The Hegemony of English and Determinants of Borrowing from Its Vocabulary

ROTEM KOWNER and JUDITH ROSENHOUSE

Since the second half of the 20th century English has become a global lingua franca. Whereas Mandarin remains the world's most widely spoken first language, English has emerged as the world's first choice as a second language; more importantly, it is by now the principal means for international communication. The effect of English does not end with its wide usage. With its rise, English has come to serve many languages as a source for intensive lexical borrowing, reflecting the importance and status it holds as a leading language. This ongoing process, however, has not been uniform. Certain societies have offered resistance to the spread of English and a reluctance to borrow its vocabulary. Others have embraced English, making English loan words an important part of their vocabulary, using it in codeswitching, and even adopting it as their main language.

The Italian phrase lingua franca (literally Frankish language), which now denotes English as a leading language, referred originally to the hybrid language created and used in the Mediterranean area. From early times, seamen and merchants in certain Mediterranean ports used a mixture of languages, predominantly Italian, but with many lexical elements from Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish and French, for communicating with each other (Cifoletti, 1989; Schuchardt, 1980). Although the term means literally 'European language', it arguably narrowed down to Romance-based pidgin (e.g. Minervini, 1996). Evidently, there was nothing distinctive about the Mediterranean lingua franca, and other hybrid languages, often linguistically defined as pidgins and creoles, emerged in many other places where people speaking different languages intermingled for a prolonged length of time (Gilbert, 2002; Jahr and Broch, 1996; Mühlhäusler, 1986; Sebba, 1997).

These forms of mixed and simplified language were not the only means of intergroup communication. In many places where speakers of different languages met they chose to speak one language. Usually it was the language of the majority, although in some cases numerical advantage did not play a crucial role, but the importance of the culture or nation to which the speakers belonged did. Over the years, the term lingua franca gained an additional meaning: now, it also denotes a leading language, not a hybrid but a proper language, which serves as a medium of communication between speakers of different languages in a given region or setting. In the Middle East it was Accadian, then Aramaic, then Arabic and finally the Ottoman Turkish; in some parts of Eurasia and North Africa Greek was the lingua franca for more than a millennium after the death of Alexander the Great. In East Asia classical Chinese played a similar role for thousands of years, mainly in a written form, until the late 19th century, whereas throughout much of the American continent, from California to Patagonia, Spanish has been used since the age of exploration. After the Napoleonic wars French served as the lingua franca of imperial diplomacy, as well as the principal choice of communication among the European aristocracy. More recently, for a short period (about four decades starting from 1945) Russian enjoyed similar importance in the Soviet bloc, stretching from East Germany to Mongolia. While virtually not a spoken tongue, Latin served as a key language of religion, government and scholarship throughout Europe of the medieval era, and as late as 1687 Isaac Newton wrote his first major work, Principia, in this language – but not his second!

English as a Lingua Franca

The rise of English during the last two centuries to its present position has been nothing less than spectacular. In 1780 the second American president, John Adams, predicted that English is destined 'to be the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the past or French in the present time' (quoted from McCrum et al., 1986: 239). Adams reasoned that the increasing population in America, its inhabitants' universal connection with their mother countries, and the global influence of England would inevitably make English a leading language. The realisation of this prophecy was not as self-evident as it seems in retrospect today, even for the mere fact that in 1780 English had fewer than 15 million speakers, spread sparsely over England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and the Caribbean. Half a century later the German linguist Jacob Grimm stated that English 'may with all right be called a world language; and, like the English people, appears destined hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive even than its present over all the portions of the globe' (quoted in Trench, 1881: 44). Neither Adams nor Grimm lived to see their prophecies come true, but a few decades later some early but promising precursors of English linguistic hegemony were more than visible.

During the late 19th century English began to replace French as the lingua franca of Western Europe, and while Russian aristocrats regarded the latter as their language of choice well into the Bolshevik Revolution, their ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, displayed a clear preference for the former. Earlier, during the 18th and the 19th centuries, English had already established its position as the lingua franca of North America and the Indian subcontinent. Whereas in North America most of the population used English as their first language, in the Indian subcontinent only a small fraction did so. In the latter case English was the language of the British rulers but was gradually adopted by the multilingual locals...