Prospects for Global English: Back to BASIC?

We have lived, at least since the 18th century, with an immense respect for the power of language, a conviction about its centrality to mind and society that runs more or less unbroken from Herder and Fichte to Derrida and beyond. The origins of our exemplary arguments for the power of language—we might call it the “strong determination” theory, according to which what we speak makes us what we are and perhaps makes the world we see—lie in the efforts at state formation and in the consolidating nationalisms of the 18th and 19th centuries, or perhaps even earlier. When Fichte spoke of the beauties of German, he had in mind a group of speakers yet to become a nation. Concerns about a national language in the United States after 1776 had a related emphasis—on the question of how a common language might or might not consolidate a new nation into a working society, one balancing common customs and laws with the diversity and flexibility deemed appropriate to a liberal-democratic ethic, all of this complicated by the fact that the language—English—was already spoken elsewhere and by a different nation and culture. ¹ Marshall McLuhan told us, with some conviction, that fixing the language had been an essential prerequisite for fixing a nation: “there cannot be nationalism when there has not first been an experience of a vernacular in printed form. . . nationalism depends upon or derives from the ‘fixed point of view’ that arrives with print, perspective, and visual quantification.” ²

Now we are supposed to be in a postnational, along with a postmodern era. And if postmodernism really is, as Stuart Hall says somewhere, a word for describing “how the world dreams itself to be ‘American,’” ³ then what is the language in which the world is dreaming? An international national language? Who controls it, forms it, adds to it and subtracts from it? Who is resisting it, and why? (We know that the French, and Prince Charles, are resisting it.) ⁴ And how is it circulated? Should someone try to conceive and impose a global English, or is it best left to the vagaries of the global market and the unpredictable circulation of culture? We know about the longstanding resistance to planning and controlling in the British and American traditions. John Adams said that he wanted an academy, prompted perhaps by the optimism about social planning that was current after the French Revolution, and the argument has reappeared from time to time. But most British and American commentators have taken the line set forth by Samuel Johnson, that this kind of attempted control is first, empirically hopeless and second, metaphysically hostile to the spirit of liberty and laisser-faire that governs the two homelands of the English language. We Britons and Americans have trembled before our schoolteachers with their canons of correct usage, but we tell ourselves that we will never bow before a government agency, or even an MLA commission.

The development of English—British and American—has then been apparently unplanned—which means, of course, that it has been policed locally and variably rather than by a grand vision of a single design. In the 18th century, Johnson, Sheridan, Bailey and their kind fought over the definition of proper English, and over the right to market it in the form of dictionaries, grammars, and manuals of pronunciation. Something similar happened in America with the competitive grammars of Webster and Murray and others, and in the famous “dictionary wars” between Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester. What forces are playing upon and within global English? What kinds of languages compose global English, given that there is no one standard in current use? I won’t try to answer this empirically. I’ll just mention the hodge podge of British Council English, International Business English, American media English, and local conventions generated in the anglophone former colonies and now spoken by millions in India, South Africa, Australasia and so on. Cambridge University Press has tried to hit the spot with the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995), its 100,000 entries...