Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Division of English Language and Literature
English in the Era of Globalization
Fall 2005
Week 3, Day 1 - Answers
Trimnell 2003, Chapters 5 and 6
1. In chapter 5 Trimnell argues that languages and their use and disuse can be used to promote national security. Do you agree or disagree and why?
As with most questions, in looking at Trimnell’s argument I find I both agree and disagree, depending on the level at which you need to look at the language learning. I agree that certainly intelligence officers within a specific country need to know the languages of other countries so that they can assess intelligence, which is an extremely important part of national security, particularly for a country like the US which has its fingers stuck into many pies. On the other hand, national security should not require that all citizens all any given country speak foreign languages for the purposes of being able to understand other people so that they can spy on them. This is impossible.
National security issues are far too complex to envision or even allowing multitudes of private citizens to start working on it. This is ludicrous. Trimnell is suggesting that Americans should learn foreign languages so that they can understand enemies who might want to harm them. First of all, for most people this would not be a very good or solidly motivating reason for wanting to learn a foreign language. Second of all, most regular citizens residing in their home country do not have any need to use some of these languages of so-called enemies. They simply won`t learn them. This seems to be kind of a knee-jerk reaction to the shock and horror of the September 11 attacks in the US, but it is highly doubtful that if more Americans spoke Arabic that such attacks could have been avoided. North Korea and South Korea share a common language but that still does not make them friends. At the same time I think it is both inflammatory and insulting to insinuate, as he does, that these Saudi Arabian children are learning English, at least in part, to be able to harm English speakers and predominantly Americans.
This national security view Trimnell is expounding takes the underlying ideas of globalization and turns them on their head. Looking at this, we begin to wonder about what globalization really means in its most basic sense. For me a globalized person is a person who is able to, based on experience both linguistic and extra linguistic, to empathize with other groups in the world who they know and know about. It simply means that people can think outside of their own restricted region. They are able to see things in a different way taking other viewpoints and even the good of the whole world into consideration. A good example would be the perceived problem of the declining population in Korea. Rather than thinking globally, the former mayor of Seoul pushed forward a program by which citizens of Seoul will be paid money from the city government if they have more children. Not only is this a localized treatment of a national problem but the local treatment ignores the opposite global trend of vast overpopulation. It is also extremely short-sighted, but that is not the issue here. A global solution to this problem would involve encouraging skilled people from overpopulated regions to come and resettle in Seoul.
It seems to me that Trimnell, like the Seoul city mayor, is not a particularly globalized individual in that he is trying to assert knowledge of other regions simply to promote his own particular region of the world. That is not the true spirit of globalization, but unfortunately is often the practice. A truly globalized person can put herself in the shoes of another and adopt their point of view. They can see a particular situation, whether global or local, from different sides based on a profound understanding of other peoples and cultures, which is, again, achieved predominantly through the study of language(s). It is contact and the resulting cognitive restructurisation which makes people think globally. Information is also key to this.
We have spoken previously about the idea that globalization seems to occur at two different levels, the personal level which occurs inside and between people and the economic level which occurs inside and between companies. Despite these different levels they both work in more or less the same way. If individuals are changed in their thought processes, or lease potential thought processes, through globalization then economies are as well. In a true global situation, we become, in effect, reliant on each other because our fates become entwined at least at the economic and cognitive level. Globalization is a cognitive reality. Think about your own reactions to the disaster in New Orleans, or the continuing strife in the Darfur region of Sudan. We really are saddened by the horrible loss of life in these situations. Because of globalization we feel closer to other people than ever before, but only truly globalized individuals will know what to do about these things.
2. There have been claims that English is a language which brings or hastens political change in repressed groups. Is this true and, if so, how?
Since rising to the pinnacle of world leadership in the 1940s, the United States has often linked its expansion and success to its political system. At the same time, and in the same vein, the US State Department has often made the teaching of English an important aspect of foreign policy in developing parts of the world under the belief that teaching repressed groups of people the English language provides them with a medium through which they can learn about and explore democracy. Continuing in this vein it was believed that through these explorations of the democracy in the English language repressed groups would strive to achieve political systems like in the US, in the process toppling their repressive and sometimes anti-American governments. Interestingly, the Americans are not the first to believe in the superiority of the English language in certain areas related to democracy. Really in so many ways the Americans are following the path already cut by the British a couple hundred of years earlier.
Trimnell, seemingly annoyed by this train of thought, argues that there is no connection between the ability to use English and a necessary belief in democracy and of course this is true. Just because the English language uses some terms related to democracy does not mean that the English language is any way more equalitarian or democratic than any other language and to claim so is simply ridiculous. But it seems that Trimnell is also missing the point here.
English is an important language in democratization movements not because of any kind of structural or lexical elements in the language but because of two things, it status as a global lingua franca and the global media. English has become a protest language because it has reach and power. English gives a group with a gripe a vehicle through which the entire world can come to know their views and problems. It is also true that English speakers are rich and powerful (not all, of course, but in general). This is an extremely important aspect of globalization; the idea that through media coverage and information technology (the dissemination of information) problems and issues themselves are no longer regional. We must acknowledge that English as the world`s lingua franca plays an extremely important role for any kind of repressed people in getting their ideas out and even in bringing about change. Such a result comes from the global power of English, the media, and the willingness of governments all over the world to try to limit both strife and loss of human life across the globe. It really has little to do with the nature of the English language itself, but really just its role in the world today and the global shape of the world.
3. According to Trimnell, how did English rise to be the world language and why is this power diminishing?
Trimnell gives us all rather short and somewhat skewed view of how English came to be the world language. According to him it was after World War II that the United States became the head of a global coalition of Western democracies which stood in direct opposition to an Eastern coalition of communist states. When this coalition of communist states fell in the late 1980s-early 1990s the United States was then left alone as the world leader and English became a global language. In reality the history of English as a global language is much longer and much more complex and involves, for the most part, the economic and military development of the United Kingdom from the early Middle Ages until the end of World War II.
Languages do not come to be world languages overnight and do not cease to be important languages overnight either, as Trimnell would seem to claim. He sees the power of English diminishing but, as we discussed last week, I am not sure that is necessarily true. The Germans and the French might not be frenetically euphoric about learning English for the moment but they still do it because they need to. The fact that a multitude of countries are promoting their own languages doesn`t necessarily diminish the power of English or mean that they are anti-English. In fact, all countries have the right to promote their own cultures.
In fact, some of the changes that Trimnell talks about as far as increased regionalization in Europe have come about as a direct result of globalization. Paradoxically, it is globalization which has made it feasible for regions to split off from larger unions and become separate. The fact that the economies all over the world are so deeply intertwined means that there is no specific need for huge empires anymore. Rather than invading a region and taking it over to exploit a specific region`s resources, as was done in the past, a country can now access the resources of any region in the world by simply buying them. As long as different regions have strong economic ties and good international relations it doesn`t really matter to what actual country the resources belong. So, it is possible for some of these smaller nations to be off by themselves, so long as there are a few people who can deal with the international community so that trade can occur freely.
Based on these new changes in the global economy we can see that the new trend in globalization is that it allows people to be both local and global. Following what Trimnell sees in his rather alarmist chapter we can argue that the most prosperous regions of the world will follow this basic model of preserving their regional identity on the one hand while embracing elements of globalization on the other.