and so on; and, finally, at the periphery, we find the speakers of English as
a living language learnt at school (English as a foreign language). At the
centre we have standard English and at the periphery English as a lingua
franca: these are not precisely the same language and will soon not be the
same language at all.
This ‘soon’ is an exaggeration, for the imperial domination of English,
relayed by contemporary technology, produces centripetal effects. When we
consider that standard English is no longer the language of Shakespeare (or
Tony Blair) but that of George Bush, we will note that the global diffusion of
American TV series in the original is a powerful factor of linguistic unification:
this is how the village is becoming global. And it is scarcely necessary to
recall that English is the language of the world-wide web and the language
of economics – that is, the language of neoliberal globalisation: here, the
English language is the direct instrument of imperialism.
But these centripetal trends are, if not counter-balanced, then at least
attenuated by centrifugal trends. The English of the centre – national English –
is undergoing rapid diversification: American and English dialects are diverging
and the same is true of Australian English. In the second circle, English is
proliferating, with the emergence of what are today called New Englishes.
The English of Singapore, for example, is different from that of the former
metropolis not only phonetically (the first and most notable difference is that
of accents), but also in its vocabulary and syntax. At the furthest stage of this
development, we arrive at pidgins and Creoles, fruits of the contact between
English and other national languages. Transformed into a lingua franca,
globalised English is diverging rapidly from standard English. This involves
a contradictory process of impoverishment (lexical and syntactical) and
enrichment, with the emergence of contact dialects and literatures: I am
thinking of what Dylan Thomas, an English writer of Welsh extraction, and
Amos Tutuola, the first novelist to have dared to write in the English of
Nigeria, do to the language of Shakespeare, to its considerable benefit.
Linguistic imperialism therefore involves a mixed picture, a position of
strength that is at the same time one of weakness. The centripetal forces are
massively present: globalised media and the web; Anglo-American universities
being established throughout the world via subsidiaries; compulsory
bilingualism for a significant percentage of the global population. But their
effectiveness is often contradictory. Thus, the paradox of teaching a foreign
language and not teaching the mother tongue means that foreigners who
8 • Chapter One