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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
120 Language Planning and Education embedded in a sociological framework, it also elucidates the factors that predispose individuals to acquire one language rather than another. Let us turn to a brief exposition. 5.1.3.1 The global language system This is, in de Swaan’s (2001a: 25) view, a hierarchical, coherent, ‘strongly ordered’ system held together by individual plurilingual speakers. At the base of the hierarchy are the majority of the world’s languages, most of which are unwritten, remaining languages of memory and narration rather than record. The speakers of these ‘peripheral’ languages, as de Swaan (2001a: 4) calls them, tend to communicate with other peripheral groups through a common second language, which, because it plays this linking role, and is often official at a national or regional level, is termed a ‘central’ language. De Swaan (2001a) estimates that there may be around a hundred central languages spoken by 95 per cent of the world’s population. At the next higher level of the hierarchy are around twelve ‘supercentral’ languages, each of which – with the exception of Swahili – has a hundred million speakers or more: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili. These are supercentral not just because they play important roles in administration, commerce and education within their respective spheres of influence, but because they link plurilingual speakers of a series of central languages both with each other and with the native speakers of the supercentral language. Thus, Malay (Bahasa Indonesia) is supercentral for the Indonesian language constellation because, among other things, it links plurilingual speakers of various Indonesian languages. For similar reasons French is supercentral in a constellation covering much of West and North Africa. The convergence of plurilingual speakers of a variety of central languages on a supercentral language, acquired as a second language, is explained, de Swaan (2001a), argues, by a centripetal, upward tendency in language learning; that is, people usually prefer to learn a language at a higher level in the global hierarchy than one at the same or a lower level. At the apex, finally, of the hierarchy is English, the hub of the world language system and the sole ‘hypercentral’ language that connects the speakers of the supercentral languages with one another. De Swaan’s account of the global language system is underspecified in some respects. It is unclear, for instance, where the boundaries of regional language constellations lie, or how exactly in an age of putative globalisation they may be drawn. The same language can, it seems, appear at different levels in the hierarchy: English, for example, is hypercentral in the world system, but also supercentral in relation to its own constellation. And French too is supercentral in relation to West and North Africa, but also central with respect to the regional languages of France. It would appear the hierarchy has two levels in Europe and three levels in the more multilingual states of Africa and Asia. Finally, one might also ask why Russian is identified as a current supercentral language: it may once have been with respect to
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vi Contents 5 The global spread of
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