presentation about global language

History of English

English as a Global Language

What is a Global Language?

There is no official definition of “global” or “world” language, but it essentially refers to a language that is learned and spoken internationally, and is characterized not only by the number of its native and second language speakers, but also by its geographical distribution, and its use in international organizations and in diplomatic relations. A global language acts as a “lingua franca”, a common language that enables people from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities to communicate on a more or less equitable basis.

Historically, the essential factor for the establishment of a global language is that it is spoken by those who wield power. Latin was the lingua franca of its time, although it was only ever a minority language within the Roman Empire as a whole. Crucially, though, it was the language of the powerful leaders and administrators and of the Roman military – and, later, of the ecclesiastical power of the Roman Catholic Church – and this is what drove its rise to (arguably) global language status. Thus, language can be said to have no independent existence of its own, and a particular language only dominates when its speakers dominate (and, by extension, fails when the people who speak it fail).

The influence of any language is a combination of three main things: the number of countries using it as their first language or mother-tongue, the number of countries adopting it as their official language, and the number of countries teaching it as their foreign language of choice in schools. The intrinsic structural qualities of a language, the size of its vocabulary, the quality of its literature throughout history, and its association with great cultures or religions, are all important factors in the popularity of any language. But, at base, history shows us that a language becomes a global language mainly due to the political power of its native speakers, and the economic power with which it is able to maintain and expand its position.

Why is a Global Language Needed?

It is often argued that the modern “global village” needs a “global language”, and that (particularly in a world of modern communications, globalized trade and easy international travel) a single lingua franca has never been more important. With the advent since 1945 of large international bodies such as the United Nations and its various offshoots – the UN now has over 50 different agencies and programs from the World Bank, World Health Organization and UNICEF to more obscure arms like the Universal Postal Union – as well as collective organizations such as the Commonwealth and the European Union, the pressure to establish a worldwide lingua franca has never been greater. As just one example of why a lingua franca is useful, consider that up to one-third of the administration costs of the European Community is taken up by translations into the various member languages.

Some have seen a planned or constructed language as a solution to this need. In the short period between 1880 and 1907, no less than 53 such “universal artificial languages” were developed. By 1889, the constructed language Volapük claimed nearly a million adherents, although it is all but unknown to day. Today the best known is Esperanto, a deliberately simplified language, with just 16 rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings and no illogical spellings. A sentence like “It is often argued that the modern world needs a common language with which to communicate” would be rendered in Esperanto as “Oni ofte argumentas ke la moderna mondo bezonas komuna linguon por komunikado”, not difficult to understand for anyone with even a smattering of Romance languages.

Many of these universal languages (including Esperanto) were specifically developed with the view in mind that a single world language would automatically lead to world peace and unity. Setting aside for now the fact that such languages have never gained much traction, it has to be said this assumption is not necessarily well-founded. For instance, historically, many wars have broken out within communities of the same language (e.g. the British and American Civil Wars, the Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia, etc) and, on the other hand, the citizens of some countries with multiple languages (e.g. Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, etc) manage to coexist, on the whole, quite peaceably.

Is a Global Language Necessarily “A Good Thing”?

While its advantages are self-evident, there are some legitimate concerns that a dominant global language could also have some built-in drawbacks. Among these may be the following:

• There is a risk that the increased adoption of a global language may lead to the weakening and eventually the disappearance of some minority languages (and, ultimately, it is feared, ALL other languages). It is estimated that up to 80% of the world’s 6,000 or so living languages may die out within the next century, and some commentators believe that a too-dominant global language may be a major contributing factor in this trend. However, it seem likely that this is really only a direct threat in areas where the global language is the natural first language (e.g. North America, Australia, Celtic parts of Britain, etc). Conversely, there is also some evidence that the very threat of subjugation by a dominant language can actually galvanize and strengthen movements to support and protect minority languages (e.g. Welsh in Wales, French in Canada).
• There is concern that natural speakers of the global language may be at an unfair advantage over those who are operating in their second, or even third, language.
• The insistence on one language to the exclusion of others may also be seen as a threat to freedom of speech and to the ideals of multiculturalism.
• Another potential pitfall is linguistic complacency on the part of natural speakers of a global language, a laziness and arrogance resulting from the lack of motivation to learn other languages. Arguably, this can already be observed in many Britons and Americans.

Is English a Global Language?

As can be seen in more detail in the section on English Today , on almost any basis, English is the nearest thing there has ever been to a global language. Its worldwide reach is much greater than anything achieved historically by Latin or French, and there has never been a language as widely spoken as English. Many would reasonably claim that, in the fields of business, academics, science, computing, education, transportation, politics and entertainment, English is already established as the de facto lingua franca.

The UN, the nearest thing we have, or have ever had, to a global community, currently uses five official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese, and an estimated 85% of international organizations have English as at least one of their official languages (French comes next with less than 50%). Even more starkly, though, about one third of international organizations (including OPEC, EFTA and ASEAN) use English only, and this figure rises to almost 90% among Asian international organizations.

As we have seen, a global language arises mainly due to the political and economic power of its native speakers. It was British imperial and industrial power that sent English around the globe between the 17th and 20th Century. The legacy of British imperialism has left many counties with the language thoroughly institutionalized in their courts, parliament, civil service, schools and higher education establishments. In other counties, English provides a neutral means of communication between different ethnic groups.

But it has been largely American economic and cultural supremacy – in music, film and television; business and finance; computing, information technology and the Internet; even drugs and pornography – that has consolidated the position of the English language and continues to maintain it today. American dominance and influence worldwide makes English crucially important for developing international markets, especially in the areas of tourism and advertising, and mastery of English also provides access to scientific, technological and academic resources which would otherwise be denied developing countries.

Is English Appropriate for a Global Language?

Some have also argued that there are other intrinsic features of the English language that set it apart, and make it an appropriate choice as a global language, and it may be worthwhile investigating some of these claims:

• The richness and depth of English’s vocabulary sets it apart from other languages. The 1989 revised “Oxford English Dictionary” lists 615,000 words in 20 volumes, officially the world’s largest dictionary. If technical and scientific words were to be included, the total would rise to well over a million. By some estimates, the English lexicon is currently increasing by over 8,500 words a year, although other estimates put this as high as 15,000 to 20,000. It is estimated that about 200,000 English words are in common use, as compared to 184,000 in German, and mere 100,000 in French. The availability of large numbers of synonyms allows shades of distinction that are just not available to non-English speakers and, although other languages have books of synonyms, none has anything on quite the scale of “Roget’s Thesaurus” . Add to this the wealth of English idioms and phrases, and the available material with which to express meaning is truly prodigious, whether the intention is poetry, business or just everyday conversation.
• It is a very flexible language. One example of this is in respect of word order and the ability to phrase sentences as active or passive (e.g. I kicked the ball , or the ball was kicked by me ). Another is in the ability to use the same word as both a noun and a verb (such as drink , fight , silence , etc). New words can easily be created by the addition of prefixes or suffixes (e.g. brightness , fixation , unintelligible , etc), or by compounding or fusing existing words together (e.g. airport , seashore , footwear , etc). Just how far English’s much-vaunted flexibility should go (or should be allowed to go) is a hotly-debated topic, though. For example, should common but incorrect usages (e.g. disinterested to mean uninterested ; infer to mean imply ; forego to mean forgo ; flout to mean flaunt ; fortuitous to mean fortunate ; etc) be accepted as part of the natural evolution of the language, or reviled as inexcusable sloppiness which should be summarily nipped in the bud?
• Its grammar is generally simpler than most languages. It dispenses completely with noun genders (hence, no dithering between le plume or la plume , or between el mano or la mano ), and often dispenses with the article completely (e.g. It is time to go to bed ). The distinction between familiar and formal addresses were abandoned centuries ago (the single English word you has seven distinct choices in German: du , dich , dir , Sie , Ihnen , Ihr and euch ). Case forms for nouns are almost non-existent (with the exception of some personal pronouns like I / me / mine , he / him / his , etc), as compared to Finnish, for example, which has fifteen forms for every noun, or Russian which has 12. In German, each verb has 16 different forms (Latin has a possible 120!), while English only retains 5 at most (e.g. ride , rides , rode , riding , ridden ) and often only requires 3 (e.g. hit , hits , hitting ).
• Some would also claim that it is also a relatively simple language in terms of spelling and pronunciation, although this claim is perhaps more contentious. While it does not require mastery of the subtle tonal variations of Cantonese, nor the bewildering consonant clusters of Welsh or Gaelic, it does have more than its fair share of apparently random spellings, silent letters and phonetic inconsistencies (consider, for example, the pronunciation of the “ou” in thou , though , thought , through , thorough , tough , plough and hiccough , or the “ea” in head , heard , bean , beau and beauty ). There are somewhere between 44 and 52 unique sounds used in English pronunciation (depending on the authority consulted), almost equally divided between vowel sounds and consonants, as compared to 26 in Italian, for example, or just 13 in Hawaiian. This includes some sounds which are notoriously difficult for foreigners to pronounce (such as “th”, which also comes in two varieties, as in thought and though , or in mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb), and some sounds which have a huge variety of possible spellings (such as the sound “sh”, which can be written as in shoe , sugar , passion , ambitious , ocean , champagne , etc, or the long “o” which can be spelled as in go , show , beau , sew , doe , though , depot , etc). In its defence, though, its consonants at least are fairly regular in pronunciation, and it is blessedly free of the accents and diacritical marks which festoon many other languages. Also, its borrowings of foreign words tend to preserve the original spelling (rather than attempting to spell them phonetically). It has been estimated that 84% of English spellings conform to general patterns or rules, while only 3% are completely unpredictable (3% of a very large vocabulary is, however, still quite a large number, and this includes such extraordinary examples as colonel , ache , eight , etc). Arguably, some of the inconsistencies do help to distinguish between homophones like fissure and fisher ; seas and seize ; air and heir ; aloud and allowed ; weather and whether ; chants and chance ; flu , flue and flew ; reign , rein and rain ; etc.
• Some argue that the cosmopolitan character of English (from its adoption of thousands of words from other languages with which it came into contact) gives it a feeling of familiarity and welcoming compared to many other languages (such as French, for example, which has tried its best to keep out other languages).
• Despite a tendency towards jargon, English is generally reasonably concise compared to many languages, as can be seen in the length of translations (a notable exception is Hebrew translations, which are usually shorter than their English equivalents by up to a third). It is also less prone to misunderstandings due to cultural subtleties than, say, Japanese, which is almost impossible to simultaneously translate for that reason.
• The absence of coding for social differences (common in many other languages which distinguish between formal and informal verb forms and sometimes other more complex social distinctions) may make English seem more democratic and remove some of the potential stress associated with language-generated social blunders.
• The extent and quality of English literature throughout history marks it as a language of culture and class. As a result, it carries with it a certain legitimacy, substance and gravitas that few other languages can match.

