Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 119
up on that account as ultimately patronising. A third is that some accounts of how
hegemony operates tend to exaggerate the causal power of discourse. Pennycook
(1994), for example, influenced heavily by Foucault, is one commentator who
attributes considerable power to discourse, but in so doing underrates, as Holborow
(1999) suggests, the material conditions of power as a more pressing constraint on
individuals’ decisions to acquire or reject English.
This is not to deny the existence of hegemonic processes, nor that there are some
less than beneficent effects produced by the spread of English, as we shall see
presently. It is rather to invite a recalibration of the relative contributions of
hegemony and rational choice in favour of the latter, and to give weight to the role
played by perceived economic advantages in individual language learning decisions.
We shall return to this theme shortly, but first, to conclude this discussion of
linguistic imperialism as a theory of cause and agency, it seems opportune to mention
Fishman et al.’s volume (1996a), in which contributors from a range of former
British and United States colonies address empirically the question of whether
linguistic imperialism is operative in a given context, an investigation that Phillipson
(2000a: 93) himself has called for. Reflecting on the findings of the volume, Fishman
(1996b: 639) concludes that, while British colonial history and linguistic diversity
are among the significant correlates of degree of Anglification – as measured by the
degree of penetration of English into such domains as education, government,
commerce and print and broadcast media – the continuing spread of English is
driven by forces that are both indigenous and external to the countries surveyed:
the socioeconomic factors that are behind the spread of English are now indigenous
in most countries of the world and part and parcel of indigenous daily
life and social stratification … Economically unifying and homogenous corporate
and multinational forces are increasingly creating a single market into which all
societies – former colonial and non-colonial states alike – can be and, indeed, for
their own self-interests’ sake usually seek to be, integrated. (Fishman 1996b: 639)
Although Fishman is not very precise about the exact nature of these impersonal
forces, the evidence he summarises, added to the points made above and to Brutt-
Griffler’s (2002) historical evidence, tends to confirm that linguistic imperialism is
an overly simple, hence unsatisfactory, explanation for the ongoing spread of English
as a global lingua franca. An alternative is needed.
5.1.3 The spread of English: an alternative explanatory framework
Fortunately, in the work of de Swaan (1998, 2001a) there is an alternative framework
at hand, which, incomplete though it is, offers a more plausible, more satisfying
basis for understanding the spread of English as a global lingua franca. Among its
attractive features is that it locates English within a global language constellation,
which is itself an integral feature of an emergent global, transnational society. It
shows how a multiplicity of individual choices, when aggregated, produce language
spread or language shift at the macro-level; and, drawing on economic concepts