Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Division of English Language and Literature
English for International Communication
Spring 2006
Crystal (2003) Chapter 3 - Questions
1. How have English views on the colonial endeavour worked to support the spread of the language?
The English view of the colonial endeavor was generally very positive and of course this was the same for all the European powers at the time. To understand this view, which seems to be horrific and strange to us today, we need to think about those times. During the time of colonial expansion there was no UN, international organizations, or anything remotely like that. There was also a tremendous disparity in the states of development between different areas of the world. The Europeans felt that they had superiority over other places and peoples and that this made them actually superior. This unwarranted feeling of superiority extended to language. This is easy for us to understand because we know that language is the outward manifestation of culture. At the time the British felt themselves to be culturally superior to not only non-Europeans but also within the European sphere. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that Britain is an island nation and was somewhat separate from the continent of Europe. Separation certainly seems to create xenophobia and feelings of superiority. But really this was a time when powerful people and powerful countries could do pretty much anything they wanted and unfortunately they did.
In the same vein people tried to justify what they were doing by claiming that it was their right to be able to do such things. British people believed that because their society was, in their view, more advanced than it was their duty to bring their society to other people. Sadly, we still see strong elements of this in the foreign policy of the European countries and certainly to a greater extent that of the United States. The difference however is that even in the United States there are voices against such imperialism. At the time of colonial expansion it was just seen as a natural type of thing. Nobody in Britain was opposed to colonial expansion during the time, except those who didn`t want to endanger British lives. Nobody thought about colonial expansion negatively from the point of view of the people who were being exploited.
This type of view in which British colonialism was seen as a natural and positive thing for everyone involved really helped to support the spread of English. It seemed natural to the British that their language was better than other people`s language simply because it was through the English language that people could become cultured and civilized. English is sophisticated and technologically advanced. We know this is true, but old views diehard and the French are still making similar claims about French in contrast to English as a way of trying to keep their own language intact in certain parts of the world. The matter how you want to look at modern or in the past it is a very skewed way of looking at the world based on the basic idea that people in the cultures and languages which they have are not equal.
2. In reflecting on the spread of English as a world language when was the turning point and what forces came together to make this point clearly visible?
The real turning point development of English as an international language came with the Industrial Revolution. Starting in the very end of the 18th century but really not becoming determining force until near the middle of the 19th-century, the economic development of Britain was astounding. Britain was the first industrialized, the first developed country in the world. Most of the manufacturing technology used in industrial pollution was developed first in Britain. This was really the major turning point because at this point it was no longer military force which was pushing the spread of English, as was the case for most of the other European colonial powers, but was economic force and economic power. This economic power spread not only to the British colonies but two other `civilized` countries in Europe. What was more was that this great economic expansion in Britain jumped across the Atlantic and took off, to an even greater extent, in United States. So, as we have mentioned before, just as the military and economic power of Britain was beginning to wane, the power of the United States rose.
It is probably interesting to note the role that colonization probably had on the economic development of both Britain and the United States. As we mentioned previously in this class British colonization, even in the pre-industrial period, was based on economics in the form of trade. This emphasis on trade meant that in Britain people have access to goods from all of the world which of the people did not happen. Undoubtedly it was this global trade which had a huge effect on impelling Britain to further economic development and pushing them into the Industrial Revolution. The wealth from trade allowed this new development to take place. As we also mentioned before, economic development, and more specifically technological development, requires wealth. The British got this wealth through a vast colonial empire. As for the Americans we can argue the same thing except it isn`t necessarily through trade that the Americans acquired vast wealth, but through the acquisition of virtually free land. Free land was the initial impetus which drew wealth into the country and this wealth was able to be used for again technological development.
We can`t overestimate the power of economics in spreading English. The economic development of Britain created an entire new vocabulary which people all over the world needed to learn if they wanted to come in contact with any kind of modern technology. People from all over Europe would go to Britain either permanently or temporarily in order to learn about some of these modern technologies and economic policies. At the same time, it is really hard to think of how the United States might have developed had so many millions of Europeans not gone there for resettlement. Most people who went to the United States did not go for religious or political reasons. Most of the immigration into the United States was based on economics. People simply wanted to be able to live better and since the United States economy was so favorable for development people went there. In fact, people are still going there and for the same basic reason.
Looking at all this I think if we want to find a particular turning point I think the best example we can find from the book would be the quote from Jacob Grimm made in 1851 which we can use as probably the best marker for the turning point of English from about the middle of the 19th-century English really took off in its power only increased dramatically on the basis of this economic power in Britain and the US.
3. Crystal (2003) discuses three main factors supporting the spread of English what are these three?
Crystal mentions three main factors supporting the spread of English. They are:
Political development
Political development is important petition shows this kind of triumphant attitude not just of regular people on the street, but on the actual people in the government and in power positions around the world in British colonies. Part of the British government policy, and simultaneously American government policy, was to spread the English language. This was done sometimes through somewhat beneficial means like schooling and sometimes done through rather brutal means such as the purposeful extermination of indigenous languages. In both cases the spread of the language was official government policy, interestingly even in the context where neither country at the time had any semblance of English as an official language.