On balance, though, the intrinsic appeal of English as a world language is probably overblown and specious, and largely based on chauvinism or naïveté . It is unlikely that linguistic factors are of great importance in a language’s rise to the status of world language, and English’s position today is almost entirely due to the aforementioned political and economic factors.

What About The Future?

Although English currently appears to be in an unassailable position in the modern world, its future as a global language is not necessarily assured. In the Middle Ages, Latin seemed forever set as the language of education and culture, as did French in the 18th Century. But circumstances change, and there are several factors which might precipitate such a change once again.

There are two competing drives to take into account: the pressure for international intelligibility, and the pressure to preserve national identity. It is possible that a natural balance may be achieved between the two, but it should also be recognized that the historical loyalties of British ex-colonies have been largely replaced by pragmatic utilitarian reasoning.

The very dominance of an outside language or culture can lead to a backlash or reaction against it. People do not take kindly to having a language imposed on them, whatever advantage and value that language may bring to them. As long ago as 1908, Mahatma Gandhi said, in the context of colonial India: “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them”. Although most former British colonies retained English as an official language after independence, some (e.g. Tanzania, Kenya, Malaysia) later deliberately rejected the old colonial language as a legacy of oppression and subjugation, disestablishing English as even a joint official language. Even today, there is a certain amount of resentment in some countries towards the cultural dominance of English, and particularly of the USA.

As has been discussed, there is a close link between language and power. The USA, with its huge dominance in economic, technical and cultural terms, is the driving force behind English in the world today. However, if the USA were to lose its position of economic and technical dominance, then the “language loyalties” of other countries may well shift to the new dominant power. Currently, perhaps the only possible candidate for such a replacement would be China, but it is not that difficult to imagine circumstances in which it could happen.

A change in population (and population growth) trends may prove to be an influential factor. The increasing Hispanic population of the USA has, in the opinion of some commentators, already begun a dilution of the “Englishness” of the country, which may in turn have repercussions for the status of the English language abroad. Hispanic and Latino Americans have accounted for almost half of America’s population growth in recent years, and their share of the population is expected to increase from about 16% today to around 30% by 2050. Some even see the future possibility of a credible secessionist movement, similar to that for an independent Quebec in Canada, and there has been movements within the US Republican party (variously called “English First” or “Official English” or “US English”) to make English the nation’s official language in an attempt to reduce the significance of Spanish. Official policies of bilingualism or multilingualism in countries with large minority language groups, such as are in place in countries like Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, are an expensive option and fraught with political difficulties, which the USA would prefer to avoid.

A 2006 report by the British Council suggests that the number of people learning English is likely to continue to increase over the next 10-15 years, peaking at around 2 billion, after which a decline is predicted. Various attempts have been made to develop a simpler “controlled” English language suitable for international usage (e.g. Basic English, Plain English, Globish, International English, Special English, Essential World English, etc). Increasingly, the long-term future of English as a global language probably lies in the hands of Asia, and especially the huge populations of India and China.

Having said that, though, there may now be a critical mass of English speakers throughout the world which may make its continued growth impossible to stop or even slow. There are no comparable historical precedents on which to base predictions, but it well may be that the emergence of English as a global language is a unique, even an irreversible, event.

Richard is an English teacher with over 25 years of experience. He has dedicated his life and career to his passion for English, literature, and pedagogy, guiding multiple generations of students on their journey to discovery.

English as a Global Language

Global English, World English, and the Rise of English as a Lingua Franca

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In Shakespeare 's time, the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between five and seven million. According to linguist David Crystal, "Between the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1603) and the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth II (1952), this figure increased almost fiftyfold, to around 250 million" ( The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language , 2003). It's a common language used in international business, which makes it a popular second language for many.

How Many Languages Are There?

There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. About 2,000 of them have fewer than 1,000 speakers. While the British empire did help spread the language globally it's only the third most commonly spoken language in the world. Mandarin and Spanish are the two most commonly spoken languages on Earth. 

From How Many Other Languages Has English Borrowed Words?

English is jokingly referred to as a language thief because of it has incorporated words from over 350 other languages into it. The majority of these "borrowed" words are latin or from one of the Romance languages.

How Many People in the World Today Speak English?

Roughly 500 million people in the world are native English speakers . Another 510 million people speak English as a second language , which means that there are more people who speak English along with their native language than there are native English speakers.

In How Many Countries Is English Taught as a Foreign Language?

English is taught as a foreign language in over 100 countries. It's considered the language of business which makes it a popular choice for a second language. English language teachers are often paid very well in countries like China and Dubai.

What Is the Most Widely Used English Word?

"The form OK or okay is probably the most intensively and widely used (and borrowed) word in the history of the language. Its many would-be etymologists have traced it variously to Cockney, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Norwegian, Scots, several African languages, and the Native American language Choctaw, as well as a number of personal names. All are imaginative feats without documentary support." (Tom McArthur, The Oxford Guide to World English . Oxford University Press, 2002)

How Many Countries in the World Have English as Their First Language?

"This is a complicated question, as the definition of 'first language' differs from place to place, according to each country’s history and local circumstances. The following facts illustrate the complexities:

"Australia, Botswana, the Commonwealth Caribbean nations, Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, Ireland, Namibia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States have English as either a de facto or statutory official language. In Cameroon and Canada, English shares this status with French; and in the Nigerian states, English and the main local language are official. In Fiji, English is the official language with Fijian; in Lesotho with Sesotho; in Pakistan with Urdu; in the Philippines with Filipino; and in Swaziland with Siswati. In India, English is an associate official language (after Hindi), and in Singapore English is one of four statutory official languages. In South Africa, English [is] the main national language—but just one of eleven official languages.

"In all, English has official or special status in at least 75 countries (with a combined population of two billion people). It is estimated that one out of four people worldwide speak English with some degree of competence." (Penny Silva, "Global English." AskOxford.com, 2009)

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Article contents

Language and power.

• Sik Hung Ng Sik Hung Ng Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China
•  and  Fei Deng Fei Deng School of Foreign Studies, South China Agricultural University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.436
• Published online: 22 August 2017

Five dynamic language–power relationships in communication have emerged from critical language studies, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and the social psychology of language and communication. Two of them stem from preexisting powers behind language that it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring the extralinguistic powers to the communication context. Such powers exist at both the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, the power behind language is a speaker’s possession of a weapon, money, high social status, or other attractive personal qualities—by revealing them in convincing language, the speaker influences the hearer. At the macro level, the power behind language is the collective power (ethnolinguistic vitality) of the communities that speak the language. The dominance of English as a global language and international lingua franca, for example, has less to do with its linguistic quality and more to do with the ethnolinguistic vitality of English-speakers worldwide that it reflects. The other three language–power relationships refer to the powers of language that are based on a language’s communicative versatility and its broad range of cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions in meaning-making, social interaction, and language policies. Such language powers include, first, the power of language to maintain existing dominance in legal, sexist, racist, and ageist discourses that favor particular groups of language users over others. Another language power is its immense impact on national unity and discord. The third language power is its ability to create influence through single words (e.g., metaphors), oratories, conversations and narratives in political campaigns, emergence of leaders, terrorist narratives, and so forth.

• power behind language
• power of language
• intergroup communication
• World Englishes
• oratorical power
• conversational power
• leader emergence
• al-Qaeda narrative
• social identity approach

Introduction

Language is for communication and power.

Language is a natural human system of conventionalized symbols that have understood meanings. Through it humans express and communicate their private thoughts and feelings as well as enact various social functions. The social functions include co-constructing social reality between and among individuals, performing and coordinating social actions such as conversing, arguing, cheating, and telling people what they should or should not do. Language is also a public marker of ethnolinguistic, national, or religious identity, so strong that people are willing to go to war for its defense, just as they would defend other markers of social identity, such as their national flag. These cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions make language a fundamental medium of human communication. Language is also a versatile communication medium, often and widely used in tandem with music, pictures, and actions to amplify its power. Silence, too, adds to the force of speech when it is used strategically to speak louder than words. The wide range of language functions and its versatility combine to make language powerful. Even so, this is only one part of what is in fact a dynamic relationship between language and power. The other part is that there is preexisting power behind language which it reveals and reflects, thereby transferring extralinguistic power to the communication context. It is thus important to delineate the language–power relationships and their implications for human communication.

This chapter provides a systematic account of the dynamic interrelationships between language and power, not comprehensively for lack of space, but sufficiently focused so as to align with the intergroup communication theme of the present volume. The term “intergroup communication” will be used herein to refer to an intergroup perspective on communication, which stresses intergroup processes underlying communication and is not restricted to any particular form of intergroup communication such as interethnic or intergender communication, important though they are. It echoes the pioneering attempts to develop an intergroup perspective on the social psychology of language and communication behavior made by pioneers drawn from communication, social psychology, and cognate fields (see Harwood et al., 2005 ). This intergroup perspective has fostered the development of intergroup communication as a discipline distinct from and complementing the discipline of interpersonal communication. One of its insights is that apparently interpersonal communication is in fact dynamically intergroup (Dragojevic & Giles, 2014 ). For this and other reasons, an intergroup perspective on language and communication behavior has proved surprisingly useful in revealing intergroup processes in health communication (Jones & Watson, 2012 ), media communication (Harwood & Roy, 2005 ), and communication in a variety of organizational contexts (Giles, 2012 ).

