Language war: How or why did English beat French and Spanish to become the dominant global language?
Originally posted on:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/language-war-how-why-did-english-beat-french-spanish-become-nwaiwu
How did the English language emerge as the dominant global language? Considering that the three international languages under consideration have a long and rich history tied to their national origins. The three countries where these languages are naturally domiciled were major world powers at some point in their history. They dominated world affairs, politics, and economy. They were major colonial and military powers, occupied many other countries and forcibly spread their cultural influences far beyond their borders. Yet at the twilight of their power, when their massive influence seemed to recede, their cultural influence still continued to spread, especially their languages.
As the geopolitical landscape of the world changed, so also did a new front open in the global power play for dominance, this time it was in a more subtle form, a non-violent and non-coercive form of power struggle, it was in the supremacy of the languages. As the story stands today, the English language has clearly emerged as the global winner in this new power struggle, even though the French in their pride still do not wish to admit that they have been beaten to second place, the facts speak for themselve. Evidence abound to support the claim that access to the English language gives more advantages to anyone who is able to key into it even if not as a native speaker. Some of the interesting stats about the English language are: it is the language spoken by the greatest number of non-native speakers (250 million to 350 million non-native speakers); it is the language with the most words with approximately 250,000 distinct words; it is the most widely published language; it is the language that has been adopted by the highest number of nations as their official or national language.
No doubt, the British empire did have a much vast colonial influence than the French, but was that enough leverage for their language to usurp that of the French? Perhaps it may have been a contributory factor, but if another factor is introduced into the equation, a new perspective and interesting emerges as a possible explanation. Taking into consideration the geopolitical significance and influence of some of the nation states that have English as their national language and compare it with French, it becomes obvious that the spread of the influence of English as a global language would have benefited from not just the geopolitical influence and significance of the United Kingdom, but also of those other nation states, specifically those of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, on a regional level, it is also evident that English speaking countries which were former colonies seemed to outclass their French speaking counterparts in the same region, an example is Nigeria and Ghana in West Africa which completely outclass the other French speaking countries in the same region of Africa.
Stating that it was never about the number of nations that spoke English or French, it was about the number of geopolitically significant nations that spoke each language becomes a justifiable argument to some extent. In terms of geopolitical significance, English speaking countries clearly outclassed the French speaking ones. Spanish as a foreign language is confined to South America, and apart of its homebase in Spain, it is only spoken in a few other countries that are not in South America. As globalisation accelerated in the 20th century, everything seemed to revolve around the English language because of the attraction which geopolitically significant English speaking countries had around their language universe, this accelerated the rise to dominance of English as an international language and preferred medium for communication. Unfortunately, France was the lone star in its own language universe, and Spanish had become much more confined to Latin America even with Spain being a dimming star in its own language universe. The UK may not have deliberately raised other giants like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but nevertheless they emerged within the circle of the cultural influence of the UK, the same cannot be said for France or Spain. The lesson here is that, if you are the only successful one in your circle, then it is only a matter of time before you decline.