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Minority languages and language revitalisation 109 3. As late as 1972 Pompidou is reported to have declared: ‘Il n’y a pas de place pour les langues minoritaires dans une France destinée à marquer L’Europe de son sceau.’ [There is no place for regional languages in a France destined to make its mark in Europe]. (Cited in Temple 1994: 194) 4. France signed the Charter in 1999. 5. The state may grant minority language rights according to either a territorial or a personality principle. Under the territorial principle, the minority rights are only exercised within the defined territory of the minority language (as in Belgium). Under the personality principle, by contrast, language rights are more portable in that they attach to the individual speaker irrespective of his geographical location. There are fewer examples of states that grant rights on a personality principle, though Canada and Finland are sometimes cited here. 6. This is in fact a crucial point, and we shall return later to a discussion of the advantages/ disadvantages of the bilingual/multilingual solution, only noting here that much of the world’s population is fact individually bilingual or multilingual. Monolingualism is a relatively unusual condition worldwide. 7. The last proposition here draws attention to the potential of technology in language revitalisation. The Internet, for example, may help minority language speakers build up a ‘virtual community’, thereby partially overcoming the problems of geographical dispersion. Technology also creates possibilities for distance and on-line language learning. 8. An eisteddfod is a festival of Welsh music, song and poetry recitation. Mitchell (personal communication), recalling the situation in the 1940s when every small town had its local eisteddfod and every young person (including himself) competed, makes the point that the importance of eisteddfodau to the maintenance of Welsh should not be underrated. He draws attention also to the supportive role of the Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth). 9. It was in fact only a threat by Gwynfor Evans, former Plaid Cymru president, to fast to the death that finally convinced the London government to discharge its promise to establish a publicly funded Welsh-medium TV channel. 10. Davies, A. (personal communication) observes that the forceful promotion of Welsh could provoke a backlash from elements of the English-speaking Welsh population, especially if they felt disadvantaged in the labour market. 11. Jones (1998a: 305) provides a fascinating account of the Breton ‘orthography wars’. 12. A xenolect has been defined as ‘a foreignised variety spoken natively’, but not a creole since it has not undergone significant restructuring (Jones 1998a: 323 after Holm 1998).
Chapter 5 The global spread of English: cause, agency, effects and policy responses The global spread of English has been thoroughly documented in a range of wellknown publications: for example, those by Cheshire (1991), Crystal (1995, 1997), McArthur (1998), Graddol (1997) and Ammon (2001a). By now, therefore, the dominance of English as a global lingua franca, or ‘hypercentral language’ (de Swaan 2001a), is hardly disputed empirically, even by those most critical of this state of affairs such as Phillipson (1992, 2000a, 2003), Phillipson and Skuttnab-Kangas (1995, 1996, 1999), Pennycook (1994, 1995, 2001) and Tollefson (1991, 2002a). It would be uneconomical, therefore, to reiterate other than in the briefest manner the statistical and factual basis for the claims made to global dominance. Instead, our main focus is on the causes, effects and implications of the global spread of English and how these have been variously interpreted, bearing in mind Spolsky’s observation (2004: 91) that ‘English as a global language is now a factor that needs to be taken into account in its language policy by any nation state’. In the present chapter, then, we focus on the socio-political and ideological dimensions of English spread, paying attention to implications for English language teaching. It need hardly be said that the implications of the global dominance of English for social justice, equality within and between nations, linguistic and cultural diversity and economic development are complex and contested. It may be helpful, therefore, to consider the debate over cause and agency in the spread of English before moving on to an examination of the various effects of the dominance of English. 5.1 CAUSE AND AGENCY IN THE GLOBAL SPREAD OF ENGLISH It is widely accepted, with good reason, that the spread and decline of languages is causally linked to the power and the fortunes of their speakers rather than to any properties of the language code. Standard explanations of the spread of English have, therefore, emphasised firstly the role of the British empire and secondly the growing economic, military and political dominance of the United States in the later twentieth century as key factors (Crystal 1997; Graddol 1997). The British colonial empire is seen as creating the necessary initial conditions
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