The major theoretical foundation that has underpinned the intergroup perspective is social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982 ), which continues to service the field as a metatheory (Abrams & Hogg, 2004 ) alongside relatively more specialized theories such as ethnolinguistic identity theory (Harwood et al., 1994 ), communication accommodation theory (Palomares et al., 2016 ), and self-categorization theory applied to intergroup communication (Reid et al., 2005 ). Against this backdrop, this chapter will be less concerned with any particular social category of intergroup communication or variant of social identity theory, and more with developing a conceptual framework of looking at the language–power relationships and their implications for understanding intergroup communication. Readers interested in an intra- or interpersonal perspective may refer to the volume edited by Holtgraves ( 2014a ).

Conceptual Approaches to Power

Bertrand Russell, logician cum philosopher and social activist, published a relatively little-known book on power when World War II was looming large in Europe (Russell, 2004 ). In it he asserted the fundamental importance of the concept of power in the social sciences and likened its importance to the concept of energy in the physical sciences. But unlike physical energy, which can be defined in a formula (e.g., E=MC 2 ), social power has defied any such definition. This state of affairs is not unexpected because the very nature of (social) power is elusive. Foucault ( 1979 , p. 92) has put it this way: “Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” This view is not beyond criticism but it does highlight the elusiveness of power. Power is also a value-laden concept meaning different things to different people. To functional theorists and power-wielders, power is “power to,” a responsibility to unite people and do good for all. To conflict theorists and those who are dominated, power is “power over,” which corrupts and is a source of social conflict rather than integration (Lenski, 1966 ; Sassenberg et al., 2014 ). These entrenched views surface in management–labor negotiations and political debates between government and opposition. Management and government would try to frame the negotiation in terms of “power to,” whereas labor and opposition would try to frame the same in “power over” in a clash of power discourses. The two discourses also interchange when the same speakers reverse their power relations: While in opposition, politicians adhere to “power over” rhetorics, once in government, they talk “power to.” And vice versa.

The elusive and value-laden nature of power has led to a plurality of theoretical and conceptual approaches. Five approaches that are particularly pertinent to the language–power relationships will be discussed, and briefly so because of space limitation. One approach views power in terms of structural dominance in society by groups who own and/or control the economy, the government, and other social institutions. Another approach views power as the production of intended effects by overcoming resistance that arises from objective conflict of interests or from psychological reactance to being coerced, manipulated, or unfairly treated. A complementary approach, represented by Kurt Lewin’s field theory, takes the view that power is not the actual production of effects but the potential for doing this. It looks behind power to find out the sources or bases of this potential, which may stem from the power-wielders’ access to the means of punishment, reward, and information, as well as from their perceived expertise and legitimacy (Raven, 2008 ). A fourth approach views power in terms of the balance of control/dependence in the ongoing social exchange between two actors that takes place either in the absence or presence of third parties. It provides a structural account of power-balancing mechanisms in social networking (Emerson, 1962 ), and forms the basis for combining with symbolic interaction theory, which brings in subjective factors such as shared social cognition and affects for the analysis of power in interpersonal and intergroup negotiation (Stolte, 1987 ). The fifth, social identity approach digs behind the social exchange account, which has started from control/dependence as a given but has left it unexplained, to propose a three-process model of power emergence (Turner, 2005 ). According to this model, it is psychological group formation and associated group-based social identity that produce influence; influence then cumulates to form the basis of power, which in turn leads to the control of resources.

Common to the five approaches above is the recognition that power is dynamic in its usage and can transform from one form of power to another. Lukes ( 2005 ) has attempted to articulate three different forms or faces of power called “dimensions.” The first, behavioral dimension of power refers to decision-making power that is manifest in the open contest for dominance in situations of objective conflict of interests. Non-decision-making power, the second dimension, is power behind the scene. It involves the mobilization of organizational bias (e.g., agenda fixing) to keep conflict of interests from surfacing to become public issues and to deprive oppositions of a communication platform to raise their voices, thereby limiting the scope of decision-making to only “safe” issues that would not challenge the interests of the power-wielder. The third dimension is ideological and works by socializing people’s needs and values so that they want the wants and do the things wanted by the power-wielders, willingly as their own. Conflict of interests, opposition, and resistance would be absent from this form of power, not because they have been maneuvered out of the contest as in the case of non-decision-making power, but because the people who are subject to power are no longer aware of any conflict of interest in the power relationship, which may otherwise ferment opposition and resistance. Power in this form can be exercised without the application of coercion or reward, and without arousing perceived manipulation or conflict of interests.

Language–Power Relationships

As indicated in the chapter title, discussion will focus on the language–power relationships, and not on language alone or power alone, in intergroup communication. It draws from all the five approaches to power and can be grouped for discussion under the power behind language and the power of language. In the former, language is viewed as having no power of its own and yet can produce influence and control by revealing the power behind the speaker. Language also reflects the collective/historical power of the language community that uses it. In the case of modern English, its preeminent status as a global language and international lingua franca has shaped the communication between native and nonnative English speakers because of the power of the English-speaking world that it reflects, rather than because of its linguistic superiority. In both cases, language provides a widely used conventional means to transfer extralinguistic power to the communication context. Research on the power of language takes the view that language has power of its own. This power allows a language to maintain the power behind it, unite or divide a nation, and create influence.

In Figure 1 we have grouped the five language–power relationships into five boxes. Note that the boundary between any two boxes is not meant to be rigid but permeable. For example, by revealing the power behind a message (box 1), a message can create influence (box 5). As another example, language does not passively reflect the power of the language community that uses it (box 2), but also, through its spread to other language communities, generates power to maintain its preeminence among languages (box 3). This expansive process of language power can be seen in the rise of English to global language status. A similar expansive process also applies to a particular language style that first reflects the power of the language subcommunity who uses the style, and then, through its common acceptance and usage by other subcommunities in the country, maintains the power of the subcommunity concerned. A prime example of this type of expansive process is linguistic sexism, which reflects preexisting male dominance in society and then, through its common usage by both sexes, contributes to the maintenance of male dominance. Other examples are linguistic racism and the language style of the legal profession, each of which, like linguistic sexism and the preeminence of the English language worldwide, has considerable impact on individuals and society at large.

Space precludes a full discussion of all five language–power relationships. Instead, some of them will warrant only a brief mention, whereas others will be presented in greater detail. The complexity of the language–power relations and their cross-disciplinary ramifications will be evident in the multiple sets of interrelated literatures that we cite from. These include the social psychology of language and communication, critical language studies (Fairclough, 1989 ), sociolinguistics (Kachru, 1992 ), and conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974 ).

Figure 1. Power behind language and power of language.

Power Behind Language

Language reveals power.

When negotiating with police, a gang may issue the threatening message, “Meet our demands, or we will shoot the hostages!” The threatening message may succeed in coercing the police to submit; its power, however, is more apparent than real because it is based on the guns gangsters posses. The message merely reveals the power of a weapon in their possession. Apart from revealing power, the gangsters may also cheat. As long as the message comes across as credible and convincing enough to arouse overwhelming fear, it would allow them to get away with their demands without actually possessing any weapon. In this case, language is used to produce an intended effect despite resistance by deceptively revealing a nonexisting power base and planting it in the mind of the message recipient. The literature on linguistic deception illustrates the widespread deceptive use of language-reveals-power to produce intended effects despite resistance (Robinson, 1996 ).

Language Reflects Power

Ethnolinguistic vitality.

The language that a person uses reflects the language community’s power. A useful way to think about a language community’s linguistic power is through the ethnolinguistic vitality model (Bourhis et al., 1981 ; Harwood et al., 1994 ). Language communities in a country vary in absolute size overall and, just as important, a relative numeric concentration in particular regions. Francophone Canadians, though fewer than Anglophone Canadians overall, are concentrated in Quebec to give them the power of numbers there. Similarly, ethnic minorities in mainland China have considerable power of numbers in those autonomous regions where they are concentrated, such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Collectively, these factors form the demographic base of the language community’s ethnolinguistic vitality, an index of the community’s relative linguistic dominance. Another base of ethnolinguistic vitality is institutional representations of the language community in government, legislatures, education, religion, the media, and so forth, which afford its members institutional leadership, influence, and control. Such institutional representation is often reinforced by a language policy that installs the language as the nation’s sole official language. The third base of ethnolinguistic vitality comprises sociohistorical and cultural status of the language community inside the nation and internationally. In short, the dominant language of a nation is one that comes from and reflects the high ethnolinguistic vitality of its language community.

An important finding of ethnolinguistic vitality research is that it is perceived vitality, and not so much its objective demographic-institutional-cultural strengths, that influences language behavior in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. Interestingly, the visibility and salience of languages shown on public and commercial signs, referred to as the “linguistic landscape,” serve important informational and symbolic functions as a marker of their relative vitality, which in turn affects the use of in-group language in institutional settings (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ).

