Globalization and the Future of German: With a Select Bibliography 9783110197297, 9783110179187

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Globalization and the Future of German

W G DE

Globalization and the Future of German With a Select Bibliography

Edited by

Andreas Gardt Bernd Hüppauf

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

We gratefully acknowledge a printing subsidy from the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

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Globalization and the future of German / edited by Andreas Gardt, Bernd Hüppauf. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 3-11-017918-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. German language - 21st century. 2. German language in the United States. 3. Language and languages - Study and teaching United States. I. Gardt, Andreas, 1954II. Hüppauf, Bernd. PF3088.G56 2004 430'.9'0905-dc22 2004011660

ISBN 3-11-017918-0 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at .

© Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Globalization - Threats and Opportunities Bernd Hiippauf

3

Globalization and Language

25

The Past, Present, and Future of World English David Crystal

27

English as Threat or Resource in Continental Europe Robert Phillipson

47

Global English - A New Lingua Franca or a New Imperial Culture? . . . 65 Hans Joachim Meyer English Rules the World. What Will Become of German? RudolfHoberg Language Policies in East and West. National Language Policies as a Response to the Pressures of Globalization Petra Braselmann The Impact of English on the Vocabulary and Grammatical Structure of German German as an Endangered Language? Peter Eisenberg Does "Denglish" Dedifferentiate our Perceptions of Nature? The View of a Nature Lover and Language "Fighter" Hermann H. Dieter

85

99

119 121

139

vi

Contents

Internationalizing Science and Technology

155

German as an International Language of the Sciences Recent Past and Present Ulrich Amnion

157

The Future of German and Other Non-English Languages for Academic Communication Konrad Ehlich

173

Language and Identity

185

The German Language and the Linguistic Diversity of Europe Wolfgang Thierse

187

Language and National Identity Andreas Gardt

197

Yiddish and German: An On-Again, Off-Again Relationship and Some of the More Important Factors Determining the Future ofYiddish Joshua A. Fishman

213

The Past and Future of the Pennsylvania German Language: Many Ways of Speaking German; Many Ways of Being American . . . . 229 David L. Valuska and William W. Donner German in the USA

243

Language Policies of the Goethe-Institut Nikky Keiìhoìz-Riihìe, Stephan Nobbe, and Uwe Rau

245

The Kulturpolitik of German-Speaking Countries in the USA John Lalande II

253

Self-inflicted Wounds? Why German Enrollments are Dropping Robert C. Reimer

265

Meeting the Challenge: The Future of German Study in the United States Helene Zimmer-Loew German in Wisconsin: Language Change and Loss Peter Wagener

281 293

Contents

vii

Language and the Creative Mind

305

The Seductive Aesthetics of Globalization: Semiotic Implications of Anglicisms in German Prisca Augustyn

307

Critically "Kanak": A Reimagination of German Culture Yasemir Yildiz

319

Globalization: A Look at the Positive Side John M. Grandin

341

Select Bibliography

349

List of Contributors

373

Preface

It seems justified to say that in Europe language has never before been the subject of heated, or even public, debate, as was the case in the decades around the year 2000. It had by this time become obvious that English was now the dominant language world-wide. The implications, as well as possible responses to the continuing rise of English differ greatly between languages and nations. It is no surprise that the language debate was particularly heated in Europe since European languages are losing their traditional position and societies are concerned about the reduction of their national language to a 'small language.' The situation of German is paradigmatic. In public debate and academic publications the question was raised whether German was among the dying languages, with a future reduced to the private sphere or folklore. Some commentators denied this possibility while others were seriously afraid of the future, and yet others considered it an inevitable implication of the tendency towards a global village that will only be possible if English is used as the language of communication all over the world. Whichever side one takes in this debate, it is obvious that linguistic changes cannot be discussed in terms of linguistic concepts only, since they are inextricably intertwined with social, political and economic tendencies. The year 2001 was declared the European Year of Languages. It gave rise to many conferences, lectures and hearings considered worthy of media coverage. Official publications of the EU made an attempt to demonstrate the bright future of Europe's linguistic diversity. However, not every one agreed. In contrast to the celebration of languages, critical voices pointed out that the positive presentation of the diversity of European languages was little more than a deception. Presenting English as one of the many languages spoken in Europe, equal to Greek or Finnish, was seen by many commentators as an ill-conceived attempt to cover up the real situation. The European Year of Languages was meant to boost positive attitudes and foster a love of Europe's colorful plurality through a glowing image of its linguistic diversity. The contrary seems to have been achieved. Skepticism and even deep pessimism in relation to the future of European languages ensued. The debate was particularly intensive in Germany. After two years of preparation, a conference addressing the topic of the future of European languages with a specific focus on German as a paradig-

χ

Preface

matic example was held in 2002 at New York University. New York seemed an ideal place for a re-examination of these issues. It is the power center of the drive towards English as a global language and, at the same time, it is distanced both geographically and mentally from the sites of political debate in Europe. The intention was to use this distance to create a different framework and to re-adjust the debate by defining the issues in a different way. It was hoped that the focus on the effects of globalization - rather than on the fear of domination - would lead to a reconstitution of the terms of the debate and liberate it from the sterile perspective of confrontation that perceives languages as being engaged in a struggle for survival. This volume contains revised contributions to the conference, expanded by six solicited essays. A guiding principle that the editors adopted was to reflect the broad spectrum of the debate that is not limited to academic positions. Language policy is a field where scholarly research and public interest intersect and it is no surprise that not every argument used in this debate stands up to closer academic scrutiny, particularly where assumptions about the 'nature' of language are made. This has become evident in German speaking countries in the debate about foreign words and phrases. This is the major concern of language societies which have contributed to the intense public debate in recent years. Language is a public good and controversy over its current state and future development is a legitimate aspect of public discourse, open to all groups of society. The decision to publish this volume in English rather than in German gave rise to strong criticism and warrants a brief explanatory comment. The book is addressed to a target group that can be called international readership. In the past ten years a large number of books on the language question have been published in German. Yet, the relationship between questions of language and globalization has been neglected. Furthermore, the European language debate is all but unknown in English speaking countries and the specific situation of German is even less well known. Publication in English, it is reasonable to assume, will lead the book to reach a new readership unfamiliar with the issues elaborated on in this anthology. The editors responded to the concern expressed about the problem of linguistic diversity by including abstracts of all essays in German. The first chapter deals with the general effects that globalization has on language. Globalization manifests itself in the increased use of English as a second language world-wide, in the corresponding decrease of importance of other languages in second language acquisition and in the increasing presence of English in everyday life in non-English speaking societies. The question is raised whether this will lead to an ideal community of uninhibited communi-

Preface

xi

cation where English as the new lingua franca enables individuals and groups to participate in an increasingly global market of information, entertainment and material goods, or, alternatively, whether (American) English is becoming a new means of expanding cultural and economic hegemony. Where linguistic diversity is seen as linked to cultural diversity, the dominance of English as the language of globalization is often held responsible for erasing cultural differences and creating a uniform and faceless world. For those who regard this as a genuine threat the question of language policy and strategies for supporting the various national languages is inevitable. The second chapter focuses on the impact of English on the vocabulary and grammatical structure of German. What is at stake is less the replacement of one language by another, but the growing presence of English words and phrases in German. This controversy has gained considerable public appeal in the past years, involving the print and electronic media and has provided language societies with a specific and popular agenda. The third chapter is concerned with the linguistic consequences of the internationalization of science and technology. It is their specialist languages that make the impact of English most obvious. Not only individual words and phrases are incorporated, but whole areas of communication have shifted to English. For many scientists, publishing in English has become common practice and they regard linguistic diversity in their professional sphere as a hindrance for efficient communication. In their attempt to keep their educational programs internationally attractive, universities in German speaking countries have begun offering entire degree programs in English. From early on and, as a result of the political conditions, with renewed urgency since the late 18th century, language played a major role in the construction of cultural and political identity in Germany, both of individuals and of societies as a whole. The fourth chapter deals with various aspects of this question, addressing German in the context of a multilingual Europe and America. Using the examples of Yiddish and Pennsylvania German, contributions deal with historical traditions of defining identity through language and also address current developments. The increasing international importance of English has had obvious consequences for the international standing of German (and French, Italian, Russian etc.) as a second language. The situation of German in schools, universities and other institutions of learning and study in Europe has been the subject of comprehensive research in recent years. However, not much has been published on the presence of German in America, Australia and Canada. Chapter five therefore concentrates on the role German plays in education and the public life in the United States.

xii

Preface

The departure point of the final chapter is the question of possible responses to the perceived threat posed by globalization. The contributions reflect the complexity of these relations by placing emphasis on productive and innovative responses to the challenge to the future of German as a world language. There are areas of knowledge and experience, these essays suggest, that continue to make German attractive. They must be identified and actively pursued in promoting the language. Also, new hybrid forms of German resulting from close contact between German and the languages of immigrants, primarily from Turkey, could well lead to a revitalization of the productive power of the spoken and written language. There is hope, it seems, that an endangered love of language could be revitalized through a newly open and self-confident attitude. Many were involved in the preparation of this volume. We would like to acknowledge, in particular, contributions by Kathrin DiPaola (NYU), Katharina Schaumann (Universität Kassel), Peter Bews (Universität Heidelberg) and Dr. Ursula Kleinhenz, Dr. Anke Beck, and Frank Benno Junghanns. We are grateful for support from the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache that covered the cost of the simultaneous translation of the papers presented at the conference. Without the financial support from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst, the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung the conference would not have been possible. Andreas Gardt, Kassel

Bernd Hüppauf, New York

Introduction

Globalization - Threats and Opportunities Bernd Hiippauf

Zusammenfassung Die unaufhörlich wachsende Bedeutung von Englisch als der Kommunikations- und Geschäftssprache der EU sowie als Sprache des Tourismus, der Wissenschaft, der Unterhaltungsindustrie und vieler weiterer Bereiche auf der Welt hat in den letzten Jahren zu intensiven Diskussionen in der Öffentlichkeit sowie in akademischen Disziplinen, vor allem der Linguistik, geführt. Der Sammelband knüpft an diese Diskussionen an, definiert jedoch den Rahmen der Betrachtung auf andere Weise; er führt in die vorwiegend durch die Bedingungen der EU und die Perspektive der Nationalstaaten bestimmte Debatte den Begriff der Globalisierung ein. Die Beiträge diskutieren die Frage, wie sich die Folgen der Hegemonie des Englischen als der Sprache der Globalisierung für die Stellung der Sprachen Europas in der Gegenwart und voraussehbaren Zukunft verstehen lassen, am Beispiel von Deutsch im Alltag und in Institutionen der Ausbildung Europas und Amerikas. Es besteht weitgehende Übereinstimmung, dass sich die Stellung von Deutsch, und nicht allein von Deutsch, in der Gegenwart grundlegend ändert. Diese Veränderung wir in einigen Beiträgen kritisch bewertet, während andere es für unfruchtbar halten, sie lediglich als einen Verlust zu verstehen. Vielmehr bieten sich Möglichkeiten zu einem eigenbestimmten und innovativen Verhältnis zur Sprache an, die erkannt werden müssen, um praktiziert werden zu können. An die Stelle eines Denkens in Kategorien von Ausschliessung und Verdrängung kann, so argumentieren einige der Beiträge, eine Identifikation und wiederbelebte Liebe zur eigenen Sprache treten.

Without doubt, the importance of English as a language of international communication has increased significantly during recent decades. It has become the undisputed international language in many areas including tourism, business and trade, the sciences, popular culture and diplomacy. The statistical data are unequivocal. Equally obvious is that we do not know how to interpret such data. We are witnessing a rapid change of the world's linguistic map without really understanding what we are witnessing. Inter-

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Bernd Hiìppanf

pretations are highly controversial; furthermore, assessments of these tendencies are often emotionally charged. There is a fear among many European (and non-European) nations of losing the power of language itself, and with this the capacity for self determination and the development of cultural identity. This anxiety is particularly strong in France and Germany, but can also be observed, albeit to a lesser degree, within other nations with major languages. The principle of parity for the languages of all EU member states, initially six, now eleven and soon, as the result of the eastward expansion, many more has not been practiced in real communication for many years. What is new, however, is an emerging mono-linguaslism; and the dominance of English as both a language of institutions of the European Union as well as of general communication is perceived as a threat that may reduce all other languages to insignificance. The historical experience of colonization provides many observers with a preeminent model for interpreting the growing hegemony of English in the contemporary world as a whole as well as in the EU. The only situations in the past comparable to the current conflict over language, also designated a 'language war', 1 was, they believe, the political domination of colonizing powers which uncompromisingly suppressed indigenous languages: English and French in Africa, America and Asia, Spanish and Portuguese in South America. This is a new experience for European nations that is particularly wounding to their self esteem, since they have enough experience with imperialism to know that it contains "the notion of a purposeful project": the intentional spread of a political system, combined with cultural values and a life style, from one center of power that creates victims pushed to the margins, reducing their significance. This new variant of imperialism, they argue, is now spreading across the globe. 2 While it is increasingly difficult to locate purpose in an identifiable power center, imperialism reshaped as a political program based on anonymous channels of electronic communication and language is all the more threatening. Powerful nations feel they are being pushed to the periphery of world affairs by English and AngloAmerican culture for which language is the main vehicle. The current phase of creating a new monetary, economic and political unity in Europe has created conditions that have had an obvious impact on the perception of language, in particular, the relationship between English - the language of a nation that not only joined the EU late, but by continuing to be reluctant to give up national sovereignty is suspected of maintaining a mentality of imperialistic arrogance - and other major European languages. German can serve as an example for the submergence of European languages as a consequence of the emergence of English as the foremost foreign language in

Globalization - Threats and Opportunities

5

Europe. While Germany has the strongest economy in the EU and German is spoken by nearly 100 millions Europeans, the language is "progressively marginalized in scholarship, commerce, youth culture and in the global linguistic market place, in similar ways to a reduction in the power of French internationally." 3 In public debates and academic publications the question has often been raised whether German may be among the dying languages, its future reduced to the private sphere and folklore. The preparation of the conference on "Globalization and the future of European languages" in 2002, that provided the basis for most of the essays collected in this volume, made this obvious: the controversy polarizes opinions and touches emotions so deeply, that irrational responses are not uncommon. A controversy over the conference language nearly led to the abortion of the project. Issues related to the current situation of European languages and their prospective futures have been debated extensively at conferences and in publications, both scholarly and popular. This volume makes an attempt to reconstitute the debate by developing a new conceptual framework. It is our contention that the future of European languages, in terms of their relation to English, needs to be addressed in the context of globalization. In contrast to political interpretations that posit the situation in terms of a clash between English and other European languages, the observed polarization can more appropriately be interpreted within the frame of reference provided by one of the main tendencies of the present. With globalization as an analytical term, the rise of English and the complementary fall of European languages can then be perceived as a struggle between globalization and identity'. Globalization is not a clearly defined term. Rather, it is "beset with vagueness and inconsistencies" and therefore often used with a mixture of uneasiness and fascination. 4 Yet, considering the complex reality that needs to be conceptualized it has a great analytical potential and, as long as it is used as a semantic tool for sensitizing the observer, its explanatory range proves remarkably powerful. Globalization has been defined in two mutually exclusive ways: either as an extension of familiar tendencies in modernity towards internationalism and its imperialist heritage, or, alternatively, as the symptom of a deep caesura and the powerful and dominant tendency in a post-colonial world in which the nation state and with it stable identities, are losing the power once gained in the process of (occidental) modernization. Regardless whether globalization is constructed as a term of continuation or rupture, it denotes fundamental changes that are leading to unifying the world as a whole. The impact of new communication technologies and the global circulation of capital and consumer goods, as well as a new type of mass migration result in the disappearance of differences. "Monocultures

6

Bernd Hiìppanf

are gaining ascendancy and [are] overwhelming the globe. Wherever we look, fewer kinds in ever fewer variants of com and rice and wheat; Chinese, Russian and English; and sheep and cattle and pigs look back at us." 5 Pörksen observes a disquieting homogenization of modern languages which he calls a "disabling of the vernacular". He warns that this part of a continued reduction of diversity threatens to turn the globe into one large and uniform space. Supporters of globalization tend to argue that, on the contrary, the reduction of cultural diversity is the inevitable implication of the desirable objective of globalization. Local cultures and a sense of place may well be losing ground, but this loss, they argue, is well justified by the gains achieved through the creation of a world liberated from inherited restrictions for communication and movement. One such loss, it needs to be added, is the loss in importance of languages other than English. They may be reduced to local idioms. This too, supporters of globalization argue, is a price worth paying. Other observers place less emphasis on loss and sacrifice and do not see the beginning of the final end for diversity, but rather the realization of a discourse initiated around 1800 when Kant, Goethe and other thinkers of the late Enlightenment phantasized about world citizenship, world literature and a world society, and wrote about humankind (die Menschheit) with enthusiasm. This society had no grammatical plural and served as the linguistic sign for an ideal of a world in harmony and eternal peace. In the process of its realization, it can be argued, this ideal lost much of its fascination, but is still worthy to be pursued. There is no need, it is the contention of this volume, to perceive the situation in terms of this exclusive opposition. Furthermore, this perspective could well be a crass distortion. The tension between these two mutually exclusive concepts of globalization provides the framework within which the arguments of the contributions to this volume are elaborated. They make an attempt to define language as either a major force or as the victim in this debate on globalization. It may not be a surprise to note that contributions based on the American experience have an inclination towards the more open and post-colonial concept of globalization and, as Robert Reimer argues in his essay, can even conceive of loss as a 'self-inflicted' wound, whereas the German and, in general, European experience seems to embrace a concept of language connected with the stable identities of separate cultures and are consequently much more concerned with the pain of the wound.

