helpings of English. The language remains in official use and is heard in parliamentary debates at roughly the same frequency as Hindi. The “bitter truth,”80 reported The New York Times recently, is that “English is the de facto national language of India.”
That is the bitter truth of many countries. Sri Lanka, which once passed a Sinhala Only Act, has restored English to its former official status (“Welcome to Official Web Portal of Government of Sri Lanka,” its home page awkwardly beams). Singapore, which had replaced English with Malay, launched a Speak Good English movement in 2000. “Investors will not come if their supervisors and managers can only guess what our workers are saying,”81 the prime minister explained. “Poor English reflects badly on us and makes us seem less intelligent.”
The Philippines fell, too. Despite Manuel Quezon’s quest to establish a national indigenous language to dislodge it, English remains both an official language and a constant presence. The Philippines has more call-center workers than any other country.82 It’s also an international center for teaching English, a place where aspiring speakers can learn the language cheaply, with a clear mainland accent.
English’s gravitational pull extends far beyond the domain where Anglophone powers promoted their language. It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia.83 But in 2004 its prime minister, a Harvard graduate, announced that English would replace Russian as the first foreign language in Mongolian schools. He hoped to turn Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, into a hub for call centers.
“Conquer English to make China stronger”: Li Yang, the media personality who is China’s most popular English teacher, claims to have taught millions in his campaign to turn China into a global hegemon through the mastery of English.
The most remarkable conquest by English has been China. In 1978, under the reformist premier Deng Xiaoping, China restored English as a permissible foreign language and encouraged it as part of China’s path to prosperity. Chinese television started broadcasting an English-language teaching show, Follow Me, starring a British woman and commanding an audience of tens of millions. Today the top Chinese universities offer hundreds of degree programs in subjects ranging from history to nuclear physics taught in English. Some hundred thousand native speakers of English have found work as teachers in China.84
“If the Chinese … rule the world some day,”85 the linguist John McWhorter has written, “I suspect they will do it in English.”
*
English is not the language with the most native speakers today.86 Mandarin Chinese is, followed by Spanish. There are many people in the United States itself who struggle with English. But what’s remarkable about English is that it’s the language with the most nonnative speakers. Estimates vary widely, but it seems that roughly one in four humans on the planet can now speak it.87 That number appears to be growing.
For those who speak English as a foreign language, the reasons are clear. English is the language of power. Speaking it means going to better schools, getting better jobs, and moving in more elite circles. A study commissioned by the British Council of five poorer countries (Pakistan,88 Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Rwanda) found that professionals who spoke English earned 20 to 30 percent more than those who didn’t.
In South Korea, parents alert to this dynamic have sent their young children, usually under the age of five, to clinics for lingual frenectomies,89 surgery to cut the thin band of tissue under the tongue. The operation ostensibly gives children nimbler tongues, making it easier for them to pronounce the difficult l and r sounds. If masters once cut slaves’ tongues out to prohibit native languages, today people do the cutting themselves. And they do it to enable English.
Lingual frenectomies, it should be said, aren’t common. Nevertheless, their mere existence speaks to a widely felt hunger for English. Even in South Korea, which has never been colonized by an Anglophone power, mastering the language is of overwhelming importance. As a professor at a Seoul university put it, “English is now becoming a means of survival.”
*
For the inhabitants of the United States, the anglicization of the world is, just as Churchill predicted, a “grand convenience.” It allows them to do business in any part of the world. It also helps their ideas and ambitions to resound. Films, books, shows, music, and advertisements flow easily out of the United States, so that even the remotest foreign countries feel
like home.
Perhaps the most extraordinary privilege, though, is that people from the United States don’t have to struggle with foreign languages. While everyone else pays the cognitive tax of learning English, English speakers can dispense with language classes entirely. In 2013 the Modern Language Association found that college and university enrollments in foreign languages were half what they had been fifty years earlier.90 In other words, U.S. students have responded to globalization by learning half as many languages.
