In the European quarter of Brussels next to the buildings only a mother could love you see young men and women, impeccably dressed in suits and coats, a little too young for senior roles but already very much dressed for them. They hold doors open, they vape outside, they conduct themselves with a fresh-faced elegance. And when you catch wind of what they are saying to each other, for all their varied countries of origin, they are speaking flat American English. Apart from the Italians. They are speaking Italian.
It’s the same everywhere across Europe; indeed, it seems to be much more the case now than when I lived in Berlin twenty years ago that it’s perfectly acceptable to live in a major European capital and do all your business in English. The Belgian case is to a certain extent particular for, as with any multilingual polity, the tension between different languages finds a readymade solution in the use of an auxiliary language. The question of whether to speak French or Dutch in Brussels is to some extent resolved in the choice of an unrelated third language, one without an intrinsic connection to either Wallonia or Flanders.
Yet it is precisely this mode de vie – displaced ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, passing through societies and failing to integrate into them, participants in a cultural homogenization which sees the centre of every European city dominated by the same four or five big chains – that the critics of globalization claim to dislike. It also remains the case that the driving medium of this is the English language, the closest the world has come yet to a true lingua franca.
What is it it that post-liberals and anti-globalists claim to seek? A world of people better rooted in communities, of people with deep connection to places, of those places themselves being well-made, and of the retention of history and tradition. An English-only world threatens all of that; therefore, by definition, to argue against it in English is like trying to sober up in a brewery. The charge, long levelled at the English, that they go abroad and don’t learn the local language, is by now by no means confined to them; increasingly, everybody who goes abroad doesn’t learn the local language.
At best such workers stay for a few years, making their contribution in international English before moving on to the next global staging post. Often their children go to schools where they are instructed in international English too which they speak with flat American accents. This is a state of affairs necessitated in part by the practicalities of global collaboration; most people, I would imagine, would take breakthroughs in international medical research conducted in English over the maintenance of smaller national languages. Nonetheless, it remains the case that to argue against globalization in English is a fish making the moral case against water.
Yet the increasing use of English isn’t entirely unrelated to populist currents in Europe, the kind of destructive politics which might one day make a world of international teams of cancer researchers impossible. English is above all now the language of European elites, moving around, living in each other’s countries, leaving their national tongues behind. Indeed, many such people I meet display an unmistakeable contempt against their native language or the concept of speaking something other than English – of being associated with the ‘parochial’ culture of their own country.
For most it is a simple matter of necessity. Something that native English speakers rarely seem to consider is that if you are a born into a European country which speaks a minority European language, Lithuania or Slovenia say, you will have to give up your own language to have a career of any international standing. You will have to give up on your most precise and sophisticated tool of expression – your own native tongue. And, even in the case of languages with larger bases of speakers, such as German or French, there is an increasing sense of social pressure to be seen speaking English. Indeed that even speaking bad English is better than none.
Can you imagine how English speakers would cope with that? In avowedly monolingual England, one of the places where foreign words seem to induce genuine panic in people, imagine if it became necessary to force people as adults to communicate in a new language, to struggle with unfamiliar sounds and, crucially, to not necessarily always be steering the conversation. Yet that is the fate facing thousands of people across the world today and, even within national spheres itself, the field where the national language is used is increasingly restricted. German companies are notorious for, if a meeting contains one non-German speaker, conducting the whole meeting in English; through such an approach, national language cultures inevitably become marginal.
I struggle with this as an English-language writer. To write in English is, whatever you say in the language itself, to automatically to further this state of affairs. English-language writing can never be entirely confined to a local audience; by default, everyone who writes in English is an internationalist. Of course, writers who’ve grown up with English use it in a different way to those who’ve learnt it, often with more colour, shade and character, often better able to innovate in words. Granted, English itself is a dizzingly varied language; writing in, say, Nigerian pidgin is not to express yourself in the world tongue. Yet for every BBC newsreader expressing themselves in their native accent there is a case like Sanas, the California start-up which offers real-time standardisation of English accents for those from outside the Anglosphere working in call centres , replacing the apparent stigma of a non-native accent with ‘normal’ American.