Globalization - Threats and Opportunities

7

The first interpretation links the language question closely to a concept of power vested in nation states and a system of international power relations. The conflict is, then, seen as an example of one political power seeking domination over other nations. Rome and the Roman Empire have been suggested as the model for this power game. 6 A clash of civilizations, to use Samuel Huntington's popular phrase, and dominance of one over all other civilizations presupposes the continuation of the system of nations as it has existed from the beginning of the modern period. It takes for granted the continued existence of the nation state as the basis of the organization of a reality that had not existed previously, namely, the world. This world wide system, from its inception on, has always been one of conflict and competition. What is at present changing, according to this view, is the scale of the struggle. There is no place on the globe unaffected by it since the EuropeanAmerican model - which is rapidly changing to the American-only model became the only guiding force world wide. Also, this change is accompanied by a shift in the source of power from military and political domination to competing civilizations and their systems of economic and cultural production. Its absence from the political and sociological debate notwithstanding, language has to be considered a fundamental dimension of this change. This image of globalization is indebted to the critical analysis of mass culture pioneered in the 1940s by Horkheimer and Adorno. Based on observations gathered during their exile in America, they argued that the emergence of a homogenized mass culture would lead to a fundamental change in Western civilization. It was leading, they contended, to the lowest quality level of cultural production. The domination of American pop culture and the triumph of mass entertainment would, they feared, inevitably result in the eradication of diversity and the leveling of quality. What was missing from their analysis and, given recent experience, needs to be strongly emphasized is the weight of commercial interests of large corporations. Their agenda increasingly dictates the agenda of national governments and makes questions of linguistic diversity pale. The subjugation of cultural objectives and in particular linguistic and cultural self-determination to economic interests is simultaneous with the protection of producers and, American business strategy suggests, the bigger the producer the more protection it deserves. From this perspective, globalization is interpreted as a deceiving term concealing the imperialist struggle for domination. Power results from a civilization's success in promoting industrial goods and other products of national production and in the present it is particularly ideas, values and

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entire systems of thought and perception mediated by language that will lead to domination. It is this analytical framework, critical of American capitalism as the anatomy of globalization, that leads to the perception of the growing domination of English as a threatening colonizing act of the Americanization of the world. The apparent arrogance of the political and economic elite in relation to the rest of the world provides further support for this critical analysis. America's power, Zbigniew Brzezinski recently wrote, "is unprecedented in its global military reach, in the centrality of America's economic vitality for the well-being of the world economy..." It is no surprise that he adds to this benevolent view of America's role in the process of globalization "the worldwide appeal of the multi-facetted and often crass American mass culture." 7 For critical theory that interprets globalization as a camouflaged Americanization of the world, the triumph of American pop culture is ill-understood in tenus of its "appeal". This distortion has to be corrected, they argue, and what is referred to by the innocent tenu "appeal" needs to be seen in terms of a continued international power struggle. Language as inextricably intertwined with this struggle for the domination of one nation over others makes it mandatory for anti-colonial and antiimperialist theories of liberation to include it in their critical analysis. As Phillipson argues in this volume, it can be interpreted as a major agent of domination not only among the members of the EU but in the emerging world market in the age of information and knowledge. Within this framework, European languages are being interpreted as centers of authentic culture. 8 Through language a system of values and beliefs, knowledge and life style is being covertly imposed on other cultures. 9 By putting them in a position of dependence comparable to colonies during their struggle for decolonization, they need to be protected. "Leaving language policy to market forces, nationally and in the supranational institutions, is a recipe for more English and less of the other languages." 10 What can be observed in relation to the power of English in politics and economics can also be said about the arts, literature and the entertainment industry which all are up against the menace of the subjugating power and need organized support in their struggle against the threat of their identity melting into global pulp. According to George Kennan - who no one will accuse of ideological bias - America exports "the cheapest, silliest, and most disreputable manifestations of our 'culture.' No wonder that these effusions become the laughingstock of intelligent and sensitive people the world over. But so long as we find it proper to let millions of our living rooms be filled with this trash every evening... I can see that we would cut a poor figure trying to deny it to others beyond our borders...""

Globalization - Threats and Opportunities

9

The critical theory of the American culture industry undoubtedly captures the mood of many who feel directly affected by globalization. Globalization's power of dissolution creates feelings of exposure and extreme uncertainty. These feelings of threat are not to be underestimated and have led to active responses ranging from violent protests to subtle forms of resistance. Aggression and violence, as the ultimate expression of a desire for identification, create the desperate alternative to the abdication of self. Language, as several essays in this volume argue, is a key factor in this conflict. The power to litter public language with often ill-understood phrases and fragments of American English can appear as mere folly.12 Yet, it is more commonly associated by many with the power of anonymous corporations and huge institutions to rule over, and shape the lives of, individuals. The loss of language is not perceived in isolation, but as embedded in a wider context made up of the destruction of jobs, the erosion of the welfare state and the imposition of a new geographical mobility. 13 Marketing slogans designed by multi-national corporations are declarations of their success in pulling down all boundaries and borders and creating a consumer paradise without limits. This achievement cannot be understood as an act of liberation so long as this opening is perceived as a damaging loss. Globalization, in a common assessment, is creating casualties who are helplessly exposed to a bizarre combination of internationalism and a new parochialism expressed through unfamiliar words and phrases and American sounds. For many this new language is difficult to comprehend, but, on the other hand, is associated with innovation, the power of the modern and dynamic as well as the distant other, not necessarily identical with America, but perceived as the anonymous power of a financial-industrial empire whose language is English. As long as changes in the language are perceived as loss and threat, the liberating opportunities for creativity and openness cannot be realized and the world becomes a space of alienation in which local and regional identities need to be protected from the danger of extinction. Petitions to parliaments of European countries, the creation of associations for the protection of one's own language and resistance to an increasing number of English words and phrases penetrating into German, French and other continental languages, are consequences of a growing attitude of defense against a perceived menace.14 They often demonstrate a high degree of frustration and anger. In Germany, the language of corporations, advertising, the media and increasingly also of education provide appalling examples of servility, lack of pride and, it has been suggested, contempt for one's own

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language. The president of the Federal Republic of Germany, has given expression to this serious concern about a lack of love for the mother tongue, identifying it as the prime source for linguistic deterioration. Collections of ridiculous examples of linguistic pollution have been put together. The verhunzte Sprache, to paraphrase Thomas Mann's word for the perversion of genuine German traditions for detested political purposes, has led to popular outcries of resistance to this unwelcome penetration and transformation of the common language by a foreign idiom. The effects that 'Americanization' has had on the German language are often exaggerated out of all proportion and responses occasionally border on the hysterical. The claim has been made that the German language is suffering "irreparable damage from an excessive influx of words and phrases from the Anglo-American sphere" that has "destructive effects for the creation of the individual's self." 15 Rather than the imminent death of authentic German or ruin of language as the precondition for the creation of self, it is the linguistic and mental framework of culture wars, it can be argued, that has lead to the perception of language as a unit fixed in time, a Gegenwartssprache that is threatened by extinction. From the distant and disengaged perspective of a socio-linguist, this defensive position may well be an entirely misconceived perception. Yet, it needs to be acknowledged that these anxieties are real. For those who are directly affected, globalization is easily identified with an act of expropriation and dispossession and the feared destruction of one's own language is experienced as a particularly painful loss. These feelings of loss and destruction, subjective as they may be, need to be taken seriously. They are indicators of the perceived threat and growing insecurity felt by many, for whom globalization is identical with exposure and loss as well as a frightening loss of identity.

In contrast, post-colonial globalization theories offer a different interpretation by suggesting a radically different model that no longer focuses on the expansion of the power of one, single nation within a system of nations, but attempts to address recent changes in terms of a transformation of time and space. Well known is Anthony Giddens 's sociological definition of globalization that makes space shrink and links distanced places with each other, making them, thus, interdependent. 16 While this is an attempt to overcome the inherited and restrictive framework of the nation state and related international systems based upon it, it maintains a way of framing globalization

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11

as the extension of the process of modernization, that has a long history going back to the early modern period, the time of explorers who made the world shrink through their voyages, and the period in which the transportation revolution brought distant places within the reach of all. Recent changes are interpreted as an intensification and acceleration of these processes, and this interpretation remains within a framework of continuity. It links the present to the emergence of modernity and globalization to the spirit of early explorers, adventurers and experimental scientists. While this is an attempt to overcome the restrictive framework of the nation state and related international systems based upon the nation state, it is also a way of conceiving globalization in terms of historical continuity. These sociological definitions interpret globalization, often in spite of their stated intention, as a further step in the continuous evolution of the modern. Focusing on language suggests a very different account. The new importance of language as a defining quality and the new position of English among all other languages are indicative of the emergence of a new world, comparable to the rearrangement of the world by the Roman Empire with the concomitant spread of Latin as an inter-ethnic means of communication. The linguistic map of the globe has never been stable. Yet changes we are currently witnessing go far beyond ordinary changes of influence and popularity, or domination. The rapid emergence of English as the world language and the simultaneous decline of linguistic variety make the observer aware of a different scenario, one characterized by radical discontinuity. More radical definitions, less concerned with the future of the nation state and production of goods and services than with the world as a product of the imagination and symbolic exchange, make an attempt to frame the issue by focusing on movement and instability rather than stable concepts and reality in flux. Their perception is often denoted by the term "flow ", which is conceived as an element of relationships and networks. These flows do not have a specific place of origin and do not follow a defined course of movement, clearly not the direction from a center to a periphery. Their relationships are highly complex and resist analysis through a causeand-effect schema. Originators and recipients vary and change roles. "Globalization as an aggregation of cultural flows or networks is a less coherent and unitary process than cultural imperialism and one in which cultural influences move in many different directions." 17 They do not construct the world as a container holding separate cultures each centered on its own essential character, but rather the point of departure is the proposition that neither boundaries nor their definitions remain unaffected by globalization. In contradistinction to the assumption that societies, cultures and nation

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states exist as "bounded, separate, discrete and/or autonomous ...units," these globalization theories argue "that there are no absolute political, social or cultural boundaries un-breached by global flows. Comparison, generalization, or any other mode of social theorizing... must then address not separate examples or discrete cases." Instead, what they define as real are the most fleeting and instable qualities of modern life, movements, relationships and systems of signs, such as language. They are defined as "phenomena that are densely and dynamically interconnected." 18 Globalization is then a term denoting not a process of acceleration and intensification but of a rupture, identical with the vanishing of the economic and political autonomy of nation states and the simultaneous emergence of a new space that absorbs all limiting boundaries. It defines the present as the presence of one society only, a society of multiple presences. This presence in one space will make one language indispensable, a global language.

Nations, regions and place, not dissimilar to identity and ethnicity, have never been fixed, but always imagined. They are, by definition, the unreal products of cultural imagery and construction. From this point of view, globalization is a concept for the emerging world society. Concerns in relation to the political implications of English as the dominant language world-wide notwithstanding, globalization cannot be comprehended as a system of independent nations or civilizations engaged in international exchanges or conflicts.19 Globalization cannot be conceptualized as intercultural exchange or described in terms of its potential for enriching autonomous cultures, or, alternatively, destroying their authenticity. Rather, what is needed is an understanding of movements and relationships, are "conceptions of social realities that are supple enough to handle this flowing and flowed-at mode of being." 20 So far, this debate has all but ignored languages. It is the objective of this volume to make a contribution to the debate by focusing on the role of language, arguing that changes in the global linguistic map can only be appropriately interpreted if they are perceived as an element of the process of globalization, understood in terms of movements and flows. One effect of globalization is that the traditional privileging of national languages in the production of knowledge is eroded. This is not the result of the traditional competition between nations, but of the unifying and universalizing power of one language in the production and distribution of scientific knowledge around the globe.21 English as the "Tyrannosaurus Rex" (John

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Swales) of scientific language is in its early years and will not be threatened by extinction for a long time. Knowledge no longer has a natural home in any one, national language. On the contrary localization creates the danger of undercutting a discourse's claim to the status of theory. For example, psychoanalysis loses something of its theoretical power as soon as it is perceived as the product of bourgeois Vienna at the turn of the 19th century. The same seems to apply to the relationship between knowledge and language. Linguistic globalization has reached a point where theories couched in local, regional or national languages face difficulties of being perceived and integrated into international scientific discourse. The question as to how theories travel from one nation to another, from one place to another and from one metropolis to others has been asked,22 and the concept of traveling theory' is emerging. An appropriate answer requires a shift of perspective. The underlying image of travel needs to be reconstructed under the conditions in which travel can no longer be defined as a movement from a place of origin to a destination, but is predicated upon a global network of traveling routes without a center, a place of origin and a final destination. Within this network of theory and information flows, English is used as the vehicle. We no longer perceive an individual theory that is translated from one language into the language of a host society and that subsequently travels from one place to another, but a constant exchange of knowledge and information in a pre-existing pattern of exchange. We do not know the answer to Clifford's question: "How do theories travel among the unequal spaces of postcolonial confusion and contestation?" 23 It is obvious, however, that an attempt to answer it on the basis of the traditional pattern of a transfer of ideas and theories between national languages and fixed places has become insufficient and inappropriate. If we ask what the new knowledge gained by using globalization as a sensitizing analytical tool might be, the answer is paradoxical. Globalization is the result of a claim made by modern western societies, increasingly represented by America, to be exceptional and to hold a superior position and dignity through the universality of ideas and values. Globalization's effects, however, are the demonstration of the contrary. The emerging world society, characterized by the radically diminished importance of borders and various lines of separation, requires close contact between western and non-western societies and this contact makes it obvious that the universality claim cannot be justified. It is, as the examples of Turks in Germany and migrants in America, who do not wish to abandon their identity, or conflicts between the West and modern Islam demonstrate, nothing but an illusion. Many of these, allegedly, universal ideas and values are not shared or are

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even aggressively rejected by large parts of the globe's population. As yet, globalization and migration have led neither to an integrated world culture nor to the eradication of cultural difference and national languages. On the other hand, expectations of progress, equality, freedom and self-determination derived from the concept of a rational society that dominated political and social discourse from the 18th century on are not met by the emerging global society. It seems not to lead to the horror vision of complete homogeneity, but does not support the creation of stable identities either. Globalization forces us to realize that the unifying realities of the past, such as the nation state or a national language, were always dependent on the production of an imaginary shared world. At present, conditions for this production are undergoing fundamental changes. In the world of global flows and migration, it may be precisely the maintenance of the tension that must be understood as paradigmatic for the world society that is no longer the product of the 18th century imagination, but rather of electronic communication and flows with multiple directions. Skepticism in relation to unity and continuity could be seen as the imperative of the present. Negativity, difference and distinction in the face of the absence of cohesion, harmony and smooth adaptation to existing structures could well be defined as constitutive elements of the mental pattern referred to as globalization and world society.

In recent years, ethnologists and cultural analysts have made contrasting observations. 24 The region, the village or home town and local landscapes have all been deconstructed in recent theory as constructions of the imagination. Critical analysis has done a lot towards debunking as a myth any naïve notion of the local, the regional and the national as ontologies. They have never been empirically given, but always - before globalization or internationalism had their impact on local idylls - been the product of imagination and cognitive construction. They are under imminent threat by globalization's dissolving power. However, whereas globalization seems to know no borders and creates an infinite and homogenizing flow of everything and anything around the globe, it also seems to be giving rise to a new awareness of specificity, the particular and the difference of regions. Local cultures are demonstrating a remarkable power of resistance and capacity to absorb and transform goods and ideas spread through international trade. It can be argued that it is precisely the intensified awareness of the imaginary quality of identity and identification that is imperative for maintaining feelings of

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belonging and security at a time when globalization is threatening to destroy them. Obvious homogenizing changes are, paradoxically linked to a growing sense of self and local identity. Globalization, it has been observed, gives rise not only to often violent resistance movements, but also to an imaginative creativity that is less spectacular, but could lead to more lasting effects as the rediscovery and maintenance of regional cultural identity demonstrates. It is a surprising observation that the blurred images of self and indeterminate lines of separation are being clarified and gaining a new meaning and importance as a result of the perceived threat through globalization. 25 Experience in ethnology, social psychology and related disciplines suggests the deep emotional attachment of people to place and a language which they are familiar with and have experienced as their own from childhood on. Boundaries and exclusion are experienced as natural and constitutive for the construction of identity. Old boundaries are being rediscovered and cultivated, leading to a considerable degree of identification. This includes the rediscovery of regional traditions and languages, believed for a long time to be dying out such as Frisian, Basque, Welsh or aboriginal languages of Australia and America. Local identities have always been fleeting constructs of the imagination and the linguistic diversity of Europe has never been a stable system of independent idioms. Languages have always been on the move, continuously changed and interfered with each other. Any Gegenwartssprache that can be analyzed as a system is an artificial construction. Attempts to stop changes or reverse them are fraught with oversimplification and inevitably enmeshed in the politics of identity and therefore an illusory reaction. Maintaining a focus on both at the same time is the difficult, but necessary task for those who observe or are affected by globalization. What Fabian suggested for the ethnology of foreign and local 'own ' cultures needs to be translated into the realm of language analysis: he suggests making culture liquid or liquidating culture by replacing static forms with indeterminacy, and clearly defined concepts with fuzziness, so that learning and unlearning, constructing and deconstructing can be accommodated within the framework of analytical description. 26 Understanding the situation of languages in the age of globalization requires developing sensitivity to shifting relationships and unstable constellations. In this world of global flows the increasing importance of English will remain an extension of the age old struggle for political power only to the degree to which the nation state itself maintains the position it acquired four hundred years ago; with the decline of the nation state and the complementary rise of trans-national forms of organization, the national power struggle becomes insignificant and increasingly anachronistic.

