Shared Language: Integration Through

Multilingualism , Tallinn 2019

English, Panacea or Pandemic

Robert Phillipson
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Handelshøjskolen i København, Danmark
Clarifying concepts, myths, agendas in language policy

pandemic
the disease is pandemic; widespread, prevalent,
pervasive, rife, rampant
panacea
cure for all ills, universal remedy, elixir,
wonder drug, informal magic bullet
Oxford Compact Thesaurus, 1997

English has been seen as one or the other

in countless contexts worldwide.
Joshua Fishman, founder of the sociology
of language, in 1976

Would English
‘continue to spread as a second language the
world over, as a benevolent bonus or creeping
cancer of modernity’?
Cited in Linguistic Imperialism, 1992
 Discourse advocating English is plagued by
invalid, unscholarly statements
When English is referred to as
•the lingua franca of Europe
•the global language
•the language of science
•a universal need
•etc etc.
these are instances of linguicist discourse.
Linguicism – societal discrimination by means of
language (like sexism, racism, classism) involving
unequal treatment of languages in resource allocation
and mistaken beliefs about languages.
 How can integration be through multilingualism?

• The Index of The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism

(2012), has no entry for integration.
• Nor are there entries for dictionaries, vocabulary, translation,
writing, neoliberalism, or hegemony (see my review of the
book in the TESOL Quarterly).
• The supranational integration that membership of the EU
entails is ‘integration through law’ (treaties, Lisbon
constitutional treaty, Eurolaw, court decisions of the
European Court of Justice, directives) through the medium of
24 languages, i.e. integration through multilingualism.
• The use made of the 24 languages is equal, parallel, for some
written and spoken purposes and unequal for others. In the
EU, some languages are more equal than others (Orwell).
Some languages are ‘shared’ more than others.
Examples of the expansion of English that have language policy
implications and may involve linguicism

• English learning ever earlier in schools

• at continental European universities, using English as the
medium of instruction and publication
• English-medium ‘international’ schools
• universities in ‘English-speaking countries’ remain
monolingual and monocultural, even if the student
intake is diverse
• US/UK/Australian university branch campuses in Asia
and the Middle East use same content & language
• British Council and corporate world are promoting
English-medium schools in basic education worldwide
 Impact of the expansion of English
on local and global integration

• Globalisation of multinational US & UK publishers

• Journals in English (& The Economist) are pre-eminent
• English as a/the primary corporate language
• English now the dominant in-house language in EU
institutions except the European Court of Justice
• NATO and US global military activity
• Hollywood, technologies of ‘social’ media, Amazon
• etc etc.
 Greta Thunberg
English for moral, humane purposes English as a foreign language
English for egocentric, ignoble purposes
English as a mother tongue
 How is English used, for what purposes?

There is nothing intrinsic to a language that can explain an

expansion - but there are lots of myths about ‘superior’
languages.
What is crucial is the purposes that a language serves, the
resources invested in it (in contrast with other languages),
beliefs about it, and the roles the languages perform.
English, like any other dominant language, can be used to
include or exclude.
All of these issues exist at the macro level (international
pressures), the meso level (institutional policies) and the
micro level (interpersonal interactions).
 English is studied ever earlier in schools in
continental Europe
• There is a concomitant contraction of the learning of
French, German, Russian, and other foreign languages.
Is there a policy for languages throughout schooling?

• Time for English may entail the marginalisation of

minority languages, local (autochtonous) and migrant.
For speakers of such languages this risks leading to
assimilation rather than integration.

Integration is bi-directional, a reciprocal process,

assimilation is uni-directional.
 Integration is characterised by voluntary additive
language ‘learning’ of other cultures.
Assimilation means being forcibly transferred to another
group, which can constitute cultural and linguistic
genocide.
A report commissioned by the (Inuit) Nunavut local
government in Canada, April 2019: Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove,
Robert Phillipson, & Robert Dunbar. Is Nunavut education
criminally inadequate? An analysis of current policies for Inuktut and
English in education, international and national law, linguistic and
cultural genocide and crimes against humanity.

