The Story of English, or the Global Phase Shift
Some years ago, there was a fantastic PBS mini-series on the history and possible future of the English language. Or at least I hear it was fantastic. I never saw it, but my parents did buy the book that accompanied the program, which I found as a kid. Man, the book was far out — particularly the sections on established and emerging creoles. Basically, The Story of English argued that the same historical forces that fragmented the Roman world were driving apart Englishes spoken around the world. We live in a globalizing world (this was before the term globalization was widely used, but they got the drift), yet this doesn’t mean the end of particularisms: far from it. I recall having read that as American English “homogenizes,” we’re actually seeing a proliferation of new accents — strange admixtures caused by geographical churn.
I was thinking about this last week when I read about Australia’s state-building and peacekeeping efforts in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere in the Pacific, and the backlash it has caused. (WSJ.) As Australia admits a vast number of high-skill economic migrants and refugees, its demographic composition is changing rapidly. For example, there are serious tensions between a fast-growing Muslim population and non-Muslims, even in rural areas and small towns, that more closely resembles the scene in France than in the US. Then you have large number of East Asians, who, one suspects, will assimilate and intermarry over time, giving rise to a distinctive Australian type quite different from the Anglo-Irish Australia of the past.
At the same time, New Zealand is, as a friend recently explained, becoming a more Pacific country. New Zealand’s history is very unique in that relations with the indigenous Maori population were governed by a Treaty, and so the Maori have long played a prominent constitutional role. The Maori have a formidable imperial history of their own, which colors relationships with other Pacific islander populations. The has been a large influx of Pacific islanders, in part out of deference to Maori wishes to frame a humane policy toward (sometimes distant) cultural relatives. Meanwhile, large numbers of New Zealanders, generally among the more ambitious, are emigrating to Australia. New Zealand also has a distinctive political tradition that will presumably grow more distinctive over time.
So America isn’t the only exceptional nation — all of the Anglo-Saxon settler states are changing at a fast clip. Something similar is happening in Europe, where elites are increasingly shaped by the Erasmus culture and migrants are interacting with native populations in very different, highly unpredictable ways. In Latin America, we see the continuing political “indigenization” of countries like Bolivia and Paraguay that were always heavily indigenous: what we’re seeing is a more equitable distribution of power, which looks like and feels like a slow-motion revolution. In Brazil, the economic boom and PT populism is fostering a redistribution of power within the country just as Brazil is gaining newfound prominence in the wider world. In India, a lot of different things are happening at once — indigenization is happening; traditional elites are using, or trying to use, their cultural and administrative capital to seize new levers of economic power; and than you have Erasmusian transnational assimilation, etc. China has a small but growing Christian minority. South Korea has a far larger Christian minority, and familiar left-right politics.
All of this is to say that all of the global pieces are moving, even in the familiar precincts of the West. It’s not obvious what the new alignments will be. It’s not obvious that China will continue to have a smooth rise. I sometimes think of GNP as in tune with the “indigenization” of America, which is an idea that’ll take some unpacking. We’re fixated on Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign policy traditionalists are fixated on China’s rise. Latin Americanists are really into Venezuela and to a lesser extent Bolivia. I think the real action is in Parag Khanna’s Second World, and in traditional allies that are simultaneously undergoing weird phase shifts. I’m going to try to think this through.
I think the problems of Muslims in France have been over-stated. Pew have done a few surveys of Muslims in different European countries and generally speaking France has had greater success at integrating Muslims into their culture. Muslims are less religious, less conservative and less angry about foreign policy in the West than their co-religionists in the UK, Spain or Germany.
I don’t think the reasons are wholly clear. On the one hand France’s Muslims are portrayed as predominately Algerian and while there is a very large North African community there’s also a large minority that comes from sub-Saharan Africa which is a very different sort of religion. In Senegal for example Islam is predominately divided between different Sufi sects and is rather heterodox. However I don’t think cultural background is enough to explain it. Germany’s Muslim community is, largely, Turkish and yet they poll closer to Britain’s predominately Pakistani and Indian Muslim community. Why do Spain’s Moroccan community have more ideologically Islamist values than France’s Algerians?
