The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics Christian Mair The paper argues that, in view of the current boom in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and related developments of globalisation, research on English as a World Language should pay more attention to economic factors. Sociolinguistic models of postcolonial English which emphasise speakers’ desires to express new local identities as the driving force behind the ongoing differentiation of English remain valid, but should be refined through engaging with work on the political economy of language and language planning. The potential benefits of such dialogue across disciplinary boundaries are illustrated in two brief case studies on English in India and in sub-Saharan Africa (where the focus is on recent realignments in the traditional English and French zones of linguistic influence). The paper concludes that establishing English as the global lingua franca for a multilingual world and for multilingual speakers makes economic and political sense for the 21 st century world. Multilingualism of the ‘English Plus X’ type should also be embraced by global citizens whose native language is English. Alas, what decides is not the right of human beings to speak whatever language they wish, but the freedom of everyone else to ignore what one says in the language of one's choice. (de Swaan 2010: 65) 1. Introduction The motto introducing the present paper was chosen because it is a provocation. On the one hand, it formulates an obvious truth. In the end, we go for the language that gets us the widest communicative reach, the greatest gains in financial and cultural capital, and the best reputation. This ex- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0001 Christian Mair 16 plains why retiring German professors of Romance Studies working on Portuguese literature may continue publishing their findings in German and, perhaps, Portuguese. It also explains why their up-and-coming younger colleagues, who have their eyes on the future rather than the past, are thinking about adding English-language publications to their list (see Eichinger 2014 for empirical and theoretical support for this illustrative anecdote). On the other hand, the motto is irritating. After all, the situation it describes is - oh! - so unfair. Why should young German Romanisten have to struggle to express themselves in a language in which they may not be able to fully express what they want? Or spend money on language classes or translation services that native speakers can use to pay for their vacation? The paper will argue that linguists working on World Englishes are, perhaps, paying a little too much attention to culture and identity and, perhaps, not enough to the relation between languages and money in the global economy. This is advice that I first formulated in a different and more narrow context in Mair (2014). Many of my readers may still view it with reservations today, but I can assure them that there will be some reward at the end. They will learn that multilingualism makes good business sense even in the 21 st century and that we should therefore ‘domesticate’ global English for a multilingual and culturally diverse world. The structure and function of ‘global English’ is a research topic that has become too big for linguistics. This assertion is not intended to cast doubt on the value of the vast body of research on varieties of English around the world that has been carried out in English linguistics and in general linguistics. On the contrary, I am convinced that academic and public debates on the role of English in the world today would gain in depth if they incorporated basic linguistic insights into how grammar works or how prestige and stigma are assigned to accents and dialects. On the other hand, when it comes to accounting for the full complexity of a global language, (socio)linguistic approaches have much to gain from insights on language and communication achieved in other disciplines - cultural studies, history, political science, sociology, the law and economics, to mention just the most important ones. At the very least, looking at one’s object of study from the vantage point of other disciplines will add a fresh perspective, widen horizons and lead to a more balanced and comprehensive analysis. To use the case of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as an illustration: In our standard sociolinguistic models of World Englishes, such as Kachru’s ‘Three Circles of English’ (1982, 1992) and Schneider’s Dynamic Model (2007), the focus is still clearly on natively spoken (ENL) and postcolonial second-language (ESL) varieties. 1 ELF remains on the margins even in a very recent model developed in this research tradition, the Intraterritorial/ Extraterritorial Forces 1 This is the general picture, with exceptions proving the rule. Thus, Ostler (2010) uses “Lingua Franca Present” as the title of his chapter on the late 20 th early 21 st The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 17 Model proposed by Buschfeld and Kautzsch (2021). It explicitly addresses ‘non-postcolonial’ Englishes, but largely continues to do so in the EFL terms of Kachru’s ‘Expanding Circle.’ By contrast, lingua-franca uses of English (ELF) occupy prominent positions in analyses of global English produced by scholars in history (Northrup 2013) and the law (Salomone 2022). On the level of empirical facts, it is self-evident that it is ELF use that has promoted English from one of several competing world languages to the single global language that it is today. This development has come about rapidly and in such an unspectacular fashion that we need to remind ourselves that this privileged position of a single language is a world-historical first: “explaining how English became the first global language is an exercise in world history” (Northrup 2013: 1). The current “World Language System” (de Swaan 2002, 2010, 2020) that is organised around a single global hub has not come about because the number of native speakers of English has increased (though it has), nor because the number of second-language proficient users has increased (though it has, at an even faster rate), but because ELF use has exploded, both in the ‘Anglo’ postcolonial sphere and in the world at large. As EFL uses have become key to the present status and future development of the global ‘English Language Complex’ (ECL), 2 they deserve attention also in sociolinguistic models of English. In that way, much needed (socio-)linguistic expertise could be brought to bear on the study of some of the most dynamic linguistic developments involving English today, such as the rapid establishment of official English (mainly at the expense of Afrikaans) in Namibia (Buschfeld and Kautzsch 2014, Schröder 2020, Stell 2014), the competition between Russian and English as lingua francas in the post-Soviet states (Northrup 2013, Proshina 2014), or the management of English in the global call centre industry (e.g. Hultgren 2011, Bolton 2016). Needless to say, this latest chapter in the rise of English must not be framed as a grand narrative of Anglo triumph, but as a story that casts English as the global language for a multilingual world, thus raising awareness that spread of English comes with gains and losses and that communities throughout the world need to negotiate the right place for English in their multilingual ecologies. century manifestation of English as a World Language. Also compare Mauranen (2018), a programmatic call for closer cooperation between research on second-language acquisition, ELF and World Englishes. 2 This designation, coined by McArthur (2003) and taken up in Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008) and Mair (2013), is felicitous because it captures the insight that English continues to be a language like all others in vernacular usage, especially in ENL contexts, but has come to occupy a unique and privileged position among the world’s languages as the global lingua franca. Christian Mair 18 2. Putting ELF into World Englishes models Parallels between the interference-caused L1 learner errors of EFL varieties and the contact-induced emerging features of ESL varieties have long been pointed out in the World Englishes literature (cf., e.g. Williams 1987, Hundt and Mukherjee, eds. 2011). EFL (but not ELF) was explicitly incorporated into the probably most successful early model of World Englishes, Kachru’s (1982, 1992) ‘Three Circles’ of English. The focus of this model was on the native-speaker varieties (ENL) of the ‘Inner Circle’ and the emerging second-language standards (ESL) of the ‘Outer Circle’. With an element of almost prophetic foresight, Kachru placed both these circles in the wider context of a less well defined ‘Expanding Circle’ of EFL. In hindsight, the term EFL, with its resonances of the traditional foreign-language classroom, has become something of a misnomer. It does not even come close to capturing the dynamics of the fluid EFL-to-ELF continua that we encounter, for example, in the European Union (after Brexit! ), in the United Arab Emirates (where they co-exist with equally fluid ESL-to-ELF and ENLto-ELF continua), or in parts of the African continent, such as the Maghreb or Rwanda, where English has made recent inroads into traditionally francophone countries (Salomone 2022, particularly Chapter 6, “The ‘New Scramble’ for Africa”). As long as the focus remains on ENL and ESL varieties, the story of English as a World Language is one of emancipation, with a growing number of postcolonial nation states creating and embracing their own varieties of English in response to political and cultural decolonisation - a movement that started in the ‘Inner Circle’ settler colonies, but subsequently also affected the ESL Empire of the ‘Outer Circle.’ As Schneider (2007) argues, ENL and ESL varieties move along the same path of development, though not at the same time and at the same speed, making present-day English into a highly pluricentric constellation. ELF uses of English cannot easily be incorporated into this narrative of emancipation, in which new-dialect formation is assumed to reflect communities’ new postcolonial identities. ELF is not primarily about identification, but about successful communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries, about widening one’s communicative range (see Meierkord 2012). This is where the economic factor comes in - not only in the established sense of linguistic economy as communicative efficiency, but in the metaphorical sense of a linguistic and communicative market (Bourdieu 1980) in which we can study how financial buying power converts into cultural prestige and how languages, dialects and communicative styles are priced and costed. The parallels between the transnational flows of financial capital and linguistic resources become eerily literal for international travellers who start wondering at the diverse, but always limited range of languages that the automatic teller The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 19 machines ‘speak’ which they use for cash withdrawals. 