Economic development - Access to knowledge
The tremendous economic development first of Britain and later of the United States came not just through trade or extensive land grabs but through the development of new technologies and systems. The simple fact that Britain and United States controlled a huge amount of technological development meant that in order to access this technological development people needed English. For example, back in the 19th century if you wanted to find out about how to set up a telegraph system in your country or region you would need to travel to either the United States in order to find out how this new technology worked. Obviously you would need to be able to deal in English with the people who controlled all this different technology. This type of development brought English not only to the poorest parts of the world but also to the richest parts of the world.
Taken for granted
Unlike today where language policy is always a major topic of discussion all over the world, back in the 18th and 19th centuries which saw the greatest physical and political expansion of English, there were no debates. Nobody questioned using English simply because no one thought at all about other people and their languages. That was the basic arrogance of these people. Not a thought was made to anyone else. The fact that English was spoken by the people who develop this technology was good enough to package all this different technology in English. The packaging of technology in English and a major role in spreading English further because English became the language of money, technology and development and even the language of the future. To a large extent it still is.
4. Which of these three do you think is the most important and why?
It is actually hard to say definitively which of these three different factors is most important because all of them are necessary for this tremendous spread of English, but one we find the most enduring today is the `access to knowledge` factor. The basic idea in the access to knowledge factor is that people will want to learn English because it provides access to all the things they want and need. Because of the rapid economic development as well as the colonial system of the United Kingdom and later the United States manufactured goods came from abroad and were very much linked to English language and culture. This really made people want to learn more English. Even in this globalized world of today it is the access factor makes people want to learn English. People need to learn English for education, for jobs, for politics, money, and even for culture. This is the weight is now globally but you can imagine that during the colonial period this is also the way it was in British colonial realms.
5. What does it take for a new or outside language to replace an indigenous language?
Basically there two ways for a language to replace another, not necessarily in the mind of one speaker but on a societal level. The first of these we already discussed when we dealt with the physical expansion of English. This involves genocide and then simply repopulating the land. Certainly this was done on a grand scale in not only Northern Ireland but throughout the Americas and particularly in North America and the Caribbean. At the same time this model requires a very specific set up. When the British got to Asia they found that this simply could not work. It needed to try to get people to shift English and some other way. The other way of trying to get a language to replace another is to make people see more value in this new language as opposed to the old one(s). In the second type of replacement the British were not nearly as successful as they were with the first type. For this second type a replacement there is a minimum of three requirements within the society for the language which seeks to do some of the replacing. They are:
High Valorization
Valorization is based on the idea of emotive value. Stored in our brain, in the mid brain, in a special section called the amygdala are valorization levels for all the concepts which have been coded into the brain. A high valorization levels simply means that people have a strong positive emotional value set for a particular concept. Languages are concepts, in fact there will be many concept related to a single language. Therefore, languages also have valorization levels. A language with a high valorization level such as English in certain colonial settings at certain times or today in Korea will not only draw people`s attention but will make them want to learn the language. A high valorization level will force parents to get their children to learn a language.
Frequency
Frequency breeds contentedness. Within the brain the more often somehow perceives something the more they’re probably going to like it. There have been many studies would show a strong correlation between frequency and positive valorization levels for different objects. A language is no different. The more frequently someone encounters a particular language, the more they will, often despite themselves, like that language. The language is not only being pulled into the brain from the outside world but the parts of the brain which house that language are going to be activated more often due to frequency. At some point it all seems good and normal. Even in a brutal colonial situation frequency of will have the effect of making people feel more content.
Access
None of the requirements mentioned above really matter if people do not have access to the language itself and, more importantly, ways of learning the language. This means that people need either to find ways of speaking that language, or educational access. Access is the key to spreading the language. Of course in granting access to large numbers of people also cost a lot of money. Since in a colonial endeavor the colonizer wants to take as much money as possible and spend as little as possible, we don`t end up finding too many extensive school systems set up in colonized countries. Within the British colonies schooling was also just for a very small minority of people. The American experiment in the Philippines, partially because he came much later and partially because of its somewhat singular role as a large American colony, actually put a lot of emphasis on education from the very beginning with strong results for the English-language.
