Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  33. Slate (2001: 391).

  34. Memorandum of M. Austin’s Journey, 1796-1797, Amer. Hist. Rev., v, pp. 518-42.

  35. Welling (2001).

  36. US Census Bureau, quoted in Wright (2000:490); state populations likewise, pp. 169-201.

  37.Gholam Hossein Khan (1902 [1789]: iii, 191-2).

  38. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education, 1835 (reprinted in Young 1957: 721-4). Although this a particularly pernicious example of cultural chauvinism on behalf of English, and played a major role in the withdrawal of support for Sanskrit education in India, Macaulay was thinking not of English’s own culture exclusively but rather of his belief that English could provide access (where necessary, through texts already translated) to every aspect of world culture. But his easy assurance that Indians could afford to neglect their own traditions is a monument to the kind of cultural overconfidence bred by successful imperialism.

  39. J. J. Campos, The History of the Portuguese in Bengal, 1919, p. 173, cited in Sinha (1978:3).

  40. Holden Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, 1965, p. 2, cited in Sinha (1978: 6).

  41. Polier (2001). Characteristically, the work is called I’jāz-i Arsalānī, the ‘wonderment of Arsalān’, alluding to the author’s own Persianate title, Arsalān-i-Jang, ‘lion of battle’, bestowed by the Mughal emperor Shah Alam himself (p. 9). In their Introduction, p. 70, the modern translators point out Polier’s classic approach to a dispute between his two Indian wives, threatening one mother-in-law while appealing to her sense of shame for her daughter. Polier went on to marry a third wife after his return to France in 1788.

  42. S. N. Mukherjee, History of Education in India, 1961, p. 30, cited in Sinha (1978: 27).

  43. Ingram (1969: 235-6).

  44. Sinha (1978: 28).

  45. ‘All Ministers shall be obliged to learn within one year after their arrival the Portuguese language and shall apply themselves to learn the native language of the country where they shall reside, the better to enable them to instruct the Gentoos that shall be the servants or the slaves of the company, or of their agents, in the Protestant Religion’ (J. W. Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company, 1853, p. 626, cited in Sinha (1978: 10).

  46. Sinha (1978: 13); Kachru (1983: 21).

  47. W. H. Carey, The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company, 1906, p. 397, cited in Sinha (1978: 10).

  48. British Library, Additional Manuscripts, 13828, pp. 306v-308r; McKinnon goes on to propose setting up a seminary, teaching English and classical Greek, in Lucknow, on the basis of an existing library of classical books.

  49. Parliament Debate (1813), 26: 562-3.

  50. Selections from Educational Records I (H. Sharp, 1920), p. 22, and II (J. A. Richey), p. 152, cited in Sinha (1978: 32).

  51. Sir Hyde East’s letter to J. Harrington, 18 May 1816, cited in Sinha (1978: 36).

  52. Ram Mohan Roy’s letter to Lord Amherst, 11 Dec. 1823, cited in Kachru (1983: 60).

  53. Samachar Darpan, 23 April 1834, cited in Sinha (1978: 41).

  54. Duff (1837: 3). The member of the committee representing the law interest, Thomas Babington Macaulay, made a particular impression. Damning quotations from his Minute on Indian Education, which was accepted by the committee, appear in the epigraph to this section and in a footnote in Chapter 2.

  55. Duff (1837: App., p. 2).

  56. Spear (1965: 127).

  57. Crystal (2003: 46). In his summary of world English-speaking populations, Crystal plumps for about 19 per cent of Indians in 2001 (200 million), but 12 per cent of Pakistanis (17 million), 10 per cent of Sri Lankans (1.9 million), and barely 3 per cent of Bangladeshis (3.5 million).

  58. Alexander Duff’s words, in another 1837 pamphlet, Vindication of the Church of Scotland’s India Missions, p. 27.

  59. Flannery (1994: 326); Dixon (1980: 1); Crystal (2003: 41).

  60. Flannery (1994: 338); Crystal (2003: 41).

  61. Grimes (2000).

  62. Crystal (2003: 57).

  63. ibid.: 62-5 offers some surprising estimates for some of these countries, suggesting that 45 per cent of Nigerians, and 84 per cent of Liberians, speak English. These may well reflect the number who have received some English-language education, since the literacy levels in these countries are rather high. But Crystal’s explicit reason is the prevalence of English-based pidgins and Creoles.