3 A similar, if far more complex interface between technology, the economy and multilingualism is, of course, presented by the World Wide Web. Here, early fears that this new medium might become an English-dominated linguistic mono-culture have proved to be unfounded. On the other hand, the highly selective multilingualism that has emerged shows that the digital marketplace is even more competitive and more biassed against smaller languages than communicaton on the ground (Dor 2004, Danet and Herring, eds. 2007, Mair 2020). 4 3. The price and cost of English, literally Table 1 represents the very uneven distribution of the roughly 7,000 languages still spoken today over the world’s population: Number of languages with more than X native speakers Percentage of world’s languages Percentage of global population covered X > 100 million 9 0.1 40.4 X = 10 million to 100 million c. 80 1.1 39.0 X = 1 million to 10 million c. 300 4.3 14.8 X = 100,000 to 1 million c. 950 13.6 4.7 X < 100,000 c. 5,660 80.9 1.1 Table 1: Distribution of the world’s languages across the global population (figures adapted from www.ethnologue.com) In the order of number of native speakers, the nine top languages are Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian and Japanese. There is no reason to doubt that the around 90 languages in the top two categories will continue to thrive throughout the 21 st century. The future of many of the languages in the one-to-ten million range is safe too, although there are moderate concerns for some of them. Severe concerns exist for many of the languages with less than a million native speakers at 3 I owe this observation to Prof. Akinmade Akande, Awolowo Obafemi University, Ile- Ife, Nigeria, who has documented the recent additon of Nigerian Pidgin to the languages used for this purpose by the country’s banking sector. 4 Again the exception proves the rule. Digital communication in social media has been a liberating force when it comes to writing dialects and other nonstandard varieties. Also, politically conscious and technologically competent language activists have used the Web successfully to help maintain endangered languages. Christian Mair 20 present, especially those that - unlike Icelandic - are not supported by official status, a writing system, a long literary tradition, and significant media presence. Figure 1 presents similarly drastic asymmetries in the global distribution of wealth (Routley 2018, based on research by Credit Suisse and Forbes magazine): Figure 1: The uneven distribution of global wealth in 2018. As can be seen, 0.7 per cent of the world’s population are dollar millionaires and together control almost 46 per cent of the world’s wealth. At the other end of the scale, more than two thirds of the world’s population have less than 10,000 dollars at their disposal and thus control a mere 2.7 per The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 21 cent of the world’s wealth. While economists, at the World Economic Forum or elsewhere, are usually not concerned with millionaires’ native languages, it seems plausible to assume that most of them speak languages that are listed in the top two tiers in Table 1, if only for reasons of statistical probability. But what if the ‘buying power’ of languages reveals differences beyond the demographic weight of their speakers? If that were the case, it would definitely be interesting to find out in what ways English follows the money, and in what other ways, perhaps, the money follows English. These are questions that have been asked before, but usually in highly specific contexts. Almost half a century ago, François Grin started investigating how English-language skills paid off for employees in the multilingual Swiss labour market (e.g. Grin 2001) and thus proved a pioneer bridgebuilder between economics and linguistics. Since the turn of the millennium, the economics of language (and language policy and planning) has been taking shape as a definable interdisciplinary domain of enquiry, as is shown by several handbooks (e.g. Ginsburgh and Weber, eds. 2016, Gazzola and Wickström, eds. 2016). It seems that, at least in the early stages, with the exception of a pioneering monograph by Coulmas (1991), economists and political scientists were more active than linguists in bringing about a rapprochement between the two fields. This bias has definitely been redressed by Vigouroux and Mufwene’s (eds. 2020) Bridging Linguistics and Economics, a clearly linguist-led initiative, as is evident, for example, in its conscious inclusion of indigenous and nonstandard lingua francas alongside standard languages. An economic concept that was adopted early and eagerly in the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010, Coupland, ed. 2010) is the commodification of language, communication and identity (Heller 2003, Cameron 2012). These are notions that have direct appeal for economists, political scientists and lawyers. Consider how Rosemary Salomone defines 21 st century English at the outset of her study The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, a magisterial tour d’horizon of almost 500 pages that provided the immediate inspiration to write the present paper: English is no longer solely a language for ethnic or national identification as languages are conventionally considered. For better or for worse, it is an economic skill, a marketable commodity and a form of cultural capital. English is the most marketable language in today’s globalized economy. It is more sought after than any conventional commodity in the market, pervading the