What makes a global language?

By David Crystal

Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people
who speak it. It is much more to do with who those speakers are. Latin became an
international language throughout the Roman Empire, but this was not because the
Romans were more numerous than the peoples they subjugated. They were simply
more powerful. And later, when Roman military power declined, Latin remained for a
millennium as the international language of education, thanks to a different sort of
power – the ecclesiastical power of Roman Catholicism.

There is the closest of links between language dominance and economic,

technological, and cultural power, too, and this relationship will become increasingly
clear as the history of English is told. Without a strong power-base, of whatever kind,
no language can make progress as an international medium of communication.
Language has no independent existence, living in some sort of mystical space apart
from the people who speak it. Language exists only in the brains and mouths and ears
and hands and eyes of its users. When they succeed, on the international stage, their
language succeeds. When they fail, their language fails.

This point may seem obvious, but it needs to be made at the outset, because over the
years many popular and misleading beliefs have grown up about why a language
should become internationally successful. It is quite common to hear people claim that
a language is a paragon, on account of its perceived aesthetic qualities, clarity of
expression, literary power, or religious standing. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and
French are among those which at various times have been lauded in such terms, and
English is no exception. It is often suggested, for example, that there must be
something inherently beautiful or logical about the structure of English, in order to
explain why it is now so widely used. ‘It has less grammar than other languages’, some
have suggested. ‘English doesn’t have a lot of endings on its words, nor do we have to
remember the difference between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, so it must
be easier to learn’. In 1848, a reviewer in the British periodical The Athenaeum wrote:

In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflection, in its almost total
disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and
precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs, not less than in the majesty, vigour and
copiousness of its expression, our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization
to become the language of the world.

Such arguments are misconceived. Latin was once a major international language,
despite its many inflectional endings and gender differences. French, too, has been
such a language, despite its nouns being masculine or feminine; and so – at different
times and places – have the heavily inflected Greek, Arabic, Spanish and Russian.
Ease of learning has nothing to do with it. Children of all cultures learn to talk over
more or less the same period of time, regardless of the differences in the grammar of
their languages.
And as for the notion that English has ‘no grammar’ – a claim that is risible to anyone
who has ever had to learn it as a foreign language – the point can be dismissed by a
glance at any of the large twentieth-century reference grammars. The Comprehensive
grammar of the English language, for example, contains 1,800 pages and some 3,500
points requiring grammatical exposition1.

This is not to deny that a language may have certain properties which make it
internationally appealing. For example, learners sometimes comment on the ‘familiarity’
of English vocabulary, deriving from the way English has over the centuries borrowed
thousands of new words from the languages with which it has been in contact. The
‘welcome’ given to foreign vocabulary places English in contrast to some languages
(notably, French) which have tried to keep it out, and gives it a cosmopolitan character
which many see as an advantage for a global language.

From a lexical point of view, English is in fact far more a Romance than a Germanic
language. And there have been comments made about other structural aspects, too,
such as the absence in English grammar of a system of coding social class differences,
which can make the language appear more ‘democratic’ to those who speak a
language (e.g. Javanese) that does express an intricate system of class relationships.
But these supposed traits of appeal are incidental, and need to be weighed against
linguistic features which would seem to be internationally much less desirable –
notably, in the case of English, the accumulated irregularities of its spelling system.

A language does not become a global language because of its intrinsic structural
properties, or because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been a vehicle of
a great literature in the past, or because it was once associated with a great culture or
religion. These are all factors which can motivate someone to learn a language, of
course, but none of them alone, or in combination, can ensure a language’s world
spread. Indeed, such factors cannot even guarantee survival as a living language – as
is clear from the case of Latin, learned today as a classical language by only a
scholarly and religious few. Correspondingly, inconvenient structural properties (such
as awkward spelling) do not stop a language achieving international status either.

A language has traditionally become an international language for one chief reason:
the power of its people – especially their political and military power. The explanation is
the same throughout history. Why did Greek become a language of international
communication in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago? Not because of the intellects
of Plato and Aristotle: the answer lies in the swords and spears wielded by the armies
of Alexander the Great. Why did Latin become known throughout Europe? Ask the
legions of the Roman Empire. Why did Arabic come to be spoken so widely across
northern Africa and the Middle East? Follow the spread of Islam, carried along by the
force of the Moorish armies from the eighth century. Why did Spanish, Portuguese, and
French find their way into the Americas, Africa and the Far East? Study the colonial
policies of the Renaissance kings and queens, and the way these policies were
ruthlessly implemented by armies and navies all over the known world. The history of a

1
Largely points to do with syntax, of course, rather than the morphological emphasis which is
what many people, brought up in the Latinate tradition, think grammar to be about. The figure of
3,500 is derived from the index which I compiled for Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik
(1985), excluding entries which related solely to lexical items.
global language can be traced through the successful expeditions of its soldier/sailor
speakers. And English has been no exception.

But international language dominance is not solely the result of military might. It may
take a militarily powerful nation to establish a language, but it takes an economically
powerful one to maintain and expand it. This has always been the case, but it became
a particularly critical factor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with economic
developments beginning to operate on a global scale, supported by the new
communication technologies – telegraph, telephone, radio – and fostering the
emergence of massive multinational organizations. The growth of competitive industry
and business brought an explosion of international marketing and advertising. The
power of the press reached unprecedented levels, soon to be surpassed by the
broadcasting media, with their ability to cross national boundaries with electromagnetic
ease. Technology, chiefly in the form of movies and records, fuelled new mass
entertainment industries which had a worldwide impact. The drive to make progress in
science and technology fostered an international intellectual and research environment
which gave scholarship and further education a high profile.

Any language at the centre of such an explosion of international activity would

suddenly have found itself with a global status. And English, as we shall see in
chapters 3 and 4, was apparently ‘in the right place at the right time’ (p. 78). By the
beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the world’s leading industrial
and trading country. By the end of the century, the population of the USA (then
approaching 100 million) was larger than that of any of the countries of western
Europe, and its economy was the most productive and the fastest growing in the world.
British political imperialism had sent English around the globe, during the nineteenth
century, so that it was a language ‘on which the sun never sets’2.

During the twentieth century, this world presence was maintained and promoted almost
single-handedly through the economic supremacy of the new American superpower.
Economics replaced politics as the chief driving force. And the language behind the US
dollar was English.

(Taken from the book English as a global language)

2
An expression adapted from the nineteenth-century aphorism about the extent of the British
Empire. It continued to be used in the twentieth century, for example by Randolph Quirk (1985:
1).