Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  In the sweep-aside countries,* the action was concentrated in the nineteenth century. Australia is estimated to have accommodated 300,000 people (speaking two hundred languages) when the British began arriving in the 1790s; by 1890 they were down to 50,000 (with 150 languages left). Their population had always been concentrated in the south-east, just as the English speakers are today: that is where there is water. In the same period, English speakers went from nil to 400,000 by 1850, and nearly 4 million by 1900.59 As in the Americas, after the first few years no serious effort was made to accommodate the Aboriginals, let alone learn any of their languages; even the missionaries were rather unsuccessful in making non-destructive contact.

  In New Zealand, although the British found it in 1770 held by a single people speaking a single language, Maori, a similar story ultimately played out. After the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was struck between the Maori and Britain, British immigration took off, growing twelvefold in the following decade, from 2000 to 25,000 by 1850. In the next half-century, their population grew thirtyfold again, now boosted by big families, as well as an unceasing flood of hopeful new settlers: by 1900 it had reached 750,000. In the same nineteenth century, Maori numbers sank from well over 100,000 to 42,000. They may have had the advantage of knowing the country for a millennium before the British arrived; but they could not contend with European diseases, and above all the productivity of European farm animals, cattle and sheep, evolved to thrive on temperate grasslands. They put up a bitter fight, but like the Australian Aboriginals, they were swept aside.60

  Both Australian Aboriginal and Maori populations have rebounded in the late twentieth century, but their proportions in their own countries remain tiny: 170,000—a little less than 1 per cent—Australians are now reckoned to be of Aboriginal descent (47,000—0.03 per cent—with some knowledge of an Aboriginal language), and there are now over 310,000 Maori—8 per cent of New Zealanders—of whom some 70,000 speak the language, 1.8 per cent. They are simply engulfed by the modern English-speaking nations of Australia (18.5 million) and New Zealand (3.8 million) in which they still struggle to survive.61

  Farther north, English speakers came in earnest to South-East Asia only in 1786, when the English East India Company acquired Penang, a small island just off Kedah, largely as a base for naval refitting.* Lord Cornwallis was still governor-general at the time, as keen as ever to avoid settlement, and above all any political involvement. But one thing led to another; the British kindly stewarded the Dutch empire from 1795 to 1814, while its metropolis was occupied by the French, and in the meantime Penang gained a mercantile life of its own, eclipsing the ancient entrepôt of Malacca. The British lieutenant-governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, who had opposed return of the Dutch colonies, felt that Penang, lying outside the Straits, was not quite right to protect the burgeoning trade (largely in opium) between India and China. Through an act of diplomatic legerdemain, installing there a Malay sultan who had been slighted by the Dutch, he was able to acquire Singapore for Britain in 1819. It was then a fairly small settlement, but the population instantly went up to five thousand, and began to develop as the new major entrepôt.

  Subsequent intrigues and wars, always undertaken by the British with an eye to the commercial main chance, resulted in British political control being extended to the whole of Burma (1853-86), Malaya (1883-95) and the northern region of Borneo (1888). As icing on the cake, Britain also acquired its own base in China, Hong Kong (1848, enlarged in 1860 and 1898). The linguistic effect was extension of English for law and administration, all over these parts of South-East and East Asia. Others soon saw which way the language wind was blowing: the Straits Times of Singapore began publication in 1845 (current circulation 386,000, for a national population of 3 million), and the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong in 1903 (circulation 200,000, for a population of 6 million).

  Nowadays, knowledge of English is still a mark of the elite in all the successor states of the British colonies. It is often difficult to know what proportion of the people speak it. Its status has become politically controversial in Malaysia since independence in 1957; there is an active policy to ‘standardise’ on Malay in education, but as in India, English is popular with the large minorities, here Chinese- and Tamil-speaking, who feel threatened by this. In Burma (or, to use its more ancient name, Myanmar) use of English is nowadays not readily admitted by government sources. Its future in Hong Kong, since 1997 returned to mainland China, is obscure, but a survey in 1992 suggested that over 25 per cent had some competence in it. In Singapore, a 1975 survey put competence among the over-forties at 27 per cent, but among fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds at over 87 per cent.62

  In Africa, there were no major European settlements until the nineteenth century, except for those of the Portuguese and Dutch. But when the scramble for colonies had exhausted the available territory, the spread of English in British possessions followed the re-education pattern as against sweep-aside. The temperate parts of South Africa did attract large numbers of white settlers, but they tailed off as British territory extended northward; the Bantu population, who were fairly recent arrivals themselves, held their ground well. As a result we find 3.5 million English speakers in South Africa, 9.1 per cent of the population, but even grouping together the English and Afrikaans speakers, a million of them mutually bilingual, they amount only to 22 per cent. Farther north, the percentage of native English speakers—essentially white citizens—is far less, 3 per cent in Zimbabwe, 0.5 per cent in Zambia. English is a more significant secondary language in East Africa; there are few native speakers, but 5 per cent of Tanzanians, Kenyans and Ugandans use it, despite the availability of Swahili as an alternative lingua franca. This, of course, is a figure very comparable to countries of Asia that accepted reeducation; and in all these countries, as in so many Asian ones, English remains as an official language.