entire range of social and business relations in which it is used and discussed. It implicates accent, register, and levels of native fluency, which all carry economic value as markers of social class and educational background. It is the language of global communication, both driving the knowledge economy and gaining from it. (2022: 8-9) Christian Mair 22 The reference to “accent, register, and levels of native fluency” is welcome because it highlights a major potential gap in current economic-political approaches to English as a global language, namely lack of expertise in the fine-grained analysis of language at the levels of structure and interaction in discourse, which practitioners are usually aware of themselves: Accepting a naïve conceptualization of English as a monolithic entity putting everyone on the same footing is risky because we cannot disregard the practical relevance of the sociolinguistic concept of linguistic variety. For example, being a rich native British speaker abroad, say, in Spain, cannot be viewed as equivalent to being a poor African-born speaker of English who migrated to that country. Speaking English as such therefore does not mean all that much if we do not clarify who speaks this language with which accent and where. (Gazzola and Wickström 2016: 13-14; see also May 2016) If this is not an invitation for the World Englishes research community to enter into a more intensive dialogue with economists than many of them seem to be inclined to doing, what is? But to return to the main point. It is the ‘Promise of English’ sketched by Salomone that, in slightly adapted local variants, is at the heart of the language’s current attraction world-wide. Unfortunately, like economic markets, communicative markets may be efficient, but that does not necessarily make them free or fair. Access to English, especially to high-status expensive varieties of the language, is restricted for many, because their money only pays for the cheap version. This is not theoretical analysis, but lived experience for hundreds of millions of people all over the world, as the following extract from a focus-group interview with two Nigerians and two Cameroonians resident in Germany shows. Speaker 1 is male and in his thirties (see Mair 2022 for more information on the data and the project in the frame of which it was collected): Speaker 1: my point is that the kids they need to understand the correct English the Pidgin they will learn the Pidgin but you as a parent speaking with them the teenage the teenage you have to speak with them with correct English Speaker 2: uhm Speaker 1: because you are paying because you are paying for the English […] like the school that I attended in Nigeria […] The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 23 let me use Euro there is a school of two thousand Euros and there is school of hundred Euros the school of hundred Euros you can't expect them to speak the good English with your with your kids […] the teacher the teacher there in the school of hundred Euros they are secondary school drop-outs […] there is school of two thousand Euro the student the teacher there they are graduate they speak English with your kids everything but when they go outside they can learn the broken English but when they go back to the home English must be spoken For better or worse, the global Promise of English has come to regulate language use in this family. The task of the sociolinguist is to study to what extent the conflicting pulls of covert and overt prestige, of solidarity and power, or - to use Duchêne and Heller’s (2003) terms - pride versus profit help or hinder the implementation of the language policy. Another illustration of the Promise of English is provided by the following advertisement for a private language school in India: Figure 2: Advertisement, private language school - Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh, 2009 (photo: Dr. Andreas Sedlatschek). Christian Mair 24 This is clearly not the 19 th century promise of English in India, which was about cultural assimilation and limited upward mobility within the colonial system. It is about English as the supposed key to economic advancement, participation in a modern consumer lifestyle, self-realisation, personal autonomy, and unrestricted mobility. Millions of Indians have bought into the new version of the promise. They have created a booming market for private language instruction and education, and they have often been shortchanged. Fraudulent business with English has apparently become a social scandal to the extent that Outlook, one of India’s major weekly news magazines, devoted the entire cover of its 24 March 2008 issue to what it referred to as the “Torment of English: ” Figure 3: “Torment of English,” Outlook, 24 March 2008. This is very different from the torment of English experienced by Mahatma Gandhi in an earlier age, who was thoroughly convinced of - to put it in his own words - the “evil wrought by the English medium.” Nevertheless, he had to use the language of the coloniser in his struggle for freedom, and hence ended up with a sense of alienation, guilt and betrayal: Is it not a painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium; [...] and that someone else should have to The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 25 translate to me from my own language? [...] Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we, the English-knowing men, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the nation but upon us. (Gandhi 1958, quoted in Bailey 1992: 144) As we know, independent India has not developed along the lines envisaged by Gandhi, into a secular, economically and culturally self-sufficient state with Hindi as its national language. Instead, English has sunk deeper roots in the country than it had before independence. Whatever desire there may have been to get rid of the language of the coloniser, it was overridden by a new and much more powerful Promise of English. Although the focus of the present paper is on the economy of English, one other discipline deserves at least a mention, if only because it is the closest disciplinary neighbour in the working lives of most researchers working on English linguistics in continental European English Departments, namely English literature and (postcolonial) cultural studies. Indeed, it is not hard to find recent Indian fiction in which the Promise of English plays a major role. A particularly striking example is Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). This darkly satirical novel is narrated in the voice of the protagonist, a poor rickshaw-driver’s son who rises to become a wealthy business mogul and powerful stringpuller in Bangalore’s booming IT industry, and it is a literary critique of globalisation unleashed in contemporary India. Not surprisingly, the call centre, one of the new sites for linguistic fieldwork in India, also figures in this novel, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist when he is still an illiterate ‘countrymouse’: ‘This building - the one they call a mall - the one with the posters of women hanging on it - it’s for shopping, right? ‘Right.’ ‘And that’ - I pointed to a shiny glass building to our left - ‘is that also a mall? I don’t see any posters of women hanging on it.’ ‘That’s not a mall, Country-Mouse. That’s an office building. They make calls from there to America.’ ‘What kind of calls? ’ ‘I don’t know. My master’s daughter works in one of those buildings too. I drop her off at eight o’clock and she comes back at two in the morning. I know she makes pots and pots of money in that building, because she spends it all day in the malls.’ He leaned close - the pink lips were just centimetres from mine. ‘Between the two of us, I think it’s rather odd - girls going into buildings late at night and coming out with so much cash in the morning.’ (2008: 127-128) The bright and gifted boy’s one ambition is to escape from destitution, custom, tradition and the fold of his extended family. Over the course of a very turbulent sequence of events, he achieves his aims, mainly by using Christian Mair 26 his wits to turn the corruption that surrounds him to his own advantage and literally getting away with murder in the process. At the end of his story - which, incidentally, is told to a visiting leading Chinese politician, apparently in English as a Lingua Franca - he reflects on his life: When I drive down Hosur Main Road, when I turn into Electronics City Phase 1 and see the companies go past, I can’t tell you how exciting it is to me. General Electric, Dell, Siemens - they’re all here in Bangalore. […] The entire city is masked in smoke, smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like? Maybe it will be a disaster: slums, sewage, shopping malls, traffic jams, policemen. But you never know. I t may turn out to be a decent city, where humans can live like humans and animals can live like animals. A new Bangalore for a new India. […] I think I might sell everything, take the money, and start a school - an Englishlanguage school - for poor children in Bangalore. A school where you won’t be allowed to corrupt anyone’s head with prayers and stories about God or Gandhi - nothing but the facts of life for these kids. A school full of White Tigers, unleashed on Bangalore. (2008: 317-319) This tongue-in-cheek celebration of the English language in India is suffused with irony. It mocks the intention of the 19 th -century language planners, Bentinck and Macaulay, 5 who formulated the case for English as the teaching language of the colonial education system in India, set out as follows in his often quoted words: The English language was to serve as a tool to create “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect” (1835: 9). As we can see from the example of Gandhi, Macaulay’s hope that English-language education would make the local educated elites docile interpreters was vain. He did foresee, however, that his decision would lead to a twotier system, in which a small number of privileged Indians would have easy access to a wide range of information and knowledge, whereas the greater proportion of the population taught in the local languages would be at a disadvantage. 6 5 Lord William Bentinck (1774-1839), first Governor-General of India in 1834/ 35, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, historian, politician, and advisor to Bentinck while in India from 1834 to 1838. 