Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

128 Language Planning and Education
of transnational business networks, of education and of inter-ethnic communication
beyond the home – at least in Malaysia and Singapore. But indigenous, non-
European languages (Malay, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc.) remain the unmarked choice
for most in-group communication.
All this is not to say that there is no threat to indigenous local languages in former
exploitation colonies. On the contrary, ample evidence exists of ongoing language
loss in Africa, South-east Asia and areas of the Pacific (see Grenoble and Whaley
1998, Nettle and Romaine 2000). Here, however, language shift is not towards
English but to indigenous languages – some of which function as indigenous lingua
francas – Swahili in East Africa, Hausa in Nigeria, Lingala in Congo-Zaire, Wolof in
Senegal and Malay in Malaysia/Indonesia, for example. Moreover, with the increased
urbanisation of many African societies, and the concomitant proletarianisation of
significant numbers of people, many of these lingua francas are turning into urban
vernaculars with sufficient economic allure to induce some rural populations to shift
towards them and away from their ancestral languages.
Our conclusion, then, is that claims that former colonial languages, and English
in particular, are endangering indigenous languages around the world are insufficiently
nuanced. They have done so in former settlement colonies, but in the
different language contact ecologies of former exploitation colonies the shift tends
to be to other indigenous languages rather than English. The generalisation that
best accounts for this contrast is that English tends to undermine indigenous local
languages when it becomes a vernacular for a substantial segment of the population,
as it has in most settlement colonies. Where, on the other hand, it is not a vernacular
but a lingua franca, and a lingua franca for a minority at that, as appears to be the
case in most former exploitation colonies, there is little threat to indigenous
languages. As Mufwene (2002: 24) points out, ‘languages or dialects can be a threat
to each other only when they compete for the same functions. Languages … that
have separate communicative or social functions can coexist quite happily’. Thus far,
there is little evidence to suggest that English is competing for vernacular functions
with indigenous languages.
5.2.1.1 English as a lingua franca in Europe
Turning for a moment to Europe, where English has also been seen as a threat to
other languages – as ‘a kind of linguistic cuckoo, taking over where other breeds of
language have historically nested’ (Phillipson 2003: 4) – rather similar points can be
made. There is little evidence that English is undermining the standardised national
languages of European states, even the smaller ones (e.g. Norway). Certainly, it is
in competition for, and displacing, other languages – most notably French – from
lingua franca functions (see Wright 2004: 133), for example their roles in scientific
communication, and it increasingly dominates the foreign language curricula of
European schools and universities. But this does not mean that it poses a threat to
the survival of other European languages. Any such suggestion is implausible for the
following reasons: first, despite globalisation, most European states retain sufficient