  The other major area of old British colonies in Africa is the west, from Cameroon out along the coast to Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. In this area also is Liberia, another country with English-speaking links, but in this case through its foundation as a preserve for freed slaves from the United States of America. They all have different histories; but they share the fact that their climate has always discouraged white settlement. All define English as an official language, but it appears that only a smallish minority of their populations, again in the region of 5 per cent, are actually speakers. Since all the countries are highly multilingual, another widespread means for communication is the use of English-based creóles, such as Nigerian Pidgin in Nigeria, Krio in Sierra Leone, Liberian English in Liberia.63

  The last major area for expansion of English was into the islands dotted across the Pacific. British colonisation of this area came rather later than the French (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 417): Fiji in 1874, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892, the Solomons in 1893, Tonga in 1900. New Guinea’s western half was reserved by the Dutch, but Germany and Australia claimed the rest in 1884. Like many German colonies in Africa, this one fell into British hands after the German defeat in the First World War, but in this case the hands were specifically Australian. At the same time, the German (western) half of Samoa was assigned to New Zealand. In the New Hebrides, British missionaries and French planters shared control from 1887.

  None of these territories was of great interest to British imperial strategists, except in some notional competition with French influence; the islanders in general were left to the shifting mercies of whale and sea-slug hunters, sandalwood cutters, the cultivators of sugar cane, cotton and coconut, and of course missionaries. One result was the temporary recruitment of large gangs of South Sea Islanders to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where they learnt to communicate in pidgin English. Another was a vast infusion of Indians into Fiji to engage in sugar planting and processing, so that now close to half its population speak a form of Hindi. But as a long-term result of all those indentured workers, the South Pacific has bec
ome a prime area for English-based creóles, and two of them are now accepted as official languages: Tok Pisin is the language of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, and Bislama of Vanuatu (once the New Hebrides), independent since 1980. These creoles are very different from the English spread by missionaries. Anyway, the communities that speak this English are all very small minorities in their countries, as one would expect where the language has been spread by re-education.

  English was also coming to the Pacific islands from the opposite direction. Since the early nineteenth century Hawaii had been a winter harbour for whalers, and from 1820 it became the focus of interest for fifteen companies of missionaries from New England. US businessmen were also increasingly active, perhaps looking for a new frontier after the fulfilment of their country’s ‘Manifest Destiny’; they were the main beneficiaries of a land division organised in 1848-50. For a short time, Hawaiian independence survived, balanced among the contending interests of Britain, France and the USA. But American pressure was unabating: a special treaty of reciprocity was struck in 1875, the Hawaiian monarchy was deposed in 1893, and in 1898 the whole archipelago was annexed to the USA.

  In 1896 one of the first acts of the Hawaiian republic, formed briefly after the fall of the monarchy, was to require English as medium of instruction for no less than half the school day; but in practice no Hawaiian at all was allowed. In that generation, the transmission of the language from parent to child stopped dead. One grandmother told her granddaughter before her first day of school:

  E pa’a pono ka ‘ōlelo a ka haole. Mai kālele i kā kākou ‘ōlelo, ‘a’ohe he pono i laila. A ia ke ola o ka noho ‘ana ma kēiamua aku i ka ‘ike pono i ka ‘ōlelo a ka po’e haole.

  Learn well the language of the whites. Do not rely on our language, there’s no value there. One’s future well-being is dependent upon mastering the language of the foreign people.64

  This sounds like particularly harsh re-education, but in fact Hawaii conforms at least as well to the sweep-aside model: by 1996, with the population now standing at 1.2 million, only 18.8 per cent were ethnic Hawaiians, and half of these had less than 50 per cent Hawaiian ancestry. Outside the one small island of Niihau, everyone on the islands is now at least bilingual in English, and the vast majority know no other language.

  In the same year of 1898, the USA took the Philippines and Guam forcibly from Spain in a flush of imperialist glee (see Chapter 10, ‘Coda: Across the Pacific’, p. 377); and a year later they also enforced their own solution to a long-standing dispute over Samoa, taking the eastern half of the archipelago. There was then a respite for forty years, as these new territories got used to the sound of English; but on 7 December 1941 an attack on Pearl Harbor, in American Hawaii, unleashed the Pacific war with Japan. At the war’s end, having got to know a decidedly unbalmy side of the islands as battlefields, the USA found itself in possession of all the Japanese colonies in Micronesia. Though no longer colonies after the 1970s, they have all kept close ties to the USA. English has become the lingua franca of the Pacific, but outside Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand it is nowhere a majority language.

