The Transformation of the World (169 page)

The biggest winner from nineteenth-century globalization was English. In 1800, although already respected throughout Europe as a language of business, poetry, and science, it had by no means been the undisputed number one. But by 1920 at the latest, it had become geographically the most widespread language in the world and culturally the most influential. At a rough estimate, for the period between 1750 and 1900, one-half of the “weightiest” publications on natural science and technology appeared in English.
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As early as 1851 Jacob Grimm, the leading linguist of his age, noted that no other language carried so much force.
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In North America (where, contrary to legend, German never had a chance of becoming the national language of the United States), English was as firmly rooted as in Australia, New Zealand, or Cape Province. In all these cases, it was the language of settlers and invaders little open to the influence of indigenous languages (which were never of any importance officially).

In India, by contrast, English became the standard language in the higher law courts only in the 1830s, while the lower courts continued to operate in local languages, often with the help of interpreters. Here and in Ceylon, English did not spread through European settlement, or a fortiori as a result of ruthless Anglicization policies on the part of the colonial rulers, but because a combination of cultural prestige and mundane career advantages made it advisable to master the language.
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New educated strata first emerged in Bengal and around the colonial metropolises of Bombay and Madras, then in other parts of the Subcontinent. In the 1830s there was a heated debate between “Anglicists” and “Orientalists” about the pros and cons of an education in English versus one of the indigenous Indian languages.
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The Anglicists won out in 1835 at the level of countrywide politics, but in practice there was scope for pragmatic compromises. The British language export to India was at the same time a voluntary import by Indian citizens and intellectuals who hoped to link up with more extensive circles of communication. During the second half of the nineteenth century, English spread along with British colonial administrators and missionaries to Southeast Asia
and Africa. In the Pacific (Philippines, Hawaii) the US influence was decisive.
¹⁴
But the global fortunes of the English language in the nineteenth century were driven by Britain more than America. The triumph of English in education, business, mass media, pop music, science, and international politics got under way only after 1950, this time spurred on by the dynamism of the United States.

Language Transfer as a One-Way Street

Outside the colonies too, there was growing pressure and incentive to learn European foreign languages. The Chinese state, which in the Qing period was officially trilingual (Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian), had never felt it necessary to promote the study of European languages. Paradoxically, this was one of the reasons for the high linguistic competence of Jesuit missionaries during the early modern period, so high that many served as interpreters for the Qing Emperor in contacts with emissaries from Russia, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Britain. But since the ex-Jesuits who remained behind in China after the abolition of their order in Europe had no knowledge of English, the British envoys who established the first diplomatic contacts in 1793 could in some cases communicate only through a prior translation into Latin for the Jesuits' benefit. When much more serious negotiations had to be conducted, after 1840, such gobetweens were no longer available. China initially lacked any personnel trained in languages—another disadvantage in the general asymmetry between China and the West—and the emperor long adhered to the old Qing policy of making it as difficult as possible for foreigners to study Chinese.

In the Ottoman Empire too, no encouragement for the study of European languages was given until well into the nineteenth century. But after 1834 (the comparable Chinese date was 1877), when the Sublime Porte began to establish permanent diplomatic representations in the main European capitals, some of the leading Tanzimat reformers got to know foreign languages and foreign countries while serving as diplomats abroad. The new power elite of the Tanzimat period was recruited less from the army and the
ulama
(clergy trained in law) than from the State Translation Bureau and embassy chancelleries.
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In China, meanwhile, the Qing government changed course only after the Second Opium War ended in defeat in 1860. Two years later the Tongwenguan translation school—the first Western-style educational institution of any kind—was founded in Beijing; its dual task was to train English speakers and to translate technical literature from the West (no mean feat, given that, as in Turkey a few decades earlier, much of the vocabulary first had to be created in the destination language).
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Even some of the large state arsenals and shipyards that sprang up in this period had language departments attached to them. The most important channel of linguistic transfer, however, was the mission schools and universities. At the Paris peace conference of 1919, China fielded a young guard of capable diplomats who impressed others with their proficiency in foreign languages.

In Japan, where classical Chinese remained the most prestigious language of education down to the end of the Tokugawa period, specialist hierarchies of translators were responsible for contacts with the Dutch in Nagasaki; the world of true scholarship had little to do with them. It was through this needle's eye of Dutch trade, alone in having official approval, that European knowledge found its way into the sealed-off archipelago. Only after 1800 did it gradually became clear to the Japanese government that Dutch was not the most important European language, and greater efforts now went into translation from Russian and English.
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Since the seventeenth century, Japanese had also been familiar with translations of Western scientific and medical texts into classical Chinese, made by Jesuits in China with the help of indigenous scholars;
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“Holland studies” (
rangaku
), in which scientific material had featured prominently since the 1770s, were not the only transmission route of Western knowledge into Japan. But in the end, the more intensive introduction of that knowledge in the Meiji period was possible only because in addition to the hiring of Western experts, there was a more systematic drive to develop translation skills among the Japanese themselves.

European languages were included only late and sporadically in the official educational syllabus of non-European countries, even though these often had a multilingual dimension in that scholars were required to show proficiency in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Knowledge of Europe was for a long time the reserve of indispensable, but not very highly regarded, specialists modeled on the dragomans in the Ottoman Empire—a small group of state-appointed interpreters and translators dominated by Christian Greeks until 1821.
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Conversely, it never occurred to anyone in Europe to honor a non-Western language by including it in the school curriculum. Among European linguists, Persian and Sanskrit (first known in Europe in the late eighteenth century) were considered the height of perfection. But if they could ever have seriously competed with Greek and Latin (perhaps in 1810 or 1820), that brief opportunity was missed.
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The humanism of the
Gymnasien
,
lycées
, and public schools remained purely Greco-Roman; European intellectual formation centered on the West. Only in recent times has Chinese made a breakthrough into the syllabus of a growing number of high schools in Australia or a few European countries.