World Englishes and Lingua Franca English

Another field of research on the power behind and reflected in language is “World Englishes.” At the height of the British Empire English spread on the back of the Industrial Revolution and through large-scale migrations of Britons to the “New World,” which has since become the core of an “inner circle” of traditional native English-speaking nations now led by the United States (Kachru, 1992 ). The emergent wealth and power of these nations has maintained English despite the decline of the British Empire after World War II. In the post-War era, English has become internationalized with the support of an “outer circle” nations and, later, through its spread to “expanding circle” nations. Outer circle nations are made up mostly of former British colonies such as India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. In compliance with colonial language policies that institutionalized English as the new colonial national language, a sizeable proportion of the colonial populations has learned and continued using English over generations, thereby vastly increasing the number of English speakers over and above those in the inner circle nations. The expanding circle encompasses nations where English has played no historical government roles, but which are keen to appropriate English as the preeminent foreign language for local purposes such as national development, internationalization of higher education, and participation in globalization (e.g., China, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Israel, and continental Europe).

English is becoming a global language with official or special status in at least 75 countries (British Council, n.d. ). It is also the language choice in international organizations and companies, as well as academia, and is commonly used in trade, international mass media, and entertainment, and over the Internet as the main source of information. English native speakers can now follow the worldwide English language track to find jobs overseas without having to learn the local language and may instead enjoy a competitive language advantage where the job requires English proficiency. This situation is a far cry from the colonial era when similar advantages had to come under political patronage. Alongside English native speakers who work overseas benefitting from the preeminence of English over other languages, a new phenomenon of outsourcing international call centers away from the United Kingdom and the United States has emerged (Friginal, 2007 ). Callers can find the information or help they need from people stationed in remote places such as India or the Philippines where English has penetrated.

As English spreads worldwide, it has also become the major international lingua franca, serving some 800 million multilinguals in Asia alone, and numerous others elsewhere (Bolton, 2008 ). The practical importance of this phenomenon and its impact on English vocabulary, grammar, and accent have led to the emergence of a new field of research called “English as a lingua franca” (Brosch, 2015 ). The twin developments of World Englishes and lingua franca English raise interesting and important research questions. A vast area of research lies in waiting.

Several lines of research suggest themselves from an intergroup communication perspective. How communicatively effective are English native speakers who are international civil servants in organizations such as the UN and WTO, where they habitually speak as if they were addressing their fellow natives without accommodating to the international audience? Another line of research is lingua franca English communication between two English nonnative speakers. Their common use of English signals a joint willingness of linguistic accommodation, motivated more by communication efficiency of getting messages across and less by concerns of their respective ethnolinguistic identities. An intergroup communication perspective, however, would sensitize researchers to social identity processes and nonaccommodation behaviors underneath lingua franca communication. For example, two nationals from two different countries, X and Y, communicating with each other in English are accommodating on the language level; at the same time they may, according to communication accommodation theory, use their respective X English and Y English for asserting their ethnolinguistic distinctiveness whilst maintaining a surface appearance of accommodation. There are other possibilities. According to a survey of attitudes toward English accents, attachment to “standard” native speaker models remains strong among nonnative English speakers in many countries (Jenkins, 2009 ). This suggests that our hypothetical X and Y may, in addition to asserting their respective Englishes, try to outperform one another in speaking with overcorrect standard English accents, not so much because they want to assert their respective ethnolinguistic identities, but because they want to project a common in-group identity for positive social comparison—“We are all English-speakers but I am a better one than you!”

Many countries in the expanding circle nations are keen to appropriate English for local purposes, encouraging their students and especially their educational elites to learn English as a foreign language. A prime example is the Learn-English Movement in China. It has affected generations of students and teachers over the past 30 years and consumed a vast amount of resources. The results are mixed. Even more disturbing, discontents and backlashes have emerged from anti-English Chinese motivated to protect the vitality and cultural values of the Chinese language (Sun et al., 2016 ). The power behind and reflected in modern English has widespread and far-reaching consequences in need of more systematic research.

Power of Language

Language maintains existing dominance.

Language maintains and reproduces existing dominance in three different ways represented respectively by the ascent of English, linguistic sexism, and legal language style. For reasons already noted, English has become a global language, an international lingua franca, and an indispensable medium for nonnative English speaking countries to participate in the globalized world. Phillipson ( 2009 ) referred to this phenomenon as “linguistic imperialism.” It is ironic that as the spread of English has increased the extent of multilingualism of non-English-speaking nations, English native speakers in the inner circle of nations have largely remained English-only. This puts pressure on the rest of the world to accommodate them in English, the widespread use of which maintains its preeminence among languages.

A language evolves and changes to adapt to socially accepted word meanings, grammatical rules, accents, and other manners of speaking. What is acceptable or unacceptable reflects common usage and hence the numerical influence of users, but also the elites’ particular language preferences and communication styles. Research on linguistic sexism has shown, for example, a man-made language such as English (there are many others) is imbued with sexist words and grammatical rules that reflect historical male dominance in society. Its uncritical usage routinely by both sexes in daily life has in turn naturalized male dominance and associated sexist inequalities (Spender, 1998 ). Similar other examples are racist (Reisigl & Wodak, 2005 ) and ageist (Ryan et al., 1995 ) language styles.

Professional languages are made by and for particular professions such as the legal profession (Danet, 1980 ; Mertz et al., 2016 ; O’Barr, 1982 ). The legal language is used not only among members of the profession, but also with the general public, who may know each and every word in a legal document but are still unable to decipher its meaning. Through its language, the legal profession maintains its professional dominance with the complicity of the general public, who submits to the use of the language and accedes to the profession’s authority in interpreting its meanings in matters relating to their legal rights and obligations. Communication between lawyers and their “clients” is not only problematic, but the public’s continual dependence on the legal language contributes to the maintenance of the dominance of the profession.

Language Unites and Divides a Nation

A nation of many peoples who, despite their diverse cultural and ethnic background, all speak in the same tongue and write in the same script would reap the benefit of the unifying power of a common language. The power of the language to unite peoples would be stronger if it has become part of their common national identity and contributed to its vitality and psychological distinctiveness. Such power has often been seized upon by national leaders and intellectuals to unify their countries and serve other nationalistic purposes (Patten, 2006 ). In China, for example, Emperor Qin Shi Huang standardized the Chinese script ( hanzi ) as an important part of the reforms to unify the country after he had defeated the other states and brought the Warring States Period ( 475–221 bc ) to an end. A similar reform of language standardization was set in motion soon after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty ( ad 1644–1911 ), by simplifying some of the hanzi and promoting Putonghua as the national standard oral language. In the postcolonial part of the world, language is often used to service nationalism by restoring the official status of their indigenous language as the national language whilst retaining the colonial language or, in more radical cases of decolonization, relegating the latter to nonofficial status. Yet language is a two-edged sword: It can also divide a nation. The tension can be seen in competing claims to official-language status made by minority language communities, protest over maintenance of minority languages, language rights at schools and in courts of law, bilingual education, and outright language wars (Calvet, 1998 ; DeVotta, 2004 ).

Language Creates Influence

In this section we discuss the power of language to create influence through single words and more complex linguistic structures ranging from oratories and conversations to narratives/stories.

Power of Single Words

Learning a language empowers humans to master an elaborate system of conventions and the associations between words and their sounds on the one hand, and on the other hand, categories of objects and relations to which they refer. After mastering the referential meanings of words, a person can mentally access the objects and relations simply by hearing or reading the words. Apart from their referential meanings, words also have connotative meanings with their own social-cognitive consequences. Together, these social-cognitive functions underpin the power of single words that has been extensively studied in metaphors, which is a huge research area that crosses disciplinary boundaries and probes into the inner workings of the brain (Benedek et al., 2014 ; Landau et al., 2014 ; Marshal et al., 2007 ). The power of single words extends beyond metaphors. It can be seen in misleading words in leading questions (Loftus, 1975 ), concessive connectives that reverse expectations from real-world knowledge (Xiang & Kuperberg, 2014 ), verbs that attribute implicit causality to either verb subject or object (Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013 ), “uncertainty terms” that hedge potentially face-threatening messages (Holtgraves, 2014b ), and abstract words that signal power (Wakslak et al., 2014 ).

The literature on the power of single words has rarely been applied to intergroup communication, with the exception of research arising from the linguistic category model (e.g., Semin & Fiedler, 1991 ). The model distinguishes among descriptive action verbs (e.g., “hits”), interpretative action verbs (e.g., “hurts”) and state verbs (e.g., “hates”), which increase in abstraction in that order. Sentences made up of abstract verbs convey more information about the protagonist, imply greater temporal and cross-situational stability, and are more difficult to disconfirm. The use of abstract language to represent a particular behavior will attribute the behavior to the protagonist rather than the situation and the resulting image of the protagonist will persist despite disconfirming information, whereas the use of concrete language will attribute the same behavior more to the situation and the resulting image of the protagonist will be easier to change. According to the linguistic intergroup bias model (Maass, 1999 ), abstract language will be used to represent positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors, whereas concrete language will be used to represent negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. The combined effects of the differential use of abstract and concrete language would, first, lead to biased attribution (explanation) of behavior privileging the in-group over the out-group, and second, perpetuate the prejudiced intergroup stereotypes. More recent research has shown that linguistic intergroup bias varies with the power differential between groups—it is stronger in high and low power groups than in equal power groups (Rubini et al., 2007 ).

Oratorical Power

A charismatic speaker may, by the sheer force of oratory, buoy up people’s hopes, convert their hearts from hatred to forgiveness, or embolden them to take up arms for a cause. One may recall moving speeches (in English) such as Susan B. Anthony’s “On Women’s Right to Vote,” Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India,” or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” The speech may be delivered face-to-face to an audience, or broadcast over the media. The discussion below focuses on face-to-face oratories in political meetings.