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Equally, the image of globalization as a free flow of ideas facilitated by English as the lingua franca of the world is obviously a distorting over-simplification. The significance of the expansion of English cannot be grasped by postulating a benevolent invisible hand that leads to the ideal of a global village based upon free communication of equals.27 Violent protests against globalization have made it obvious that this ideal is a naïve deception. It seems equally deceptive to assume that globalization can be reversed and the linguistic diversity of previous centuries regained. Particularly interesting in this context are the observations about the current situation of the language and culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch in America. To some observers, this language is experiencing a phase of contraction and may be threatened with extinction. The essay by Donner and Valuska provides an outline of its deplorable vanishing resulting from processes of adaptation and homogenization. It is obvious that there is no identifiable agent behind this process and it may have to be accepted as an inevitable consequence of changing life styles. Empathy expressed in their essay demonstrates that they consider this a sad loss owed to modernization and its drive toward reducing diversity. For other observers, however, this language is well and alive and has a future, possibly reduced in scope and exclusiveness, but, as the experience with education outside the school curriculum seems to indicate, as a viable hybrid between the cultures that retains its status as a distinctive language. In her paper presented at the conference, Renate Losoncy offered strong empirical evidence that the Delaware valley where Pennsylvania German is spoken has potential to become the site where, under these new circumstances, the cultural framework for a complex identity with a two-sided orientation could emerge. 28 A blending of the local German/Dutch tradition and American main culture could be interpreted as a model for the future of languages in the age of American hegemony word wide.

The question arises whether the network of openness and directionless flows creates a condition without rules and is leading to the final dissolution of order, that only veils cultural monotony, or will this new openness create conditions for defining specific niches where national languages can thrive and even gain new significance? Will globalization leave room for interfering and planning by national governments and cultural organizations? Does the conflict between globalization and identity exclude interference by interested organizations, or is it an invitation for interference, negotiation

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and steering? National organizations such as the German Goethe Institute or the DAAD are faced with this open question and, despite the indeterminacy of the situation, need to make decisions that inevitably have political and financial implications. Contributions to this volume by representatives of the Goethe Institute and others, in particular John Lalande, Helene ZimmerLoew and Petra Braselmann, can see sufficient space for language policies by governments and other organizations and advocate developing strategies for taking a proactive position in support of languages. They are confident that the adverse effects of globalization can be overcome and furthermore see globalization as opening up new perspectives. Following this model, there is no need to perceive the current situation of languages as being threatened. On the contrary, fear is bound to lead to defensive strategies that are weak and may well turn into self-fulfilling prophecy. In any event, the chance to stop or reverse powerful global tendencies is remote. In the age of virtualization and digitalization, English is the global language, and it serves no purpose to engage in a struggle against this position. This global language is highly attractive and successful in seducing people the world over. No power or political agent is needed to make the language of the internet the language of desire for people all around the globe. It is the idiom of hopes and promises, of emancipation from feudal and autocratic powers, of liberating women, of consumption and unrestricted movement. Prisca Augustyn's essay addresses the seductive power of this language. If the death of a language, as Meyer's contribution argues, can be attributed to a lack of love, Augustyn's essay offers an explanation as to why the love may have been lost. Its loss results from a flight from languages that are no longer attractive, since they have little to offer and pose no challenge. Success and prestige are being searched for where they are offered. English - not as the language of Great Britain and possibly not even as the language of the USA, but as an artificial idiom of a dynamic, innovative world society - is attractive in the way tax havens attract capital - they offer higher revenues. The promise of success and productivity is irresistible both for capital and the restless mind. The decline of German as a language for the sciences, the social sciences and increasingly even the humanities is a point in case. There are two possible responses: closing the paths of flight by decree or regaining attraction. The history of capital moving around the globe makes it obvious that only the latter can have success. It is the simultaneity of threat and seduction, anxiety and pleasure that needs to be reflected on and that finally shapes the gaze of the observer. Many fine arguments can and have been made why German as a language of the sciences is worth to be maintained. They will convince no-one to opt in favor of the endangered language and

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contrary to his or her personal interests and expectations. There is ample space for supporting the language. Attempts to make the language attractive and returning to it a seductive power is certainly, but not exclusively a question of finances but also of innovative and imaginative approaches and projects. Focusing on the struggle over language as a conflict of power among nations and civilizations misses the challenge of the reality of the age of virtual realities. But neglecting the desire for place, identity and stability misses an equally strong current of the present. The desire to maintain a diversity of languages and, through language, identity, is misunderstood as long as it is read in terms of reactionary politics and anti-modern sentiment. It needs to be conceived in terms of a legitimate desire and a real dimension of the highly complex processes labeled globalization. Globalization is not only a tendency of the political and sociological reality of the present, it is also a mental pattern. Its connection with lived experience is not simply given, but needs to be defined. The question needs to be raised as to whether globalization's threat is a construction on the part of the observer and, consequently, what is required is a reconstitution of the ways of perceiving and describing the situation. The questions need to be addressed as to whether an active and aggressive approach to the indisputable loss in importance of national languages would be able to turn loss into gain. As several of the contributions to this volume suggest, languages cannot be understood as static systems defined by dictionaries and books of grammar. They, too, are in constant flux. For centuries, German has been subjected to the impact of several other European languages, primarily Latin, French and English and the concept of a language as a fixed system that can and deserves to be protected from change is an illusion. The struggle for preservation is predicated upon a concept of the history of languages as a series of artificially fixed moments in history, and of a purposeful construction of Gegenwartssprachen which, however, at any given moment in time, are in the process of mutation and reconstruction. The emerging German-Turkish literature can be read as a convincing example of this fluid and undefined relationship between globalization as a mental and emotion pattern and globalization as lived experience. Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu's books and, in particular, his provocative short text entitled Kanak Sprak (1995) are a case in point. 29 Its language is obscene, aggressive and violent, using dirty imagery and slang, and is deliberately non-literary and non-German. In spite of its tough and provocative appearance, the self expressed in this aggressive language is affectionate and constructed in a new idiom capable of nestling up to equally instable identities.

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In her essay Yazemin Yildiz refers to an emerging linguistic variety and diversity and, moreover, interprets this new and hybrid language as an encouraging sign of a growing sense of difference. 30 The linguistic and literary foundations of the creation of a new reality is, she contends, triggered by one of the major characteristics of globalization namely migration. In her description, the merger of two languages and cultural traditions as practiced in Zaimoglu's language, results from the every-day life practices of a migrant. The question of identity is of small importance and is subordinated to the needs of creating a symbolic space for a self-determined life in-between separate nations and cultures, German and Turkish. The invention of a new language is a decisive moment for creating a new reality in a period of migration flows and destabilized identifications. Undefined spaces on borders, beyond political definitions of dependence and obligations, and spaces outside national cultures and languages provide fertile ground for innovative experiments with life, triggered and encouraged precisely by the challenges of impersonal tendencies in globalization. This creative approach to language is not hampered by the fear and anxiety of loss. It creates a potential for the creation of self as fluid, diffuse and permeable, and that does not feel obliged, it seems, to have or own a single indistinguishable identity that gives stability, but, once threatened or lost, shatters the whole. This emerging hybrid language carries the stigma of the unwelcome outsider. However, this is clearly the problem of the insiders. Their immobility and inability to acknowledge a reality which they have not produced and have no control over results in attitudes of fearful exclusion. Attempts to salvage dissolving identities by demarcating spaces and arresting time need to be identified as a politics of illusion. Rather than looking at loss with melancholia or nostalgia, the situation of European languages seems to call for a balancing act. What seems to be required is the imagination and flexibility to develop a two-sided attitude that is capable of upholding both identification with one's own language and also respect, curiosity and openness in relation to other languages, practiced, not as an abstract ideal of tolerance, but as a concrete attitude towards the one or two foreign languages that each individual is surrounded by. Only in as far as the mental pattern globalization makes it visible, are we exposed to this ambivalence and perceive the situation as that of an emerging word society based upon mutual dependence and a complementarity of languages. They enter into a relationship of difference only in as much as the pattern of globalization makes it possible to perceive them in conjunction and as elements of a network, but not as separate and competing units. The difference between the global language and one's own language

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is constituted neither by an absence of contact nor by warlike competition. It works the other way around; perceived differences are the necessary and constitutive precondition for the creation of a mental pattern that gives contours to the global society of which languages other than English will remain an integral part. This mental pattern has the potential to enable us to perceive and practice our own language without inhibition as the other of the global language, but not as its enemy, suffering its aggressive competition, and not its casualty. Attitudes of aggression or self-pity are anachronistic. A balancing act that maintains one's own language in the mode of continuous flux, English as the language of globalization and a mental pattern that creates the space for contact among the two will make it possible to realize that the argument which declares the world society a thinly veiled version of colonialism and English as the symbolic army of imperialism is little else than the certification of the new global society's existence turned upside down. Under the circumstances of globalization and the seductive power of its global language, the vanishing love for one's own language will not return as a result of competition and purification through exclusion, nor be found in the quest for absolute identification with a language that can be owned or possessed. The search for a uni-linear relationship to one language as the object of attention will undoubtedly fail. Love's reciprocity needs openness and a language that is not protected by well-meaning guardians. The most promising support that can be offered to one's own language are imaginative approaches and affection. Openness, free of fear and competition, will lead to confidence in European languages and prepare the only way to nurture their power to generate innovation and invite identification.

Notes 1. A less bellicose but equally fatal image has gained some prominence in recent years: the death of nature as a result of dying species and the general loss of bio-diversity. (See Hermann Dieter's essay in this volume.) 2. John Tomlinson, Cultural imperialism. A Critical Introduction. Baltimore 1991, p. 175; Robert Phillipson, Linguistic imperialism, Oxford 1992; Phillipson, English-only Europe? Language policy challenges. London 2003. 3. Robert Phillipson, English for emerging or submerging multiple European identities? Paper presented to the Third Language and Politics Symposium, Queen's University Belfast, 18-10 September 2002.

Globalization - Threats and Opportunities 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

21

Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere, Introduction to: Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Oxford 1999, p. 1. Uwe Pörksen, Plastic words. The tyranny of modular language. University Park, PA 1995, p. 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge and London 2000. Language and the media are conspicuously absent from their analysis of Empire. Yet, it seems to me that their central importance for the process they reconstruct is obvious. It is regrettable that Michael Hardt, who gave the opening address to the conference that led to this volume, did not have the time to prepare his lecture for publication. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, quoted from The New York Review of Books, 8 April 2004, p. 26. Andreas Gardt, (ed.), Nation und Sprache. Die Diskussion ihres Verhältnisses in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Berlin, New York, 2000. M. B. Salwen, Cultural Imperialism: A Media Effects Approach, in: Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8, 1991, p. 29-38; Dieter E. Zimmer, Abschied von Illusionen. Über den internationalen Status der deutschen Sprache. In: Zimmer, Deutsch und anderes - die Sprache im Modernisierungsfieber. Reinbek 1998. Robert Phillipson, English for emerging or submerging multiple European identities? (Footnote 3). George Kennan interviewed by Richard Ullman, The New York Review of Books, 12 August 1999. The literature on this issue is vast; see e.g. Gerhard Stickel (ed.), Neues und Fremdes im deutschen Wortschatz. Aktueller lexikalischer Wandel. Berlin, New York, 2001: Andreas Gardt, Das Fremde und das Eigene. Versuch einer Systematik des Fremdwortbegriffs in der deutschen Sprachgeschichte. S. 30-58. Ulrich Busse, Typen von Anglizismen: von der heilago geist bis Extremsparing - aufgezeigt anhand ausgewählter lexikographischer Kategorisiemngen, S. 131-155. Bernhard Kettemann, Anglizismen allgemein und konkret: Zahlen und Fakten. In: Rudolf Muhr and Bernhard Kettemann (eds.), Eurospeak - Der Einfluss des Englischen auf die europäischen Sprachen zur Jahrtausendwende, Frankfurt 2002, S. 53-83. Conservative critics of modem culture observed an excessive influx of American words in the German language after 1945 and associated this, they thought, undesirable tendency with the collapsed identity following military and political defeat. Herbert Drube, Zum deutschen Wortschatz, München 1968, esp. pp. 125 ff. Eckart Werthebach, Die deutsche Sprache braucht gesetzlichen Schutz!, in: Berliner Morgenpost, 31.12.2000, p. 6. In 2001, the "Institut für Deutsche Sprache" (Mannheim) proposed the creation of a German Language Council ('Sprachrat') and stated as reasons the increasing number of English words and other related changes of the language that have led to suggesting a law for the protection of the German language and the creation of an academy following

22

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

Bernd Hilppaiif the French example. The "Verein deutsche Sprache" (Wiesbaden) is the most prominent example of a recent foundation of a language association. It claims 13000 active members and has branches in several Gemían and European cities. The equivalent among a few similar organizations in France is an association called "Défense de la langue française". Verein deutsche Sprache: Leitlinien, 2nd edition, June 2000: www.vds-ev.de/ ueberans/leitlinien.htm. In 2001, the Verein created a "Berliner Sprachbündnis" with the aim to stem the flood of foreign words and expressions. The sociological literature on the subject is vast. It seems to me that a representative approach is still: Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 1995; Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, 1995. Diana Crane, Culture and Globalization, in: Global Culture. Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, ed. Diana Crane et al, New York and London 2002, p. 3. John D. Kelly, Time and the Global, in: Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, Oxford 1999, p. 240. Pioneering work was done by Arjun Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value, in: The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural perspectives. 1986, S. 3-63; Appadurai, Disjuncture and difference in the Global Cultural Economy, in: Public Culture 2,1990, p. 1-24, and Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis 1996; Christian F. Feest, Ethnologie und materielle Kultur, in: Das Ding. Die Ethnologie und ihr Gegenstand. Archiv für Völkerkunde 51, 2000, S. 147-155. John D. Kelly, Time and the Global, p. 241. Among numerous publications, Ulrich Ammon, Die internationale Stellung der deutschen Sprache, Berlin, New York 1991; Ammon, Ist Deutsch noch internationale Wissenschaftssprache? Englisch auch für die Lehre an den deutschsprachigen Hochschulen. Berlin, New York 1998; Ammon (ed.) The dominance of English as a language of science. Effects on other languages and language communities. Berlin, New York, 2002; Friedhelm Debus, Franz Gustav Kollmann and Uwe Pörksen (eds.), Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Vorträge des Internationalen Symposiums vom 18./19. Januar 2000. Stuttgart 2000: Jürgen Schiewe, Von Latein zu Deutsch, von Deutsch zu Englisch. Giünde und Folgen des Wechsels von Wissenschaftssprachen, S. 81— 104. Edward Said, Traveling Theory, in: E. Said , The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge 1983, S. 226-247; also: Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Displacement, 1996. James Clifford, Notes on Theory and Travel, in: Inscriptions 5: Traveling Theories; Traveling Theorists, 1989, S. 177-188; S. 178. Karl-Heinz Kohl, Das exotische Europa. In: Merkur 610, 2000. Kohl and Nikolaus Schaffhausen (eds), New Heimat, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, 2001; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, 2000.

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25. Maiken Umbach and Bernd Huppauf (ed.), Vernacular Modernism, Stanford 2004. 26. J. Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical essays 1971-1991. Chur 1991, chapter 10. 27. Paradigmatic is David Crystal's interpretation of the envisaged future of English as the language of uninhibited global communication. David Crystal, English as a Global Language. Cambridge 1997; Crystal, Language Death. Cambridge 2000. 28. It is regrettable that lack of time prevented the inclusion of a revised version of her presentation in this anthology. 29. Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt 1995. 30. This interpretation of the potential of contact between languages stands in opposition to Pörksen's observation of an increasing "unification", "reduction of diversity" and "disabling" of the language of the everyday-life. Footnote 5, p. 1 - 8 .

