The Globalization Of English and How It's Murdering Languages

By Ria Surendro

“Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.”
— John Noble Wilford, 2007

The Globalization of English can refer to the increased use, spread, and influence of English around the world. The UK and US have been the most powerful countries both politically and economically for an extended amount of time, allowing the English language to spread across the globe and influence many cultures over time. Languages are able to represent one's culture. Historically, English is associated with British and American history so it can be closely associated with their culture; therefore, it cannot represent the international language as it is biased. When a speaker leaves a language voluntarily, it can be seen as a natural disappearance, which is one form of Language Death. However, when there is another language actively discouraging the use of other languages, it is referred to as Language Murder — in this case, English is the killer.

The accelerating decline of languages all over the world is the consequence of the aggravating global dominance of English; this can be thought of as Language Murder.

The deterioration of language leads to the deterioration of both identity and diversity, since people lose their mother tongue and part of their ethnicity in the process. According to Doctor Pamela Serota Cote of the University of San Francisco, "The loss of language undermines a people's sense of identity and belonging, which uproots the entire community in the end. Yes, they may become incorporated into the dominant language and culture that has subsumed them, but they have lost their heritage along the way," implying that losing a language slowly degrades our identity.

Most mass media, technology, schools, politics, trade, and business use English to communicate, pressuring non-native English speakers to use English more frequently compared to their mother tongue. With time, they will start forgetting their language or choose to not communicate at all. We can take into account the Native American “Eyak” language; it was spoken in Alaska until 2008, where the last speaker of that language, Marie Smith Jones, died at 89. Despite having nine children and making an effort to preserve her native language, none of them wanted to learn it, because it was considered inappropriate to speak any language but English.

Papua New Guinea has myriad indigenous languages. According to Language Death and Language Maintenance by Mark Janse, until about 12 years ago, Papua New Guinea had maintained these languages. Australians colonized the south-eastern part of the island sometime during the 20th century. Tok Pisin was an English-based lingua franca used as a commercial and administrative language developed during that time and was used by over two million people in Papua New Guinea. Factors that contributed and are still contributing to the decline of indigenous languages are from the lack of recognition. Digital media was starting to become important, which allowed viewers to take a glimpse of the outside world. Consuming it regularly, English and Tok Pisin were the most-used languages, as well as some other indigenous ones. The rest of the 820 local languages were being neglected by the media. Later on during colonization, the Australian administration started enforcing English more and more in schools, discouraging the local languages and Tok Pisin in education.

More proof on English attempting to murder other languages would be the English-only movements. Knowing the US has no official language, sometime during the 1990s, the English-only movement had gained popularity. It is a political movement to make English the official language of the US. In 1995, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Language of Government Act, intended to mandate English as the only language of the federal government; luckily, it was later defeated in the Senate. English-only supporters claim the movement will empower rather than victimize non-English-speakers, thinking English is a “common bond” that allows people of diverse backgrounds to overcome differences and reach mutual understanding. According to Crawford, however, this is just an oppressive attempt to coerce diversity by terminating essential services of the other languages. The amendment poses a threat to civil rights, educational opportunities, and free speech. It is an insult to the heritage of cultural minorities, including groups whose roots in this country go deeper than English speakers. This movement tries to justify racist and nativist biases using American patriotism as a cover. If everyone is forced to speak English, it could lead to even more ambiguities when communicating, because people who are not fluent in English would be forced to speak in a language with words they are unsure of, making it harder to come to an understanding.  

Nowadays, English seems to be prioritized while a stigma of speaking in the indigenous language begins to rise. We cannot afford to lose any more of our diverse cultural heritages to this murderer. The solution to prevent and hinder this trend would be to promote diversity and make an effort in building motivation towards the use of indigenous languages. One way we can do this is by creating a language database or using already existing ones, aiming to preserve and catalog languages before they are forgotten. Subsequently, people in the future across the globe can access this data and enrich their own lexicons. It is difficult to grasp the crucial information of languages we lose every two weeks, but we don’t have to grasp anything if we just preserve them. We should continue to pass these languages along, effectively saving them! ◆

Sources 

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