6 Classic quotes always suffer from being presented out of the context of the original argument. This is why I invite interested readers to consider the entire complex argument in depth: “I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813, that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied, that we are free to employ our funds as we choose, that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing, that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic, that The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 27 As the Indian example shows, the global Promise of English is held out in a communicative marketplace in which it will be heard by all, but will be fulfilled only selectively. A global lingua franca is a potential good, but only where access to it is provided for all in functioning educational systems and where it is managed in language planning regimes that benefit local communities. Where this is not so, the financial investment in English may be wasted, and an additional immaterial price - loss of linguistic diversity and cultural heritage - will have to be paid. This is precisely the problem that language planners, educators and sociolinguists are struggling with throughout the postcolonial world (see Vaish 2008 for India). The Promise of English remains an extremely potent force in top-down language planning in Africa, too - regardless of whether the policies are promoted by governments or NGOs from the global North. In view of this, it is not surprising that Africa should occupy such a prominent place in Salomone’s Rise of English. It is often remarked that Africa is the continent on which the future of French as a world language is at stake, not least because more and more people are taking up English in historically French colonial and postcolonial zones of influence. What may constrain the spread of English within Africa in the long term is the growing economic, political and cultural presence of China. As Salomone points out, China has become a major political and economic player in a very short time and is aware of the importance of education, language and culture as factors of soft power. But so far its growing influence has generally been exercised through the medium of English as a Lingua Franca, for example when large numbers of young Africans receive scholarships to study in English-Medium-of-Instruction programmes in China. From an empirical sociolinguistic perspective, it remains to be seen which of the grand designs in top-down policy-making will be implemented successfully, what the results at the grassroots level will be and, most importantly, what unanticipated consequences they may give rise to. the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic, that neither as the languages of law nor as the languages of religion have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our encouragement, that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed. In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” These words convey both colonial arrogance and the realism of a competent language planner. Christian Mair 28 A country that occupies a prominent place in Salomone’s study is Rwanda, which broke with its francophone colonial past in the 1990s and switched its education system to English as a medium of instruction. From the beginning, there was significant British support for the shift, in the form of investment in language teaching and teacher-training, and the cordial links have continued to the present day. This drastic re-orientation was facilitated by two factors: (a) the 1994 genocide, after which the reputation of France was tainted in the eyes of many Rwandans because of what they perceived as collusion in the genocide and (b) the fact that Paul Kagame’s new government was formed by former Hutu rebels returning from exile in anglophone Uganda. It should be added that the shift was real, although it was accompanied with some experimental fine-tuning (relating to the role of Kinyarwanda, the population’s shared indigenous language, in primary education) and rather more tactical and political manoeuvring with regard to membership in various ‘Anglo’ and francophone international bodies. In the end, none of this stopped the advance of English to a dominant position in the country, which has recently been confirmed in a largescale empirical study of the pay-offs of competence in English, competence in French and bilingual competence in English and French in the country’s workforce (Muhawenayo et al. 2022). If Muhawenayo et al. are thus able to demonstrate a pay-off for English (and, in certain contexts, also for bilingualism in English and French), the question remains what percentage of the country’s total population are even affected by the shift, for example because they don’t even enter formal education, are left behind in a severely underfunded system or drop out before they become literate in either Kinyarwanda, English or French. As Romaine points out: As the only language with global reach, English is paradoxically positioned as both pathway and obstacle to development. […] Just as rising markets alone do not level the playing field between rich and poor or create sufficient conditions for equitable development, access to English on its own does nothing to improve the lives of the poorest. (2015: 253) From the evidence assembled by Romaine, it seems that a working Englishbased education system will take a lot of time to develop, and well focussed ESL-norms of local English usage may not have emerged yet (which, of course, does not imply that the World Englishes research community should not start systematically documenting developments, as it has done in the case of Namibia). One could argue that Rwanda’s change in postcolonial linguistic affiliation has been dramatic and has had dramatic effects, but these played out mostly on the policy level: Favorably positioning itself in the sphere of anglophone world powers and development partners has already proven to be a successful strategic move that The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 29 has paid off handsomely. Not only is the British Council investing substantially in the language transition throughout the country by supplying teachers and civil servants with