And why should they bother? If, in the early twentieth century, internationally inclined and ambitious men such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover had to learn foreign languages, their counterparts today do not. Barack Obama, despite his almost comically cosmopolitan background (a Kenyan father who met his mainland mother in a Russian class, a childhood spent in Hawai‘i and Indonesia), speaks only English.
“It’s embarrassing,”91 Obama has admitted. “When Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup.”
20
POWER IS SOVEREIGNTY, MISTER BOND
“Ah, Mr. Powers … welcome to my hollowed-out volcano,” says Dr. Evil, gesturing to his elaborate underground base on a tropical island. The scenario, from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, is instantly recognizable. The deranged supervillain, his island lair, the threat of world destruction—it’s so familiar you forget how bizarre it is.
Of all the potentially menacing locales, why do our most ambitious evildoers, the ones bent on world domination, seek out remote specks of land in the middle of seas and oceans? You’d think the qualities of islands that make them desirable vacation spots—their distance from population centers, their relaxed pace of life—would ill suit them as launchpads for global conquest. After all, Napoleon’s adversaries sent him to Elba to exile him, not to encourage him to have another go.
It’s true that there has long been an association with islands and malfeasance, at least in Western fiction. It’s not hard to think of examples of islands as lawless and dangerous spaces, such as Treasure Island (1883), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), or Skull Island in King Kong (1933).
World domination from an island, though—that’s different. As far as I can tell, it’s a more recent literary phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it begins with Bond.
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, knew about islands and the villainy they engendered. During the Second World War, he served as the assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence. In 1943 he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, for a high-level naval intelligence conference with the United States. The Caribbean was then in dire straits, tormented by German submarines that evaded the Allied navies. Rumors floated that the U-boats were finding safe berth at a secret harbor built by Axel Wenner-Gren,1 a Swedish multimillionaire who had established himself on an island in the Bahamas.
Wenner-Gren was a shadowy figure, moving, as one of his chroniclers put it, “behind the curtains of history,2 profoundly influencing the course of events.” He was a striking physical specimen, with piercing blue eyes, snow-white hair, bronzed skin, and ramrod-straight posture. He’d made his first fortune manufacturing vacuum cleaners, but his sprawling multi-national business empire grew to incorporate munitions, matches, wood pulp, planes, monorails, banking, telecommunications, and, ultimately, computers. The Disneyland and Seattle monorails were built by Wenner-Gren’s company. Telmex, the Latin American telecommunications company (now the core of the fortune of the world’s-richest-man contender Carlos Slim), was founded by Wenner-Gren.
Wenner-Gren had left Sweden for the Bahamas, apparently for tax reasons. There, he’d purchased the bulk of an island, established an estate called Shangri-La, and anchored his yacht, the largest in the world, equipped with state-of-the-art radio communications.
“He is too big for Sweden,”3 a magazine from his home country wrote. “He is an international power.”
Wenner-Gren did, it was true, have a foreign policy all his own. He theorized that science and rationality were bringing forth an era of peace.4 To nudge the new age along, he backed one of the period’s many spelling reform schemes, Anglic,5 in the hopes of turning English into a global language. He also pursued peace by serving as a back-channel emissary between British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Hermann Göring, the second-in-command in the Nazi leadership. Wenner-Gren was, in fact, one of the last diplomatic links between Britain and Germany before Hitler invaded Poland.
Wenner-Gren’s ties to Göring threw a pall of suspicion over him. “I have not a shred of evidence,6 but I have a very strong feeling that this man acts as a spy for the German government,” the U.S. undersecretary of state reported. The FBI put Wenner-Gren under surveillance, the U.S. government froze his accounts, and wild accusations flew. It was said that he was helping Nazis transfer wealth, that Göring had sneaked a mysterious bundle onto Wenner-Gren’s yacht, or that every member of the yacht’s crew was a spy.