References Ammon, Ulrich 1991 Die internationale Stellung der deutschen Sprache. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Ammon, Ulrich (ed.) 2001 The Dominance of English as a Language of Science. Effects on Other Languages and Language Communities. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modentity of Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crane, Dian 2002 Globed Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization. New York: Routledge. Crystal, David 1997 English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000 Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Debus, Friedhelm, Franz Gustav Kollmann and Uwe Pörksen (eds.) 2002 Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Vortrage des Lnternationalen Symposiums vom 18./19. Januar 2000. Stuttgart: Steiner.

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Gardt, Andreas (ed.) 2000 Nation und Sprache. Die Diskussion ihres Verhältnisses in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000 Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Meyer, Birgit and Peter Geschiere 1999 Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Phillipson, Robert 1992 Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003 English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Pörksen, Uwe 1995 Plastic words. The tyranny of modular language. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press Stickel, Gerhard (ed.) 2001 Neues unci Fremdes im deutschen Wortschatz. Aktueller lexikalischer Wandel. Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache 2000. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter. Tomlinson, John imperialism 1991 Cultural imperialism. A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Umbach, Maiken and Bernd Hüppauf (ed.) 2004 Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zimmer, Dieter E. 1998 Deutsch und anders - die Sprache im Modernisierungsfieber. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Globalization and Language

The Past, Present, and Future of World English David Crystal

Zusammenfassung Englisch ist heute die Sprache der Welt. Wie ist es dazu gekommen? Und was sind die Konsequenzen dieses neuen Status für die künftige Entwicklung der Sprache? Der Aufsatz untersucht zehn historische Gründe für die gegenwärtige Stellung des Englischen in den Bereichen von Politik, Ökonomie, Presse, Reklame, Radio, Film, Unterhaltungsmusik, Reise und Sicherheit, Kommunikationssysteme und Ausbildung. Drei Konsequenzen der Globalisierung der Sprache werden angesprochen: Die Tendenzen, die das Englische bereits weltweit beeinflussen - in der Form von neuen 'Englische'; die Wirkung von Englisch auf gefährdete Sprachen; und der Einfluss des Englischen auf den linguistischen Charakter anderer Sprachen durch die Einführimg von Lehn- und Fremdwörtern.

1. Introduction Any conference dealing with the theme of globalization must at some point address the question of language; and these days, the language which must be chiefly considered is English. I say 'these days', because only a relatively short time ago the prospect of English becoming a genuinely global language was uncertain. I never gave talks on English as a world language in the 1960s or 1970s. Indeed, it is only in the 1990s that the issue has come to the fore, with surveys, books, and conferences trying to explain how it is that a language can become truly global, what the consequences are when it happens, and why English has become the prime candidate (Crystal 1997, McArthur 1998, Graddol 1998). But, in order to speculate about the future of English - or, as I shall say later, Englishes - we must first understand what has happened in the past.

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2. The present situation A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. This role will be most obvious in countries where large numbers of the people speak it as a first language - in the case of English, this would mean the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, several Caribbean countries, and a scattering of other territories. However, no language has ever been spoken by a mother-tongue majority in more than a dozen or so countries, so mother-tongue use by itself cannot give a language world status. To achieve such a status, a language has to be taken up by other countries around the globe. They must decide to give it a special place within their communities, even though they may have few (or no) mother-tongue speakers. There are two main ways in which this can be done. First, the language can be made the official (or semi-official) language of a country, to be used as a medium of communication in such domains as government, the law courts, the media, and the educational system. To get on in such societies, it is essential to master the official language as early in life as possible. This role is well illustrated by English, which now has some kind of special administrative status in over 70 countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singapore, and Vanuatu. This is far more than the status achieved by any other language (French being closest). Second, the language can be made a priority in a country's foreignlanguage teaching. It becomes the language which children are most likely to be taught when they arrive in school, and the one most available to adults who - for whatever reason - never learned it, or learned it badly, in their early educational years. Over 100 countries treat English as just a foreign language; but in most of these, it is now recognized as the chief foreign language to be taught in schools. Because of this three-pronged development - of first language, second language, and foreign language speakers - it is inevitable that a world language will eventually come to be used by more people than any other language. English has already reached this stage. Those who have learned it as a first language are now estimated to be around 400 million. Those who have learned it as a second language are more difficult to estimate, for now we must take into account the levels of fluency achieved. If we take a basic level of conversational ability as the criterion - enough to make yourself understood, though by no means free of errors, and having no command of specialized vocabulary - the figure is also some 400 million. The significance of these two figures should not be missed. The population growth in

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areas where English is a second language is about three times that in areas where it is a first language. This means that second-language speakers of English will soon hugely exceed first-language speakers - a situation without precedent for an international language. And when the number of people who speak English as a foreign language is taken into account, this contrast becomes even more dramatic (Graddol 2001). The British Council has estimated that roughly a billion people are learning English around the world (British Council 1997). Excluding the complete beginners, it would seem reasonable to take two thirds of these as a guess at the number of foreign learners with whom it would be possible to hold a reasonable conversation in English - say 600 million. If, now, we add the three totals - the 400 million who use it as a first language, plus the 400 million who use it as a second language, and the 600 million who use it as a foreign language, we will end up with a grand total of 1,400 million or so - which in round terms is a quarter of the world's population (recently passing 6 billion). No other language is used so extensively Even Chinese, found in eight different spoken languages, but unified by a common writing system, is known to "only" some 1,100 million. Of course, we must not overstate the situation. If one in four of the world's population speaks English, three out of four do not. We do not have to travel far into the hinterland of a country - away from the tourist spots, the airports, the hotels, the restaurants - to encounter this reality. But even so, one in four is impressive, and unprecedented. And we must ask: Why? It is not so much the total, as the speed with which this expansion has taken place, very largely since the 1950s. What can account for it?

3. Historical factors An obvious factor, of course, is the need for a lingua franca - a concept probably as old as language itself. But the prospect that a lingua franca might be needed for the whole world is something which has emerged strongly only in the 20 th century, and since the 1950s in particular. The chief international forum for political communication - the United Nations dates only from 1945, and then it had only 51 member states. By 1960 this had risen to over 80 members. But the independence movements which began at that time led to a massive increase in the number of new nations during the next decade, and this process continued steadily into the 1990s. There are now 191 members of the U N - nearly four times as many as there were 50 years ago. The need for lingua francas is obvious, and the pressure

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to find a single lingua franca is a consequence, the alternative being expensive and often impracticable multi-way translation facilities. But why English? There is of course nothing intrinsically wonderful about the English language that it should have spread in this way. Its pronunciation is not simpler than that of many other languages, its grammar is no simpler - what it lacks in morphology (in cases and genders) it certainly makes up for in syntax (in word-order patterns) - and its spelling certainly isn't simpler. A language becomes a world language for one reason only the power of the people who speak it. But power means different things: it can mean political (military) power, technological power, economic power, and cultural power. Political power relates to the colonialism that brought English around the world from the 16th century, so that by the 19th century, the language was one "on which the sun never sets". Technological power relates to the fact that the industrial revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries was very significantly an English-language event. The 19th century saw the growth in the economic power of the United States, rapidly overtaking Britain as its population hugely grew, and adding greatly to the number of world English speakers. The point was recognized by Bismarck as early as 1898: asked by a journalist what he considered to be the decisive factor in modern history, he is said to have replied, "The fact that the North Americans speak English" (cited in Nunberg 2000). And in the 20th century, we have indeed seen the fourth kind of power, cultural power, manifesting itself in virtually every walk of life through spheres of American influence. I will now look more closely at these different kinds of power, and their consequences, recognizing ten domains in which English is now pre-eminent.

3.1. Politics Most pre-20 th -century commentators would have had no difficulty giving a single, political answer to the question, "Why world English?" They would simply have pointed to the growth of the British Empire. This legacy carried over into the 20 th century. The League of Nations was the first of many modern international alliances to allocate a special place to English in its proceedings: English was one of the two official languages (the other was French), and all documents were printed in both. I have already mentioned the UN, which replaced it. But English now plays an official or working role in the proceedings of most other major international political gatherings, in all parts of the world. The extent to which English is used in this

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way is often not appreciated. According to a recent issue of the Union of International Associations' Yearbook, there are about 12,500 international organizations in the world. A sample showed that 85% made official use of English - far more than any other language. French was the only other to show up strongly, with 49% using it officially. International politics operates at several levels and in many different ways, but the presence of English is usually not far away. A political protest may surface in the form of an official question to a government minister, a peaceful lobby outside an embassy, a street riot, or a bomb. When the television cameras present the event to a world audience, it is notable how often a message in English can be seen on a banner or placard as part of the occasion. Whatever the mother tongue of the protesters, they know that their cause will gain maximum impact if it is expressed through the medium of English. A famous instance of this occurred a few years ago in India, where a march supporting Hindi and opposing English was seen on world television: most of the banners were in Hindi, but one astute marcher carried a prominent sign which enabled the voice of his group to reach much further around the world than would otherwise have been possible. His sign read: "Death to English".

3.2. Economics By the beginning of the 19th century, Britain had become the world's leading industrial and trading nation. Its population of 5 million in 1700 more than doubled by 1800, and during that century no country could equal its economic growth, with a gross national product rising, on average, at 2% per year. Most of the innovations of the industrial revolution were of British origin. By 1800, the chief growth areas, in textiles and mining, were producing a range of manufactured goods for export which led to Britain being called the "workshop of the world". Over half of the scientists and technologists who made that revolution worked in English, and people who travelled to Britain (and later America) to learn about the new technologies had to do so through the medium of English. Steam technology revolutionized printing, generating an unprecedented mass of publications in English. The early 19th century saw the rapid growth of the international banking system, especially in Germany, Britain and the USA, with London and New York becoming the investment capitals of the world. In 1914, Britain and the USA were together investing over $10 billion abroad - three times as much as France and almost four times as much as Germany. The resulting "eco-

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nomic imperialism" brought a fresh dimension to the balance of linguistic power. "Money talks", then as now, was the chief metaphor - and the language in which it was talking was chiefly English.

3.3. The press The English language has been an important medium of the press for nearly 400 years. The 19th century was the period of greatest progress, thanks to the introduction of new printing technology and new methods of mass production and transportation. It also saw the development of a truly independent press, chiefly fostered in the USA, where there were some 400 daily newspapers by 1850, and nearly 2000 by the turn of the century. Censorship and other restrictions continued in Continental Europe during the early decades, however, which meant that the provision of popular news in languages other than English developed much more slowly. Today, about a third of the world's newspapers are published in countries where English has special status, and the majority of these will be in English. The high profile given to English in the popular press was reinforced by the way techniques of news gathering developed. The mid-19 th century saw the growth of the major news agencies, especially following the invention of the telegraph. Paul Julius Reuter started an office in Aachen, but soon moved to London, where in 1851 he launched the agency which now bears his name. By 1870 Reuters had acquired more territorial news monopolies than any of its Continental competitors. With the emergence in 1856 of the N e w York Associated Press, the majority of the information being transmitted along the telegraph wires of the world was in English.

3.4. Advertising Towards the end of the 19th century, a combination of social and economic factors led to a dramatic increase in the use of advertisements in publications, especially in the more industrialized countries. Mass production had increased the flow of goods and was fostering competition; consumer purchasing power was growing; and new printing techniques were providing fresh display possibilities. In the USA, publishers realized that income from advertising would allow them to lower the selling price of their magazines, and thus hugely increase circulation. Two-thirds of a modern newspaper, especially in the USA, may be devoted to advertising. During the 19th cen-

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tury the advertising slogan became a feature of the medium, as did the famous "trade name". "It pays to advertise" itself became a US slogan in the 1920s. Many products which are now household names received a special boost in that decade, such as Ford, Coca Cola, Kodak, and Kellogg. The media capitalized on the brevity with which a product could be conveyed to an audience - even if the people were passing at speed in one of the new methods of transportation. Posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs, and other techniques became part of the everyday scene. As international markets grew, the 'outdoor media' began to travel the world, and their prominence in virtually every town and city is now one of the most noticeable global manifestations of English language use. The English advertisements are not always more numerous, in countries where English has no special status, but they are usually the most noticeable. American English ruled: by 1972, only three of the world's top 30 advertising agencies were not US-owned.

3.5. Broadcasting It took many decades of experimental research in physics, chiefly in Britain and America, before it was possible to send the first radio telecommunication signals through the air, without wires. Marconi's system, built in 1895, carried telegraph code signals over a distance of one mile. Six years later, his signals had crossed the Atlantic Ocean; by 1918, they had reached Australia. English was the first language to be transmitted by radio. Within 25 years of Marconi's first transmission, public broadcasting became a reality. The first commercial radio station, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast its first program in November 1920, and there were over 500 broadcasting stations licensed in the USA within two years. A similar dramatic expansion affected public television 20 years later. We can only speculate about how these media developments must have influenced the growth of world English. There are no statistics on the proportion of time devoted to English-language programmes the world over, or on how much time is spent listening to such programs. But if we look at broadcasting aimed specifically at audiences in other countries (such as the BBC World Service, or the Voice of America), we note significant levels of provision - over a thousand hours a week by the former, twice as much by the latter. Most other countries showed sharp increases in external broadcasting during the post-War years, and several launched English-language radio programmes, such as the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, The Netherlands,

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Sweden, and Germany. No comparative data are available about how many people listen to each of the languages provided by these services. However, if we list the languages in which these countries broadcast, it is noticeable that only one of these languages has a place on each of the lists: English.

3.6. Motion pictures The new technologies which followed the discovery of electrical power fundamentally altered the nature of home and public entertainment, and provided fresh directions for the development of the English language. The technology of this industry has many roots in Europe and America during the 19th century, with England and France providing an initial impetus to the artistic and commercial development of the cinema f r o m 1895. However, the years preceding and during the First World War stunted the growth of a European film industry, and dominance soon passed to America, which oversaw f r o m 1915 the emergence of the feature film, the star system, the movie mogul, and the grand studio, all based in Hollywood, California. As a result, when sound was added to the technology in the late 1920s, it was the English language which suddenly came to dominate the movie world. And despite the growth of the film industry in other countries in later decades, English-language movies still dominate the medium, with Hollywood coming to rely increasingly on a small number of annual productions aimed at huge audiences. It is unusual to find a blockbuster movie produced in a language other than English, and about 80% of all feature films given a theatrical release are in English. The influence of movies on the viewing audience is uncertain, but many observers agree with the view of director Wim Wenders: "People increasingly believe in what they see and they buy what they believe in. ... People use, drive, wear, eat and buy what they see in the movies" (cited in Robinson 1995). If this is so, then the fact that most movies are made in the English language must surely be significant, at least in the long term.

3.7. Popular music The cinema was one of two new entertainment technologies which emerged at the end of the 19th century: the other was the recording industry. Here too the English language was early in evidence. When in 1877 Thomas A Edison devised the phonograph, the first machine that could both record

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and reproduce sound, the first words to be recorded were "What God hath wrought", followed by the words of the nursery-rhyme "Mary had a little lamb". Most of the subsequent technical developments took place in the USA. All the major recording companies in popular music had English-language origins, beginning with the U S firm Columbia (from 1898). Radio sets around the world hourly testify to the dominance of English in the popular music scene today. Many people make their first contact with English in this way. By the tum of the century, Tin Pan Alley (the popular name for the Broadway-centred song-publishing industry) was a reality, and was soon known worldwide as the chief source of US popular music. Jazz, too, had its linguistic dimension, with the development of the blues and many other genres. And by the time modern popular music arrived, it was almost entirely an English scene. The pop groups of two chief English-speaking nations were soon to dominate the recording world: Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley in the USA; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the UK. Mass audiences for pop singers became a routine feature of the world scene from the 1960s. N o other single source has spread the English language around the youth of the world so rapidly and so pervasively.

3.8. International travel and safety The reasons for travelling abroad are many and various. Each journey has immediate linguistic consequences - a language has to be interpreted, learned, imposed - and over time a travelling trend can develop into a major influence. If there is a contemporary movement towards world English use, therefore, we would expect it to be particularly noticeable in this domain. And so it is. For those whose international travel brings them into a world of package holidays, business meetings, academic conferences, international conventions, community rallies, sporting occasions, military occupations, and other "official" gatherings, the domains of transportation and accommodation are chiefly mediated through the use of English as an auxiliary language. Safety instructions on international flights and sailings, information about emergency procedures in hotels, and directions to major locations are now increasingly in English alongside local languages. Most notices which tell us to fasten our seatbelts, find the lifeboat stations, or check the location of the emergency stairs give us an option in English. A special aspect of safety is the way that the language has come to be used as a means of controlling international transport operations, especially on water and in the air. English has emerged as the international language of

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the sea, in the form of Essential English for International Maritime Use often referred to as "Seaspeak". Progress has also been made in recent years in devising systems of unambiguous communication between organizations which are involved in handling emergencies on the ground - notably, the fire service, the ambulance service, and the police. There is now "Emergencyspeak", trying to cope with problems of ambiguity at the two ends of the Channel Tunnel. And of course there is "Airspeak", the language of international aircraft control. This did not emerge until after the Second World War, when the International Civil Aviation Organization was created. Only then was it agreed that English should be the international language of aviation when pilots and controllers speak different languages. Over 180 nations have since adopted its recommendations about English terminology - though it should be noted that there is nothing mandatory about them.