English training. Britain’s Department of International Development has also increased its funding for education in Rwanda by over 50% over five years (2010-2015), committing approximately 27% of its total budget for Rwanda on education initiatives. This makes Britain the single largest donor to Rwanda […]. (Romaine 2015: 271) Cynically speaking, among those who seem to have benefitted most immediately from the Promise of English in this case are former British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, whose scheme to deport unwanted asylum seekers to Rwanda would have been more difficult to negotiate across the English-French African language divide. As Romaine points out, only a small segment of the Rwandan population will be directly affected by the shift from French to English even if it is eventually implemented sustainably at the grassroots level. At the time of her writing, in a country in which - unusually for Africa - almost the entire population shares the same language (Kinyarwanda), 8 per cent spoke French, and 4 per cent spoke English. As Muhawenayo et al. (2022) have shown, English has advanced since then, but it is still far from being an accessible and inclusive language within the country. 4. Conclusion: Pride AND profit - English as a global language for a multilingual world In sum, the illustrative examples sketched above show that the following major determinants are shaping English as a global language at the beginning of the 21 st century. - Pluricentric English is not a happy democracy of voices, but remains a hierarchically structured constellation of varieties and styles. They all command different prices in economic terms and are evaluated very differently in terms of cultural prestige. - In this constellation, it is ELF uses that are developing most dynamically. The ELF boom is driven by globalisation and more immediately responsive to economic factors than traditional ENL and EFL uses. - Educated native-speaker elites have lost some of their power to define norms of language use. A particularly striking example of a powerful new standardising force are globally operating IT corporations engineering usage norms into word-processing software, spell checkers, ‘grammar’ checkers (which - contrary to what the name suggests - aim to homogenise a much wider range of usage), editing and machine translation tools. - Links between ‘variety’ and ‘territory/ nation’ have weakened considerably in the world of increasingly mobile speakers, writers and texts. Christian Mair 30 With apologies for the hyperbole, I propose the slogan ‘All Englishes are everywhere’ (cf. also Mair 2013: 256, Mair 2018). - While Standard English, by and large, still commands the highest price in the global communicative marketplace, some nonstandard varieties of the language have also become good business, especially in the global media landscape. All these developments have given rise to three paradoxes of Global English: - The postcolonial paradox: Decolonisation has gone hand in hand with deeper entrenchment of English in ESL communities and a world-wide boom in ELF. In the course of this development, the terms of the debates around English have often shifted from issues of identity/ pride/ culture to considerations of communicative efficiency and economic profit. - The standardisation paradox: Global English is becoming more homogeneous and more heterogeneous at the same time. Standard language use on formal and public occasions tends to be homogenised along US norms throughout the world, whereas the internal differentiation of English is progressing apace in the United States itself and throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. ELF use is particularly likely to escape the regulatory power of traditional agents of linguistic standardisation. - The world-language paradox: The more English gets entrenched as the global language, the more it will enter into contact with other languages and the greater will be the proportion of multilingual speakers who use it alongside other languages. A striking illustration of this dynamic is the fact that the English-speaking world’s major metropoles - New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Sydney, to mention just a few - have always been multilingual places in their history and have become even more so in the recent past. This should not be surprising, as a major aspect of their attractiveness as immigrant destinations is the absence of a language barrier: Wherever the aspiring newcomer hails from, it is more likely that they speak English than any other foreign language. For at least two centuries, the world has learned to live with English. For most competent users today, English is not their native language, but they use it in the constellation ‘English Plus’ (that is ‘English plus whatever language or languages they speak in addition’). Many individuals and communities have adopted English at a price, either through cultural alienation or the ‘colonial cringe’ that made them be ashamed of their ‘new’ English, before they endorsed it through nativisation and asserted its legitimacy through endonormative stabilisation (stages 3 and 4 in Schneider’s The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 31 Dynamic Model). Two billion regular users in the world know from experience that ELF communication is not a level playing field, particularly in cases where native speakers participate. On the other hand, few would deny that competence in more than one language confers practical (including direct economic), cognitive and cultural benefits