  64. Sarah Nākoa, Lei Momi O ‘Ewa (’Garland of Pearls Awry’), 1979, p. 19, cited in Warner (1999: 71).

  65. Kennedy (1988: 151); P. Bairoch 1982 is ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European Economic History, 11, and F. Crouzet 1982 is The Victorian Economy, London.

  66. W. S. J. Jevons, The Coal Question, London: Macmillan, 1865.

  67. Crystal (2003: 88). French was the runner-up in official use with 49 per cent; otherwise, only Arabic, Spanish and German achieved over 10 per cent.

  68. ibid.: 65.

  69. India Today, 18 August 1997: ‘Contrary to the census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English, although less than 20 per cent are confident of speaking it.’ Cited in Graddol (1999: 64).

  70. This ’ worldliness’ of English is a major theme of Pennycook (1994), considered especially as it shows up in Malaysia and Singapore: its overtones are seen as political, as well as economic. And Phillipson (1992) develops a view of ELT as malign, characterising it as Linguistic Imperialism.

  71. Guilarte (1998: 22-3).

  72. Joyce (1977 [1910]: 33, 85); Gensler (1993: 235-42); and see Chapter 7, ‘Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 290.

  IV Languages Today and Tomorrow

  13 The Current Top Twenty

  1. Following the date given by Mario Citroni, in Hornblower and Spawforth (1999). Martial is referring, of course, not to the parts of a modern book, but to umbilici, ‘navels’, the rods around which the scroll was wound up; librarius means copyist or bookseller rather than a publisher.

  2. The principal source of these figures is the fourteenth edition of Ethnologue (Grimes 2000), itself a compilation of figures from a variety of sources. The population sizes for native and secondary speakers of major languages are derived from Funk & Wagnall’s World Almanac.

  3. Some consideration of how radically the true figures for English may differ from these can be found in Crystal (2003), Graddol (1997) and Graddol (1999).

  4. Wilkinson (2000: 27); Norman (1988: 48-9, 187).

  5. Miller (1967: 144).

  6. Baugh and Cable (2002: 194).

  7. Masica (1991: 27-8).

  8. Entwistle and Morison (1949: 288).

  9. Dalby (1998: 668).

  10. Bourciez (1967: 287).

  11. ibid.: 397.

  12. Dalby (1998: 328); for Korean, it is impossible in practice to trace any dialectal variation earlier than the establishment of a phonetic writing system in the fifteenth century.

  13. The source of population statistics is United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), The State of World Population 2000, and United Nations Department for Social Information and Policy Analysis, Population Division, World Population 1996, as reported in Wright (2000: 468-72).

  14 Looking Ahead

  1. Bauer (1996: 27).

  2. Papal Bull of Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (3 May 1493): ‘…We, then, commending greatly to the Lord your holy and praiseworthy purpose, and desiring that the same attain the due end, and that in those regions the name of our Saviour be introduced, we exhort you with all our power in the Lord and by the reception of holy baptism by which we are obliged to obey the Apostolic commands and with the entrails of mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ we require you intently that you pursue in this manner this expedition and that with spirit imbued with zeal for the orthodox faith you will and must persuade the people who inhabit the said islands to embrace the Christian faith without ever quai
ling at the labours or the dangers, with the firm hope and confidence that Almighty God will happily accompany your endeavour …’

  3. Harold Macmillan, speech to South African parliament, 3 February 1960.

  4. Composed for, and sung in, Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville (music by Richard Baskin).

  5. Fukuyama (1992).

  6. Crystal (2003: 191).

  7. As Salman Rushdie, admittedly a major exponent of English himself, believed already in 1981: ‘The debate about the appropriateness of English in post-British India has been raging ever since 1947; but today, I find, it’s a debate which has meaning only for the older generation. The children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.’ ‘Commonwealth literature does not exist’, in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991).

  8. The ‘engco’ model, expounded in Graddol (1997: 26).

  9. First-language English speakers in the USA were estimated at 210 million in 1984 (Grimes 2000). Between 1980 and 1990, the US population grew from 226, 542, 203 to 248, 709, 873 (US Census Bureau, 1980 figure revised in 1987; cited in Wright 2000: 264). The quote is from a summary of Bill Emerson’s English Language Empowerment Bill, presented to the US House of Representatives on 4 January 1995, as cited by Crystal (2003: 130). No such provision has yet (as of September 2004) been adopted as law.

  10. Bauer (1996: 33-40).

  11. Anderson (1991: 133-4).

  12. Krauss (2001: 19).

  13. Crystal (2003: 191).

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