In China last month, Theresa May attended the launch of the British Council’s English is Great campaign, intended to boost interest and fluency in our national language. This might sound like Donald Trump’s notorious “Make America great again”, but comes in fact from a stronger position. Beyond doubt, the use of English is greater than ever, and far more widespread than any other language in the world. All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn; it is also, uniquely, in practical use worldwide. The British Council reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people, a quarter of the world’s population. It is taught from primary level up in all China’s schools; it is the working language of the whole European Union. [...]
Considering the windfall benefits of English as one’s own language, some immediate advantages are undeniable. It has given direct access to the world’s principal medium of communication: good for having an inside track on “news we can use”, as well as facilitated access for well-educated anglophones to influential jobs. It has also put us in a position to charge some kind of rent for allowing others admission to this linguistic elite: hence the massive earnings from teaching English as a foreign language (now well over £2bn in the UK alone, reaching £3bn by 2020), and global markets for English-language publishing (£1.4bn in exports in 2015). This is another spin-off from Britain’s recent history of dominance, like the siting of the Greenwich meridian, giving daily opportunities for global trades between Asia and America, or the association of investment, and hence global finance, with the City of London. [...]
For English, therefore, its current peak is likely to be as good as it will ever get, its glory as a world language lasting just a couple of centuries – almost a flash in the pan, not yet comparable with those forerunners Latin or Farsi. And on present form, its fall is likely to coincide with the latest rise of China, whose documented history has run for three millennia. Chinese, too, is great.
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