Globalisation involves macro-level processes and

structures of assimilation and integration,
as does membership of the European Union.
 ‘an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’

Heading for a federation/federation?

Or merely inter-governmental?
The Lisbon Constitutional Treaty enshrines market forces,
which impact on language policy at supranational,
national, and sub-national levels.
Normand Labrie, La construction linguistique de la Communauté
Européenne. 1993
English-only Europe? Challenging language policy. 2003
La domination de l'anglais: un défi pour l'Europe. 2019.
The Economist 15/6/2019:
“Brexit is the ideal moment to make English
the EU’s common language”
 English undermining multilingualism?

• Translation and interpretation are for all 24 official

and working languages for important documents
(Eurolaw, directives etc.) and high-level meetings.
• English is the dominant in-house language for drafting
and conceptualising texts. This grants English a
privileged status de facto, but not de jure.
• French in the European Court of Justice is challenged
by English.
• EU multilingualism a reality for many purposes but in
many EU policies there is a linguicist privileging of
English (e.g. research applications).
 terra nullius
• a doctrine to justify European territorial
expansion in the Americas, Australasia, Africa
etc., the myth of unoccupied territory
• territorial, cultural and linguistic dispossession
• entailing ‘success’ for homo americanus (UK,
N America, South Africa, New Zealand, etc.)
and for the Chinese CCCP (Tibet, Uighur, …)
• failure for homo sovieticus (but minorities in
the Russian Federation are at risk)
 Globalisation as cultura nullius
• military, economic, cultural americanisation
• McDonaldisation (Ritzer 2011) in academia, the
business world, the media, advertising, lifestyles,
entertainment, clothing etc.; Régis Debray, Civilisation.
Comment nous sommes devenus américains
• neoliberal commodification principles become
internalised cultural norms
• consumerist capitalism is internalised as a necessity in
the modern world (Kayman 2004)
• transition from the cultural cold war (Saunders 1999) to
the technological cold war – Huawei vs. Apple
Winston Churchill on linguistic globalization,
Harvard lecture, 1943

The power to control language offers far

better prizes than taking away people’s
provinces or lands or grinding them down
in exploitation. The empires of the future
are the empires of the mind.
 Churchill’s five themes, macro level agendas,
from 1943 to the 21st century
• UK/US unity
(Brexit to unify the Anglosphere, Kenny & Pearce;
Johnson - the new Churchill?)
• military collaboration
• plans for global peace-keeping
• ensuring US/UK global dominance
• expanding English worldwide – a lingua nullius
global English – and global English teaching
– The use of English as a world language, 1934
– investment in 1930s and from 1950s onwards
– global professional service industry.
 global professional services
• consultancy firms, McKinsey, Accenture, …
• international banks, stock exchanges
• accountancy big four: Ernst and Young, KPMG, Deloitte, and
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
– active in 150 countries, with a staff of 890,000 people
– audit 97% of US public companies and all the UK’s top 100
corporations
• English language education
– teaching, testing, publishing, consultancies, conferences
– British Council offices/centres in 100 countries
– ‘international’ schools
– English-medium in universities and schools
 global professional services
• consultancy firms, McKinsey, Accenture, …
• international banks, stock exchanges
• accountancy big four: Ernst and Young, KPMG, Deloitte, and
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
– active in 150 countries, with a staff of 890,000 people
– audit 97% of US public companies and all the UK’s top 100
corporations
• English language education
– teaching, testing, publishing, consultancies, conferences
– British Council offices/centres in 100 countries
– ‘international’ schools
– English-medium in universities and schools
 At universities, more English as the medium of
instruction and publication
• Empirical questions at the meso level: is there
- a concomitant contraction of publication in other foreign
languages?
- a downgrading of national languages in academia?
- a canonisation of English as a/the hegemonic lingua academica?
- an explicit institutional language policy to counteract market
forces?
• Evidence from Scandinavia, Germany, France, …
• Bologna process has neglected language policy
• What are the pandemic or panacea symptoms and
consequences?
 English-medium ‘international’ schools

• Neglect the mother tongue of learners

• and local cultural history, societal needs?
• Syllabus and exams are from USA or UK
• Preparation for universities in USA & UK
There are 2 in Tallinn, and one ‘European’ school.
• English serves to integrate the young into the
neoliberal global economy (transnational elites?)
to detach them from local involvement and
challenges.
 How is academia faring in noliberal times?