Oratorical power may be measured in terms of money donated or pledged to the speaker’s cause, or, in a religious sermon, the number of converts made. Not much research has been reported on these topics. Another measurement approach is to count the frequency of online audience responses that a speech has generated, usually but not exclusively in the form of applause. Audience applause can be measured fairly objectively in terms of frequency, length, or loudness, and collected nonobtrusively from a public recording of the meeting. Audience applause affords researchers the opportunity to explore communicative and social psychological processes that underpin some aspects of the power of rhetorical formats. Note, however, that not all incidences of audience applause are valid measures of the power of rhetoric. A valid incidence should be one that is invited by the speaker and synchronized with the flow of the speech, occurring at the appropriate time and place as indicated by the rhetorical format. Thus, an uninvited incidence of applause would not count, nor is one that is invited but has occurred “out of place” (too soon or too late). Furthermore, not all valid incidences are theoretically informative to the same degree. An isolated applause from just a handful of the audience, though valid and in the right place, has relatively little theoretical import for understanding the power of rhetoric compared to one that is made by many acting in unison as a group. When the latter occurs, it would be a clear indication of the power of rhetorically formulated speech. Such positive audience response constitutes the most direct and immediate means by which an audience can display its collective support for the speaker, something which they would not otherwise show to a speech of less power. To influence and orchestrate hundreds and thousands of people in the audience to precisely coordinate their response to applaud (and cheer) together as a group at the right time and place is no mean feat. Such a feat also influences the wider society through broadcast on television and other news and social media. The combined effect could be enormous there and then, and its downstream influence far-reaching, crossing country boarders and inspiring generations to come.

To accomplish the feat, an orator has to excite the audience to applaud, build up the excitement to a crescendo, and simultaneously cue the audience to synchronize their outburst of stored-up applause with the ongoing speech. Rhetorical formats that aid the orator to accomplish the dual functions include contrast, list, puzzle solution, headline-punchline, position-taking, and pursuit (Heritage & Greatbatch, 1986 ). To illustrate, we cite the contrast and list formats.

A contrast, or antithesis, is made up of binary schemata such as “too much” and “too little.” Heritage and Greatbatch ( 1986 , p. 123) reported the following example:

Governments will argue that resources are not available to help disabled people. The fact is that too much is spent on the munitions of war, and too little is spent on the munitions of peace [italics added]. As the audience is familiar with the binary schema of “too much” and “too little” they can habitually match the second half of the contrast against the first half. This decoding process reinforces message comprehension and helps them to correctly anticipate and applaud at the completion point of the contrast. In the example quoted above, the speaker micropaused for 0.2 seconds after the second word “spent,” at which point the audience began to applaud in anticipation of the completion point of the contrast, and applauded more excitedly upon hearing “. . . on the munitions of peace.” The applause continued and lasted for 9.2 long seconds.

A list is usually made up of a series of three parallel words, phrases or clauses. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is a fine example, as is Obama’s “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day , in this election , at this defining moment , change has come to America!” (italics added) The three parts in the list echo one another, step up the argument and its corresponding excitement in the audience as they move from one part to the next. The third part projects a completion point to cue the audience to get themselves ready to display their support via applause, cheers, and so forth. In a real conversation this juncture is called a “transition-relevance place,” at which point a conversational partner (hearer) may take up a turn to speak. A skilful orator will micropause at that juncture to create a conversational space for the audience to take up their turn in applauding and cheering as a group.

As illustrated by the two examples above, speaker and audience collaborate to transform an otherwise monological speech into a quasiconversation, turning a passive audience into an active supportive “conversational” partner who, by their synchronized responses, reduces the psychological separation from the speaker and emboldens the latter’s self-confidence. Through such enjoyable and emotional participation collectively, an audience made up of formerly unconnected individuals with no strong common group identity may henceforth begin to feel “we are all one.” According to social identity theory and related theories (van Zomeren et al., 2008 ), the emergent group identity, politicized in the process, will in turn provide a social psychological base for collective social action. This process of identity making in the audience is further strengthened by the speaker’s frequent use of “we” as a first person, plural personal pronoun.

Conversational Power

A conversation is a speech exchange system in which the length and order of speaking turns have not been preassigned but require coordination on an utterance-by-utterance basis between two or more individuals. It differs from other speech exchange systems in which speaking turns have been preassigned and/or monitored by a third party, for example, job interviews and debate contests. Turn-taking, because of its centrality to conversations and the important theoretical issues that it raises for social coordination and implicit conversational conventions, has been the subject of extensive research and theorizing (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990 ; Grice, 1975 ; Sacks et al., 1974 ). Success at turn-taking is a key part of the conversational process leading to influence. A person who cannot do this is in no position to influence others in and through conversations, which are probably the most common and ubiquitous form of human social interaction. Below we discuss studies of conversational power based on conversational turns and applied to leader emergence in group and intergroup settings. These studies, as they unfold, link conversation analysis with social identity theory and expectation states theory (Berger et al., 1974 ).

A conversational turn in hand allows the speaker to influence others in two important ways. First, through current-speaker-selects-next the speaker can influence who will speak next and, indirectly, increases the probability that he or she will regain the turn after the next. A common method for selecting the next speaker is through tag questions. The current speaker (A) may direct a tag question such as “Ya know?” or “Don’t you agree?” to a particular hearer (B), which carries the illocutionary force of selecting the addressee to be the next speaker and, simultaneously, restraining others from self-selecting. The A 1 B 1 sequence of exchange has been found to have a high probability of extending into A 1 B 1 A 2 in the next round of exchange, followed by its continuation in the form of A 1 B 1 A 2 B 2 . For example, in a six-member group, the A 1 B 1 →A 1 B 1 A 2 sequence of exchange has more than 50% chance of extending to the A 1 B 1 A 2 B 2 sequence, which is well above chance level, considering that there are four other hearers who could intrude at either the A 2 or B 2 slot of turn (Stasser & Taylor, 1991 ). Thus speakership not only offers the current speaker the power to select the next speaker twice, but also to indirectly regain a turn.

Second, a turn in hand provides the speaker with an opportunity to exercise topic control. He or she can exercise non-decision-making power by changing an unfavorable or embarrassing topic to a safer one, thereby silencing or preventing it from reaching the “floor.” Conversely, he or she can exercise decision-making power by continuing or raising a topic that is favorable to self. Or the speaker can move on to talk about an innocuous topic to ease tension in the group.

Bales ( 1950 ) has studied leader emergence in groups made up of unacquainted individuals in situations where they have to bid or compete for speaking turns. Results show that individuals who talk the most have a much better chance of becoming leaders. Depending on the social orientations of their talk, they would be recognized as a task or relational leader. Subsequent research on leader emergence has shown that an even better behavioral predictor than volume of talk is the number of speaking turns. An obvious reason for this is that the volume of talk depends on the number of turns—it usually accumulates across turns, rather than being the result of a single extraordinary long turn of talk. Another reason is that more turns afford the speaker more opportunities to realize the powers of turns that have been explicated above. Group members who become leaders are the ones who can penetrate the complex, on-line conversational system to obtain a disproportionately large number of speaking turns by perfect timing at “transition-relevance places” to self-select as the next speaker or, paradoxical as it may seem, constructive interruptions (Ng et al., 1995 ).

More recent research has extended the experimental study of group leadership to intergroup contexts, where members belonging to two groups who hold opposing stances on a social or political issue interact within and also between groups. The results showed, first, that speaking turns remain important in leader emergence, but the intergroup context now generates social identity and self-categorization processes that selectively privilege particular forms of speech. What potential leaders say, and not only how many speaking turns they have gained, becomes crucial in conveying to group members that they are prototypical members of their group. Prototypical communication is enacted by adopting an accent, choosing code words, and speaking in a tone that characterize the in-group; above all, it is enacted through the content of utterances to represent or exemplify the in-group position. Such prototypical utterances that are directed successfully at the out-group correlate strongly with leader emergence (Reid & Ng, 2000 ). These out-group-directed prototypical utterances project an in-group identity that is psychologically distinctive from the out-group for in-group members to feel proud of and to rally together when debating with the out-group.

Building on these experimental results Reid and Ng ( 2003 ) developed a social identity theory of leadership to account for the emergence and maintenance of intergroup leadership, grounding it in case studies of the intergroup communication strategies that brought Ariel Sharon and John Howard to power in Israel and Australia, respectively. In a later development, the social identity account was fused with expectation states theory to explain how group processes collectively shape the behavior of in-group members to augment the prototypical communication behavior of the emergent leader (Reid & Ng, 2006 ). Specifically, when conversational influence gained through prototypical utterances culminates to form an incipient power hierarchy, group members develop expectations of who is and will be leading the group. Acting on these tacit expectations they collectively coordinate the behavior of each other to conform with the expectations by granting incipient leaders more speaking turns and supporting them with positive audience responses. In this way, group members collectively amplify the influence of incipient leaders and jointly propel them to leadership roles (see also Correll & Ridgeway, 2006 ). In short, the emergence of intergroup leaders is a joint process of what they do individually and what group members do collectively, enabled by speaking turns and mediated by social identity and expectation states processes. In a similar vein, Hogg ( 2014 ) has developed a social identity account of leadership in intergroup settings.

Narrative Power

Narratives and stories are closely related and are sometimes used interchangeably. However, it is useful to distinguish a narrative from a story and from other related terms such as discourse and frames. A story is a sequence of related events in the past recounted for rhetorical or ideological purposes, whereas a narrative is a coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories formed by incorporating new stories and relating them to others so as to provide an ongoing basis for interpreting events, envisioning an ideal future, and motivating and justifying collective actions (Halverson et al., 2011 ). The temporal dimension and sense of movement in a narrative also distinguish it from discourse and frames. According to Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle ( 2013 ), discourses are the raw material of communication that actors plot into a narrative, and frames are the acts of selecting and highlighting some events or issues to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and solution. Both discourse and frame lack the temporal and causal transformation of a narrative.