and that linguistic and cultural diversity are part of the human condition. This is a lesson that monolingual native speakers of English may have to learn in the 21 st century. As we know, linguistics straddles the boundary between the humanities and the sciences, for example in computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. However, I suppose that those of us who, like myself, are not directly active in these fields have been academically socialised in the humanities. This is why for most of my professional life I thought of the handicap of the monolingual English native speaker as one of culture and identity - such as it is, for example, presented in Wierzbicka 2013. Books like Salomone’s, however, have opened my eyes to a deeper truth. She shows that these days more and more intelligent young people in Britain and the US seem to avoid enrolling as students in foreign-language departments (and universities close down more and more of these departments as a result). However, if these young people do not feel the monolingual handicap, it is their countries’ military and business elites who have raised the alarm about the dangers of monolingualism. In response, five august academic bodies from the English-speaking world - the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, and the Royal Society of Canada - have recently issued a position paper on “The Importance of Languages in the Global Context: An International Call to Action.” 7 The text opens with the following diagnosis of the condition humaine actuelle, paying due respect to the public figures that inspired the initiative: We are at an extraordinary moment in human history. Cooperation within and across borders is vital as we work to solve global challenges. Clear and precise communication is more crucial than ever before to the health and security of every nation. As global businesses, diplomatic corps, and other leaders have repeatedly stated, language education, and the accompanying linguistic and intercultural competencies, are a necessity for social, political and economic development, and for effective collaboration. During a global health crisis, researchers, governments, and health care workers must be able to share accurate information. 7 The paper, published in 2020, can be downloaded from: https: / / www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/ publications/ the-importance-of-languages-in-global-context-an-international-call-to-action/ . Christian Mair 32 In such times, language matters, and fluency in our languages matters. The people of the world must be able to speak to each other and be understood - to communicate as effectively and as rapidly as technology allows. The text briefly mentions the cultural value of linguistic diversity and the need to respect the linguistic rights of minorities, but returns to the ultimately neoliberal utilitarian and economic argumentation at the end. Multilingualism is promoted as a necessary asset for the competitive global citizen of the future: The challenge of providing education in multiple languages has proven especially complicated in primarily Anglophone nations, and even in countries whose English-speakers are co-citizens with important populations speaking other languages. Today, Anglophone communities in particular are not producing enough speakers of languages other than English to meet 21 st -century needs, arguing that multilingualism is too difficult to achieve, or that English should be treated as a lingua franca. Nor are these communities sufficiently focused on what is needed for the preservation, maintenance, and invigoration of the other linguistic communities with whom they live. To help reverse this trend, the [academies] have issued complementary reports promoting the importance of languages in addition to English, within both education and wider society. Needless to add, I share the hope that 21 st century English can be managed in such a way that pride is reconciled with profit, and language for identity/ culture balanced with lingua franca for communication. This is also a challenge that should be put on the research and teaching agenda of English linguistics. I conclude with references to two writers who have been more courageous than I in venturing longer-term predictions on the future of English in a multilingual world. For Ostler (2010) English is the last lingua franca in history. This is not because it will remain entrenched permanently. He predicts that the power of English will be insufficient to integrate the rising global players of the 21 st century. Previous collapses of large linguistic empires usually led to fragmentation and breakdowns of lines of communication. Ostler is optimistic that, as the hold of English loosens, the world will not be ‘lost in translation.’ He assumes that advances in language technology will compensate for the loss of a global lingua franca. Whether or not this technocratic optimism is justified is a question beyond the scope of the present paper. Even more daring is David Crystal, who sketches his vision for the year 2500. He thinks it conceivable that by this time every human being will grow up with English, either the natural way or through as yet unknown feats of language-technological and bio-technological engineering that he does not spell out in any detail. Then he comes to the crucial point: The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 33 If this is part of a rich multilingual experience for our future newborns, this can only be a good thing. 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