Special Report

Loosening the Linkages Between Language and the Land

by Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Board members Lawrence Baines and Gul Nahar.

Abstract

Like any living thing, languages evolve over time. This paper examines the connections among sociocultural change, access to the Internet, and the fluctuations of English as a global language. English has begun to transcend geographical borders and sociocultural boundaries as its status as a national language, official language, or unofficial language grows. Connections among various phenomena, such as Internet penetration, language policy, and linguistic diversity, and economic well-being, are analyzed. Countries discussed include South Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Tunisia, Japan, and China.

The rush of governments worldwide to connect their citizens to the mobile Internet and to adopt English as a language of commerce comes with the expectation that an enhanced quality of life will be an inevitable outcome. However, the proliferation of English as a global language and the widespread adoption of the Internet are transmogrifying the roles of indigenous languages and local customs. The contention of the authors is that these transformative events — the global spread of English and the proliferation of the Internet — are loosening the historically durable ties between the geography of a region and the language and customs of the people who live there.

Language and Geography

Traditionally, languages have been defined in geographic terms. The assumption always has been that words and meanings are inextricably connected to the land and its people. The names of language families, themselves, are reflective of the geography of the regions where languages were born and have thrived.

The Indo-European family of languages, for example, include over 400 languages and dialects and are associated with current-day Europe and parts of Asia, including India (Haak et al. 2015). The largest language family on the continent of Africa in terms of geographic area is Niger-Congo, which includes about 1400 languages and is associated with the countries of Central and Southern Africa (Niger-Congo languages 2015).

About the link between language and geography, Chambers (2000: 170) writes:

Eighteenth century philosophers believed that language was a natural, organic entity, like a plant, and its diversity was thought to have the same source as the diversity of vegetation. Just as vegetable life took on distinctly different appearances according to the climate and soil that nourished it, so languages took on distinctly different characteristics in different climates.

With the advent of mass transportation and the proliferation of mobile, global communications, the connection between language and the land may be loosening. Today, two of every seven persons on planet Earth speak English, and the number seems likely to increase over the next 50 years (Baines 2012; Westcombe 2011). Needless to say, it is difficult to substantiate the proliferation of English using arguments solely predicated upon national boundary lines or physical features of a landscape.

In the country of South Korea in East Asia, for example, English is widely spoken and taught in schools, though the country shares no borders with countries where English is the primary language. Of course, the US military, along with the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, worked with the government of South Korea during the Korean War, 1950–1953. However, South Korea has no history of colonization by English-speaking people, other than a trickle of religious evangelists (Chung 2014).

English in East Asia

In many countries of East Asia, proficiency in English is viewed as a gateway to economic success. English proficiency is considered desirable by most citizens who want a higher standard of living and by national governments attempting to promote growth and financial stability. For better or worse, the presence of English language education in East Asian countries pits the rewards associated with increased trade against the preservation of native languages, cultural identity, and local traditions.

Since the 1970s, the initiative to integrate English language instruction into the Chinese educational system has been a priority for the central government’s modernization agenda (Hu and McKay 2012).

China’s Ministry of Education has already mandated formal primary English instruction beginning in the elementary years, but recent initiatives have expanded English instruction into kindergarten, where bilingual classes are now offered in a variety of venues (Feng 2005; Deloitte China Research and Insight Center 2014). At the same time, Chinese universities have begun to offer courses exclusively in English (Yan et al. 2015).

In 2013, there were over 50,000 English language schools in China, and the English language learning industry in China generated about 5 billion dollars (Adkins 2014: 9). Incredibly, with as many as 400 million English language learners in China, there may be more speakers of English in China than in the United States (Wei and Jinzhi 2012).

In Japan, English is viewed as a necessary second language for participation in both business and research. As a result, English as a course of study has customarily begun in fifth grade in Japan and has continued well into the university curriculum. However, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) recently has announced that the teaching of English will commence even earlier — in grade 3 — to insure better English language acquisition at an earlier age (Yoshida 2013).