Linguistic Hybridity: Pidgin

World languages—that is, ones in which people could make themselves understood outside their land of origin—were for the most part loosely super-imposed on a multiplicity of local languages and dialects. Even in postcolonial India, a maximum of 3 percent of the population could understand English (the figure in today's Republic of India is around 30 percent).
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In many cases, simplified hybrids made communication easier. These seldom replaced the original languages, however, and demonstrated by their very existence how strongly local languages resisted the colonial ones they encountered. Not a few
pidgin languages were older than colonialism. And when, following the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, French replaced Latin as the usual language of negotiation and treaty among the representatives of European states, diplomats in the eastern Mediterranean and Algeria were still using the old lingua franca (i.e., language of the Franks), a kind of pidgin Italian.
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In other parts of the world—for example, the Caribbean and West Africa—Creole tongues developed into independent language systems.
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Pidgin English, originally known as “Canton jargon,” took shape in a long process after the 1720s as the second language on the South Chinese coast. After the opening of China it served throughout the treaty ports as a means of communication between Chinese and European traders. It was later forgotten that it had originated in a reluctance or inability on the Western side to learn Chinese; the risibility of pidgin, with its reduced and inflected forms (“likee soupee?”), became a key element in the racist cliché of “primitive” Chinese. Conversely, a striving to overcome this humiliation was a major reason why nationalistic Chinese intellectuals, in particular, learned foreign languages in the early twentieth century. This went hand in hand with drastic “depidginization.” On closer examination, however, the mature China Coast English that pidgin became around the turn of the century proved to be a communicative medium well suited to the situation. Blending many other sources into the mix, from Malay to Portuguese to Persian, it offered a rich vocabulary for the realities of life on the Chinese coast.
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As in India, sophisticated communication in a European language did not mean subjugation to linguistic imperialism so much as an important step to cultural acceptance and equality. Pidgin remained a language of the business world; Western-oriented intellectuals learned proper English. Pidgin did not persist in twentieth-century China, leaving only scattered lexical remnants even in Hong Kong. Chinese as a language of education easily survived contacts with the West, while in Japan there was not even an embryonic pidgin. Classical Chinese also continued to fulfill practical objectives in the region where Chinese culture has always radiated outward. When in 1905 Phan Boi Chau, the most famous Vietnamese patriot of his time, visited the great Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao in his Tokyo exile, the two men found they had no spoken language in common. But since Phan had mastered classical Chinese writing, for centuries the medium of communication used by Vietnamese mandarins, they were able to engage in what Phan in his memoirs calls “brush conversation.”
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Knowledge travels in the baggage of languages. Not only did the expansion of major language areas in the nineteenth century strengthen local linguistic diversity and the practical necessity of multilingualism at a time when an extra language required close attention; it also opened up new spaces of horizontal communication and increased the mobility of knowledge. Colonialism and globalization created cosmopolitan language systems. In Chinese civilization, which had never lost its linguistic unity and capacity for resistance, this spelled a
less dramatic change than in regions such as South Asia, where in the preceding centuries local vernaculars had gained ground at the expense of a single overarching language, Sanskrit, and where new semantic ranges were now developing at the level of the elite. After its linguistic fragmentation, India was reunified communicatively through the appropriation of English.
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Limits of Linguistic Integration

We should not, however, exaggerate the integrative effects outside the ranks of small elites. In Europe too, linguistic homogeneity within nation-states often emerged only in the course of the nineteenth century. The national language, rising above a multiplicity of regional idioms, did become the ideal norm for communication and the measure of correctness, but it was rather a slow process putting such an ideal into practice.
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This was true even of France, with its strong centralist traditions. In 1790 an official investigation established that a majority of people in France spoke and read a language other than French: Celtic, German, Occitan, Catalan, Italian, or Flemish. Even in 1893 every eighth schoolchild between ages seven and fourteen knew no French.
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The situation was even more discrepant in Italy, where in the 1860s less than 10 percent of the population could understand effortlessly the Tuscan Italian that had been declared the official language in the process of nation building.
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Nor were things necessarily different in the successor states of the Spanish colonial empire. The Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico did not think of creating schools for the Indian or mestizo population, so that in 1910 as many as two million Indios—14 percent of the total population—spoke no Spanish.
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As scholars all over Europe collected languages (and added neologisms) in dictionaries, described them in grammar books, and laid down rules for spelling, pronunciation, and style, whole nations were conceived and promoted as speech communities, and a cultivated language began to be considered a key achievement of every nation. Yet the language that ordinary people spoke in many regions remained stubbornly tied to the locality of their birth. If scientists and intellectuals in Asian countries—around 1862 (and even more after the turn of the century) in the Ottoman Empire, or after 1915 in China—created simpler forms of language, writing, and literature to bridge the gulf between elite and popular culture, they were doing only what had been done in European countries a few decades earlier, or was even then being done, without engaging in anything that might be described as direct imitation. In Europe too, the linguistic divide in the nineteenth century between elite and people, between written and spoken language, was more extensive than we can easily imagine today. For mature nation-states, however, this became intolerable a few decades later, and great efforts were made to impose a uniform national language or at least to preserve the external appearance of one. After the Second World War, European regional and national movements—from Catalonia via Wales to the Balkans—set a countertrend in motion.