of empire, whose practices are ever more explicitly imperialist. To those who
doubt the relevance of the old Marxist concept of imperialism in a world
markedly different from that of the First World War, the recent war in Iraq
will have come as a revelation. Thanks to George Bush, Lenin and Luxemburg
are rising from their graves to haunt us.
But to say that English is the language of imperialism is not only to utter
an insult or a slogan, but to give a name to a much more complicated situation.
Stage left, English, the language of globalisation, is an instrument of
imperialism. A form of linguistic imperialism clearly exists. Anyone who uses
a computer is immediately conscious of the fact. English is invading the
media, either directly (American series broadcast in the original language –
in this regard, France is still an island of resistance, but try watching Swedish
or Dutch television during peak hours); or indirectly, when programmes, in
French in the text, are copies of American programmes (here we find the
cultural equivalent of the process of translation à la Sun: Loft Storyis a cultural
‘translation’ of Big Brother). Naturally, it is invading teaching (not so long ago
a French education minister declared that English was the second French
language). And, by contamination, it is invading everyday language – and
not only via music. Readers may be aware of the controversy over franglais.
And the most common graffiti on the walls of my banlieueis an aggressive
‘Fuck you!’, which indicates that pupils, even the most deprived among them,
benefit from the teaching they receive. To describe this situation, linguists
have coined the concept of glottophagy, or the devouring of one language
by another: it at least has the advantage of linking linguistic change to wider
social change.^3 Obviously, I am not claiming that, in the short term, the French
language risks being replaced by English. But I am registering an obvious
trend whose effects are accelerating (a sign of this is the development of
English at the expense of French in European institutions, despite the lack of
enthusiasm for the EU on the part of British governments). Taken to the
extreme, the domination of one language over another results in the death
of languages: they are dying out more rapidly than species in danger of
extinction and linguists argue that a language dies every fortnight. Of the
five thousand languages currently spoken in the world, half will have
disappeared before the end of the century.^4 English is certainly not the cause
6 • Chapter One
(^3) See Calvet 1974.
(^4) See Crystal 2000; Dalby 2003; and Nettle and Romaine 2000.