3.9. Education English is the medium of a great deal of the world's knowledge, especially in such areas as science and technology. And access to knowledge is the business of education. When we investigate why so many nations have in recent years made English an official language or chosen it as their chief foreign language in schools, one of the most important reasons is always educational - in the broadest sense. Sridath Ramphal provides a relevant anecdote (Ramphal 1996): Shortly after I became Secretary-General of the Commonwealth in 1975,1 met Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Colombo and we talked of ways in which the Commonwealth Secretariat could help Sri Lanka. Her response was immediate and specific: "Send us people to train our teachers to teach English as a foreign language". My amazement must have showed, for the Prime Minister went on to explain that the policies her husband had put in place twenty years earlier to promote Sinhalese as the official language had succeeded so well that in the process Sri Lanka - so long the pearl of the English-speaking world in Asia - had in fact lost English, even as a second language save for the most educated Sri Lankans. Her concern was for development. Farmers in the field, she told me, could not read the instructions on bags of imported fertiliser - and manufacturers in the global market were not likely to print them in Sinhalese. Sri Lanka was losing its access to the world language of English.

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Since the 1960s, English has become the normal medium of instruction in higher education for many countries - including several where the language has no official status. Advanced courses in The Netherlands, for example, are widely taught in English. N o African country uses its indigenous language in higher education, English being used in the majority of cases. The English language teaching (ELT) business has become one of the major growth industries around the world in the past 30 years.

3.10. Communications If a language is a truly international medium, it is going to be most apparent in those services which deal directly with the task of communication - the postal and telephone systems and the electronic networks. Information about the use of English in these domains is not easy to come by, however. It is thought that three-quarters of the world's mail is in English. But as noone monitors the language in which we write our letters, such statistics are highly speculative. Only on the Internet, where messages and data can be left for indefinite periods of time, is it possible to develop an idea of how much of the world's everyday communications (at least, between computerowners) is actually in English. To begin with, of course, the whole of the Internet was in English, because the Internet was yet another American invention. It began as ARPANET , the Advanced Research Projects Agency network, in the late 1960s, conceived as a decentralized national network, its aim being to link important American academic and government institutions in a way which would survive local damage in the event of a major war. Its language was, accordingly, English; and when people in other countries began to form links with this network, it proved essential for them to use English. The dominance of this language was then reinforced when the service was opened up in the 1980s to private and commercial organizations, most of which were (for the reasons already given) already communicating chiefly in English. There was also a technical reason underpinning the position of the language at this time. The first protocols devised to carry data on the Net were developed for the English alphabet, and no browser is yet able to handle all aspects of multilingual data presentation. However, the number of non-English language users on the Internet is growing all the time, and now exceeds the number of new English-speaking users. In particular, minority languages are finding that the Net gives them a louder and cheaper voice than is available through such traditional media as radio, and Usenet groups are now ongoing in several hundred languages. The estimate

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for 2003 is that less than 50% of the Internet is in English. This is good news for those worried by the global trend in language loss, but it is also good news for those concerned that global intelligibility should not lose out to local identity. On the Net, all languages are as equal as their users wish to make them, and English emerges as an alternative rather than a threat (Crystal 2001).

4. The future of English as a world language When a language becomes a world language, what happens to it, and what happens to other languages as a consequence? There are no precedents, because no language has ever been spoken by so many people in so many countries before. Three questions need to be briefly addressed. Will English fragment into mutually unintelligible languages, as it spreads around the world? Will English kill off other languages? Will English change other languages?

4.1. Will English fragment? The answer to the first question is: probably yes, at one level, and no at another. For the "yes" answer we need to note the many new varieties of spoken English developing around the world, in such countries as India, Singapore, and Ghana (Burchfield 1994). They have been called "New Englishes", and they have arisen because of the need to express national identity. A primary motivation of the newly independent nations of the 1950s and 1960s was the need to manifest their identity in the eyes of the world; and the most convenient way of doing this was through the medium of the language they use. Many of the new countries, such as Ghana and Nigeria, found that they had no alternative but to continue using English the alternative was to make an impossible choice between the many competing local ethnic languages (over 400, in the case of Nigeria). However, we can also appreciate the view that to continue with English would be, in the eyes of many, an unacceptable link with the colonial past. How could this dilemma be resolved? The answer was to continue with English, but to shape it to meet their own ends - adding local vocabulary, focussing on local cultural variations, developing fresh standards of pronunciation. It is not difficult to quickly accumulate several thousand local words, in countries which have a wide range of local fauna and flora, diverse ethnic cus-

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toms, and regular daily contacts with different languages. The emerging literatures of the Commonwealth countries - the novels from various parts of West Africa, the poetry from the countries of the Caribbean - illustrate how quickly new identities can emerge. The term "New Englishes" reflects these identities. And in some parts of the world, the kind of English which has emerged has brought increasing unintelligibility to outsiders - as in the case of Singlish, in Singapore, which incorporates a great deal of Chinese. So, is the future one of mutually unintelligible Englishes - an English family of languages, as some have put it? At the level of popular speech, this is probably already taking place. But there is another level - usually referred to as "standard English" - where there is little sign of any such fragmentation. Standard English is essentially written, printed English, seen in the textbooks, newspapers, and periodicals of the world - and also, these days, on the World Wide Web. It is largely identical in its global manifestation; we must allow only for the small amount of variation in vocabulary, grammar, and spelling which make up the differences between American, British, Australian, and other 'regional' standards. Standard English may of course also be spoken, and we hear it typically in the international broadcasting media, such as CNN, BBC, and ABC. Educated people also use it in daily interaction, at least on formal occasions; informally, they may well use a regional dialect, or a dialect which is a mixture of standard and regional (a "modified standard"). One of the consequences of globalization is that through the media we have immediate access to standard English, in ways that have come to be available but recently; and this is influencing the character of New Englishes. A British Council colleague told me a little while ago that he had just come back from India where he had seen a group of people in an out-of-the-way village clustering around a television set, where they were hearing CNN News beamed down via satellite. None of these people, he felt, would have had any regular contact with English previously other than the Indian variety of English used by their schoolteacher. But with a whole range of fresh auditory models becoming routinely available, it is easy to see how the type of English spoken in India could move in fresh directions. And satellite communication being, by definition, global, we can also see how a system of natural checks and balances - well-attested in the history of language - could emerge in the case of world English. The pull imposed by the need for identity, which has been making Indian English increasingly dissimilar from British English, will be balanced by a pull imposed by the need for intelligibility, on a world scale, which will make Indian English increasingly similar. And this could happen anywhere.

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4.2. Will English kill off other languages? As to the second question, the effect of English on other languages, here the situation is much gloomier. The surveys which have taken place since the 1970s have shown us that, of the 6000 or so languages in the world, at least half are likely to become extinct in the next 100 years (Crystal 2000). One of the chief reasons is, of course, the way small rural communities have been affected by globalization processes. Ninety percent of the world's languages are located in equatorial and tropical regions - a thousand in Africa, over 700 in Papua New Guinea alone. One of the consequences of colonialism has been the way in which many of these cultures have assimilated to the dominant one, with an inevitable shift in use away from the indigenous language. In Australia and North America, for example, the shift has been to English. Because of its worldwide spread, English is undoubtedly the language which many of these peoples will eventually speak. But the issue of language death goes well beyond English, for the same effects have been noted in parts of the world where English is not historically a major influence. The indigenous languages of South America are also rapidly disappearing - but there the shift has been to Spanish and Portuguese. In the area covered by the countries of the former Soviet Union, the shift has been to Russian. Chinese, French, Swahili, Arabic, and a few other languages have played similar roles. There is a massive imbalance of language use in the world: some 96% of the world's population speak only 4% of its languages. There is of course very little that can be done to preserve the world's linguistic diversity - any more than it has been possible to prevent the extinction of so many biological species. On the other hand, the ecological movement has had its major successes, in conservation, and there is no reason why there should not be successes too, in relation to language. Governments can do a great deal by introducing sensible bilingual policies, and protection measures for minority languages. These can be reinforced by international statute, and the fostering of a generally positive climate of opinion. The Barcelona Declaration of Linguistic Rights (1996), currently being taken forward by U N E S C O , is a step in the right direction. The European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages illustrates another positive development. But measures of this kind take many years to have any effect. In the meantime, languages are dying at the rate of one every two weeks or so. Linguists are urgently trying to document these dying languages before they disappear for ever - for we must recognize that, when a spoken language dies which has never been written down, it is as if it has never been, and the loss to the human race is permanent. But it is an expensive business,

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getting languages recorded. Organizations have grown up in several countries to try to help - in Britain there is the Foundation for Endangered Languages, founded in Bath in 1995; in Germany there is the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen, founded in Cologne in 1997 [address: Institut f. Sprachwissenschaft, Univ. Köln, 50923 Köln] - but they are very limited by shortage of funds. It seems to me, though, that if we are concerned by the processes of globalization, as they affect language, then one of the ways in which we can actually do something is to work towards preserving our world linguistic heritage. While recognizing the importance of world languages as a means of fostering international intelligibility, we must not forget the importance of indigenous languages as a means of fostering community identity. We need both. A world in which there was only one language left (probably, but not necessarily English) - a scenario which could in theory obtain within 500 years - would be an ecological intellectual disaster of unprecedented scale. It is our responsibility to work towards ensuring that this does not happen.

4.3. Will English change other languages? The answer to this last question is, of course, yes. Indeed, it is the arrival of unprecedented numbers of loan words into other languages that has been one of the most notable trends in the past half century. Cultures vary greatly in their response to this influx, and within each culture there are mixed attitudes, as the surveys by Görlach (2001, 2002) have made very clear. Some people welcome them , seeing them as a source of lexical enrichment; more puristically minded people condemn them, seeing them as an attack on traditional language values. Organizations have been set up to fight them. In some famous cases, attempts have been made to ban them - the loi Toubon in France being perhaps the best-known instance. The energy and emotion generated has to be respected, but at the same time history tells us very firmly that it is misplaced. All languages have always been in contact with other languages. All languages have always borrowed words from other languages. And no language community has ever succeeded in stopping this process taking place. The only way to do so would be to take one's language away from contact with other languages. But no-one would want the social and economic isolationism that such a policy would imply. There is a fallacy underlying the anti-borrowing position. Purists believe that borrowing words from other languages will lead to their own language changing its character and that this is a disaster. Change there certainly will

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be. Disaster there certainly won't be. The evidence, of course, comes from English itself. A search through the Oxford English Dictionary shows that English over the centuries has borrowed words f r o m over 350 other languages. This has changed the character of English dramatically. English today is not like the English of Anglo-Saxon times. In fact, four-fifths of English vocabulary is not Germanic at all, but Romance, Latin, or Greek. English is actually a Romance language, from the lexical point of view. I always find it ironic that when the French, for example, complain about some of the English words currently entering French, in many cases these are words which have a French or Latin origin (such as computer). As a result of all this, English has changed its character, undoubtedly. But has this been a bad thing? Much of the impact of Chaucer and Shakespeare - to take just two of many authors - is due to their ability to work with all that multilingual vocabulary. And everyone benefits, in a lexically enriched language. In English we have many "doublets" and "triplets", such as kingly, royal, and regal, which stem from the borrowing history of the language one Germanic, one French, one Latin. Three words for the same basic concept allows a whole range of stylistic nuances to be expressed which would not otherwise have been possible. Loan words always add semantic value to a language, providing people with the opportunity to express their thoughts in a more nuanced way. This is exactly what is happening with English in other languages at the moment: young people, for example, find many English loan words "cool", in a way that the older generation does not, and their expressiveness is empowered as a consequence. Many social domains now actively and creatively make use of English words - in advertising, for example, where the use of an English lexicon can actually help to sell goods. It is, of course, the same in English, but the other way round. French words in English help to sell perfume. And one of the most widely used expressions borrowed into English via TV ads in the past decade or so was Vorsprung durch Technik. When a language adopts words - and also sounds and grammatical constructions - it adapts them. This is the repeated history of English, as it has spread around the world, evolving " N e w Englishes". This will happen to the loan-words currently entering German and other languages too. When the French word restaurant entered English it slowly changed its meaning, losing the French nasal vowel in the final syllable to end up first with "restuh-rong" and eventually the m o d e m pronunciation "rest-ront". English words change their pronunciation, and eventually their English character, when they are re-pronounced in other languages. The syllabification which has affected English words entering Japanese is a well-studied case: several

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are now unintelligible to a native-English listener - which is one reason for the emergence of labels like "Japlish" (and of course such labels as "Denglish" and "Angleutsch"), with the implication that these varieties are becoming new languages. Such labels are not jocular - though they are often used thus: they are intuitive attempts to characterize what is happening linguistically around the world, as languages become increasingly in contact with each other. They are a prime example of the point that human language cannot be controlled. The more a language becomes a national, then an international, then a global language, the more it ceases to be in the ownership of its originators. English itself has long since ceased to be owned by anyone, and is now open to the influence of all who choose to use it. That is why it is changing so much, as it moves around the globe, and why the scenario of an "English family of languages" is likely to be the main development of the 21 st -century. One of the new varieties, incidentally, will be German: a patently German-influenced variety of English already exists, and is bound to develop further in due course. The reason that vocabulary attracts all the attention is because the lexicon is the area where change is most rapid and noticeable. People are aware of new words, and new meanings of words. But not all borrowings attract the same amount of attention. Loan words tend to be of two types: words for concepts which the language never expressed before (as in much Internet vocabulary); and words for concepts which were already expressed by a perfectly satisfactory local word. It is this second category which attracts the criticism, because there is a fear that the new word will replace the old one. It is a misplaced fear, as I have said, for two reasons. First, as the many examples like kingly illustrate, the new word does not replace the old one, but supplements it. As German, for example, adopts English words, and adapts them, they cease to be English, and become German - though conveying a different nuance alongside the traditional German word. The process of integration is facilitated by many people, such as poets, novelists, dramatists, satirists, comedians, advertisers, and journalists, who can make use of these nuances creatively. It usually takes a generation for loanwords to become integrated, though the Internet seems to be speeding up this time-frame. Looking back on previous generations' loan-words, we value them, because we see the way that authors and others have made good use of them. It is only the current generation of borrowings that attracts criticism. And second, even in cases where the new word does replace the old one (as often happened in English too, with hundreds of French words replacing Anglo-Saxon ones in the early Middle Ages) there is not very much that

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anyone can do about it. As I have said, human language cannot be controlled. A story is told by the 12 th -century historian, Henry of Huntingdon, that King Canute of England rebuked his flatterers by showing that even he, as king, could not stop the incoming tide - nor, by implication, the might of God. The story has great relevance when we think of individuals, societies, academies, or even parliaments trying to stop the flow of loan-words - from any language. They have never managed it in the past. They never will in the future. Language is just too powerful, because too many speakers are involved. Apart from a few cases where the numbers of speakers are so few that their usage can be planned by a central body (as in the case of some endangered and minority languages), usage is beyond control. This is plainly the case with a strong language like German, in a country which has incorporated so many ethnic identities. Instead of attacking loan words, accordingly, it makes much more sense to develop creative strategies to foster their integration, in literature, school, and society at large. That, in my view, would be time and energy better spent. Loan words are the invisible exports of a world where people talk to each other. As a citizen of the world, I value every loan word I have in my linguistic repertoire, and look forward to the day when others feel the same.

References British Council 1997 English Language Teaching. London: The British Council. Burchfield, Robert (ed.) 1994 English in Britain and Overseas. (Cambridge Histoiy of the English Language V.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David 1997 English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000 Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001 Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Görlach, Manfred (ed.) 2001 A Dictionary of European Anglicisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002 English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Graddol, David 1998 The Future of English. London: The British Council. 1999 The decline of the native speaker. In: David Graddol and Ulrike H. Meinhof (eds.), English in a Changing World. AILA Review 13: 57-68. McArthur, Tom 1998 The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunberg, Geoffrey 2000 Will the Internet always speak English? The American Prospect 11/10(27 March-10 April). Ramphal, Sridath 1996 World language: opportunities, challenges, responsibilities. Paper given at the World Members' Conference of the English-Speaking Union, Harrogate, UK. Robinson, David 1995 The Hollywood conquest. In: Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year, 245.

English as Threat or Resource in Continental Europe1 Robert Phillipson

Zusammenfassung Der Aufsatz untersucht die Expansion des Englischen in den verflochtenen Prozessen von Amerikanisierung, Globalisierung und Europäisierung. Die Welt der Unternehmen hat einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Art und Weise gehabt, wie sich die EU entwickelt hat, und könnte nun auf eine einzige Sprache für den gemeinsamen Markt drängen. Es gibt viele Gründe dafür, dass in EU-Institutionen die Sprachpolitik nicht offen behandelt wird. Die Sprachpolitik spiegelt ungelöste Spannungen und Widersprüche auf der nationalen wie auf der supranationalen Ebene. Es gibt sogar Uneinheitlichkeiten in der Verwendung von Grundbegriffen (wie "Arbeitssprache" oder "lingua franca"). Schweden ist bisher das einzige EULand, das eine größere Untersuchung durchgeführt hat, wie eine gesunde Balance zwischen Schwedisch, Englisch und anderen Sprachen gesichert werden könnte. Die Erweiterung und die Diskussion über die Zukunft Europas unterstreichen das dringende Bedürfnis, die Probleme einer Sprachpolitik anzugehen und Kriterien für eine ausgeglichene vielsprachige Kommunikation auszuarbeiten.

