The English Language in a Global Context: Between Expansion and Resistance

Alamin Mazrui

The spread of English globally is, of course, a direct product of the expansion of capitalism across national borders. In its initial phases in much of the world, however, this process of linguistic extension was by no means a spontaneous and peaceful one. It was often a violent course of development in which English itself became part of the imperial arsenal to subdue, inferiorise and conquer the colonial subject. Like many other aspects of colonialism, language featured prominently in the creation of new hierarchies and in the disfiguration and erasure of the history of the colonised. This dimension of colonial history came to find ample expression in the following verses of the South African singer, Johnny Clegg:

Bits of song and broken drums
Are all he could recall
So he spoke to me
In a bastard tongue
Carried on the silence of guns

It's been a long long time
Since they first came
And marched through the village
They taught me to forget the past
And live the future in their language

Chorus:
They said I should learn to speak
A little bit of English
Don't be scared of a suit and a tie
Learn to walk in the words of the foreigner
I am a Third World Child! (quoted by Pennycook, 1994: 2)

In other words, the violence that accompanied European colonial penetration alienated the colonised, weakened many of their languages and pushed some to the verge of extinction.

After independence, the relationship between Britain and its former colonies metamorphosed institutionally into the so-called Commonwealth. There are countries, of course, that were previously ruled by Britain but did not join the Commonwealth. These include countries like Egypt, Iraq and Kuwait - Arab countries in which the English language was more marginal than it was in other former British colonies. Among the reasons that influenced these former Arab colonies of Britain against joining the Commonwealth were (1) Arab nationalism was distrustful of continuing organisational links with the former imperial power; (2) the Commonwealth was viewed as a rival to the League of Arab States - a conflict between Pan-Britannica and Pan-Arabism; (3) British policies were viewed as pro-Israel, indirectly tarnishing the image of the Commonwealth; and (4) the head of the Commonwealth was also the head of the Church of England - in the eyes of Muslims, England's Christian theocracy tarnished the Commonwealth.

The great exception among countries that did not join the Commonwealth but where, nonetheless, English became triumphant is, of course, the United States. The United States did not become a member of the Commonwealth partly because it became independent long before the Commonwealth was born and partly because, once it was formed, America's anti-monarchical political culture would not have easily accepted the idea that the British monarch was the head of the Commonwealth. But although the United States (unlike Canada) is the grand exception to Commonwealth membership, it nevertheless became an even more influential carrier of the English language than Britain by the second half of the 20th century. People and whole societies began to experience the pull of English less and less because of Britain and more and more because of the United States.

Today it is possible to say that, as a direct result of the post-Cold War political economy of neoliberalism, a certain degree of spontaneous momentum has indeed accompanied the continued spread and consolidation of English. Having emerged as the only superpower in the post-Cold War period, the United States has naturally become central in this globalisation process. The globalisation of empire that the British attempted in the formal sense has been carried further by America in a more informal manner, constantly reproducing even more massive structures of inequality. As the single largest English-speaking country in terms of its number of native speakers, and with its economic, political and technological pre-eminence, the United States now is contributing to the expansion of the frontiers of the English language at an unprecedented rate. Due to American dominance in world affairs, the emergent global English may increasingly be assuming an American articulation.

In a sense, then, neoliberalism has provided an additional stimulus for the spread of English worldwide, giving the language a new and, to a certain extent, spontaneous momentum that has made it important in its own right for the...