Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 111
for the emergence of English as a global language in two main ways: firstly, through
the export of speakers to territories in Australasia and North America, where they
established permanent settlements and subjugated indigenous populations, forming
in due course new communities of native speakers; and secondly, through the
colonisation of territories in Asia, Africa and Oceania, where indigenous populations
– or at least an elite sector of them – learnt English not so much because they were
compelled but mainly because they perceived its acquisition as socially and
economically advantageous. In so doing, they became bilingual speakers of English,
maintaining the use of indigenous languages in informal domains but resorting to
English for inter-ethnic and for public, more formal communication. This Brutt-
Griffler (2002: 138) refers to as spread by ‘macro-acquisition’, in contrast with the
former process which she terms ‘spread by speaker migration’.
Since the formal end of British rule in the non-settler colonies, English has largely
maintained, and in some cases actually extended, its range of societal uses (see
Fishman et al. 1996a). In part this is attributable to country-internal factors (see
Chapter 7), but account must also be taken of external pressures, specifically the
second major factor in the spread of English, the rise of the United States to a
position of global dominance – economically, militarily and politically – in the
twentieth century. Recent indicators show, for instance that the United States is
comfortably the largest economy in the world with a GDP of some $10,383 billion
(constituting 36 per cent of the OECD countries’ economic output), roughly three
times the size of the next largest economy, that of Japan (OECD 2003). Its share of
the world’s military expenditure, at 43 per cent, is many times larger than the next
largest spender (SIPRI 2003).
Other indicators tell a similar tale: the scientific research output of the United
States substantially exceeds that of any other single nation, while the country
headquarters some of the world’s best known, and iconic, multinational corporations
(e.g. McDonald’s, Microsoft, Time Warner, Disney, AT&T). It has substantial voting
influence in the agencies of global financial governance established at the end of the
Second World War – the IMF and the World Bank, for example – and, armed with
this influence, it has been able to steer IMF policy towards its favoured nostrums of
market liberalisation, privatisation and fiscal austerity, the central pillars of the neoliberal
‘Washington consensus’ that so informed unsuccessful agency support to
developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s (see Stiglitz 2002).
There is no shortage of evidence, then, for American economic and political
influence, and it seems reasonable therefore to assent to the linkage Graddol (1997),
Crystal (1997) and Phillipson (2003) propose between the dominance of the United
States and the increased use of English not only in former colonies but as an
international lingua franca in countries where there was no British colonial presence
– in Europe, for example. Some of these accounts, however, leave opaque the precise
mechanisms by which power is transmuted into the increased use of English, and this
is a matter we shall return to. In the meantime, it may be useful to exemplify the
impact of US influence by referring, albeit briefly, to an important domain that
English has come to dominate – scientific publication.