6. What are some of the conditions which have made English replacement particularly possible in the spread of English?
As Crystal has mentioned in the book it seems that the spread of English has been really a case of the language being in the right place at the right time. But is also more than that. Because the British were rather late in entering into the European colonial endeavor, they first needed to colonize places that other people didn`t necessarily want up in cold North America. This was a lucky circumstance in that it led to a rapid development of new English-speaking countries unencumbered by large numbers of native inhabitants. Successes in North America bred further successes all over the world as a result we have this tremendous physical expansion of the British Empire as well as the United States. So the spread is the first condition. After spread we have this tremendous economic development within Great Britain at first and the US later. As a mention in class this economic development pretty much leads to everything else. Because Great Britain and the US are so economically developed than people begin to associate English with development. Because Britain and the US a rich people begin to associate English with wealth, they still do today. As a military power, an economic power, a political power, and the cultural power the US has come to bring all these different things together with English. This is really the second phase of the development of English and also the second major condition, but all these different things flow from economics.
7. Little bits of English seem to be everywhere in Korea, what do you think will happen as a result of this based on what we now know about cognitive functioning?
One simple truism about cognitive functioning is that perception is the root of everything. Everything that people know, feel, think they know, feel good about, and everything else stems first from perception. The contents of our brain pretty much comes in through or five different perceptual routes. And once it enters it never really leaves. Even though we might somehow not be able to retrieve upon demand lots of information which is stored in the brain, it does mean that is not there. It is also true that what is in our brain determines how we use our brain. The simple fact that English is everywhere in Korea, albeit in small written forms for the most part, means that we do have a frequent exposure to English. It also means that these frequent exposures are stored in the brain. As elements in the brain they also have an effect on how other systems in the brain function. It is therefore certainly true that the regular exposure which Koreans get to English has changed the way they think. We will happen in the future is that certainly English will be seen as being less and less of a foreign language and more and more as a second-language. That`s for sure.
Sonntag (2003) Chapter 1
Here we just want to review some of the main terms which Sonntag (2003) goes over in this first introductory chapter of her book. It is important for us to have good understanding of these words because we are going to find them appearing again and again throughout the course of the book.
Hegemony
Hegemony is basically a situation where in one country, culture, or group not only has power over other groups but also chooses to exercise that power for various purposes. So we really talking about is an unequal power base.
International relations sense
In its international relations sense hegemony relates to how different countries might actually engage with each other on the international front. We can put different countries into a hierarchy based on power and of course this power comes from different sources. Certainly it is the relative power that a country might have in its dealings with other countries which will affect how it goes about dealing. More powerful countries will of course have a tendency to push around less powerful countries and this affects their international relations. As we will see as we read this book the United States is an extremely powerful country which does indeed use its power to get what it wants and other countries react to this hegemony in different ways.
Gramscian sense
The Gramscian sense of hegemony basically revolves around the different linguistic/cultural/linguistic groups in a given society and their differing levels of power. In a given society one group will generally eclipse other groups in their power and like countries will use this power to their own advantage. Often, in multilingual and multicultural societies such groups will also have their own language and/or culture which they can use as a way of marking themselves or differentiating themselves form others.
Another important part of this Gramscian sense of hegemony as he idea that it is highly likely that within the society people will not resist the status quo. They will not rise up against the more powerful group or even laments necessarily their situation as the least powerful group of because this is the way it has always been. Societal structures change often not from the bottom but from the top.
Resistance
Resistance is the way that different groups or different countries will react to hegemony. This kind of resistance can take a lot of different forms depending on whether this is at the international level or the societal level. Here in Korea we have witnessed this happening all the late both in Korea's relations with the United States, a partner, and in Korea's relations with Japan a former competitor. While the surface of these two issues might seem quite different they both boil down to the same thing, resistance to a hegemony in which Korea has been viewed as a less powerful country by others. South Korea is obviously no longer to accept his position and wants to move up in ranks to be more equal to both its partners and its former enemies.
Elites and subalterns
The idea behind elites and subalterns is quite clear. Every society is made up of people who are at the top and people who are at the bottom. There are the people who write the history books and the people who experience history in a more real sense and this is maybe an interesting way of thinking that the difference between the elites and subalterns. In relation to language of and subalterns will not only have a different language but they will not have access to education not only in their own language but to the global language, which we know at this point is English. In his hope we will look at how subalterns have used this global lingua franca as a way of trying to win more power in their own country. There are interesting cases all of appropriation of English, a typically elitist tool, from subalterns, who end up using English in their own way in for their own purposes.
Liberalization and democratization
Sonntag puts the terms liberalization in democratization together here with a warning that though they are sometimes equated or at least linked to each other by some researchers they are not necessarily partners. Liberalization does not always lead to democratization and certainly democratization does not always lead to liberalization, but it sometimes does. What liberalization really is is simply opening up and simplifying systems so that they are more useful to outsiders. Simple example would be relaxing import taxes which Korea is possibly being pressured to to do. Liberalization simply means less control from above. Now, it has been noticed that some countries going through a liberalization process are also at the same time going through democratization process. The clearest examples of this are both the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. As these economies and liberalize the countries also are experiencing democratization at the same time. This doesn't always occur. Since the recent Asian economic crisis many Asian countries have been forced to liberalize their economies but this has not led to further democratization in countries like Singapore, China, or Malaysia, for example.