Abstract
One cannot travel far these days without being struck by the pervasiveness of English as the world’s second language. Signage in the Seoul subway is in English as well as Korean. Along Venice’s Grand Canal the vaporetto stops are announced in Italian and English. Announcements in airports everywhere and on planes are routinely in English, and, less obvious to passengers, English is used exclusively for communication between cockpits and control towers. At international meetings English is often the default language or even the only language. In many fields of knowledge publication is primarily in English. Other languages continue to be vital locally, nationally, and regionally, but for the first time in history a single language has become the global lingua franca.
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Notes
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For Jesuit interest in Chinese as the parent language, see David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 3rd ed. (Rothman & Littlefield, 2009), 85–86;
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See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004);
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Robert B. Kaplan, “English—the Accidental Language of Science?” in The Dominance of English as a Language of Science, ed. Ulrich Ammon (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001), 16, 26.
See also Alan Davies, “Review Article: Ironising the Myth of Linguicism,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 17 (1996): 485–596 (for a critique of Phillipson);
Salikoko S. Mufwene, “Colonization, Globalization and the Plight of ‘Weak’ Languages” (a review of Nettle & Romaine’s Vanishing Voices) Journal of Linguistics 38.2 (2002): 375–95. Mufwene’s first quotation is from his “Colonization, Globalization,” 376–77; the second is from Salikoko S. Mufwene, Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change (London: Continuum, 2008), 244.
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Northrup, D. (2013). Introduction: Disciplines, Perspectives, Debates, and Overview. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_1
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