It surely didn’t help that the FBI was aggressively investigating a member of Wenner-Gren’s coterie, Inga Arvad, a Danish beauty queen sometimes mistaken for his mistress. Arvad was a favorite of the Nazi leadership; Hitler had judged her to be the most “perfect example of Nordic beauty”7 he’d ever seen, and he had hosted her in his private box during the 1936 Olympics. Whether that meant she was spying was hard to say. The main revelation from the FBI’s round-the-clock surveillance was not that Arvad was consorting with Nazis, but that she was conducting a torrid, involved affair—one the FBI recorded on tape—with a young naval ensign named John F. Kennedy. (When Kennedy was elected president, J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI’s dossier on Arvad as blackmail to ensure his re-appointment as FBI director.8)
This was the hotbed of international intrigue Ian Fleming encountered in 1943.
The accusations that Wenner-Gren had built a secret harbor for German U-boats proved false. Still, Fleming found the whole rum-soaked milieu irresistible. “When we have won this blasted war,”9 Fleming told his friend, “I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.”
He bought an estate there, Goldeneye, named after one of the intelligence operations he’d participated in during the war.
*
Jamaica was, for Fleming, one of those “blessed corners of the British empire,”10 a place where brown-skin natives still served drinks at the club and the fantasies of colonial life could be indulged for just a while longer. In 1956 Britain lost control of the Suez Canal, an incident that foretold the end of the empire. (“In the whole of modern history I can’t think of a comparable shambles,”11 wrote Fleming.) It was to Jamaica that prime minister Anthony Eden repaired to recuperate from that defeat. He stayed at Goldeneye.
Fleming spent every winter in Jamaica from 1946 until his death, in 1964. It was where he wrote all the Bond books. Jamaica was also where Fleming conducted an affair with a rich widow named Blanche Blackwell, who was in turn having an affair with Fleming’s neighbor, Errol Flynn. Scampering underfoot at Goldeneye was Blackwell’s young son,12 Chris, who would later grow up to found Island Records and launch the reggae musicians Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Peter Tosh onto the world scene. (After Fleming’s death, Bob Marley bought Goldeneye, but he deemed it “too posh”13 and sold it to Chris Blackwell, who owns it now.)
Fleming set three Bond novels in Jamaica, though none captured the scene as vividly as Doctor No (1958). After a group of assassins destroy the British Secret Service’s radio station, severing the connection between Jamaica and England, Bond is dispatched. The clues point to a nearby island. A guano island, as it happens.
Fleming’s readers probably knew little of guano, but he was eager to remedy their ignorance. When Bond first arrives in Jamaica, the colonial secretary sits him down for a lecture on guano’s history (“Bond prepared to be bored”).14 This, rem
arkably, lasts an entire chapter. The secretary unspools the whole story, starting with the British-Peruvian monopoly and working his way up to Fritz Haber’s invention of ammonia synthesis.
“Bitten off a bit more than you can chew on guano,” he natters on. “Talk to you for hours about it.”
The point, as he comes to it, is that there are small, uninhabited islands scattered around the Caribbean. And one has been purchased by a mysterious international figure, Doctor Julius No.
It’s hard not to see Axel Wenner-Gren in the figure of Julius No. The two are tantalizingly similar: physically striking, obsessed with science, loyal to no country, eager to meddle in world politics, and possessors of vast fortunes. Wenner-Gren even insisted on being called “Dr. Wenner-Gren,” by dint of an honorary doctorate from a Peruvian university.
And, of course, both owned Caribbean islands. In the novel, Doctor No tells Bond how he bought his island and developed it into “the most valuable technical intelligence center in the world.”15 From it, he can use radio to monitor, jam, and redirect the United States’ missiles (“I can bend the beams on which these rockets fly, Mister Bond”), claiming for himself the arms of a superpower.
The fact that it is an island matters enormously to Doctor No. “Mister Bond, power is sovereignty,” he explains. “Who in the world has the power of life or death over his people? Now that Stalin is dead,16 can you name any man except myself? And how do I possess that power, that sovereignty? Through privacy. Through the fact that nobody knows. Through the fact that I have to account to no one.”
If there was one moment in literature when the switch was thrown, this was it. Fictional islands before Doctor No were the godforsaken outskirts of civilization. After it, they were centers of global power.
How to Hide an Empire Page 38