Copenhagen Business School is a diverse university funded by the Danish state, and has an arts faculty, but the internationalization and commodification of European higher education mean that Danish universities are increasingly expected to run like businesses, to profile and market themselves competitively. One symptom of this is an increasing use of English. This trend in communication in the university world dovetails with comparable developments in commerce, politics, the media, and youth culture, due to the impact of the interlocking processes of Americanization, globalization and europeanization. The expansion of English is central to these processes, and influences local, national and international languages and linguistic identities. I shall explore some of the implications of this by reporting on some historical aspects of European unification and Americanization, some of the intrinsic paradoxes of language policy in Europe, which

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account for its relative neglect, on whether the expansion of English constitutes a threat to other languages, and the need for more pro-active language policies that strengthen linguistic diversity. In principle the European Union is strongly committed to maintaining the cultural and linguistic diversity of Europe. This principle is articulated in treaties and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (2000): "The Union shall respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity" (Article 22). In theory eleven languages have equal rights as official and working languages in the supranational EU institutions, but the reality is more complicated, for reasons that will be explored briefly. The management of multi lingualism is very complex, and the imminent enlargement of the EU with additional states and languages will make matters even more complicated. Just as the political integration process blurs the borderline between national sovereignty and shared supranational policies, languages do not respect national borders and their use at the supranational level reflects hierarchies of language nationally and internationally. One of the motive forces behind bringing the economies of European states together was to establish forms of interdependence that would render military aggression impossible. This was to be achieved by settling territorial disputes between France and Germany and by ensuring that the reindustrialization process after the destruction of the 1939—45 war should address the needs and mutual suspicions of these countries and of the countries that the Nazis had occupied. Investment from outside Europe was essential for this, and could only come from one source, namely the USA. The Marshall Plan was part of a strategy to position America as the preeminent force globally through the Bretton Woods agreements on trade, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and NATO. A successful economy in western Europe was seen as an essential bulwark against the communist bloc. American goals have been explicit and consistent since World War II. In 1948, the State Department's senior imperial planner, George Kennan, wrote: "We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization". President Bush II is visibly cast in this mould, as clearly articulated by Condoleezza Rice, his foreign affairs adviser: "The rest of the world is best served by the USA pursuing its own interests because American values are universal". 2

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The formation of the first EU institutions thus involved a mixture of American and European motives. Some on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1940s had plans for a "United States of Europe", an idea which pacifist visionaries like Victor Hugo had mooted a century earlier. The USA insisted, as a condition for Marshall aid, on the economies of European states being coordinated and integrated. American pressure was therefore decisive for the form of European collaboration that was put in place from the late 1940s, the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), and the European Economic Community (1958). The first sketch of a European Political Community, with an Executive Council, a Court of Justice, and a Parliament was produced in 1953. The principle of parity for the languages of the participating states was established at this time, initially four, and now eleven. The relative strength of French in EU affairs is attributable to its earlier use in international relations, to the location of EU institutions in cities in which French was widely used, Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, and to speakers of French, along with the Germans, occupying the political high ground in shaping the new Europe. The British were ambivalent about joining the EU because of their imperial links, and their belief that they have a special relationship with the USA. De Gaulle blocked British entry in the 1960s because he saw Britain as a Trojan horse for American interests. When President Pompidou agreed to Britain "joining Europe" in 1972, it is reported that one condition he insisted on was that the pre-eminence of French as the dominant language of EU institutions should remain unchallenged. Although nominally there was parity between the EEC official languages, French was primus inter pares. Pompidou's worries about the risk of the French language being eclipsed by English were fully justified, as English is growing like a linguistic cuckoo in the main EU nests. The promotion of English worldwide has been central to British and American global strategy since 19453, the British Council playing a key role in maintaining the position of English in postcolonial states, and in the postcommunist world where globalization was preached through the trinity of the market economy, human rights, and English. As the Annual Report of the British Council for 1960-61 states: "Teaching the world English may appear not unlike an extension of the task which America faced in establishing English as a common national language among its own immigrant population." The consequences of US language policy for immigrant and indigenous languages have been dire. It is also important to recall that national policies

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also determine American global strategies, and that English is central to both. This has, of course, also been true of the United Kingdom over several centuries. According to some senior Americans, the world can simply dispense with all languages other than English. In 1997 the US ambassador to Denmark, who came straight from the corporate world, where else, was rash enough to say in my wife's hearing at a luncheon at the University of Roskilde: "The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this preventing real integration and development of the Union." A 1997 CIA report states that the following five years would be decisive in the establishment of English as the sole international language 4 . The very idea that there is a single international language is of course nonsense. There are literally hundreds of international lingua francas in use, but the myth of the global use of English is widely believed in, especially by those who benefit from their proficiency in English, including academic cheer-leaders of linguistic globalization. George Monbiot's book, Captive state: The corporate take-over of Britain (Macmillan, 2000), documents the many ways in which corporate power determines national and local government policy in countless fields, including agriculture, energy, the environment, urban planning, the health system, university research, and general education. The consolidation of an EU common market and monetary union has put into effect the wishes of the corporate world, coordinated by the European Round Table of Industrialists, an association of the chief executives of 46 of the biggest companies in Europe (op. cit., 320). This lobbying group is also directly involved in setting the tenus for the enlargement of the EU with the countries of eastern and central Europe (ibid., 324). In negotiations on admission, all documents from applicant states have to be provided exclusively in English. The Transatlantic Business Dialogue brings together American and European corporations, and dovetails with the G8 and related heads of state networks. There is increasingly a single state-corporate structure. There are plans for a single market incorporating Europe and North America, a Transatlantic Economic Partnership, which will develop "a worldwide network of bilateral agreements with identical conformity procedures" (cited ibid., 329). Monbiot summed up these developments two years before the Johannesburg Earth Summit, and nothing has changed to disprove his analysis (ibid., 329-330):

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Before long.. .only a minority of nations will lie outside a single, legally harmonized global market, and they will swiftly find themselves obliged to join. By the time a new world trade agreement has been negotiated, it will be irrelevant, for the WTO's job will already have been done. Nowhere on earth will robust laws protecting the environment or human rights be allowed to survive. Elected representatives will, if these plans for a new world order succeed, be reduced to the agents of a global government: built, coordinated and run by corporate chief executives.

Despite this powerful trend, in which English is pivotal, multilingualism is endorsed in countless EU pronouncements. Decisions emanating from Brussels, agreed on by the fifteen member states (and 70-80 per cent of national legislation involves implementing decisions taken in Brussels), are disseminated in the eleven languages. There are comprehensive interpretation and translation services in EU institutions that attempt to ensure that speakers of each of the official languages has equal voice and effect. An ever-expanding range of topics is being added to the EU's remit, including culture. In theory the EU does not legislate on education, but it is deeply involved in agenda-setting, funding countless schemes and research, and in the reform and standardization of higher education. This raises the question of how far language policy is still the preserve of the individual state, or can now be considered a matter for the Union. Can a member state do what it pleases, provided it pays at least lip-service to the language rights expressed in conventions, charters and EU treaties? Such questions, as well as the management of multilingualism internally in EU institutions, have been subjected to astonishingly little scholarly research. A recent doctoral study in international law in the US concludes that French language protection measures (the Loi Toubon) are in conflict with the Maastricht Treaty and the principles of a common market with the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. Corporate lawyers may therefore soon choose to challenge national language legislation on precisely these grounds. The American doctoral student has a solution to all that linguistic diversity: It is worthwhile to consider whether the EU should answer the call for uniformity on the issue of language business transactions and further protect itself against the potential onslaught of language regulation by each individual Member State. One potential action the EU might take would be to declare a common language in the EU market.5

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She argues along predictable lines: rapid access to information, efficiency, saving money on translation, eliminating "national technical obstacles", all arguments that relate to the producer rather than the consumer. She pleads for the termination of the "cultural protectionism of nations", invokes the strong role of English in the world marketplace, and English as a widely learned foreign language (which is correct), English as the "common linguistic denominator" of all European countries (which is rubbish), and "US advances in the areas of technology and science" (which we in Europe are supposed to be grateful for). The EU should act so as to prevent "one nation from frustrating the fundamental principles of the supranational governing body" (a comment which reveals little insight into the principles of EU decision-making). Her parting shot is that adopting a single language would serve, "to unify, rather than divide, Member States." (op.cit., 202). Here is the monolingual worldview of Americanization being subtly marketed as europeanization under cover of globalization. N o w it may well be that European governments are not waiting to follow this advice. Several have introduced or are contemplating legislation to resist the advance of English. However, the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law is presumably read by American corporate lawyers, who might choose to test the principle in court, and the outcome of any litigation in the European Court of Justice is unpredictable. But it appears that the Commission may be saving them the trouble and expense. In July 2002 the Commission sent a "formal notice of complaint" 6 to the French government stating that the national requirement that food products should be labelled in French (following French legislation) is in conflict with Eurolaw 7 . There has as yet been little litigation in this area, and the decisions are far from unambiguous, as indeed is the relevant Council directive 8 on the harmonization of member states' legislation on the labelling and packaging of food products. European case law is seen as holding that national law cannot require use of a specific language if the message can be expressed by other means, which can be another language that is easily comprehensible to the purchaser, possibly supported pictorially. The Commission's intervention suggests that it is possible that the transition from a single market to a single marketing language has begun. The Commission's action is seen by many in France as the thin edge of the wedge. According to L'Alliance pour la souveraineté de la France, in a press communiqué 9 entitled "Europe is attacking the well-informed housewife", the Commission is working to "impose anglo-american" throughout the E U . . . "the construction of Europe means its destruction for the benefit of mercantile America". A body called "Défense de la langue française" 1 0

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organized a public demonstration in January 2003, even though the French government has revised its regulations so as to conform to Eurolaw requirements. It has resolved the issue by issuing a new ministerial order that maintains the obligation that products are described in French, but stipulates that other languages can be used in addition11. That will not be the end of the affair. This example of a dispute between the Commission and a national government epitomises how inadequately language policies are handled. A second example that hit the headlines was a proposal to change one of the internal translation procedures in the Commission in Brussels, as part of a cost-saving exercise. The plan was leaked to the French government, as a result of which a joint letter was sent by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of France and Germany, Hubert Védrine and Joschka Fischer, to Romano Prodi, the President of the Commission, on 2 July 2001. The letter accused the Commission of attempting to introduce "monolingualism" in EU institutions, which was a coded reference to English being installed as the sole in-house working language, and that this represented an unacceptable departure from the current system. Prodi's reply, dispatched in French and German, asserts that multilingualism is of cardinal importance to the EU, that nothing had been decided, but that efficiency and savings in the language services need to be looked into. The impending enlargement of the EU made action even more important. By this stage, press coverage had identified a "plot to impose English on the EU" (Irish Times), "Fischer and Védrine against more English" (.Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), "Kinnock"s language plan riles the French" (The Independent), and so on. Much of the press coverage contains inaccurate statements about the present system and its costs, and engages in fanciful and nationalistic interpretation 12 . The exchange of letters and the press reports clearly reveal that an existential nerve had been touched. The two disputes are perfect examples of the recurrent underlying tension between national interests and supranational ones, and the absence of adequate procedures and principles for resolving the issues. I fear this is generally the case at the supranational level, and often nationally, even in countries which have given some thought to language policy, like France. French efforts have influenced the endorsement of linguistic diversity in EU proclamations, but there tends to be more special pleading for French rather than for rights for all relevant languages 13 . Many factors account for language policy not being handled more smoothly and competently. There are major differences in the ideologies underpinning the formation of states, and in the role ascribed to language in these (the national romantic

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tradition, jus sanguinis, Herder, as in Germany, and the republican tradition, jus soli, citizenship, as in France). Language issues are therefore understood differently in different countries, including such basic notions as language and dialect, this impeding a shared understanding of language policy issues. Levels of awareness about language policy issues range widely between and within each EU country. They tend to be relatively high in, for instance, Finland and Greece, but often with a very selective focus, and low in Denmark and England. There is a poor scholarly infrastructure at European universities and research institutes for the analysis of language policy, multilingualism, and language rights, reflecting a lack of investment in this field. Responsibility for language policy in each country tends to be shared between ministries of foreign affairs, education, culture, research, and commerce. They each tend to have little expertise in language policy, and between them there is inadequate coordination, if any. In countries with a federal structure, responsibility is even more diffuse. As English is used extensively by native and non-native speakers from different parts of the world, there is no simple correlation between English and the interests of a particular state. The connection of English to the dominant economic system, and its entrenchment as the most widely learned foreign language in schools (much more successfully in northern than southern Europe), and to global networking remains. A laissez faire policy thus involves major risks for all languages other than English. Leaving language policy to market forces, nationally and in the supranational institutions, is a recipe for more English and less of the other languages. Clarifying whether the advance of English entails the submerging of other languages would require exploration of a range of language functions and contexts. As eleven languages are being used and developed in parallel in EU institutions, one can argue that all are being strengthened internationally, though not necessarily in equal measure, and without the hierarchy of languages being challenged. I won't go into the tricky question of the functioning of the translation or interpretation services, but merely mention that they are generally branded as excessively costly, whereas they in fact currently account for only 0.8 % of the total budget for all EU institutions, meaning 2 euros per year for each European citizen (which is peanuts compared with agricultural subsidies). This is a modest price to pay for a principle that use of the languages of each member state is an obligation, especially when preparing and agreeing on a constant stream of documents with the force of law in each member state.

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The parity of the 11 official languages of the EU is a complex question 14 , which journalistic coverage of language issues, typically triggered by a crisis of some sort, seldom does justice to15. Language policies in Europe reflect many unresolved and interlocking paradoxes and tensions: -

a legacy of "nation" states, "national" interests and languages, BUT supranational integration, and the internationalization of many domains, commerce, finance, education, science, politics, and civil society in EU member states;

-

the formal equality of EU member states and their languages, BUT a pecking order of states and languages, currently visible in the shift from French to English as the primary working language in EU institutions. The figures for draft documents reflect a dramatic shift over the past twenty years from mainly French to mainly English 16 ;

-

the onward thrust of americanization, cultural homogenization ("McDonaldization"), and the hegemony of English, BUT the celebration of European linguistic diversity, multilingualism, cultural and linguistic hybridity, and some support for minority and national language rights;

-

languages seen as purely technical, pragmatic tools, BUT languages as existential identity markers for individuals, cultures, ethnic groups, and states;

- language policy as a matter of practical functioning, BUT language policy as "politically sensitive", a coded way of politicians, eurocrats and diplomats acknowledging that they do not know how to reform the present regime, or improve EU internal and external communication, an issue which enlargement complexifies; -

Germany as a demographically and economically dominant force in Europe, BUT German progressively marginalized in scholarship, commerce, youth culture, and in the global linguistic marketplace, in similar ways to a reduction in the power of French internationally. The emergence of English as the foremost foreign language in Europe, because of its obvious functional utility, entails the submergence of other languages as foreign languages, and few education systems are seriously addressing the question of ensuring diversity in language learning, whether of foreign, regional minority or neighbouring languages;

-

English being promoted as a linguistic panacea, BUT of the 378 million citizens of the member states, only 61 million speak English as a mother tongue, less than half of the rest are proficient in English as a foreign language, and the proportion speaking it confidently varies greatly from country to country 17 . It is ironic that states invest heavily in the learning of a language that symbolizes cultural imperialism, and awareness of the forms and mechanisms of cultural and linguistic imperialism is very patchy and often non-existent.

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Clarity when discussing EU language policy is elusive because many of the central concepts are muddled and used inconsistently I will give you three examples: In theory all eleven languages have the same status as official and working languages. In practice there tends to be a restriction of "working language" to French and English, and for certain purposes, German too. This terminological confusion (which is present in the letter written to Romano Prodi by the French and German foreign ministers referred to earlier) is symptomatic of an acceptance of a hierarchy of languages. Some languages are more equal than others. Secondly, "lingua franca" tends to be used as though there is equality between users of the relevant language, but is it likely that native and nonnative speakers of French or English perform on a level linguistic playingfield? The innocuous label conceals the power dimension that privileges some and disadvantages others. Use of the mother tongue does not, of course, guarantee intelligibility. People who function regularly in several languages are more likely to be sensitive in their use of language in intercultural communication than monolinguals. Thirdly, the designations ' Ίι a Uve/η on-ri a Uve ' take some users of the language as being authentic and infallible, and stigmatize others as not being the real thing. Work has begun in English as a Foreign Language teaching circles to describe and upgrade the English of continental Europeans, for several reasons 18 . English is used effectively by countless people for whom it is not a first language, so the "ownership" of English is changing, and perhaps these users should be seen as fluent users of a non-national, postnational language rather than as deficient users of mother-tongue English. This is an attractive principle, but whether it has any implications for language pedagogy is unclear. The assumed virtues of native speakers currently give them a colossal advantage, not least on the job market, and not only as language teachers. The Commission and the Council of Europe have been taken to task for illegitimately favouring native speakers of English when advertising posts that all EU citizens should have had equal access to. Monitoring this practice should be undertaken by the EU Ombud institution, but as yet its powers are tightly constrained. So some of our basic concepts in language policy are misleading. Permeating the structural and ideological factors that snarl up analysis at the supranational level of language policy, there is the banal reality of people talking at cross-purposes, with or without the assistance of interpreters. The unresolved paradoxes remain. The challenge of more equitable, visionary language policies has yet to be met.