  Wonder upon wonder

  This chapter, like all those before it, has mainly focused so far on the political developments that have spread a language. But something else has been acting in favour of English, at least for the last two centuries, and increasingly so as decade follows decade. A glimmer of it was seen in the 1823 remark of Ram Mohan Roy, pleading for access to English education: ‘… useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world … ‘

  It has not only been self-assured aggression, superiority in fire-power or unrivalled access to capital which has carried British enterprise—and so, directly or indirectly, its language—around the world. All these things have played a role, but they had flowed from, and been reinforced by, the amazing status of Britain as centre and source of the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, people all over the world avidly accepted re-education in English, Britain was evidently the richest, and the most dynamic, country in the world. To quote a historian’s pithy and overwhelming summary:

  Between 1760 and 1830, the United Kingdom was responsible for around ‘two-thirds of Europe’s industrial growth of output’ (— P. Bairoch 1982), and its share of world manufacturing production leapt from 1.9% to 9.5%; in the next thirty years, British industrial expansion pushed that figure to 19.9%, despite the spread of the new technology to other countries in the West … ‘With 2% of the world’s population and 10% of Europe’s, the United Kingdom would seem to have had a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45% of the world’s potential, and 55-60% of that in Europe’ (— F. Crouset 1982). Its energy consumption from modern sources (coal, lignite, oil) in 1860 was 5 times that of either the United States or Prussia/Germany, 6 times that of France, and 155 times that of Russia! It alone was responsible for one-fifth of the world’s commerce, but for two-fifths of the trade in manufactured goods.65

  Bathed in the aura of such a stunning reality—even if the full statistics were not then available—it is hardly surprising that Indian students had usually been more impressed by the material benefits of British methods than the imperishable rewards promised by the Protestant missionaries. The prestige of English in the nineteenth century was elevated to the skies through the same process that had made French the leading language of European culture throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. At root, the thought was: ‘if you’re so rich, how can you not be smart?’

  France had had a good natural endowment of fertile farmland and abundant labour on which to found this, but Britain had had quite a modest starting capital. In the early seventeenth century, when the British had first turned up in the East Indies, and tried to get involved in the spice trade, their main problem had been the lack of goods for which there was any local demand. But now, after over two centuries of trading, finagling, shipbuilding and warring, their capital and influence gave them access to pretty much anything they might desire: as the economist Stanley Jevons crowed in 1865:

  The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies…66

  Britain, as a power, was going to find that some of these other powers, especially one in North America, would have a tendency to shift the terms of trade against it; but this was no loss to the English-language community; if anything it was a net gain when the English-speaking inhabitants of America began to look beyond their own domain, and use their resources, in fertile fields, in productive mines, and in a highly educated and massive population, for schemes of their own devising.

  Amid the general splurge of galloping wealth creation, there was a particular surge in the power and speed of communications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed progress that was unheard of, first in inventing, and then in speedily applying, all over the world, systems for transport of people and merchandise. Perhaps even more impressive is the parallel progress made, largely using electronics, in systems to transmit and store all sorts of information. A hundred and fifty years from 1830 takes us from the first railway engine through the steamboat to mass-market air transport, and from telegraph through the telephone to global broadcasts of radio and television, as well as the first approaches to effective computer networks. In the same period, means were found to store, and to access at will, all kinds of sounds, including speech and music, visual scenes and pictures, and views of events and actions as they took place. Any one of these would have had the potential to transform the world in an earlier age; but in this age,
when humanity’s dreams of magical powers came true, they all came together.

  Almost every one of these new technologies was invented by a speaker of English—Stephenson, Fulton, Wright, Bell, Baird, Edison—or by a speaker perhaps of another language who had to work in the English-speaking world, as Marconi and Reuter had. And even when they were not—think of Benz’s German internal combustion engine, or the French photograph and motion picture, due to pioneers such as Daguerre and Lumière—it was English-speaking developers, such as Henry Ford or the film-makers of Hollywood, who first demonstrated what could be done with the new media on a truly vast scale. This inevitably meant that the key talk about these achievements, how to replicate them and what was to be done with them, took place above all in English. For scientists and engineers, but crucially for businessmen, English has been the language in which the world’s know-how is set out. Never since cuneiform writing set up Akkadian as the diplomatic language of the Near and Middle East has technology been so effective in spreading a language. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58.)

  These triumphs in what is called ‘communications’ all tend to reduce the time-taking and effort-costing effects of distances in the world. But they also tend to reduce the differences between the world as it is presented to distant people. Quite literally, they make certain descriptions of experience ‘common’ to more and more people. They make regional and international business routine, allow international contacts to involve the highest level of personnel, turn far-distant destinations into sites for brief visits, even holidays. But they also standardise the images and phrases that people carry in their memories, from advertising through entertainment to education; nowadays there are not only classic texts and works of art that we are taught to appreciate, but classic jingles, classic ads, classic kitsch, which we can’t get out of our heads from one end of the country or one end of the world to another: and quite likely the words we remember will be in English, even if we are Hungarian, Balinese, South African or Mongolian.