The best reason I can think of is that France is, like America, an ideological state. So while Germany never set much store in integration because the Turks were ‘guest workers’ who would, eventually, leave and the UK believed in a policy of multi-culturalism, the French were committed to anyone becoming French if they adhere to certain ‘Republican values’.
Many European countries have issues with economically integrating immigrants. In the UK many Muslims moved to working class areas where jobs were available in the 1970s and earlier but that are now very poor and have high unemployment rates. Many communities are trapped in old mill towns and so on. I believe something similar happened with blacks in America who moved from the South to Northern industrial centres just before they declined.
Similar things have happened in many other European countries and there is nowhere where I think immigrants have been successfully integrated into our economies and this is a huge failure. But, in France, I think that they have been integrated into French society and French culture far more than any other European country can boast.
And, if I can just mention the banlieues and the ‘intifada-en-seine’, the banlieues aren’t divided between Muslims and non-Muslims. They have large North African, large African Muslim, large non-Muslim African and large Indochinese communities. These aren’t some monolithic communities surrounding France’s cities. If the issues here wer Islam against non-Islamic cultures then the banlieues would be rioting against themselves. It’s between a poor and largely forgotten underclass of French (and European society) and the community who are successful, or have a more active state behind them. It’s between the outsiders and the insiders – especially in France.
Sorry to highlight one throw-away section of one sentence and it’s an interesting point but I think France and her Muslims have been done down by a lot of people without enough reason.
Shaun
— Shaun · Aug 4, 08:20 AM · #
Shaun:
I totally agree with you — and the same is roughly true in Australia: it’s not some crazed Mad-Maxian nightmare, but there are real tensions that are exacerbated by an out-of-touch clerical leadership, by class differences, and relative isolation. At least that’s my rough impression.
I think Reuel Marc Gerecht made the best observation on Islam in Europe: there reason there isn’t much in the way of “moderate Islam” is that like most Europeans, large numbers of European Muslims have become completely secular — they have ceded the field of religion to the devout and to those of separatist inclination.
— Reihan · Aug 4, 02:18 PM · #
Reihan, your comment is particularly true at universities where islamic societies (our versions of MSA’s) our very conservative if not extremist because those who are apolitical or secular have no reason to engage with them.
This wouldn’t be bad in itself except when these groups start running in and winning elections and holding themselves out to be representative. I believe that the national coalition of Islamic societies (Fosis) currently has the governing majority in the National Union of Students.
— shariq · Aug 5, 10:51 AM · #
An interesting cultural point, and I’ll be interested in your further speculations. But the original linguistic claim is nonsense; there is no evidence that the different dialects of English are growing further apart. Within countries, there is much more uniformity. For example, class-based accent distinctions in Britain have diminished greatly in the last few decades (though there are still strong regional accents.) Even regional accents in the US are weakening (except perhaps in the Northeast). Furthermore, I don’t see how one could claim that British English (or Australian English) is more different from US English than it was 50 years ago. There may be interesting new pidgins of English growing up around the globe, but only in places where no one spoke English at all 50 years ago, so that’s hardly evidence for diversification.
— Jim · Aug 5, 04:39 PM · #
Indeed…Jim is completely right here. The evidence is just unambiguous. You should have a look at the English dialect grammar and lexicon put together by Tolkein’s teacher Joseph Wright in the late 19th c. sometime if you want a taste of the sheer scale of the consolidation the English language has undertaken and continues to undertake. Or just compare BBC sitcoms from the ’70s to those now. Or speak with elderly people in flyover country in the U.S. and compare their speech to their grandkids or their contemporaries 200 miles away.
The Roman comparison may hold water inasumuch as, like English in Bangladesh or Singapore, Latin wasn’t indigenous to France or Spain either, but I can just about guarantee you that there was more spoken diversity in Latin in its home territory in Italy in the 3rd c. AD than there is in the whole anglosphere right now — and isn’t as if English is so indigenous to Nebraska or New Zealand, either.
— ERM · Aug 6, 12:33 PM · #