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Participation in EU activities by vast numbers of civil servants, experts, academics, teachers, and NGOs, adds a supranational linguistic identity to the existing national linguistic identities. Confident users of English and French, whether as a first or second language, are in a privileged position. And needless to say, foreign languages can be learned successfully, even by Brits19. In continental Europe, English has traditionally been learned additively, and until recently it has been difficult to imagine that speakers of German or Swedish run any risk of their mother tongues being marginalized or atrophying at the individual or group level. This picture may well be changing. This is due to the inroads English is making in many domains. The cover of the European edition of Business Week of 13 August 2001 asked in a banner headline "Should everyone speak English?". The inside story was flagged as "The Great English divide. In Europe, speaking the lingua franca separates the haves from the have-nots". The cover drawing portrays twin business executives: one communicates successfully, the English speaker; the other is mouthless, speechless. Competence in English is here projected as being imperative throughout Europe in the commercial world. By implication, proficiency in other languages gets you nowhere. The article describes how more and more continental European companies are switching over to English as the in-house corporate language. It also describes how English for business is big business for English language schools. It has been described as second in importance to the British economy after North Sea oil. English as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of scientific communication 20 is no extinct beast. In some faculties in Norway, scholars are rewarded for publications in English by a large bonus, whereas anything in the local language triggers a paltry one. The tendency is for "international" publication to be seen as intrinsically superior, even in countries with a long history of national scholarship, and this influences employment criteria and choice of research topic. The dominance of English as a language of science, both in publications and in postgraduate training, is increasingly under scrutiny, with alarm bells ringing in Austria 21 , Denmark 22 , Germany 23 and elsewhere. Two recent developments in the Nordic countries deserve special mention 24 . The Nordic Council of Ministers commissioned research in 2001 on possible domain loss in the Nordic languages, a laudable exercise, because while everybody seems to have an opinion on language policy, there is often a dearth of hard data actually documenting trends. The reports suggest that there is a risk of the Nordic languages suffering attrition in some domains, particularly in scientific and technological activity. The Swedish government also established a parliamentary commission to evaluate

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whether Swedish was under threat from English, and to elaborate an action plan to ensure that Swedish remains a complete language, learned and used well by its first and second language speakers, and retains its full rights as an EU official and working language. The plan also aims to ensure that Swedes are equipped to function well in foreign languages, particularly English, and that Swedes from a minority language background enjoy language rights. A massive national consultation process is currently under way, to lead to legislation in 2004. This nation-state is apparently shifting from monolingualism to a differentiated spectrum of multilingualism. There is nothing new about functional differentiation among several languages. Christian Wilster, a poet who was the first person to translate Homer's Iliad and Odyssey from Greek into Danish, wrote in 1827: "Every gentleman who took his education seriously only put pen to paper in Latin, spoke French to the ladies, German to his dog, and Danish to his servants." Since that time we have experienced the heyday of the monolingual nation state throughout Europe, a stranglehold that is being eased apart by Americanization and Europeanization. We are now experiencing the erosion of the monopoly of a unifying and stratifying national language in nation-states. This raises many language rights issues 25 . It is possible that access to the dominant international language will be the key distinction marking out haves and have-nots in continental European countries, in a much broader sense than Business Week intended. Broadly speaking this is the role of English intranationally in postcolonial states, where English opens doors for the few and firmly closes them for the many. In much of Europe, competence in English is becoming a prerequisite for access to higher education and employment, in tandem with preferred forms of communication in the national language. States are adjusting to globalization, which impacts on language policy overtly and covertly. It is not at all clear to what extent states are deciding on national language policy, or whether the initiative has already passed to EU institutions, the boardrooms of transnational corporations, and English-using gatekeepers in countless domains. The EU has basically steered clear of the issue, apart from needing to address the functioning of its institutions internally and externally in a selected set of languages. A policy statement was produced by the European Council during the 2002 Danish Presidency entitled "Use of languages in the Council in the context of an enlarged Union 26 . The document "does not call into question the current practice of providing full language interpreting for meetings of the Council and the European Council, nor the requirement enshrined in the Council's Rules of Procedure for all legislative and policy documents before the Council for a decision to be translated into all official

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languages". It suggests three ways of tackling the challenges of enlargement and more restrictive translation and interpretation procedures for lowerlevel activities, where economic and other constraints prevent full multilingualism. Further clarification of the principles to underlie implementation is needed. Although these points are essentially concerned with activity at the supranational level, clearly language policies here interlock with and influence what happens at the national and sub-national levels too. The Copenhagen summit in December 2002 was primarily concerned with reaching agreement on terms for the accession of new member states. At the press conference with heads of state from the existing and potential states when agreement was reached, the banner headline behind the politicians read "One Europe" in one language only. This prompted the Spanish Foreign Secretary, Ana Palacio, to write in El Pais on 16 December 2002: "The motto 'One Europe', solely in English, requires a reflection. Even though Copenhagen did not face the question of languages, this is one of the pending subjects that sooner rather than later must be debated for the very survival and viability of this project of Europe with a world vocation. Within it, Spanish, one of the official UN languages, spoken by more than 400 million people in more than 20 countries, must take on the place it is entitled to." The Convention on the Future of Europe is unlikely to have language policy as a high priority, even if the goals of recent EU reforms aim at increased accountability, and better communication between EU institutions and citizens. But the Convention has been asked to take language policy on board by a number of bodies. These are typically either concerned with a single official language which is seen as being marginalized (I am familiar with approaches by protagonists of French 27 , German 28 and Italian 29 ) or the exclusion of minority languages (where efforts are spearheaded by the Catalans). The submission to the Convention "Linguistic proposals for the future of Europe", by the Europa Diversa 30 group, pleads for more active policies to strengthen linguistic diversity, for funding for all autochthonous European languages, for the subsidiarity principle to ensure that power and self-regulation in language affairs should be as decentralized as possible, and for a public debate on reform of the language regime in EU institutions. They suggest that experts and users should identify the specific functions performed by different languages, and that a clear distinction should be made between (1)

"binding documents and political representation", at least one official language for each state must be included, but interpretation and trans-

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(2)

(3)

Robert Phiìlipson lation services would support a range of specified, necessary functions, depending on need, and in a more flexible but restrictive way than at present, "languages of service to the citizens of Europe", more of which would be used in interaction with the general public and in publications, including the lesser used languages recognized by member states in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and the internal working languages of the EU institutions, which should be restricted to 3 or 4.

This is a sociolinguistically informed document, the main value of which is to point to a way of addressing and potentially solving some of the current problems of linguistic hierarchies and inefficiency, while also bringing autochthonous languages into mainstream EU communication. Implementation along the lines proposed would serve to consolidate the efforts that the EU currently puts into functioning multilingually, but could make the institutions more communicatively effective and efficient. This exercise might also serve to show how hollow a lot of the rhetoric of total multilingualism and linguistic equality is. There is in fact nothing odious about a restricted number of languages being used by permanent employees of an institution that brings together people from different backgrounds. Eurocrats can be expected to function in three languages, the mother tongue and two others, and this should be demanded particularly of those who have French or English as their mother tongue. In such employment, a higher level of proficiency can be expected in reading and listening than in writing or speaking. By contrast, it is unreasonable to expect representatives of member states, national politicians, civil servants and experts, to function as well in a foreign language as in their mother tongue. In theory they are not expected to do so, since interpretation and translation serve to facilitate interaction across language borders, and often do so impressively, but in practice there are many logistic problems in drafting complex texts in parallel in several languages, and having texts ready on time. Change must tackle the fundamental paradoxes in EU language policy, clarify the criteria that can lead to equitable multilingual communication, and implement policy and practice that respect linguistic human rights and strengthen linguistic diversity. There is therefore an urgent need to bring together all the relevant stake-holders in language policy. There is a lot of relevant experience worldwide, though far too little is known to decisionmakers nationally and supranationally. Most of the books by social seien-

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tists on European integration devote very little space to language policy and reveal gross ignorance. They tend to regard an expansion of English as unproblematical. The issues are, in my view, so complex that they need book-length treatment. My book English-only Europe? Language policy challenges (Routledge, 2003) 31 attempts to move from describing the past and present of languages in Europe to a set of 45 specific recommendations that are designed to ensure language a higher profile and more competent treatment. They are grouped into four categories covering: -

national and supranational language policy infrastructure EU institutions language teaching and learning research.

Hopefully recommendations will not merely remain informed speculation until the political will is generated bottom-up and top-down to move away from laissez faire and crude national agendas to a more inclusive agenda that converts the EU rhetoric of maintaining diversity into reality. No language is intrinsically evil or good. English can be used to ensure the emergence of a more equitable European linguistic order.

Notes 1. This is a revised and updated version of a talk given initially in Belfast in September 2002, see John M. Kirk and Donali P. Ó Baoill. 2. Strategy paper "Campaign 2000: Promoting the national interest", cited in the Danish daily paper Information, 14 June 2001. 3. Phillipson, R. (1992). 4. Reported by Hervé Lavenir de Buffon, founder of the organization "Comités pour le français, langue européene". RO Magazine 34, 22 June 2002. 5. Feld, S.A. (1998), 199. 6. French "lettre de mise en demeure". 7. See the article by John Lichfield in The Independent, 19 August 2002, which predictably pokes tun at the French and does not address the issue of language rights. 8. 2000/13/EF, of 20 March 2002. 9. On 28 July 2002, , see also . 10. .

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11. Décret no 2002-1025 du 1 août 2002 art 1, Journal Officiel du 2 août 2002. It is known as the "Decret Dutreil". 12. A prime example is the editorial "Organic is healthier" in The Daily Telegraph of 16 August 2001. Another is Ian Black (2002). 13. French has for centuries been regarded as a uniquely significant language, and France as "la mère des arts, des amies et des lois" (Joachim du Bellay, 15251560). 14. Irish is not an official language but is a treaty language. It can be used at the European Court of Justice. 15. For instance, The Guardian on 20 March 2002: "The French language meets its Waterloo. Enlarging the EU is good news for the English language, confirming its victory over French as the classic medium of European integration". 16. A further symptom is that publications in other languages are being dropped, e.g. the Annual Reports on competition policy were available in all official languages until 1995, the 1996 report was published in Dutch, English, French and German, and it is now published exclusively in English. . 17. See Eurobarometer Report 54 of 15 February 2001 for a representative study of foreign language competence in all member states. These reports are on < http : //europa. eu.int/comm/dg 10/epo/eb.html >. 18. Seidlhofer, B. (2001), 133-158. 19. I well recall the good advice given to me by the admissions tutor of the university which gave me a place to read "modern", meaning foreign languages. My tutor approved of me immersing myself in France and Germany for months before going up, but advised strongly that I should read as much English literature as possible. How could one expect to acquire a profound familiarity with foreign cultures and languages if one is not securely grounded in one's own group's cultural histoiy? In bilingual education terms, learning should be additive not subtractive. A recent study for the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society (reported in The Guardian, 6 March 2003) reports that the decline in young people in Britain studying foreign languages at the upper secondary and tertiary levels is due to embarrassment at the idea of speaking a foreign language and "the general climate of negativity" towards languages in the UK. 20. This is John Swales's term, in an article in World Englishes in 1997. 21. Vienna Manifesto, Appendix 5 of R. Phillipson (2003). 22. R Jarvad (2001). 23. Gawlitta, K. and F. Vilmar (eds.) (2002). 24. Both are summarized in Engelska spráket som hot och tillgâng i Norden (The English language as a threat or resource in the Nordic countries), Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2002. This small book contains a 15-page résumé in English. 25. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (2000). 26. Council of the European Union, 15334/1/02 REV 1, 6 December 2002.

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27. See the petition on www.voxlatina.com on "Pour la liberté de vivre en français". 28. "Stellungname von Vereinen zur Förderung des französischen, der deutschen und anderer europäischer Sprachen zur Vorlage bei den Mitgliedern des Europäischer Konvents, die mit der Erarbeitung einer Europäischen Gründungsakte beauftragt sind", 200-204 in: Gawlitta and Vilmar (eds.) (2002). 29. The association "La bella lingua" has promoted a resolution in defence of the Italian language, with the support of members of parliament. There is collaboration between protagonists of French, German and Italian. 30. Fourth draft, 1 July 2002, approved by an international conference convened by five Catalan bodies in Barcelona, May 31 - June 1. 31. At the time of writing, March 2003, the book is being translated into Esperanto, and there are plans for a translation into Gemían.

References Black, Ian 2002

EU learns to conduct its business with an English accent. The Guardian Weekly. April: 4-10. Buffon, Hervé Lavenir de 2002 Comités pour le français, langue européene. RO Magazine 34, 22 June 2002. Feld, S.A. 1998 Language and the globalization of the economic market: the regulation of language as a barrier to free trade. Vanclerbilt Journal of Transnational Law 31: 153-202. Gawlitta, K. and F. Vilmar (eds.) 2002 "Deutsch nix wichtig"? Engagement für die deutsche Sprache. Paderborn: IFB Verlag. Jarvad, P. 2001 Det danske sprogs status i 1990'erne med sœrlig henblik pcì domœnetab [The status of the Danish language in the 1990s particularly in relation to domain loss]. Copenhagen: Dansk Sprogniuvn. Kirk, John M. and Donali P. Ó Baoill Language planning and education: Linguistic issues in Northern Ireland, the republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast: Queen's University, www.bslcp.com. Nordic Council of Ministers 2002 Engelska sprcìket som hot och tillgáng i Norden [The English language as a threat or resource in the Nordic countries]. Copenhagen.

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Phillipson, Robert 1992 Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003 English-only Europe? Language policy challenges. London: Routledge. Seidlhofer, B. 2001 Closing a conceptual gap: the case for a description of English as a lingua franca. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11/2: 133-158. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove 2000 Linguistic genocide in education - or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah/New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Global English - a New Lingua Franca or a New Imperial Culture? Hans Joachim Meyer

Zusammenfassung Auch in der Vergangenheit haben europäische Sprachen, wie heute das Englische, bedingt durch politische Macht, wirtschaftliche Stärke oder kulturellen Einfluss eine führende internationale Rolle gespielt, insbesondere das Französische und partiell auch das Deutsche. Der internationalen Bedeutimg des Letzteren ist durch die verbrecherische Nazidiktatur ein tödlicher Schlag versetzt worden. Heute kann von den europäischen Sprachen nur noch Spanisch mit Englisch konkurrieren, ohne auch nur entfernt dessen überragende Stellung zu erreichen. Um den globalen Gebrauch des Englischen zu erfassen, wird u. a. die Existenz neuer Varianten wie Euro-English oder Mid-Atlantic English angenommen. Es muss aber bezweifelt werden, dass deren Sprecher das Potential des Englischen tatsächlich eigenständig nutzen und zu gleichberechtigten Partner der englischen Sprachgemeinschaft werden können. Vor allem wird für das Internationale Englisch vielfach der Begriff der lingua franca verwendet. Dabei wird übersehen, dass es sich dabei begrifflich um eine Mittlersprache zum Informationsaustausch für bestimmte Bereiche der funktionalen Kommunikation handelt. Zum Wesen einer Sprache gehört jedoch ihr kreatives Potential zur Formulierung neuer Gedanken und ihre Verwobenheit in einen kulturellen Kontext. Insbesondere in der Semantik sind Sprach- und Geistesgeschichte fest miteinander verbunden. Deshalb ist das zutreffendere historische Analogon für das Internationale Englisch das Latein des römischen Imperiums und des westlichen Europas vor der Herausbildimg der Nationalsprachen. Seit längerem ist vor allem in den Naturwissenschaften eine Rückkehr zur Einsprachigkeit, diesmal auf der Basis des Englischen zu beobachten. Dies wird in den Naturwissenschaften erleichtert durch die dort festzustellende relativ klare Trennung der Kommunikation über die Forschung vom eigentlichen Forschimgsprozess und unterstützt durch das Vorhandensein bestimmter rhetorischer Muster des Englischen für diese Kommunikationszwecke. Dagegen würde die Übernahme des Englischen in vielen Geisteswissenschaften wie etwa auch in der Jurisprudenz zu einem Bruch mit den geschichtlich gewachsenen Kulturtraditionen führen. Die Frage stellt sich, ob die wachsende Internationalisierung des wissenschaftlichen imd akademischen Lebens zur weltweiten Dominanz des Englischen oder zu einem akademischen Multilingualismus führen wird. Entscheidend scheint dabei, ob es in den nationalen Gesellschaften genügend mentale

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Bereitschaft und intellektuelles Engagement gibt, die sprachliche Vielfalt zu bewahren. In der deutschen Gesellschaft ist derzeit eine starke Tendenz zur sprachlichen Aufgabe der eigenen Identität zu beobachten, die mit der allgemeinen Neigung zur Geschichtsvergessenheit und zur Nichtachtung des kulturellen Erbes einhergeht. Trotz einigem Widerstand wird in Deutschland Englisch in den meisten Bereichen einschließlich der Politik als Ausdruck von Kreativität, Innovation und modischer Werbung zunehmend bevorzugt. Daraus entsteht die reale Gefahr, dass die deutsche Gesellschaft Teil des Empires der amerikanischem Kultur wird - entweder, weil sich einflussreiche Kräfte davon einen Vorteil versprechen, oder aus blankem Opportunismus. Der Rückzug des Deutschen vor dem Englischen - weltweit und im eigenen Land - ist weithin eine selbstverschuldete Tragödie.