Pitching narratives at the suprastory level and stressing their temporal and transformational movements allows researchers to take a structurally more systemic and temporally more expansive view than traditional research on propaganda wars between nations, religions, or political systems (Halverson et al., 2011 ; Miskimmon et al., 2013 ). Schmid ( 2014 ) has provided an analysis of al-Qaeda’s “compelling narrative that authorizes its strategy, justifies its violent tactics, propagates its ideology and wins new recruits.” According to this analysis, the chief message of the narrative is “the West is at war with Islam,” a strategic communication that is fundamentally intergroup in both structure and content. The intergroup structure of al-Qaeda narrative includes the rhetorical constructions that there are a group grievance inflicted on Muslims by a Zionist–Christian alliance, a vision of the good society (under the Caliphate and sharia), and a path from grievance to the realization of the vision led by al-Qaeda in a violent jihad to eradicate Western influence in the Muslim world. The al-Qaeda narrative draws support not only from traditional Arab and Muslim cultural narratives interpreted to justify its unorthodox means (such as attacks against women and children), but also from pre-existing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism propagated by some Arab governments, Soviet Cold War propaganda, anti-Western sermons by Muslim clerics, and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. It is deeply embedded in culture and history, and has reached out to numerous Muslims who have emigrated to the West.

The intergroup content of al-Qaeda narrative was shown in a computer-aided content analysis of 18 representative transcripts of propaganda speeches released between 2006–2011 by al-Qaeda leaders, totaling over 66,000 words (Cohen et al., 2016 ). As part of the study, an “Ideology Extraction using Linguistic Extremization” (IELEX) categorization scheme was developed for mapping the content of the corpus, which revealed 19 IELEX rhetorical categories referring to either the out-group/enemy or the in-group/enemy victims. The out-group/enemy was represented by four categories such as “The enemy is extremely negative (bloodthirsty, vengeful, brainwashed, etc.)”; whereas the in-group/enemy victims were represented by more categories such as “we are entirely innocent/good/virtuous.” The content of polarized intergroup stereotypes, demonizing “them” and glorifying “us,” echoes other similar findings (Smith et al., 2008 ), as well as the general finding of intergroup stereotyping in social psychology (Yzerbyt, 2016 ).

The success of the al-Qaeda narrative has alarmed various international agencies, individual governments, think tanks, and religious groups to spend huge sums of money on developing counternarratives that are, according to Schmid ( 2014 ), largely feeble. The so-called “global war on terror” has failed in its effort to construct effective counternarratives although al-Qaeda’s finance, personnel, and infrastructure have been much weakened. Ironically, it has developed into a narrative of its own, not so much for countering external extremism, but for promoting and justifying internal nationalistic extremist policies and influencing national elections. This reactive coradicalization phenomenon is spreading (Mink, 2015 ; Pratt, 2015 ; Reicher & Haslam, 2016 ).

Discussion and Future Directions

This chapter provides a systematic framework for understanding five language–power relationships, namely, language reveals power, reflects power, maintains existing dominance, unites and divides a nation, and creates influence. The first two relationships are derived from the power behind language and the last three from the power of language. Collectively they provide a relatively comprehensible framework for understanding the relationships between language and power, and not simply for understanding language alone or power alone separated from one another. The language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated, one influencing the other, and each can draw from an array of the cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions of language. The framework is applicable to both interpersonal and intergroup contexts of communication, although for present purposes the latter has been highlighted. Among the substantive issues discussed in this chapter, English as a global language, oratorical and narrative power, and intergroup leadership stand out as particularly important for political and theoretical reasons.

In closing, we note some of the gaps that need to be filled and directions for further research. When discussing the powers of language to maintain and reflect existing dominance, we have omitted the countervailing power of language to resist or subvert existing dominance and, importantly, to create social change for the collective good. Furthermore, in this age of globalization and its discontents, English as a global language will increasingly be resented for its excessive unaccommodating power despite tangible lingua franca English benefits, and challenged by the expanding ethnolinguistic vitality of peoples who speak Arabic, Chinese, or Spanish. Internet communication is no longer predominantly in English, but is rapidly diversifying to become the modern Tower of Babel. And yet we have barely scratched the surface of these issues. Other glaring gaps include the omission of media discourse and recent developments in Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (Loring, 2016 ), as well as the lack of reference to languages other than English that may cast one or more of the language–power relationships in a different light.

One of the main themes of this chapter—that the diverse language–power relationships are dynamically interrelated—clearly points to the need for greater theoretical fertilization across cognate disciplines. Our discussion of the three powers of language (boxes 3–5 in Figure 1 ) clearly points in this direction, most notably in the case of the powers of language to create influence through single words, oratories, conversations, and narratives, but much more needs to be done. The social identity approach will continue to serve as a meta theory of intergroup communication. To the extent that intergroup communication takes place in an existing power relation and that the changes that it seeks are not simply a more positive or psychologically distinctive social identity but greater group power and a more powerful social identity, the social identity approach has to incorporate power in its application to intergroup communication.

Further Reading

• Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Billig, M. (1991). Ideology and opinions: Studies in rhetorical psychology . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Crystal, D. (2012). English as a global language , 2d ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness . New York: John Wiley.
• Holtgraves, T. M. (2010). Social psychology and language: Words, utterances, and conversations. In S. Fiske , D. Gilbert , & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 1386–1422). New York: John Wiley.
• Mumby, D. K. (Ed.). (1993). Narrative and social control: Critical perspectives (Vol. 21). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Ng, S. H. , & Bradac, J. J. (1993). Power in language: Verbal communication and social influence . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n202 .
• Abrams, D. , & Hogg, M. A. (2004). Metatheory: Lessons from social identity research. Personality and Social Psychology Review , 8 , 98–106.
• Bales, R. F. (1950). Interaction process analysis: A method for the study of small groups . Oxford: Addison-Wesley.
• Benedek, M. , Beaty, R. , Jauk, E. , Koschutnig, K. , Fink, A. , Silvia, P. J. , . . . & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). Creating metaphors: The neural basis of figurative language production. NeuroImage , 90 , 99–106.
• Berger, J. , Conner, T. L. , & Fisek, M. H. (Eds.). (1974). Expectation states theory: A theoretical research program . Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.
• Bolton, K. (2008). World Englishes today. In B. B. Kachru , Y. Kachru , & C. L. Nelson (Eds.), The handbook of world Englishes (pp. 240–269). Oxford: Blackwell.
• Bourhis, R. Y. , Giles, H. , & Rosenthal, D. (1981). Notes on the construction of a “Subjective vitality questionnaire” for ethnolinguistic groups. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development , 2 , 145–155.
• British Council . (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-faq-the-english-language.htm .
• Brosch, C. (2015). On the conceptual history of the term Lingua Franca . Apples . Journal of Applied Language Studies , 9 (1), 71–85.
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TOPIC-ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE

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General Information about English Language. What is LANGUAGE? In brief, Language is the medium of expression of our thoughts and feelings…e.g. English.

English as a global language. “English is the Global Language”  Is this statement obvious?  How many news articles deal with this topic? (click here.

Ch. 5 Language Key Issue 1: Where are English-Language Speakers Distributed? Origin and diffusion of English Dialects of English.

A global language  to analyze the notion of a“world” (global) language and its characteristic features;  to consider the present status of the English.

History of the English Language

Reasons to learn English

Happy New Year! On your desks: Textbook Pen Highlighter

5 EVENTS THAT SHAPED THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH According to Philip Durkin, Principal Etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary.

Five Events that Shaped the History of English

Polo Vergara Ernesto & Colin Juan

General Overview of History of English

The Origin of the English Language

By: Jade Rinehart & Sydney Black

History of The English Language: Old English and beyond

The role of the English language in the world culture

a language spoken internationally which is learned by many people as a second language. It is characterized by the No. of its speakers (Native or second.

British Isles – Ireland and United Kingdom. England Vs. Great Britain (Scotland, England Wales) Vs. United Kingdom (Scotland, England, Wales (AKA Great.

Late Modern English (1800-Present) The pronunciation, grammar, and spelling of Late-Modern English are essentially the same as Early-Modern English, but.

English around the world

History of the English Language.

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How the English Language Conquered the World

By Amy Chua

• Jan. 18, 2022

THE RISE OF ENGLISH Global Politics and the Power of Language By Rosemary Salomone

“Every time the question of language surfaces,” the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “in one way or another a series of other problems are coming to the fore,” like “the enlargement of the governing class,” the “relationships between the governing groups and the national–popular mass” and the fight over “cultural hegemony.” Vindicating Gramsci, Rosemary Salomone’s “The Rise of English” explores the language wars being fought all over the world, revealing the political, economic and cultural stakes behind these wars, and showing that so far English is winning. It is a panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening book, with an arresting fact on nearly every page.

English is the world’s most widely spoken language, with some 1.5 billion speakers even though it’s native for fewer than 400 million. English accounts for 60 percent of world internet content and is the lingua franca of pop culture and the global economy. All 100 of the world’s most influential science journals publish in English. “Across Europe, close to 100 percent of students study English at some point in their education.”

Even in France, where countering the hegemony of English is an official obsession, English is winning. French bureaucrats constantly try to ban Anglicisms “such as gamer , dark web and fake news ,” Salomone writes, but their edicts are “quietly ignored.” Although a French statute called the Toubon Law “requires radio stations to play 35 percent French songs,” “the remaining 65 percent is flooded with American music.” Many young French artists sing in English. By law, French schoolchildren must study a foreign language, and while eight languages are available, 90 percent choose English.

Salomone, the Kenneth Wang professor of law at St. John’s University School of Law, tends to glide over why English won, simply stating that English is the language of neoliberalism and globalization, which seems to beg the question. But she is meticulous and nuanced in chronicling the battles being fought over language policy in countries ranging from Italy to Congo, and analyzing the unexpected winners and losers.

Exactly whom English benefits is complicated. Obviously it benefits native Anglophones. Americans, with what Salomone calls their “smug monolingualism,” are often blissfully unaware of the advantage they have because of the worldwide dominance of their native tongue. English also benefits globally connected market-dominant minorities in non-Western countries, like English-speaking whites in South Africa or the Anglophone Tutsi elite in Rwanda. In former French colonies like Algeria and Morocco, shifting from French to English is seen not just as the key to modernization, but as a form of resistance against their colonial past.

