Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 129
power to implement linguistic protectionist policies, reserving a privileged place for
national languages in many public domains (e.g. education, administration, etc.);
second, these languages index valued identities in a way that English as an instrumental
lingua franca cannot, and this reduces considerably the likelihood of any
wholesale shift to English.
But this does not, however, absolve English from all charges made by its critics, an
unanswered one being that, even if English does not ‘kill’ other languages, it relegates
them to a lesser role in an incipient global diglossia (Phillipson and Skuttnab-Kangas
1996: 446; Pennycook 2001: 58; Mühleisen 2003: 113), where indigenous languages
are left, in Pennycook’s words (2001: 57), as ‘static markers of identity’, as languages
of informal, less prestigious domains, with English in control of the high prestige
domains of higher education, scientific communication and transnational business.
Such points tend to be made most forcefully with respect to science, where English
is clearly the dominant language (Ammon 2001a), and to higher education, where
English plays an increasingly prominent role, most notably in such countries as
Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. The worry here is that this may lead
in due course to register atrophy; that is, an impoverishment of a language’s lexical
and stylistic resources in the scientific domain through underuse (see Gunnarsson
2001: 306), just as a limb withers if it is not exercised.
Other concerns, perhaps more serious and to which we return later, are that higher
education may become more isolated from the rest of society if it operates in a
foreign language, and that researchers from non-English countries are placed at a
significant communicative disadvantage relative to English native speakers when it
comes to placing their research before an international audience (Ammon 2001b,
2003).
For the moment, however, let us concentrate on the question of register atrophy,
and acknowledge Gunnarsson’s point. Though clearly not yet moribund as a
language of science, there is no guarantee that Swedish, and similar languages, will
not eventually become so, this being one of the potential costs of the hegemony of
English.
There are other authors, however, who take a more sanguine view. Writing in the
same volume, Haarman and Holman (2001) acknowledge the influence of English
on the structure of scientific Finnish but also argue that English has helped Finland
become a leading player in its advance toward a ‘network society’:
Finland’s decision to favour English as its primary vehicle for scientific research
has enabled the country, perhaps unexpectedly, to assume a major role, both
active and passive, in the process of globalisation. (Haarman and Holman 2001:
256)
Highlighted here are the opportunities English offers for transcending the limitations
of a small national community and for interacting on a wider stage to the
benefit of the economy and society. De Swaan (2001b: 74) observes, meanwhile, that
the large number of technical and semi-technical terms that some languages have
borrowed from English in no way threatens the integrity of those languages. As he