Global English

Estimates of the number of present and future speakers of English (see The Future of English) suggest English will be spoken across the globe for the foreseeable future. But what kind of English will it be?

Evidence from other languages indicates that there are two opposing movements of linguistic change at work within a language.

The first movement is convergence - in which speakers of separate languages come together either using a pidgin - a mixture of their languages - or using a different second language. The Scandinavian countries are examples of this: although the languages Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are similar, and from a common Old Norse root, an overwhelming number of speakers use English as their second language.

The second movement is divergence - in which speakers of a common language differentiate their speech from each other and create first a distinct dialect then in due course a separate language. We see this from Latin which fractured into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Both forces are constantly at work and examples are given below. Which force is more likely to take control of English as a world language? If language is pictured as a raft of ice floes colliding, fusing and splitting up over a long period of time, only major changes in the political climate (collapse of an iceshelf) are likely to make an impression in the short term, though a series of minor external influences (general warming) could cause a general change.

The major change could well be a change in the power of English's main speakers, the USA. In a parallel with Latin following the decline of the Roman Empire, it is likely that any decline in the political, economic or technological power of the USA would lead to greater divergence and the development of separate mutually incomprehensible varieties.

The general change of increased global communications and travel has already had a strong influence on the use of English, leading to significant convergence on English as a second language - or, ironically, as the old phrase has it, a "lingua franca".

Incidentally Italian is a salutory lesson for convergence / divergence theorists. First cam Latin, itself formed from several dialects, which spread throughout the western world with the power of the Romans. The decline of Roman power lead to different varieties of Latin, but it was not until the mid nineteenth century that a unifying power in Italy lead to a common Italian language based on the Florentine dialect.

Further influences include increased literacy and educational opportunities which have lead to formal language learning, including the huge popularity of the BBC English language courses in China. However there is a theory that the recent surge in economic activity in China will propel Chinese or Canonese as a global language itself.

Global Travel and transport plus global communications certainly speed up the pace of linguistic change, but that change has always taken place.

There is a theory that the combination of lack of formal grammar teaching in the UK and US, contrasting with formal EFL teaching of foreign learners is producing second language speakers who have a more accurate formal grasp of English than native speakers. Could this in turn lead to a branch of Formal Classical English, learned and spoken globally but which puts native speakers at a disadvantage? Discuss!

Finally, specific changes in English may be predicted. In writing I predict the atrophy, if not the demise, of the apostrophe. It is widely misused even by native speakers though it could survive as a token of prestige for the literate.

I also suggest that the "th" sound - the voiced post dental fricative as in "then", "though" and "weather" but not as in "thin" and "throw" (where it is the unvoiced post dental fricative) - will fade away as it is unusual in any other language and difficult to emulate. Whether it will be replaced by the "z" of the French ("I am verry 'appy wiz ze wezzer") or the germanic "d" or the cockney "v" ("wos 'a wever loik?") is a matter of guesswork.