An evolving language system for the brave New World

A.H. Jaffor Ullah

A British language expert by the name David Graddol wrote an erudite article entitled “The Future of Language” for the prestigious scientific journal Science in late February 2004.  I was not aware of this very interesting article since the middle of August 2004 when I was discoursing with an American colleague of mine.  The topic of discussion was the future of world languages.  Naïvely, I propounded that the way people of other nations are learning English to communicate in the cyber world, as the days pass by, more and more folks all around the globe will be speaking English at the cost of demise of many world languages.  Perhaps within 100 years or so, I opined, there will be one dominant language throughout the world.  My colleague shook his head and said that that is what he also believed but the experts are saying something very different.  He then went into his office where there was a pile of scientific journals.  He took one from the pile, opened it, and then handed me an article written by David Graddol. 

Mr. Graddol works for a firm named English Company located in Milton Keynes, England.  Not knowing the academic stature of him, I sent a PDF file of the article to my eldest son, Rashad, who is a doctoral student at the Linguistic program at Yale University.  Rashad told me later that Mr. Graddol is a heavy weight language evolutionist and respected linguists know of him.  The article that I am penning now is based on Mr. Graddol’s fascinating work.  Mr. Graddol holds the opinion that at present the world’s language system that has evolved over centuries is going to restructure and a new linguistic world order is going to emerge in the future.  However, until then, there will be confusion and instability as far languages are concerned.  In other words, the earthlings are going to experience some rough time with their native language.  Some language will extinct, others will change dramatically.  One corollary of Graddol’s hypothesis is English is not going to dominate worldwide as feared by many of us.

In simplistic thinking, English as a language is poised for rapid growth.  Thanks to technology and in particular Internet and computer, this had caused a rapid growth in the usage of English worldwide.  The Far Eastern people in China, Korea, and Japan had shown a reluctance to learn English in the twentieth century.  But due to an exponential growth in information technology spawned by the emergence of Internet as a dominant technology many far eastern folks have learned English no matter how minuscule the level is.  Therefore, many of us, who are not language expert, wrongly opined that English language is going to bump other languages and the world is heading towards one language.  But Mr. Graddol has other opinion.  He thinks people in the world will be multi-lingual.  He also thinks that a handful of languages will flourish among them are Arabic, Bengali, Tamil, Malaya, and few more like these Asian languages.

The introductory lines in Graddol’s seminal paper states, “The world's language system is undergoing rapid change because of demographic trends, new technology, and international communication.  These changes will affect both written and spoken communication.  English may not be the dominant language of the future, and the need to be multilingual will be enhanced.  Although many languages are going extinct, new ones are emerging in cities and extended social groups.”

Mr. Graddol used the United Nations population projections and estimates of the linguistic demography of each country for 2000 and 2050 and came up with his conclusion that only 5% of the world’s population will claim to be the persons growing up in a family that considers English as theirs first language; in 2000, that number was 9%.  Therefore, there will be a net loss of 4% for English going from 2000 to 2050.  English is widely spoken in Great Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  The number one language spoken in 2000 is Chinese (different varieties of Chinese language) and this position won’t change in 2050.  The second-tiered languages are English, Hindi, Arabic, and Spanish; these languages will change rank 50 years from now.  Hindi and Arabic will bump English, which is now the second ranking language.  The third tiered languages, Bengali, Tamil, Malaya, etc., will grow at a faster rate.  Therefore, in 50 years from now the world will be very different in terms of ranking of the languages. 

What about the bottom tiered languages of the world?  Well, many of these languages will be extinct going forward.  The linguists think there are roughly about 6,000 languages in the world.  An estimated 90% of the world languages are expected to become extinct within the next 100 years.  However, it is not all gloom and doom scenarios for the world language.  Mr. Graddol writes, “However, while we lose older, rural languages, new urban hybrid forms may help maintain global diversity.  Cities are places where languages mingle and where language change speeds up.  And the fast growing urban areas of the world are breeding grounds for new hybrid languages -just as hundreds of new forms of English have already been spawned around the world.”    

Experts in the field of language think that we are at the end of “modern languages.”  The modern language has evolved over centuries.  For Bangla the modernity came through the collective works of pundits and reformers such as Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Ishwarchandra, Michael Modhusudon Datta, Rabindranath Thakur, Promoth Chowdhury, etc.  For English, the modernity came through the collective works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, and any more nineteenth century dramatists, novelists, and poets.  The invention and use of printing press also helped the world to achieve modernity in language.  The same thing will happen now in post-modern era.  The Internet is a double-edged sword.  It spreads good and bad pieces of works.  There is no gatekeeper of English or Bangla.  Anyone who knows how to make a web page may become a writer.  In fact, it is alarming to see incorrectly spelled words gracing many web pages in the cyber world.  New media of communication such as e-mail, messenger, blog, newsgroups, e-forums, etc., are spawning new style, new words, etc.  These are going to have an impact on language.  In other words, languages are going to change very rapidly in this age of fast Internet services.  The boundary between formal and informal style of writing will be blurred.  It is highly likely that a new world order of language is in the offing.  How long will it take to take us there?  There is no clue.   

The world is entering a multi-lingual age.  Gone will be the days that one would survive knowing only his or her mother tongue. To emphasize this notion Mr. Graddol writes, “In the new world order, most people will speak more than one language and will switch between languages for routine tasks.  Monolingual English speakers may find it difficult to fully participate in a multilingual society.”

As we are ushered in to a postmodern world, the text is changing.  It is becoming shorter, more fragmentary, and multimodal, i.e., using pictures, color, sound, kinetics as well as words); therefore, linguists such as Mr. Graddol thinks that strategies of interpretation and ways of reading will change.  It is a small wonder that we now live in this television-dominated world where ad message comes in short sound bite.  Our attention span has become shorter and that demands shorter sentences. 

The last query that Mr. Graddol had in his seminal article is will the future understand us.  By this, he meant if we write something today for posterity, would the future generation be able to understand what we wrote.  A practical case would be something like this: If the U.S. government erect a sign at the site in Nevada where radioisotopes are being buried stating that this place has dangerous amounts of radioactive materials; therefore no human habitation or agriculture should be permitted here for the next 10,000 years.  This question was asked to Thomas Sebeok, an American specialist in semiotics (semantics expert) in the 1980s.  Mr. Sebeok answered that here was “no secure means of transmitting such knowledge over 300 generations.”  He however recommended “putting in place a relay system which ensured that “as the information begins to decay, it should be updated” and argued that any messages written in English should be designed for only three generations ahead that is, 100 years.”  Now, if an expert in the field thinks that a sign has a lifetime of 3 generations or 100 years, then what holds for a language for thousands of years?  It poignantly tells us that change is a norm in life and language is a vital part of life.  We have to learn how to live in a changing world.  Fortunate for mankind is that change is gradual.  However, over a long period, Mr. Graddol thinks that the language will radically change in its core vocabulary or grammar.

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A.H. Jaffor Ullah, a researcher and columnist, writes from New Orleans, USA