Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 113
prosperity requires a strong research infrastructure, and this means a significant cadre
of persons with the language skills to access English language scientific publications.
This, no doubt, is one of the reasons for the entrenchment of English in so many
education systems worldwide.
5.1.2 Linguistic imperialism as an explanation of spread
Thus far, the picture presented is unexceptional and does not depart from the widely
accepted view (see Crystal 1995, 1997; Graddol 1997) that the historical context of
the global spread of English is one where the legacy of empire is supplemented and
reinforced by the rise in the twentieth century of the United States as a world power.
However, as one seeks to effect a conceptual transition from the abstractions of
power to actual decisions to acquire English, and as one enquires more closely into
the precise agencies of spread, one enters more contested terrain.
One influential view that has strongly shaped academic discussion in this area over
the past decade and which, therefore, we need to discuss, is that of Phillipson, who
in a series of publications since 1992 (e.g. 1997, 2000, 2003) has proposed that the
diffusion of English has been, and still is, substantially orchestrated, facilitated and
led by what he refers to as the Centre; that is, the United States and Britain, whose
commercial and political interests such diffusion serves.
In the core chapters of his 1992 book (chapters 5 and 6), Phillipson implicates a
variety of agencies in the promotion and spread of English. These include the British
colonial authorities, and in the post-colonial era the British Council, the British
Foreign Office, the United States Information Agency, the Agency for International
Development, the Ford Foundation, the State Department, complicitous local elites
and – not least – the TESOL/ELT profession. And to bolster his claims of orchestration
and promotion Phillipson adduces a version of the ‘cui bono’ argument (see
Spolsky 2004: 79); that is, if we wish to know who is responsible for a situation, we
should ask who benefits. Phillipson’s answer is clear: it is the Centre, with English
serving as one of the key vehicles for maintaining its dominance and perpetuating
the dependence of the ‘Periphery’.
This thesis of linguistic imperialism, as propounded by Phillipson, encompasses
effects as well as causes – the alleged adverse impact of global English on other
languages, for example – but, as it is most centrally and coherently a theory of cause
and agency, it is from this angle that we make our first approach.
5.1.2.1 Critiquing linguistic imperialism
An initial point is that the coherence of linguistic imperialism as a causal hypothesis
requires us to identify it as a distinct form of imperialism, distinguishable from but
complementary to imperialism in general, and one which has conscious, coordinated
efforts to diffuse English at its core. Otherwise it risks redundancy, for the spread of
English could be viewed as a side effect, or epiphenomenon, of the power relations
of colonialism. The very assumptions of the hypothesis, in other words, oblige us to