• university autonomy and academic freedom are

severely constrained (Collini, Karran & Mallinson)
– universities as businesses
– soft power (a deceptive term) invariably has economic,
military, and political clout behind it
• in linguistics, applied linguistics, and language
pedagogy - a dominant US and UK influence
- strong non-British staff presence
- translanguaging? superdiversity? lingua franca?
lingua academica / economica / cultura / bellica …..
lingua frankensteinia?
 Evidence of academic linguistic diversity

A Cambridge research project identified on Google Scholar

75,513 scientific manuscripts on biodiversity conservation.
-English 48,600 (64.4%)
-Spanish 9,520
-Portuguese 7,800
-simplified Chinese 4,540
-French 2,290
Amano, Tatsuya, Juan P. GonzaÂlez-Varo, and William J. Sutherland (2016).
Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science. PLoS Biol 14(12):
e2000933. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2000933.

Add German, Japanese, Russian, Nordic languages, …

What about indigenous knowledge and cosmology transmission?
 English then and now
• English has functioned as an imperialist language on
several continents.
• Linguistic imperialism entails resources and ideologies,
push and pull factors, which can be investigated
empirically, at macro, meso, and micro levels.
• In continental Europe the way English is expanding
involves risks, but will avoid being either a panacea or a
pandemic if strong measures are in force to ensure
multilingualism.
• Studies of whether the expansion of English in the
Nordic countries represents a threat or not.
 Nordic government policy for universities:
the parallel use of English and Nordic languages
• that it be possible to use both the languages of the Nordic
countries essential to society and English as languages of
science
• that the presentation of scientific results in the languages
of the Nordic countries essential to society be rewarded
• that instruction in scientific technical language, especially
in written form, be given in both English and the
languages of the Nordic countries essential to society
• that universities, colleges, and other scientific institutions
can develop long-range strategies for the choice of
language, the parallel use of languages, language
instruction, and translation grants within their fields …
 Language policy in higher education
in five Nordic countries

More parallel, please! Best practice of parallel

language use at Nordic Universities: 11
recommendations
Nordic Council of Ministers 2018
 Recommendations (1)

1. All universities should have a language policy integrated with

its internationalization policy and that relates to national
language policy parameters and the role of the university locally.

2. All universities should have a language policy committee that

follows developments continually.

3. A language centre should, on the basis of research criteria,

elaborate courses in the local language of relevance for
‘international’ staff and students, and should ensure the quality
of such courses; it should also offer translation and language
revision services; it should develop digital resources.
 Recommendations (2)
4. International teaching and research staff should be instructed
in forms of parallel academic language use, and features of local
students’ dialogue; they should also be familiarised with the local
language of university administration; and progressively acquire
competence to function fully in the local language; this should be
stipulated in their employment contract.

5. There should be needs analysis in relation to study disciplines

and future employment for guest students and for foreign
students doing an entire degree; local students should be
instructed in the discourse of their academic field in their
language and in English, and ideally in additional languages.

6. Elaboration of a specialised needs analysis so as to achieve full

parallel competence.
 Recommendations (3)
7. Criteria for choice of the language(s) of instruction,
for lecturers’ language proficiency, reading material,
and specification of achievement in each language are
needed.
8. Principles for the language of university
administration.
9. Strategies for languages of publication.
10. Policies for research dissemination and
popularisation nationally and internationally.
11. Elaboration of relevant digital tools for staff and
students.
 Integration through multilingualism
For both national and international purposes
multilingualism is imperative.
Language policy needs to address the challenges at the
three levels, macro, meso, and micro.
It needs to be aware of the linguicist pressures behind
English. The mix of pandemic and panacea forces has
been disastrous for linguistic diversity in Denmark
(Phillipson in press).
The situation is fluid in many contexts, so sharing relevant
experience is why we are here for this important event.

Thank you/merci/vielen Dank/tack så mycket/tusind tak