This is the English version of an article to appear in the French-language periodical Terminogramme, in a thematic issue entitled
"Géostratégie des langues:
Vers un nouvel ordre linguistique mondial?"
Since the end of the 15th century, when the printing press delivered the means of linguistic standardization into the hands of centrist rulers (Illich 1981; 1983), the field of language policy and planning has been dominated by what I shall call the "politostratégies des langues". Developing in tandem with theories of the nation and the state (Anderson 1983), linguistic politostrategies have generally aimed to entrench the use of a single language in public administration and education, either across an entire state territory or within well-defined internal borders. As the processes of modernity have expanded through the 20th century, ushering in a period of turbulent global change, the politostrategists of language have continued both to defend the old national linguistic monopolies and to seek to establish new ones through corpus, status and acquisition planning (Cooper 1989).
In reality, however, such "politostratégies des langues" are no longer adequate instruments of national or community policy. As late as the early decades of this century, it was possible for new national languages to play catch-up with the flagbearers -- English, French and German -- as measured in terms of their integration within a modern industrial economy and all of the standardized textual communication practices that accompany it (Smith 1990). Since then, however, a number of changes have taken place. National economies have become far more integrated in the global economy; money and workers have become much more mobile; the pace of technological change has accelerated to an unbelievable extent; and the explosive growth of communication and information networks is on the verge of "annihilating space", as one current catch-phrase has it. Increasingly, every language community must take cognizance of its position in a "dynamic world system of languages" characterized by vast and expanding differences in status and use (de Swaan 1998a,b).
The future evolution of this system depends, in part, on the means used to transmit information and ideas across language borders: these include mediation by human or electronic translators, widespread plurilingualism, and the spread of lingua francas -- either languages with a powerful political and economic base, such as English, or "planned" international languages, such as Esperanto. In an earlier article, Jonathan Pool and I suggested that all of these means might contribute to bringing about a world characterized by high levels of linguistic diversity, integration, equity, efficiency and sustainability: in our terms, an interlingual world (Pool & Fettes 1998). Unfortunately, research and thinking in this area to date has been largely concentrated among the advocates, developers and practitioners of each particular approach: World English people have little time for Esperantists, advocates of Plurilingualism are out of touch with the Technologists, and professional Language Brokers have little incentive to venture outside the boundaries of their field.
Yet as "politostratégies" give way to "géostratégies des langues" -- that is, as the defence of local interests becomes inextricably tied to the definition and protection of a particular niche in the global linguistic ecosystem -- linguistic policy makers need to understand the potential impact of these various interlingual ideas and technologies, singly and in combination, on the system as a whole and on particular communities within it. The politostrategic era led to an acutely hierarchical distribution of linguistic skills and language resources, both within and between states. National elites, for instance, typically have a very different linguistic profile from rural or working-class populations; such national profiles in turn differ markedly between the industrialized (OECD) countries and the struggling former colonies of the South; and among the languages themselves, the spectrum runs from the system of interlinked varieties known as standard English, which now occupies an unprecedented and unrivalled range of niches in the global linguistic system, to the many oral indigenous languages presently undergoing a precipitous decline. The rampant inequity and dubious sustainability of this system, I believe, reflects the "legislative impulse" of modernity, leading politostrategists to confuse integration with assimilation, and efficiency with machinization (Bauman 1987; 1992). Interlingualism offers an alternative vision.
Pool and I described the first interlingual idea in this way:
Plurilingualism. A world in which knowing many languages is as normal as knowing many people might be an interlingual world. If breakthroughs in the methodology of language teaching could be verified and propagated, and if multilingual competence became widely valued, people who needed to communicate across language barriers would normally have or could easily develop the ability to do so. (Pool & Fettes 1998: 2)
A variant of this idea, which might be termed Elite Plurilingualism, has long been current among the industrialized countries, particularly the smaller ones. Even where foreign language teaching has been widespread or even compulsory in the national curriculum, there has been a tacit acceptance of the idea that only a small minority need achieve functional plurilingualism; and even where the national population includes numerous native speakers of other languages, there has been a tacit refusal to consider them as a linguistic resource, because who is plurilingual, and in what settings, matters more than the fact of linguistic competence. Only in exceptional cases, such as Luxembourg, has individual plurilingualism become a marker of national identity, and here three languages (Luxemburgish, French and German) parcel out the domains of language use between them. Widespread plurilingual competence in functionally equivalent languages -- what might be termed Civic Plurilingualism -- is presently no more than an idea.