About the explosive advance of English in East Asia, Education First (2015: 27), an organization that publishes an annual report that rates countries in terms of their adoption of English, reports that:

Since 2007, Asia’s adult English proficiency has improved more than any other region. With half of the world’s population, Asia has wide-ranging levels of proficiency…. With their increasingly international economies, Asian countries invest in English training as a tool for accelerating globalization.

In countries of at least five million in population, the top 8 most prosperous countries in the world in terms of per person income are all predominantly English-speaking, as noted in Table 1.

Although Japan and South Korea are not in the top 8 in terms of GNIPP, both countries are economic powerhouses and are among the top 20. The percentage of English speakers in both countries has expanded markedly over the past 30 years, with younger citizens increasingly more proficient in English than their elders (Kim and Kim 2011).

The lowest-ranked countries in the world with regard to GNI per capita are listed in Table 2. Notably, none of the bottom-eight countries are located in Asia nor is English widely spoken in any of them.

It is only natural for nations who wish for greater economic development to infer a causal relationship between the ability of a country’s population to speak English and the relative wealth of the populace. Indeed, the data in Tables 1 and 2 seem to indicate a strong correlation between prosperity and large numbers of citizens who are conversant in English.

To get a better sense of how English might function as an official second language within an East Asian country, a more in-depth examination of South Korea may prove illuminating. Indeed, South Korea seems to have adopted English as a logical policy choice, with the express objectives of promoting innovation and making money. According to Nicholson (2015: 13), the English language in South Korea is not “imperialistic,” but is “pragmatic,” and related to “purposes of international business communication and academic advancement.”

It was not so long ago that South Korea was considered a “developing country” (Connolly and Yi 2008). In 1961, South Korea’s gross domestic product per capita was only $91 (World Bank 2015a), significantly less than Sri Lanka ($143), Peru ($273), and less than one-fifth of the GDP per capita of the Democratic Republic of the Congo ($563). By 2014, South Korea’s gross domestic product per capita had grown to $27,970, which was comparable to the output of France or Japan and surpassed the Democratic Republic of the Congo ($1429), Sri Lanka ($3631), and Peru ($6551) by significant margins. Although there are many factors involved in South Korea’s stunning economic ascent, technology and language have been critical, unifying factors for the country.

In addition to the Korean language, the study of English is a required course for Korean students every year, from grade 3 to grade 12 (Korean Ministry of Education 2015). Hadid (2014) found that Koreans spend on average “$15 billion on private English education, with 17,000 English cram schools (known as hagwons) scattered across the nation and an army of 30,000 native English teachers, along with thousands more who teach English illegally.” Today, over half of Koreans under the age of 40 understand basic English, and 10% consider themselves fluent (Hadid 2014), a marked contrast to a few decades ago when almost no South Koreans, outside of military advisors to the United States, spoke English (Kim and Kim 2011).

In addition to the adoption of English, South Korea has made deep monetary and policy commitments to technology. As a result, South Koreans are among the highest users of the Internet on the planet, and the country’s technological sector has become one of the world’s most formidable in terms of productivity and distribution (World Bank 2015a). The proliferation of technology and the elevation of the English language have helped speed the sociocultural transformation of South Korea from an “impoverished nation just out of war” to a flourishing world power in less than a half-century (Da-ye 2012).

The Technological Infrastructure of the Internet

Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was the original Internet, developed by the Department of Defense in the United States. As a result of its American origins, the infrastructure of the Internet was written in English-based code, as are the vast majority of programming languages that proliferate on the Internet today. English is so prevalent as the language of the Internet that developers from all over the world are as likely to consult English style handbooks as highly technical programming manuals. Ford (2015) writes:

Style and usage matter; sometimes programmers recommend Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style — that’s right, the one about the English language. Its focus on efficient usage resonates with programmers. The idiom of a language is part of its communal identity.

Of the more than 30 trillion web pages on the Internet, about 56% are in English, while only 6% are in German, 5% in Japanese, and 3% in Chinese (Phillips 2015). According to The Economist (2015: 5), “American firms now host 61% of the world’s social-media users, undertake 91% of its searches and invented the operating systems of 99% of its smartphone users.” Along with the Internet’s infrastructure and the litany of programming languages, the words used to communicate on the Internet are likely to be English, as well.

