In chemistry laboratories in Jordan, university libraries in Cambodia, and college classrooms in Sweden, an odd language is in use.
The language is English, which is increasingly becoming the language of higher education and science around the world. The development is being stoked by the growing integration of the world economy, with the United States, the one remaining superpower and the world’s economic locomotive, at its head.
The trend is also being fueled by the spread of information technology, because a large amount of computer software is written in English, and by the explosive growth of the Internet, with more than 300 million users connecting to a resource largely composed in English. And as colleges in more and more countries compete for the tuition money that foreign students can bring, the colleges are teaching their courses in English, so the students won’t have to learn Thai or Greek to go to class.
The development is unprecedented. Not even Latin, the European scholarly language for almost two millennia, or Greek in the ancient world before it, had the same reach. For the first time, one language, English—a bastard mixture of old French dialects and the tongues of several Germanic tribes living in what is now England—is becoming the lingua franca of business, popular culture, and higher education across the globe.
The expansion of English is even more striking in the sciences. Ninety-five percent of the 925,000 scientific articles published in thousands of major periodicals in 1997 were written in English, according to Eugene Garfield, founder of the Science Citation Index, which tracks science publications. But only half of the English articles originated in English-speaking countries. The trend toward publishing in English began after World War II and has accelerated over the past 20 years.
Some find the dominance of English troubling. “Nobody questions the value of having a lingua franca in academia,” says Tove Bull, rector of the University of Tromso, located above the Arctic Circle in Norway. “But the university has the responsibility to develop terminology in academic disciplines in Norwegian.”
The Norwegian Language Council, a government body, was particularly upset three or four years ago, when a Ph.D. candidate wrote a doctoral thesis on Norwegian linguistics—in English. Ms. Bull, a former chairwoman of the council, says she doesn’t foresee restrictions on English. But, she says, academics should be encouraged to write in Norwegian for the public and to keep developing terminology in Norwegian.
“I think we overestimate our ability to think deeply in a foreign language,” she says.
The spread of English represents a serious cultural and psychological imposition, say many in countries where it isn’t a native language. To get the same sense, Americans need only imagine having to learn their calculus in German, or their psychology in Chinese. “Every country loves its own culture and language,” says Ruben Umaly, secretary general of the Association of Universities of Asia Pacific, which is based in Thailand and uses English as its official language. But English is increasingly the language of international business and communications, he says, and “we cannot avoid globalization.”
Some countries have tried. Flush with the national pride that accompanied the wave of decolonization after World War II, many new nations initially resisted the intrusion of English, seeing it as a threat to their own languages, long neglected under colonial rule. But in the last few years, with students and their parents clamoring for more English, which they regard as a passport to better careers, countries have increasingly opted for what some already call “the world language.”
Malaysia is a case in point. When Peter Chai Sen Tyng began working toward a master’s degree in psychology last May, he knew that he would not be studying in the language he speaks at home, Mandarin Chinese. Nor would he use Malay, the language of his public-school education. His studies, like all graduate programs in Malaysia, are in English. Mr. Chai, 23, thinks it is worth the effort. “English has greater market value,” he says.
At independence from Britain, in 1957, Malaysia’s university system used English. But by the 1980’s, the country wanted to demonstrate its linguistic independence and began the arduous task of developing education programs in the main national language, Malay. The effort did not last long. By the early 1990’s, the authorities found that a Malay curriculum “was not realistic if they wanted to be competitive internationally,” says Mr. Umaly.
Proficiency in English was made mandatory for university admission, reading assignments in English increased, and the English-speaking lecturers were invited to teach. Foreign universities, including two from Australia and one from Britain, were allowed to open branches in the country.
“In our library,” says Tan Sri Jalaludin, vice chancellor of Putra University, a leading Malaysian institution, “most books and journals are in English.”
The situation is similar in Singapore, the Philippines, and the small, oil-rich sultanate of Brunei, as well as in Malaysia’s next-door neighbors, Thailand and Indonesia. On the campus of Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University, a student sitting in the shade of a towering casuarina tree and enjoying a tamarind drink, offers a more colorful purpose for English than getting a job. “We often use English words to insult each other,” she says. “It doesn’t sound as bad as in our own language.”
On the Internet, the number of resources in languages other than English is growing, but English still predominates. Like students around the world, Bjorn Brevaas, a student of public administration at the Netherlands’ University of Twente, uses the Internet to search library collections and databases, and to read foreign newspapers.
In Moscow, Beijing, and Seoul, thousands of private language schools have opened to dispense English lessons to students, business people, and bureaucrats who want to get ahead. “Without the language, their opportunities are limited,” says Elena Ostrovidova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Education. In China, where using English could once could have resulted in a prison sentence, the language is now on the highly competitive national university-entrance examination. A recent government survey found that 70 percent of urban Chinese have studied English. University professors hold “English corners” in community centers, department stores, and parks around Beijing, where students can come to practice.
South Korea’s president, Kim Dae Jung, told his citizens last winter that there was an urgent need for them to learn English. Students at the country’s three military academies will be expelled if they cannot speak English.
Such ideas are even beginning to gain ground in traditionally insular Japan. But many Japanese fear that welcoming English could threaten their cultural identity. This year, a commission appointed by the prime minister released a report, “Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century,” that said English should be used in teaching and research and that called for the number of foreign, English-speaking faculty members to be “dramatically increased.” That was hard enough for many Japanese to take.