In India, the role of English is spectacularly complex. The ruling Hindu nationalist Indian People’s Party prefers to depict English as the colonizers’ language, impeding the vision of an India unified by Hindu culture and Hindi. By contrast, for speakers of non-Hindi languages and members of lower castes, English is often seen as a shield against majority domination. Some reformers see English as an “egalitarian language” in contrast to Indian languages, which carry “the legacy of caste.” English is also a symbol of social status. As a character in a recent Bollywood hit says: “English isn’t just a language in this country. It’s a class.” Meanwhile, Indian tiger parents, “from the wealthiest to the poorest,” press for their children to be taught in English, seeing it as the ticket to upward mobility.

Salomone’s South Africa chapter is among the most interesting in the book. Along with Afrikaans, English is one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, and even though only 9.6 percent of the population speak English as their first language, it “dominates every sector,” including government, the internet, business, broadcasting, the press, street signs and popular music. But English is not only the language of South Africa’s commercial and political elite. It was also the language of Black resistance to the Afrikaner-dominated apartheid regime, giving it enormous symbolic importance. Thus, recent years have seen poor and working-class Black activists pushing for English-only instruction in universities, even though many of them are not proficient in the language. Opponents of English, however, argue that shifting away from Afrikaans instruction disproportionately hurts the poor of all races, including lower-income Blacks, whites and mixed-race “colored” South Africans. Meanwhile, younger “colored activists are challenging the English-Afrikaans binary and exploring alternate forms of expression, like AfriKaaps,” a form of Afrikaans promoted by hip-hop artists. For now, though, “the constitutional commitment to language equality in South Africa is aspirational at best,” and “English reigns supreme for its economic power.”

Learning English pays, with “positive labor market returns across the globe.” Throughout academia today, even in Europe and Asia, “the rule no longer is ‘Publish or perish’ but rather ‘Publish in English … or perish.’” In the Middle East, “employees who were more proficient in English earned salaries from 5 percent (Tunisia) to a stunning 200 percent (Iraq) more than their non-English-speaking counterparts.” In Argentina, 90 percent of employers “believed that English was an indispensable skill for managers and directors.” In every country she surveys, higher income is correlated with English proficiency.

Salomone concludes with a brief discussion of American monolingualism, describing the waves of political angst over threats to English as the national language, while advocating for more multilingualism in Anglophone countries. Beyond the economic benefits of speaking multiple languages in a globalized world, Salomone cites studies that show learning new languages improves overall cognitive function. In addition, she argues, “observing life through a wide linguistic and cultural lens leads to greater creativity and innovation.”

“The Rise of English” has its weaknesses. Most important, the book lacks any clear thesis beyond suggesting “language is political; it’s complicated.” In addition, the book doesn’t tie together or reflect on the divergence of its case studies; I frequently found myself wondering why the experiences of (say) France or Italy or Denmark were different, and what we should take from that fact.

Finally, the book offers no clear evaluative framework. Salomone focuses primarily on straightforward economic factors (which often boil down to the same thing: access to global markets), but there is a smattering of underdeveloped discussion of other, more elusive themes too, like race, equity, colonialism and imperialism. This hodgepodge of incommensurables may trace back to the book’s origins. In her preface, Salomone writes, “My initial plan was to write a book on the value of language in the global economy.” But “the deeper I dug … the more I viewed the issues through a wider global lens and the clearer the connections to educational equity, identity and democratic participation appeared.” Unfortunately, she never quite gets a handle on these deeper issues.

Will Mandarin, with its 1.11 billion speakers, eventually replace English as the world’s lingua franca? Will Google or Microsoft Translate moot the issue? Salomone’s painstakingly thorough book addresses these questions too (concluding probably not).

The justifications for English — or any language — as a global lingua franca are based primarily in economic efficiency. By contrast, the reasons to protect local languages mostly sound in different registers — the importance of cultural heritage; the geopolitics of resistance to great powers; the value of Indigenous art; the beauty of idiosyncratic words in other languages that describe all the different types of snow or the different flavors of melancholia. As Gramsci reminded us, the question of who speaks what language invariably puts all this on the table.

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School and the author of “World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability” and “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.”

THE RISE OF ENGLISH Global Politics and the Power of Language By Rosemary Salomone 488 pp. Oxford University Press. $35.

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English as a Global Language - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

English as a Global Language

French 130 million. who is currently speaking or learning english ... french, spanish, russian, and chinese but the bulk of its business is conducted in english. ... – powerpoint ppt presentation.

• David A. Jolliffe
• Professor of English
• Brown Chair in English Literacy
• February 20, 2007
• Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK Cambridge UP, 2003.
• Think about your travel experiences. Where have you seen English that you didnt expect to find it? What was noteworthy about the form and structure of the English? Did you encounter written English or spoken English or both? How would you describe the linguistic abilities of the person/people you were encountering?
• The Worlds Ten Most Spoken Languages
• Mandarin 1,051 million
• English 510 million
• Hindi 490 million
• Spanish 425 million
• Arabic 255 million
• Russian 254 million
• Portuguese 218 million
• Bengali 215 million
• Malay, Indonesian 175 million
• French 130 million
• Non-native English speakers now outnumber native ones 3 to 1.
• Primary schools in major Chinese cities now begin offering English classes in the third grade.
• In Prague, the English language school offers classes for two- and three-year-olds.
• Workers preparing for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 are learning English.
• At both the Peugeot and Toyota plants in the Czech Republic, English is the working language.
• Three types of speakers are currently speaking or learning English first-language, second-language, and foreign-language.
• About a quarter of the worlds population is fluent or competent in Englishabout 1.5 billion people by early in this millennium.
• As English becomes a global language, a sense might develop that nobody owns it anymore. Is that a problem?
• A language that is given special statuspriority in business, education, government, and so onover native, mother-tongue languages
• Special status can be conferred in two ways the government can make it the official language, or it can receive priority in schooling. Both are true in Belize.
• Simply put the power of its peoplemilitary, political, economic
• English was at the right place at the right time By the beginning of the 19th century, Britain had become the worlds leading industrial and trading company. By the end of the 19th century, the population of the U.S. was larger than that of any western European country, and its economy was the most productive and fastest growing in the world.
• As people from all over the world came to Britain to learn about industrialization and to America to learn about economy and corporate growth, English was simply taken for granted.
• The more a community is linguistically mixed, the less it can rely on individuals to ensure communication between different groups. In communities where only two or three languages are in contact, bilingualism (or trilingualism) is a possible solution, for most young children can acquire more than one language with unselfconscious ease. But in communities where there are many languages in contact . . . such a natural solution does not readily apply. (11)
• International organizations The United Nations, for example, has five official languagesEnglish, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinesebut the bulk of its business is conducted in English.
• Academic and business communities Most international academic conferences are conducted in English, as are most international business meetings.
• Linguistic power Are those who speak the global language as a mother tongue automatically have more power than those who learn it as a second or foreign language?
• Linguistic complacency Will a global language eliminate motivation to learn other languages?
• It is all too easy to make your way in the world with English as your mother tongue . . . . We become lazy about learning other languages. . . . We all have to make a greater effort. English may be the world language, but it is not the worlds only language and if we are to be good global neighbours we shall have to be less condescending to the languages of the worldmore assiduous in cultivating acquaintance with them. Sir Sidrath Ramphal, former secretary general of the British Commonwealth (19)
• Will the emergence of a global language lead to the disappearance of minority languages? (There are about 6,000 or so living languages in the world right now.)
• A unfounded fear for now English as a global language seems to have the opposite effectstimulating a stronger support for local languages than might have otherwise been the case.
• A global language meets a populations need for mutual intelligibility.
• A local language meets a populations need for expressions of identity.
• In the 2001 census, the Belizean population had grown to 256,000. Of that number, 190,000 were listed as minimally competent in English, and 56,000 spoke or read English as a second language.
• The world population in 2001 2,236,730,800. Of that number, 329,140,800 were minimally competent in English, and 430,614, 500 spoke or read English as a second language.

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Which large language models are best for banks?

As banks experiment with large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude — artificial intelligence algorithms trained on large datasets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content — a trend has emerged: In this area as in many others, some are leaning heavily on large cloud providers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

"Most banks — excluding perhaps the biggest tier-one banks with substantial research and development in-house — will be much more focused on the technology providers they work with to build these capabilities, in other words the IBMs, Microsofts, Googles, Oracle and AWSs of the world, rather than the much more hyped-up foundation model providers like OpenAI," said Gilles Ubaghs, a strategic advisor at Datos Insights.

But this could be a mistake, according to Bhavesh Dayalji, chief AI officer for S&P Global and CEO of Kensho, an AI company S&P Global bought in 2018. There is risk for companies in locking themselves into a closed architecture and one model or type of model from a big cloud provider, Dayalji said.  

"Not all models are equal," he said. "Some models may be good at writing poems, other models might be really good at quantitative reasoning." In other words, applying basic math to data analysis and problem-solving.

His team has been testing several of the most popular large language models, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Mistral AI's Mistral Large, on their ability to handle the kinds of use cases that come up in financial services and scoring the accuracy of the models' results. 

publicly available leaderboard , as a free benchmarking service. 

Such vetting of models' ability to handle mathematical problems is especially important in the financial industry, Dayalji noted, where models "are not going to be asked to write poems or think about innovative ways in which you can create your vacation plans in Europe and whatnot."

Industry reaction

Industry experts agree that benchmarking generative AI models is a useful idea.

"I do think LLMs are ready to do sophisticated quantitative reasoning problems, but in a field that requires accuracy there is a need for an independent assessment," said Aaron McPherson, principal, at AFM Consulting. There may also be a need for a more private assessment of banks' internally developed large language models, trained on proprietary data as well as public information, he said.