The impact of an English-based Internet has had fascinating effects on other languages. Arabizi, for example, is a system of writing in Arabic that uses Latin-type letters rather than Arabic script. The word Arabizi would be represented by “3rabizi” if written in its own language. According to Yaghan (2008: 14):

…due to the advancement of the Internet and the global use of the English language (and without any imperialistic implications) the use of Latin letters to write Arabic over the Internet and on text-messaging cellular phones is becoming increasingly common and natural.

Because of the ubiquity of QWERTY keyboards and the “westernized” nature of interfaces on the Internet, speakers of Chinese have adapted their communications by writing in pinyin, which uses the Latin alphabet as a vehicle to communicate in Chinese (Information Today 1998). In actuality, pinyin was introduced by China’s revolutionary government in 1958, and its original use was as a way to teach “correct sounds and tones” to young children before introducing the complexities of writing Chinese characters by hand (Byrne 2007: 201). However, pinyin has become the lingua franca of Chinese on the Internet.

Unfortunately, much recent research substantiates that an increasing reliance on the Roman-based pinyin system has had deleterious effects on the ability of Chinese children to write Chinese characters (Tan et al. 2013; The Economist 2014). Despite the alarm over “character amnesia,” according to Mair (2012), the Chinese language is not dying but adapting. A Chinese interlocutor who writes to a friend will probably write in pinyin. A Chinese interlocutor who composes a text in Mandarin for a professor of Chinese literature will probably use carefully chosen Chinese characters.

The top 18 countries in the world (with a population of at least five million citizens) in terms of Internet connectivity are shown in Table 3.

The connection between technology and the English language is evident in the number of countries listed in Table 3 where English is dominant. Note that 13 of the 18 most connected nations in the world have 70% or more English speakers. In the other five countries, 39–64% of residents are able to communicate in English.

English and Technology in Africa

That the English language and technological innovation have become associated with economic development has not gone unnoticed. Since 2007, the government of Tanzania, for example, has tried to speed the adoption of technological devices among its citizens through the exemption of taxes on imported technology equipment (Sife et al. 2007), one of the strategies often utilized by the South Korean government to promote technology spending.

The government of Tanzania has also sponsored the development of SEACOM, an optic-fiber, marine cable that has increased bandwidth and reduced telecommunication costs by 95% for Tanzanian citizens (Swarts and Wachira 2010; Lwoga 2012). While many Africans have no access to the Internet (the bottom-eight countries in Table 3 are all from Africa), as many as 20% of Tanzanians could access the Internet in 2013, which represents rapid growth in only a few years (Mtweve 2014).

Currently, in Tanzania, most residents speak Kiswahili, and only a small percentage of the population speaks English. Despite the adoption of Kiswahili as the national language, English has become the language of the educated elite (Hillard 2015). Tanzanians who speak English often have some affiliation with expensive, private schools in the country, who deliver the curriculum almost exclusively in English.

To encourage more Tanzanians to develop competency in English, the government has instituted a series of policies, including the edict that high schools and postsecondary institutions must use English as the basic language of instruction. About the edict to begin teaching courses in English, Qorro (2013) notes that one problem might be that most students are unfamiliar with the language:

Despite the sociolinguistic context in which Kiswahili dominates, the current language in education policy, which is in operation in 2012, stipulates that English remains LOI [Language of Instruction] for secondary school and tertiary education. This means 99.1 per cent of pupils who join secondary education coming from a primary school where Kiswahili was the LOI have to switch to English.

A second difficulty with delivering courses in English is, of course, that proficiency in English is presumed of Tanzanian teachers. However, surveys of English language proficiency among Tanzanian teachers have revealed that a large percentage struggle to speak or write in English and, thus, would be unable to coherently convey the content of their subject matter to students in English (Nunan 2003; Qorro 2013).