In my view a writer trying to write well is always making a case for the language they write in, and so a good English writer, however avowedly local in their idiom or concerns, is inevitably making the case for more English, at a time when the language has already grown exceptionally dominant.
The logic that flows from this, then, is that there is no greater argument in favour of localism and preserving tradition an Anglophone writer could make than deciding not to write in English at all. This doesn’t mean quixotically adopting a foreign language – there would be an element of perversity to that, and one reason I support multilingualism is that people’s self-expression is inevitably more complex and sophisticated in their native tongue – but in the spirit of the South African writer JM Coetzee’s decision to let his recent novels appear in Spanish translation first. Could you imagine if JK Rowling wrote a new Harry Potter book and said, well, it will be first available for a year only in Swedish? Thousands would scramble to learn the language the next day.
It's a strange world, our current one, in terms of language use; on one hand, English has never been so dominant; on the other, materials for languages and even very much minority ones have never been easier to attain. I do think a certain responsibility comes to native English speakers with this. The rest of the world has no question about which language to learn first; English will by far get them the most bank for their buck (and, in the spirit of that buck, very much American English too). English more than any other language will see them progress in their careers and open up the opportunities across the world.
Yet English native speakers already know the world language. Therefore they are much freer about what if any language they choose to learn; whatever the status of English, it’s certainly worth learning something given how essential multilingualism is to the human condition. Anglophone natives might learn Chinese, one of the key languages of the 21st-century, or Spanish, another global language, or the emerging lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region, Swahili. But if your politics are communitarianism and postliberalism, surely the obvious thing is to learn a smaller language; to learn Basque, or Scots Gaelic, or Breton; to try and keep these threatened languages alive as a friend of the culture. Or even to delve back into Ancient Languages and preserve the cultural underpinnings of the traditionalism they claim to admire. Yet instead of cashing in this ‘native speaker premium’, Anglophone anti-globalists on left and right tiresomely cycle concepts around the world language; a language which itself all the time upholding the distance between elites and ordinary people they claim to despise.
It’s often remarked that the modern world lacks charm and it’s true, once you’ve sat in your fifteenth bubble tea shop in a major European city you could be anywhere. Part of this lack of charm, I contend, is the dominance of bad English; that so many people today communicate and do their business in a language they speak imperfectly or without passion, subject to the inevitable gravitational pull of modish concepts. So many people spend their days speaking a language in which they sound so dumb. A more multilingual Europe would be more parochial, might find it harder to get things done quickly, but it would perhaps more full of character and certainly more full of tradition; it would be, in short, more the kind of Europe communitarians claim to want.
I am, in this respect, certainly doing my bit. I speak three large European languages and am currently learning the smallest language I have yet, Dutch – though, with 22 million speakers, it’s hardly on the list with Occitan (circa 200,000). I ask people to speak their native languages with me wherever possible, though I don’t have to do that; I could just as easily ‘get by in English’ and drift around in a pleasant anodyne internationalism. I insist in part because of my own professional motivations but also because I find international English extremely boring to converse in. I acknowledge our world has need of a global language to facilitate communication, but it’s no more than that, a tool, lacking aesthetics, cultural connections and frequently, sophistication.
This so-called ‘globish’ is only tangentially related to what is called English in the Anglophone world. But that terminological overlap, that both these things, English at home and abroad, are called the same thing, leaves those unhappy with globalization in the English-speaking world unable to understand what their language is doing at present, for good or ill, the thousands of displacing and deracinating conversations which occur in the language each day; it is entirely paradoxical to argue for a greater sense of place and cultural continuity and also be happy to travel all over the world speaking English as a universally understood language is an inherently homogenizing idea. If you want to take a stand against globalization, learn Welsh.
I think it’s possible to acknowledge that ‘everybody speaks English nowadays’ and, if in a country where one doesn’t speak the language, contribute to that development while wishing that every world city didn’t have shopping centres full of H&M and Footlocker. I guess the globalisation of American English goes hand in hand with the globalisation of capitalism, and to acknowledge that doesn’t mean you have to like it. There is much to miss about the way Europe was in the 70s…..
Maybe I’m just becoming more like Meister Anton at the end of Hebbel’s ‘Maria Magdalena:’ Ich verstehe die Welt nicht mehr!