S&P Global's benchmark could also be useful to technology vendors offering tailored LLMs, to establish credibility in the marketplace.  

"The use of a council of human experts reminds me of what a number of people have said, which is that black box models tend not to be trusted over human experts until they have demonstrated that their output is superior to that of the human experts," McPherson said. "So this sort of service could go a long way toward building confidence in LLMs as a technology."

Ubaghs agreed that this should appeal to many companies experimenting with large language models. 

"Financial services in general is pretty unique compared to other industry verticals, in that it's driven in large part by regulatory and risk requirements, so they will want to see industry metrics and benchmarks," he said. "As more banks do start to deploy these capabilities, and likewise as more foundation models start to target financial services more specifically, these sorts of benchmarks will prove valuable, but won't necessarily impact the decision on whether or not to invest and build these capabilities" due to banks' dependence on core banking and cloud vendors.

A common conception, perhaps a myth, about large language models is that they're not good at math, that they're much better at generating content, for instance drafting emails to customers or writing poems, because they're trained to predict the next word.

Dayalji said that two years ago, most large language models could not do quantitative reasoning. But "these models are becoming very good at it," he said. "And the fact that you can tune these models and get them to perform better and better is what we are really excited about."

Some of this progress has been incidental, according to Chris Tanner, adjunct faculty at MIT and Kensho's head of research and development.

"They happen to be trained on so much data with such large computers that they're getting some understanding of the world and numbers," Tanner said in an interview. "But the progress on understanding numbers to perform advanced calculations keeps getting better. We're still learning tons — we meaning the entire community, not just here at Kensho." 

How the leaderboard works

To create the benchmark, Dayalji's team worked with academic and industry domain experts to come up with a list of questions for the large language models. 

One quantitative reasoning question they have used is this: "The market price of K-T-Lew Corporation's common stock is $60 per share, and each share gives its owner one subscription right. Four rights are required to purchase an additional share of common stock at the subscription price of $54 per share. If the common stock is currently selling rights-on, what is the theoretical value of a right? Answer to the nearest cent."

To test the models' ability to extract data, the researchers feed them tables and balance sheets and ask them to pull out specific data points. To test their domain expertise, they ask the models to explain financial concepts and terms.

The benchmark "gives you a real idea of what you are looking for, which is, can it do this quantitative reasoning?" Tanner said. "Can it determine what is a specific financial number that you need out of a document, out of a question that you ask? Or can you do some quantitative arithmetic related to a balance sheet number?" 

The leaderboard can tell people who work in financial services how well these models can be expected to perform on a range of tasks, including complex calculations, Tanner said.

The Kensho team developed the benchmark while going through the process of evaluating large language models themselves. They were using an open-source generative AI model for a product offering, then started testing other models and realized the other models performed better.

"Our use cases are no different from the use cases that JPMorgan or another big fund management company would have," Dayalji said. He and his team decided to make their findings public to help others get a sense of what business and finance tasks these models are good at.

The group plans to keep adding large language models to the benchmark and to introduce opportunities for others to provide feedback, in the hopes of creating a community.

"This is going to be a living thing," Dayalji said. "We're continuing to update it and modify it based on what we're seeing in the industry." 

They're also paying attention to issues that plague large language models, like hallucinations, copyright infringement and cybersecurity.

"You hear these lofty goals, like, 70% productivity enhancement at these banks," Dayalji said. "But what you find once you start scratching under the surface and start thinking about that technology stack, the architecture and how to deploy this technology, is you need to be a bit more thoughtful. You have to think about data privacy, intellectual property, inherent biases and other factors as it relates to people and workflows."

First Busey closes acquisition of Merchants and Manufacturers Bank; Stax co-founders launch a new credit-scoring tool; UMB's marketing chief takes on consumer banking; and more in the weekly banking news roundup.

Based on the pace of deals through late March, the banking industry is on track for the most branch sales since 2021. Buyer interest has mounted alongside the need to acquire deposits, following hits to funding bases last year.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tapped executive compensation and cannabis banking bills as bipartisan priorities that could see movement in the Senate in the "weeks and months ahead."

A digital-payment trend that began during the COVID pandemic is being bolstered by features such as rewards and state ID storage.

The Federal Reserve scored some important legal victories in lawsuits challenging its discretion to grant or deny applicants for master accounts. But whether those victories will last through the appeals process or scrutiny from Congress is uncertain.

Global Language

Mar 23, 2019

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Global Language. Lecture 15. Toward a global language – How long will the road be?. Will English be the candidate?.

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• foreign language
• applied linguistics
• global language
• foreign language learning
• predominantly english speaking countries

Presentation Transcript

Global Language Lecture 15

Toward a global language – How long will the road be?

Will English be the candidate? English indeed possesses many characteristics that are favored by L2 learners. As the great 19th century American writer Ralph W. Emerson observed, English “is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.” Of all the world’s languages, it is arguably the richest in vocabulary, and relatively simple in grammatical structures; scattered across every continent, about one-tenth of the world’s population uses English as a mother tongue,.

The Indian scholar Braj Kachru describes English as existing in three concentric circles: the inner circle of the predominantly English-speaking countries, the outer circle of the former colonies where English is an official language, and the expanding circle where, although English is neither an official nor a former colonial language, it is increasingly part of many people’s daily lives.

However, as Widdowson says, “Control of language is, to a considerable degree, control of power.” To give up one’s first language means to give up one’s own power. Besides, even the sense of pride and identity will leave everyone clinging to their own mother tongue, too.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language Four Stages

Stage one: the grammar-translation method • The traditional academic style of teaching which places heavy emphasis on grammatical rules explained in the students’ own language and uses translation as the main form of exercises and testing. Consequently, it trains minds in logical thought, develops elegant expression, but meanwhile decontextualizes vocabulary owing to rote learning. It was welcomed in old style schools where learning a foreign language was regarded as a step toward cultural refinement and higher status, rather than its actual use. There is no emphasis on the development of fluent speech.

Stage two: the direct method • In contrast, this method encourages fast and effective learning with more tolerance for errors in performance. Its emergence about one hundred years ago was a response to the challenge of new types of students – soldiers from two world wars, immigrants, business people, and tourists, whose sole purpose was to use the language immediately after they had learned it. During the learning program the students’ own languages were banished and everything should be done through the language under instruction. With more and more audio-visual equipment available, this method has evolved into an audio-lingual style that is concerned with the real-life activities the students are going to face.

Stage three: the natural approach • Influenced by Krashen’s input hypothesis, this style was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. As a typical example of theory-guided practice, teachers then believed that an adult L2 learner could repeat the children’s route to L1 proficiency, i.e. learning would take place without explanation or grading, and without correction of errors, but simply by exposure to “meaningful input”. This means that attention to meaning would somehow trigger the natural cognitive development of the L2 system – students would work out grammar rules from listening and reading without explicit instruction. After Swain put forward her output hypothesis in 1985, this theoretically seductive method has been fatally challenged and has gradually lost its sacred aura and momentum.

Stage four: the communicative approach • As old as the natural approach, it has greater vitality. Its proposition has shifted the goal of foreign language teaching from the mastery of grammar rules to the ability to do things with the language appropriately, fluently, and effectively. Students are encouraged to apply the language first, and then learn the forms which would fulfill their needs in communication. • Recent development: the learner-centered method and task-based instruction.

Introduction to Applied Linguistics

1. Macro- and micro applied linguisticsMacro-Applied LinguisticsThe study of language and linguistics in relation to practical problems. Linguistic theories, methods, and findings can be applied to a wide domain varying from natural language processing and machine translation, stylistics, lexicography to language planning and clinical analysis of disorders of spoken, written, or signed language.

Micro-Applied Linguistics The study of second and foreign language learning and teaching. In recent years, the subject of foreign language teaching and learning has in fact developed to become the largest domain of enquiry within applied linguistics. The study of second and foreign language learning and teaching can be understood as the micro view of applied linguistics. We shall adopt this view in our course

Critical applied linguistics

Language Imperialism • The dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages. • ——Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism

Classroom discussion

How do your think of the current situation of TEFL in China?

A survey on English learners in China

Do you agree with the following viewpoints? • English is best taught monolingually. • The ideal teacher of English is a native speaker. • The earlier English is taught, the better the results. • The more English is taught, the better the results. • If other languages are used much, standards of English will drop.

Do you agree – ? • L2 acquisition resembles the process of pidginization. -- Schumann

Definitions A “pidgin” is a speech-system that has been formed to provide a means of communication between people who have no common language. A “pidgin” is an auxiliary language, one that has no native speakers.

A pidgin is rule-govern, but it usually gets rid of the difficult or unusual parts of a language, for example, the omission of verbs and the dropping of present-tense inflections. You out the game. He fast in everything he do

On the other hand, it also has useful refinements that a Standard language lacks. e.g. the use of be to signify a stable condition in a sentence like: Some of them be big. He working. (He is busy right now) He be working. (He has a steady job)

pidginization: (皮钦语化) The development of a grammatically reduced form of a target language in second language acquisition. This is usually a temporary stage in language learning characterized by, for example, a limited system of auxiliary verbs, simplified question and negative forms, and reduced rules for tense, number and other grammatical categories.

Possible future of English? • English as a standardized global language will be drowned in the sea of pidginization?

Possible future of English? • When English as a universal second language merges with the local cultural setting, new varieties will spring up and gradually detract from each other?

Possible future of English? • A new standard international English will be emerging somewhere, with its own rules and regularities different from those of any of the “native Englishes”.

Further discussion What kind of global language do we really need? What should we do for the co-existence of this universal L2 and our own L1? How will a global language be properly established?

Further reading A recommendation

V.Fromkin, et al An Introduction to Language (the 7th edition) Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. 2002 北京大学出版社，2004

Further reading 桂诗春： 新编心理语言学 上海外语教育出版社 2000

桂诗春 应用语言学 （修订版） 北京大学出版社即将出版

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