As most Tanzanians speak a local dialect as a first language, Kiswahili and English act as the second and third languages, respectively. However, because 95% of the population is fluent in Kiswahili (Brock-Utne and Holmarsdottir 2004), at least there is a common language from which to launch a move to English. The lack of a unifying, national first language makes conversion to any second language exponentially more difficult (more about this in the discussion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo below). Undeniably, the rise of English is affiliated with increased wealth, though it simultaneously imperils the 120 dialects spoken by different groups in Tanzania (Hardman et al. 2012).

Tunisia is yet another example of an African country that is moving toward English, while its native and colonial languages are in flux. Three thousand years ago, the people of the geographic area that is now Tunisia spoke Berber, Punic, and Latin. With the spread of Islam in the eighth century, Arabic became the dominant language, gradually replacing Berber and other languages and dialects. Today, Berber is spoken by less than 1% of Tunisians (Daoud 2011). During the period in which Tunisia was a French Protectorate (1881–1956), the French language surged, becoming the default second language, behind Arabic (Gibson 2013).

Today, English is systematically becoming integrated into the culture of multilingual Tunisia. In fact, English has become a mandatory subject in the school curriculum from the sixth grade on. The use of English in Tunisian society is conspicuous in science, technology, economics, and social sciences (Daoud 2011). Increasingly, younger Tunisians and academics are using the English language, rather than Arabic or French, to discuss contemporary intellectual, political, and social issues (Labassi 2008). It is no accident that the plethora of tweets and instant messages sent by Tunisians during the intense months of the Arab Spring in 2011 were mostly written in English (Bruns et al. 2013).

A Study in Contrasts: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Korea

Perhaps the most interesting case study in Africa at this moment in time is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as the Republic of Zaire. Incredibly, the per capita gross domestic product of the DRC was five times that of South Korea in 1961, but the DRC has since lost its advantage (World Bank 2015c). In 2013, the country was rated 186th of 187 countries by the United Nations in terms of human development. Almost nine of ten citizens live in severe poverty, which means that they live on less than $1.25 per day. The DRC ranks relatively low in terms of literacy but high in terms of death rates, income inequality, discrimination, and crime (United Nations Human Development Index 2013). Researchers from the World Bank (2015b) note:

There are some 2.3 million displaced persons and refugees in the country and 323,000 DRC nationals living in refugee camps outside the country. A humanitarian emergency persists in the more unstable parts of the DRC and sexual violence rates remain high.

As in Tunisia, French is the official language of the DRC, though over 200 languages are spoken and there are four additional “national” languages: Lingala, Kingwana (another dialect of Swahili), Kikongo, and Tshiluba (World Factbook 2015). According to the Language Education Policy Studies website (2015), in the DRC:

…ethnic languages are used primarily within families, as well as within ethnic groups. The national languages serve as ‘regional vehiculars,’ especially in urban areas…. French, in turn, is used in all ‘official’ domains, in particular in the government and judiciary.

Although French is the language of the government, courts, and commerce, only about one in three of DRC’s citizens actually speak French (Organisation Internationale de Francophonie 2015).

While South Korea has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world, the DRC has one of the lowest (Internetlivestats 2015; World Bank 2015b). Table 4 compares South Korea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in terms of population, land area, income, English speakers, and Internet penetration.

The top 18 countries in the world (with a population of at least five million citizens) in terms of Internet connectivity are shown in Table 3.

There seems to be universal agreement that, at least in terms of natural resources, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the richest countries on Earth (World Factbook 2015; World Bank 2015c). In comparison, Korea, despite having 30 million fewer people, scarcer natural resources, and less than 5% of the land mass, has a per capita gross national product that is 64 times greater.

Obviously, South Korea’s technological infrastructure and economic development have grown at far faster rates than those of the DRC. In addition, South Koreans communicate using a single, unifying language – Korean, with English as a de facto secondary language, a widely adopted language of commerce and academics. Not only are many courses delivered in English in K–12 schools in South Korea, current president Park Geun-hye often makes political speeches to her constituents in English (Davis 2015).