Ideas, however, have power. So far the European Union has merely formulated a universal goal of individual competence in three languages, without doing a great deal to make it a reality (Labrie 1993). If, however, this became a widely accepted ideal, it could lead to far-reaching changes in national education systems, along the lines of the European School model or other experiments in multilingual and multicultural education (Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). In order to forestall a stampede towards the larger languages, students might be required to choose both a large and a small language in addition to their own. Some versions of this system could include European regional and minority languages, others could include immigrant or foreign languages. Great through the range of pedagogical possibilities is, however, the range of political possibilities appears much more restricted, thanks to the legacies of the politostrategic era and the spread of a rival interlingual idea: World English.
Pool and I summed up this concept as follows:
World English. The most widespread second language of the present day, English, might make the world interlingual by becoming so well integrated in educational and social systems worldwide that it was accessible to all at minimal cost. One variant of World English is unilingualism; however, if the world's majority were motivated to keep cultivating their autochtonous languages, and if any related economic or social costs could be compensated, English might become the world's "second native language", transcending but coexisting with a multiplicity of other languages. (Pool and Fettes 1998: 2)
The ideas of World English and Plurilingualism both originated in the politostrategic era, but the former, influenced by the intellectual and vernacular traditions of the United States, retains a popular allure that the latter never acquired. Where Plurilingualism is associated with national cultures and a "high" style of communication, World English is associated with the international forces of the market and a popular, "democratic" style (cf. Dasgupta 1987). Furthermore, however complex the linguistic and social realities underlying it, World English is a simple idea. In an era when the visual evidence of globalization is no further away than a soft drink stand or a television set, English is a perfectly matched "name brand" among languages. And its proponents have many facts on their side: English is increasingly required for high-skill jobs anywhere in the world; it is the most widely studied foreign language; it dominates satellite TV programming; and so on (Crystal 1997; Graddol 1997).
These two interlingual ideas come into direct competition in national education systems. Both imply radical reforms to well-entrenched bureaucracies and pedagogical cultures, reforms which require long-term political commitment in order to succeed. Although Plurilingualism may superficially appear more complicated and therefore harder to implement, the uniformity of World English may actually pose greater problems, for instance in the training of vast numbers of teachers in a language distant from both indigenous and regional languages. (It is notable that the European countries that approximate the World English model -- the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands -- are also the closest to the Anglo-Saxon world, both linguistically and culturally.) Politically, trends towards decentralization within states and regionalization among states will also favour Plurilingualism, in which case English may retain a special status as the default language for use whenever national or regional languages do not suffice. This function may be extremely important in certain kinds of transnational enterprise, but only marginally relevant to the economic and cultural activities of the vast majority of people.
On the basis of such considerations, I conclude that the niche that English occupies in the global economy, in popular culture, and in most national education systems is unlikely to expand to the extent required by World English. Nonetheless, the latter idea will continue to exert considerable influence on national and regional geostrategies, so that even where Plurilingualism has been formulated as an ideal, the reality may be quite different. In Europe, the most likely result in the medium term appears to be a combination of Elite Plurilingualism with what might be termed Consumer English: active competence in several languages for the upwardly mobile, and limited, primarily passive competence in English for the rest. This trend may well be replicated elsewhere in the world as national and regional languages move into the economic, technological and cultural niches pioneered by English (Graddol 1997). Unfortunately, such a compromise, which fits relatively well with existing educational systems and practices, would fall far short of the standards for diversity, integration and equity envisioned in the two interlingual models.
While Plurilingualism and World English are based on personal competence in two or more languages, monolinguals are also able to communicate across language barriers as long as the necessary tools or services are at their disposal. For a century or more, linguistic politostrategies have fostered the growth of "language industries" serving their monolingual populations, and with them an interlingual idea that Pool and I described as follows:
Language Brokers. Professional translators and interpreters might achieve an interlingual world by enabling people without a common language to communicate with success, despite greatly dissimilar experiences and beliefs. If appropriate conditions for such work became normative, and if translators and interpreters were efficient and numerous enough, they might make it possible for most people to cultivate their own languages and communicate interlingually without the burdens and risks of widespread language learning. (Pool & Fettes 1998: 2)
The political dimensions of Language Brokering are most evident in multinational institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union, where the equitable use of the working languages is a perennial bone of contention (Lapenna 1969a,b; Tonkin 1996). In fact, all three of these organizations have historically relied on Elite Plurilingualism to supplement the efforts of the language services: if all of the representatives and technical experts insisted on using only their "official" language, the system might well grind to a halt. As it is, only English speakers generally take for granted their right to use their language in all circumstances (cf. Pearl 1996). This de facto inequality underlying a theoretically equitable system is mirrored in the translation industries, which help to maintain equal status among the larger and more prosperous language communities while widening the gap between them and a vast number of minority, indigenous, and oral languages.
