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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.
112 Language Planning and Education 5.1.1 English in scientific publication: an indicator of language spread Up to the First World War, German was an international language of science of an importance equal to, or greater than, English, but thereafter entered into decline, an immediate trigger for which was its banishment post-war from international scientific conferences (Ammon 2001b). A more profound long-term cause, however, can be found in the expanding scientific research base of the United States, a resource left largely untouched by the destruction that the Second World War inflicted on the scientific communities of Germany and France, and enhanced by the immigration of important scientific figures, seeking refuge from the National Socialist regime. The Cold War stimulus to US scientific research, the development of computerbased technology and the resourcing of large, research-oriented universities all contributed to an expansion in the United States’ share of the world’s scientific research output, and in due course this precipitated a switch from German to English as the principal medium of scientific discourse in some of the smaller European countries. Haarman and Holman (2001: 231), for example, date the reorientation of Finnish scientific and academic life to English to the 1950s, highlighting the significance of academic exchange programmes initiated in 1953 that gave Finnish academics the opportunity to spend substantial periods researching and teaching at US universities. The more such switches to English occurred, 1 the more incentives grew for yet other researchers to read and publish in English, and so it is not difficult to see the expansion of English as a language of science as assuming a self-perpetuating dynamic of its own. The resulting current dominance of English as a language of science is well attested in statistics provided by Ammon (2003: 244), who – drawing on Anglo-Saxon bibliographic databases – shows that by 1995 English accounted for 87.2 per cent of publications in the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, mathematics) and for 82.5 per cent of publications in the social sciences (sociology, history, philosophy). A remarkable feature of this trend is the inroads English has made into the formerly strong and relatively self-sufficient German scientific research community. Graddol (1997: 9), for instance, produces data showing that as many as 76 per cent of German academics in the earth sciences claim English as their main working language. Comparable figures for physics, chemistry and biology are 98 per cent, 83 per cent and 81 per cent respectively. Ammon (2001b: 353) notes, meanwhile, how the microeconomics of journal publication have in several cases pushed German publishers into a change of language of publication and of journal title. The Angewandte Chemie journal, for example, has become Applied Chemistry, and now requires contributions in English, and the Psychologische Forschung has been retitled Psychological Research. The dominance of English in such an inherently international domain as science is significant in itself, but it also has wider side effects. For example, it furnishes governments with a strong motive for retaining a prominent place for English in school and university curricula, the rationale being straightforward: economic
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