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, languages and personal identities are far more convoluted. Citizens in some areas may not be able to comprehend the language of citizens who live only a short distance away. In light of the expansion of English as the global language of commerce, English as an official language was considered by the government of the DRC in 2010, but the idea has never been taken seriously as a potential policy change (Kasanga 2012). The diversity of languages has impeded communication within the country as well as slowed trade and diplomatic relations with other nations. As a result, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world.

English as a Worldwide Phenomenon

Developing countries worldwide are considering adopting English as an official language or, at least, encouraging its widespread use. Pinon and Haydon (2010: 5) note the assumptions of financial rewards implicit in the adoption of English by developing countries, even if it means the denigration of native dialects and the evisceration of colonial languages, such as French or Spanish:

Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Cameroon all have a wide variety of indigenous languages and are seeking to develop a degree of linguistic unity through the use of English. Rwanda’s native language, Kinyarwanda, is spoken by 98% of the population. Furthermore, its government is looking to achieve greater harmony with English-speaking East African countries, while turning away from French-speaking West African nations. These trends reflect the growing awareness that strong English skills are a requirement to develop a competitive economic advantage in the global economy.

Creating governmental policies to promote English as an official language does not automatically translate into increased wealth and satisfaction. The Republic of Liberia, with a population of 4.5 million, is one of the poorest countries in the world, though as many as 20% of Liberians speak English (World Factbook 2015). Despite the inconclusive evidence on behalf of English as a liberating, money-generating language, resistance to its spread may be futile. Education First (2015: 4) notes that the connection between English and economic well-being has become an entrenched belief:

Few countries continue to debate whether or not English should be taught. Instead, discussions of English instruction in public schools focus on which dialect of English is taught, how it is assessed, and how much English education is necessary….English is often tied to development goals, expansion of the service sector, and increased connectivity to the rest of the world.

Conclusion

Once upon a time, geography and the exigencies of travel had significant delimiting effects upon language and communication. People who were born and grew up in a remote village in New Guinea, for example, would seldom leave the geographic area associated with their settlement for two very good reasons:

1. The residents of other villages might not understand them.

2. The residents of the other villages might try to kill them (Diamond 2012).

According to the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (2014: 3), the number of persons who will have access to the mobile Internet will rise to 3.8 billion — more than half of the world’s population — by 2020. The continued expansion of the English-language-based Internet to an ever wider global market will only accentuate the desirability, if not urgency, of learning the language.

Worries over the spread of English abound, chief among them the demise of language diversity and the potential dilution of local traditions. According to a UNESCO report on endangered languages, “A language disappears when its speakers disappear or when they shift to speaking another language — most often, a larger language used by a more powerful group” (UNESCO 2015). Over the next few decades, hundreds of languages are expected to disappear forever, and the rate of extinction is expected to accelerate (Baines 2012; Harrison 2007).

If, as prognosticated, the world begins moving to the Internet of Things and machines are networked so that they communicate with each other continually, then the operation of many aspects of our lives, “from streetlights to seaports,” would depend upon effective machine communication (Burrus 2014). It seems inevitable that the language of these powerful machines and the language acceptable to their human/machine interface will be some form of English. Kornai (2013: 10) writes:

What we are witnessing is not just a massive die-off of the world’s languages, it is the final act of the Neolithic Revolution, with the urban agriculturalists moving on to a different, digital plane of existence.

Herscovitch (2012) comments:

Nearly one-third of the world’s population is studying English, and it is predicted that by 2050, half of the world’s population will be largely proficient in it. Added to this, four of the six most populous countries in the world in 2050 (India, the United States, Nigeria and Pakistan) will have English as an official language.

The future of communications is the Internet and the language of the Internet is English. However, even English is changing, morphing into Leetspeak (a computerized English slang), Chinglish (Chinese and English), Spanglish (Spanish and English), Babu English (Bengali and English), and Sheng (Swahili and English). Language evolves to suit the purpose of the messenger. As the Internet removes the obstacle of distance and the rules for global conversation become increasingly standardized through English, the influence of geography on language will continue to weaken.

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