THE RISE OF ENGLISH

An American law professor and linguist addresses the babel of controversy over the predominance of the English language as the world’s lingua franca.

As Salomone demonstrates, English rules as the international language of business, finance, and technology. However, its dominance crushes regional and Indigenous languages and identity and often leads to a dangerously blinkered monolingualism. In this relevant, timely historical analysis, the author tackles many of the relevant angles in the “English only” debate. The argument against “linguistic hegemony” is fierce and ongoing—not only in Europe, where Brexit has renewed calls for the conducting of Europe’s business in French and other European languages, but also in Africa (still making peace with colonial languages), India, and even the U.S., where language immersion and bilingualism are hot-button topics. France wages a valiant battle to keep its language dominant, and calls for English-only graduate classes there and in the Netherlands and Italy have met with push back and lawsuits. In Africa, French and Chinese are giving English a run for its money. In Rwanda and Morocco, English is chosen as an equalizer, while in India (where there are thousands of Indigenous languages), the teaching of English exacerbates the class divide. “The world is chasing after English for the opportunities it presumably offers,” writes Salomone, crossing geographical, generational, and class bounds, yet after the initial headlong rush to globalization, employers are learning the value of hiring people with facility in multiple languages. With the rise in migration and immigration, the author underscores that 1 in 5 people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home and that the pandemic has emphasized the need for language skills, especially in health care. “The health crisis…revealed the limitations of machine translation and the false sense of comfort with English monolingualism that technology has created,” writes Salomone.

A pertinent, accessible study that asks a big question: What language should the world speak?