In order for the Language Brokers to actually promote the high levels of diversity, integration and equity required by interlingualism, their services must become far more efficient and affordable. This is the promise held out by a related interlingual idea:
Technologism. Invention might resolve the apparent incompatibilities of interlingualism. If the intricacies of grammar, meaning, and communicative strategy could be understood and codified, language barriers might disappear altogether in the presence of fully automatic translation between the world's tongues, or be superseded by novel, automated, non- or panlingual means of communication. (Pool & Fettes 1998: 2)
Before the advent of high-speed desktop computers and Internet connections, machine translation and multilingual software existed primarily as specialized and expensive services for large corporations and governments. Today crude translations between the largest languages are available on-line, multilingual capabilities are built into major software products such as Microsoft's Office 2000, and the Internet is progressing toward compatibility with every written language in the world. At the same time, insiders' assessments of the potential of multilingual technology have become considerably more sober (e.g. Zaenen 1996). "Fully automatic translation" is now considered to require human-like artificial intelligence, an extremely remote goal (Melby & Warner 1995). Much work is now focused on the development of "controlled languages" for specific purposes, while the quest for instantaneous translation of informal, spontaneous speech has been abandoned, for the moment, to science fiction.
It is the combination of human and machine translation that increasingly offers an approximation, at least in certain circumstances, to the interlingual ideal. Following Minako O'Hagan (1996), I will refer to this as the "Teletranslation" idea. Her thesis is that the explosive growth of telecommunications is creating both an unprecedented demand for language services and new means of delivering those services. The interlinking of translators around the globe with subject matter experts, intelligent multilingual databases, machine translation systems, and telecommunication service providers will soon make "language brokers" accessible at any time, from any point on the planet, at rates that are readily affordable for small businesses and perhaps even for individuals. Teletranslation will not wipe out language barriers, but it will greatly lower them, at least for the languages that are equipped to participate in this technical revolution. It is already possible to envisage a time, for instance, when the disadvantages of publishing an article or a database in the national languages of the smaller industrialized countries will largely have vanished, because abstracts and references will circulate freely in the languages of the industrialized world and good-quality, affordable translations will be obtainable on demand.
The great question is how far down the language hierarchy this revolution will extend. Teletranslation is market-driven and relies in part on language-specific investment: will it benefit hundreds or thousands of languages, or only a few dozen? The answer to this, as in the case of Plurilingualism, depends on political will and economic circumstance. If Teletranslation came to be regarded as a basic service, an extension of the "right to communicate" (MacBride et al. 1980), then national governments and international institutions might guarantee a certain level of infrastructure and service provision for a wide range of languages, even though more and higher quality services would be available in the larger languages. On the other hand, Teletranslation might remain a business-oriented industry, of relevance only for those few languages which have already occupied key niches in the industrial economies. The challenges and costs involved in developing sophisticated language tools and training skilled language brokers in minority, indigenous and oral languages should not be underestimated, nor the difficulty of integrating such services in language communities which have traditionally met their interlingual needs through other means.
Even in the least radical scenario, however, Teletranslation seems likely to weaken the appeal of Elite Plurilingualism as an interlingual idea: the investment of time and energy to acquire limited proficiency in several standard languages will increasingly be seen as costing more and delivering less than high-quality professional services. Plausibly, this development could strengthen World English, as the seekers of active bilingual competence converge on the most widespread second language; yet translation into and out of English also constitutes the most tempting market for language technology, meaning that the marginal benefits of learning English are likely to fall faster than those for learning other languages. This may be particularly significant for the speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and other major Asian languages, for whom the active mastery of English is especially costly. As Teletranslation spreads throughout the Asian region, it may gradually erode the use of English and thereby the credibility of World English as an interlingual idea. Will a regional ideal of Civic Plurilingualism then open up? Even if it does, continued reliance on traditional educational structures and market forces is likely to restrict the outcomes of language learning and language brokering to levels far below the interlingual ideal.