But the report created real controversy with its recommendation for a “long-term, national debate on whether to make English an official second language.” Ryutaro Ohtsuka, a University of Tokyo spokesman who published his doctoral thesis on human ecology in English 20 years ago, scoffs at the idea.
“Japanese culture can be expressed only in Japanese,” he says.
As Arab countries have developed their universities in recent decades, many have adopted English as the language of instruction in science, engineering, and medicine, although class discussion may revert to Arabic. Administrators are trying to develop Arabic-language programs, says Marwan R. Kamal, secretary general of the Association of Arab Universities, in Amman, Jordan, “but it takes time.”
In Africa, one country, Namibia, shifted its entire higher-education system in the 1990’s from Afrikaans, a language associated with apartheid, to English. In South Africa, as institutions have opened to non-whites, English has increasingly displaced Afrikaans. A few tentative efforts are under way to develop courses in some of the widely spoken African languages.
The trend toward English is well advanced in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries—and with it, muted but persistent concerns. Much of the assigned reading at the region’s institutions is in English, and if just one foreign student is present in a class, the professor usually switches to English. Graduate courses there are increasingly being taught exclusively in English, as are a small but growing number of undergraduate courses.
The University of Copenhagen, the main institution in Denmark, warned about the dangers of the trend in a 1995 strategic plan: “The fact that English is going to be the international scholarly language in the same way as Latin was in the university’s infancy and youth,” the document said, “must not mean that Danish becomes the language of the peasants, as it was then.”
The growing internationalization of higher education is adding to the pressure. Under the European Union’s Erasmus program, intended to help young people study outside their native countries, 100,000 students crossed borders for one or two semesters in the last academic year. They often attended classes taught in English, because countries using less common languages typically have to make such offerings to attract foreign students.
Eastern Europe has also been recruiting foreign students to English-language programs, especially from Greece and Arab countries. Eastern European faculty members seem ready to make the linguistic shift. Tamas Lajos, a professor of fluid mechanics and former vice rector for international relations at Budapest Technical University, says that many faculty members, especially younger ones, are happy to be freed from an obligation to learn Russian, and have embraced English with a passion. “I can hold a department meeting with no problem in English,” asserts Mr. Lajos.
Outside of Europe, English-speaking countries have stepped up their marketing of higher education to foreign students. Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have all recruited record numbers of foreign students in recent years, especially from Asia, with the United States taking in nearly 500,000 in 1998. The English-speaking countries have also opened distance-learning centers and branches in developing nations.
Now Asian countries are trying to turn the tables. Ninnat Olanvoruth, secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning, in Bangkok, says the region is not just exporting Asian students, but is beginning to import students from Australia and the West. “Most,” he says, “do their courses in English.”
Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia have witnessed a linguistic struggle also experienced in countries such as Canada and Chad: the competition between French and English. The last decade has not been a happy one for lovers of French, who have seen their tongue, once the language of royal courts and international diplomacy, steadily displaced by upstart English.
In 1990, according to the publishers of the Science Citation Index, 30.6 percent of scientific papers from France were published in French—the rest in English. By 1999, the portion in French had halved, to 16.2 percent.
French scientific conferences are now frequently conducted in English, a development that, in the early 1990’s, prompted the authorities to threaten to withdraw government money from meetings held in France and not conducted mainly in French. The threat had virtually no effect.
France spends some $300-million a year to promote the language of Moliere and Voltaire around the world, according to the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Yet the sum has done little to stem the onslaught of English. Vietnam, a former French colony, used to conduct higher education and all official business in French, and more recently favored Russian. Today, Vietnam uses primarily Vietnamese, with English by far the foreign language of choice.
“The French government tries to keep French alive,” says Nguyen Van Dao, president of Vietnam National University, in Hanoi. “But French is not so popular among young people. Foreign companies use English. Students know English is necessary for getting a good job.”
At the Royal University of Phnom Penh, the largest university in neighboring Cambodia, students who take French and maintain good grades receive $25 per semester from the L’Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, a Montreal-based association of Francophone universities that does not offer an official English translation of its name. The $25 payment is considerable in a country where the average income is about $275 a year. Yet 91 percent of the students choose English.
French authorities used to react very defensively to the steady advance of “the language of Shakespeare,” as they respectfully refer to their linguistic archrival. As late as four years ago, two private French-language watchdog groups sued the Georgia Institute of Technology’s campus in Metz, France. The groups complained that the campus’s Internet site violated a French law banning advertising in English. The courts threw out the complaint on a technicality.
But in the last few years, the official French approach has changed from attacking English to promoting multilingualism. “There was a time we were very nervous about defending the French language,” says Eric Froment, secretary general of the French Conference of University Presidents, in Paris. “Today it’s more [that] ‘English is inevitable—let’s lead people to speak other languages too.’”
Despite concerns about the smothering of other languages, despite resentment over the free ride the world’s 400 million native speakers of English are getting, many feel the English-language juggernaut is unstoppable.
Richard Brecht, director of the University of Maryland’s National Foreign Language Center, in Washington, says major regional languages—Russian in the former Soviet republics, Spanish in Latin America, and Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa—are all that is slowing the advance of English, and only temporarily. “This is the only real challenge to English as the world language,” he says.
Bengt Streijffert, a top official at the University of Lund, one of Sweden’s large state institutions, says that English is used for most intellectual discourse there and that Swedish may soon just be used “at home and with the dog.”
“It is the universities,” he concludes sanguinely, “which may be leading the way into the abyss.”
Tony Gillotte, Bryon MacWilliams, Paul Mooney, Linda Vergnani, and David L. Wheeler contributed to this report.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Page: A73