Arguably the greatest discrepancy between ideal and reality is to be found in the fifth interlingual idea, which Pool and I characterized thus:
Esperantism. An invented language (not necessarily Esperanto itself), designed as a global auxiliary language in which fluency can be achieved at low cost, might make the world interlingual. If it became customary to use such a language for all translingual communication, the burden of linguistic accommodation would be both small and equal for all. If the language retained its auxiliary status, bilingualism would become a near-universal condition. (Pool & Fettes 1998: 2)
Esperanto is a living reality for its community of users, who argue for its viability as an interlingual idea on the basis of their own experience. In qualitative terms, the evidence is in their favour: the Esperanto community does indeed manifest the high levels of linguistic diversity, integration, equity and efficiency required by interlingualism (Fettes & Bolduc 1998; Piron 1994). Quantitatively, however, the evidence is anything but convincing. The Universal Esperanto Association currently has just over 7,000 individual members and somewhat less than 20,000 members in its various national affiliates; even if this represented only 20% of the active users of Esperanto (which strikes me as a reasonable guess), the latter would number fewer than 150,000, or about one person in 40,000 among the world population. Undoubtedly this compares poorly with the global prevalence of plurilingual individuals, speakers of English as a second language, and users of texts translated by human and mechanical means.
Although there are many factors to consider in explaining the very limited acceptance of Esperanto (and the still more limited acceptance of its rivals), what most clearly distinguishes it from the other four interlingual ideas is its inconsistency with politostrategic thinking. Plurilingualism, World English, Language Brokers and Technologism all grew out of state-sponsored efforts to combine national monolingualism with international trade and diplomacy; all of them display a hierarchical bias, tending to favour elites over the masses, wealthy languages over the poor. Esperantism developed in a reverse of these trends: it began as an appeal for justice towards less privileged language groups, and evolved in response to the needs of a relatively egalitarian, transnational community of individuals. As a consequence, its sociolinguistic profile is very different from that of the national and minority languages with which national policy-makers are concerned. Even in countries and international organizations where Esperanto associations have received official approval and support for their activities, Esperanto itself has never been regarded as relevant to the politostrategic priorities of the day (Fettes 1997).
The question, then, is whether this may change in the geostrategic era, and what a realistic version of Esperantism might entail. As for the other interlingual ideas, there is no clear evolutionary route from the present world language system to Esperantism in its pure form. On the other hand, in an increasingly interconnected world where Plurlingualism remains a privilege of national elites, World English is bound up with global consumer culture, and Teletranslation is oriented to the demands of the industrial economies, the interlingual niche of Esperantism has enormous potential for growth. The geostrategists of the largest and wealthiest languages will probably pay it little attention, but further down the language hierarchy it may eventually receive serious consideration as an element in a collective geostrategy that draws on all five interlingual ideas.
This overarching geostrategy might be termed "language ecology". It will be a strategy designed not to impose one particular language or language type over another -- as in politostrategic approaches -- but to ensure their coexistence. In keeping with the principles of interlingualism, it will seek an optimal balance between linguistic diversity, integration, equity, efficiency and sustainability, integrating solutions at levels from the local to the global. In general, it will resist uniformity and the drive to make all languages intertranslatable: the functions of the standard national languages will not be taken as a universal yardstick of linguistic value, but as one small part of a vast range of linguistic possibilities to be explored and developed. Its concept of linguistic rights will stress the need to protect and strengthen the reciprocal relationships that bind individuals into communities, as part of a broader political project of "fraternités" (Attali 1999). Superficially, the linguistic mosaic it seeks to sustain will resemble that of the present, with large languages and small, national and stateless, standardized and vernacular. It is the relationships among these language communities that will change, through the impact of plurilingual schooling, teletranslation, and the wider use of Esperanto -- not as a substitute for World English, competing at the top of the politostrategic hierarchy, but as a global vernacular that can flourish alongside languages at any level of the world language system.
As the name implies, language ecology, if it becomes a reality, will be part of that wider transformation in human awareness that Fritjof Capra has called "ecological thinking" or "the systems view" (Capra 1982). To some extent such a change is being forced on us by the ecological and social impacts of globalization, but old discursive patterns will long persist in our political and intellectual systems, making the transition a drawn-out, conflict-ridden and uncertain one. Unfortunately many of the world's languages may not be able to wait that long, to say nothing of the vast numbers of people currently suffering under linguistic discrimination of various kinds, or from the huge inequities and inefficiencies that continue to beset interlingual communication in the Internet era. I hope, at least, that this tentative mapping of interlingualism has helped to convey the urgent need for further discussion, exploration, quantification, criticism and debate; and, perhaps, established the value of such an approach to developing realistic and sustainable geostrategies of language.
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