The English theme of this conference is "The Fate of European Languages in the Age of Globalisation". This reads like the announcement of a tragedy. Fate means destiny, that is, a power which controlls all events in a way that cannot be resisted. And fate can also mean death and destruction as the ultimate and inevitable end of the story. So we have here two dramatis personae the killer and the victim. But who is the killer and who the victim? In a tragedy it is the life of the victim which is fated to come to an end. And, as the theme of this conference specifies, it is German which may be the victim. However, the power of destiny is not mentioned. Is it too obvious or are we too polite? In any case, there are European languages which do not seem to share the fate of German. It has become a commonplace to say that, in the world of today, English is the leading language. The question is, however, what such a statement implies. In the course of history quite a number of languages have been used as means of communication across the borders of countries and between people of different mother tongues. Does the present international position of English simply result from a change of role and importance among languages? That the language of one nation takes on the role of an internationally accepted medium of communication, particularly in diplomacy and foreign trade, but also in culture and in academic learning, is not a new phenomenon in history. The French language had such a status in Europe from the end of the 17th up to the beginning of the 20 th century. German, although to a lesser extent, also played for some time such a role in central, eastern, and south eastern Europe. Nor is it peculiar to our time that a language which originally came into existence in one country is taken to other parts of the world and becomes the language of several nations. Apart from English, there are three other languages originating from the European continent - Spanish, Portuguese and French - which have spread far into the world, becoming the

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standard language of a number of now independent nations or legally recognized minorities. In the case of Spanish, this development does not seem to have come to an end as can easily be noticed in this city and in this country, which, if I may venture to say this, is an encouraging antidote to any danger of resignation lurking in the theme of this conference. Nevertheless it is undoubtedly true that it is English - an idiom that at the beginning of European history was spoken only in some parts of the British Isles lying on the outskirts of Western Christianity - which has experienced the most impressive expansion all over the world, making it not only the standard language of a few major nations but also giving it the function of a second language for a large number of people. Among experts, so I trust, even the most passionate admirers of English will agree that this astonishing ascent is not primarily due to the special linguistic virtues of this language. As with Spanish, French and Portuguese it is, in the first place, the result of political power, economic strength and cultural influence. And, as the example of English and Spanish shows, it is mainly the result of colonialism and migration, particularly, where the establishment of colonial empires has been combined with a migration to the conquered lands, leading to a solid domination over the indigenous population. Although French was not only the generally accepted language of foreign politics and diplomacy for more than two centuries but also set the social and cultural standards, at least for Western Europe, for quite a long time, its influence began to wane, albeit slowly, when France was no longer the strongest state on the continent, but Russia. Today the efforts of German educational policy to convince young people of the advantages of learning French are really successful only in those regions which border on France where the proximity fosters the growth of a natural interest in immediate communication. In other words, knowing French is no longer a matter of prestige. The former influence of the German language was mainly based on the position of Austria, which for a long time was the leading central European power, but after 1871 of course also on the growing power of the united Germany, as well as to some extent on German migration to eastern and south eastern parts of Europe in earlier centuries. This situation changed radically with the reduction of Austria to a smaller European state after the first world war, the total defeat of Germany in the Second World War, which had been unleashed by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, and the subsequent expulsion of almost all Germans from the eastern and south eastern parts of Europe, despite the fact that their ancestors had been living there for ages. It was a catastrophe which followed from the destruction of the first German

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Republic, the breaking with the liberal and democratic traditions of German history, and the renunciation of humanism by the nationalist and racist forces which seized power in Germany in 1933. The immediate consequence was that the second pillar on which the international position of the German language had rested for more than a century began to crumble - the world-wide reputation of German culture and the international respect for German academic learning and research. Many who had earned this respect through their achievements in intellectual life took it away with them when driven from their country, which had fallen into the hands of murderers and torturers. These political criminals are, we must not forget, the killers in our tragedy. It was German hands which struck the first and, possibly, fatal blow to the international position of the German language. Today, among the languages of European origin, only English and Spanish can really claim importance in international communication. However, the international position of Spanish is mainly based on the communication in and among the Spanish-speaking nations and national minorities who, with the exception of Spain and a few smaller territories, form a Spanish-speaking zone which is still expanding to the north. Only English stands a good chance of being the main language of the emerging global society. In addition to its status as the first or the second language in many countries, and its increasing role in traditional fields of international cooperation such as trade, diplomacy or military operations, English has come to serve as practically the only accepted medium of communication in a number of important areas of human activity associated with progress and modernity, such as promising fields in the natural sciences, international traffic and tourism, and the film and entertainment industry. In these and other areas English offers to an everincreasing number of people the chance of borderless communication and the opportunity to achieve their purposes without the need to overcome the barrier of a foreign language. For some people, particularly when they have been born in an English-speaking country, the temptation is irresistible to assume that they can also neglect cultural differences. Whereas for centuries going abroad meant learning another language and getting acquainted with another culture, in other words, becoming a richer personality, today some competence in English appears to remove such necessities. Those who speak English may get the impression of being - more or less - at home everywhere. This helps to be quicker, more mobile and more efficient, which corresponds to modem ideals of life and work. To superficial observers the whole world seems to be steeped in English. It is an impression which may breed irritation. I remember a British colleague from the endangered species of foreign-language teachers imitating tourists from England in Spain and

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their surprised statement: "Those chaps don't speak English!" It may also lead to prejudice which breeds aggressive arrogance, particularly if English is used to transport and propagate a particular way of life. 1 Such attitudes threaten the cultural diversity of mankind, which is at least as important as the diversity of the biosphere we try to preserve. In any case, English has reached a degree of world-wide importance which goes far beyond the traditional role of internationally used languages. How should this new role be discussed and explained? The term "International English" for a particular variety of this language is typically used to describe its position in the world resulting from colonialism and migration. Its new and unique role in the age of globalisation seems to be better captured by the term "Global English". But how can we precisely define the new aspects of the world-wide role of English: As a neutral tool for bordercrossing communication all over the world or rather as a form of political power and cultural dominance in the global society of tomorrow? Only for the function of English as a neutral tool of international communication would its frequently used characterization as a new lingua franca be satisfactory and acceptable. Originally, the term "lingua franca" was used to denote a link language spoken around the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea, serving merchants and sailors from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds as a medium of communication. Its basis was derived from Italian idioms, but it also included Greek and Arabic language elements. Therefore in linguistics, lingua franca - in its proper sense - denotes a language used for a restricted range of communicative purposes and combining elements from more than one language. Generally speaking, lingua franca is a hybrid language for specific functions, used in a larger territory in which various national languages are spoken. If lingua franca is to be more than a metaphor for the global role of English, a precise definition of the functions and situations to which this term applies is required. 2 In fact, various attempts have been made to identify a particular variety of English for which, linguistically, the term "lingua franca" could make sense. An important characteristic of a lingua franca seems to be that the role of the native speaker or rather of the ideal native speaker as a source of linguistic norms and correct usage is not consistent with the hybrid and functional nature of this kind of language. It is, therefore, only logical that David Graddol (1999) 3 puts special emphasis on the decline of the native speaker in absolute numbers, when analysing the new role of English as a global lingua franca, particularly in view of the new conditions developing in Europe.

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Graddol suggests distinguishing two types of second language. The first definition identifies those countries "where English serves a role in intranational communication", "although only a minority of the population may actually understand and use English". The second definition refers to "an L2 speech community as one which is 'norm creating' - that is, developing its own institutionalised variety of English. These are the so-called ' N e w Englishes': mainly in former British colonial territories." 4 As Graddol points out, neither definition can be applied to the newly developing situation in Europe, where, as a consequence of the role of English as a global lingua franca, we can find "an increasing number of fluent speakers of English who do not conform to the traditional definition of L2 speaker". Instead, he suggests the linguistic model of 'speech communities' which "redefine themselves as cross-border affiliation groups rather than as geographic groups in national boundaries". 5 This seems to be in accordance with the concept of "Euro-English" or "Mid-Atlantic English" as proposed by Marko Modiano (2000). 6 This is thought to be a variety of English spoken by "competent non-native speakers", whose pronunciation cannot be identified geographically and as "a copy of native-tongue usage". Their vocabulary is not restricted to British usage but also includes terms and expressions from American English. Spelling, too, shows and accepts American influence. Generally speaking, Mid-Atlantic or Euro-English "is not firmly based on a prescriptive standard, but instead is seen as a descriptive model which incorporates a wide range of possible usage". 7 In fact, the concept of EuroEnglish is a logical consequence following from Modiano's theoretical point of view "that native speakers of major varieties are simply one group among many that collectively comprise the English-using world. Thus, competent non-native speakers of English are placed on an equal footing in a centripetal model". 8 The question is how realistic the model of EuroEnglish as a variety in its own right can be and how far it agrees with our insights into the nature of languages. In actual communication it is certainly not necessary, as Modiano is right to assume, "to achieve near-native proficiency in one 'prestige' variety". 9 Such views may help to define realistic aims for foreign-language teaching. But Modiano's as well as Graddol's motivation when challenging the prestige of true-born English speakers as models of correct and acceptable usage is of a much more fundamental character. To Graddol the very concept of well-defined identities which are associated with definite languages is outdated and will give way to "new formations of identity; greater mobility; and a new hierarchy of languages which places most European citizens in a plurilingual context". 10 What kind of new identities will develop and what the relationship of language and

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culture will be, seems to be an open question. On the one hand, Graddol (2001) 11 regards it as a "key aspiration of the new European project" to roll back the centuries-long development "which created monolingual cultures built around standardised national languages and to create a new, borderless territory in which the majority, if not all, citizens are multilingual". 12 On the other hand, he cannot help noticing that the present spread of English "is taking Europe in a rather different direction - towards a form of multilingualism in which languages have a hierarchical relationship, and towards a society in which some languages are more equal than others". 13 Modiono is much more outspoken when referring to Euro-English "which allows Europeans ... to retain their divergent cultural distinctiveness" as "one possible way to counteract the impact of Anglo-American cultural, linguistic, and ontological imperialism". 14 I confess to sharing the fears that the cultural richness of Europe is in danger, but I can't share Modiano's hope that this way it will be possible to target features of the language "which have currency in the communication process". 15 In fact, the implication that currency could be a metaphor for language is highly questionable. Taken in the meaning of money, which seems to be intended here, it is the function of currency to make different things comparable by reducing qualitative characteristics to quantitative units. Such a comparison, however, fails to grasp the very nature of language, which is much more than an instrument of communicative exchange. Language provides a potential for creativity which combines linguistic competence with intellectual as well as emotional capacities. Any development of language is embedded in a definite cultural context and contributes to a definite culture. Therefore languages embody cultural history, particularly in their semantics, which may be regarded as the core of any language. It is for this very reason that the success of communication often depends very much on the art of negotiating meaning. To assume "that as a lingua franca all speakers of English have the same right of access and accountability for the development and definition of the language," 16 is not much more than a nice illusion. And to believe that "systems of marginalization, of prestige accents and of Euro-centric notions of the supremacy of European culture and societal organisation" will no longer be operative "when English is deemed to be a lingua franca" sounds politically correct but is far from reality. In fact, there will never be a living language that is cultureless. Just as speaking cannot be separated from thinking, it is equally impossible to use and understand the potential of a language without its cultural context. In spite of all these critical objections, however, it seems plausible to assume that certain functions of English in border-crossing communication

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can be described adequately as a new lingua franca, because these functions are confined to definite spheres of border-crossing culture. In this communicative role it may have a much wider and much more varied thematic scope in communication, and its linguistic and rhetorical means may show a higher degree in sophisticated standardisation than a traditional lingua franca. Nevertheless, this modern lingua franca is also restricted in its domain and in its repertoire. Hence, the assumption that part of the communicative use of English in the emerging global society indeed constitutes a modem lingua franca does not provide an answer to the challenge which global English presents to the national identities making up Europe and its cultural richness. A really intriguing question is: Why has the linguistic category of lingua franca become so popular in linguistics when trying to account for the new dimension in the international role of English? Is it because of its close connection with trade and commerce? Do these historical roots give this term an appeal of modernity? Or is it rather the subconscious attempt to avoid an alternative interpretation of the dominant position of English one can't help thinking of when considering the history of languages. In fact, it was not the lingua franca of the Mediterranean that was the dominant language of Western Europe before the era of nation-building and the emergence of national cultures. It was Latin which, in turn, was the heritage of the Roman Empire. Under Roman rule the conquered territories had been transformed radically and a Roman society had been established. It is true that the Roman Empire was also a multilingual and multicultural melting-pot. But the result was a unifying culture whose character was Roman and whose language was Latin. Up to the present, those parts of Europe which for a long time were Roman provinces still bear the stamp of Roman culture. And their languages are a Latin offspring. Only in England was the impact of the Roman Empire so thoroughly erased by the Anglo-Saxon invaders that Latin influence had to be brought in again by the Norman conquerors. It was medieval Latin and its dominant role in all decisive spheres all over Western Europe - in church, education, scholarship, culture and politics which created a border-crossing linguistic and mental unity. Hence, it is Latin that appears to provide a more adequate model to predict and understand what a comparable position of English in uniting Europe could mean for languages whose international role is insignificant or decreasing, as is the case with German. Only in this context does it make sense to speak of "the fate of European languages in the age of globalisation". A lingua franca, which by definition serves a restricted range of communication only, will never be able to threaten the national role of languages nor to exclude them

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totally from international life. A new Latin, however, would establish a new imperial culture and reduce national languages to the status of local dialects. In contrast to Latin in medieval Europe, English as a new Latin would be both the language of English-speaking national cultures and the language of the strongest power in the world. Under these circumstances there is no reason to hope for equal partnership in the use and the further development of English. Whether English will take up the position of a new Latin depends first and foremost on the strength of the national cultures and their international attractiveness. In other words, the present and future role of English is not primarily the result of aggressive attitudes and strategies of the Englishspeaking world or of particular English-speaking countries, although one could refer to more than one example pointing in this direction. In a world which is moved forward by competition, it would be naive to blame people for using their chance. In my view, an imperial position of English in the European and global societies of tomorrow would not be the result of defeat, but of surrender. Even in the Roman Empire it was probably culture which counted more than political suppression. Today we live in a free world, in which cultural ideals and standards are much more influential than political or military strength. Hence, in the first place, it will be the decision of the national communities themselves, in particular of their elites and their younger generations, whether they live and develop their own heritage in the continuous process of border-crossing exchange or, instead, prefer to accept English, particularly American English, as the expression of modernity and try to pose as Americans. They would then risk resembling people who hope to be successful by copying the manners and products of others. How much depends on the prevalent intellectual mood is today exemplified to a truly extreme extent by German society. Let me start with some observations on academic life which I would then like to place in a broader context. Universities are rightly considered to be the apex of the educational system and they are expected, at least, to act as centres of the intellectual life in society. As places of research and scholarship universities are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, which, by its very nature, is an international phenomenon. At the same time, universities have been the most important institutions for the development of a national culture and a national consciousness. This double role, however, is not evenly spread over the spectrum of the various academic disciplines, and we have to bear in mind these differences when considering the effects of globalisation on international academic communication. These differences also provide a remarkable argument for the necessity of distinguishing between English as a new lingua franca or as a new imperial culture.

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During the Middle Ages and even for a long period afterwards the European universities knew only one language and this was Latin. Of course the German universities were no exception. It was not until 1688 that Christian Thomasius, a Professor of Law at Leipzig, for the first time in the history of German universities, dared to give a lecture in German. It was an academic innovation which his university didn't appreciate at all so that he was forced to go elsewhere. In the two following centuries, however, German universities as well as universities in other European countries made a remarkable contribution to the development of national languages, particularly in education and academic scholarship, but also in other fields of great significance for the process of nation-building such as law and politics. United by the common pursuit of knowledge, the academic world more or less continued to be an international community, but it no longer had an international language. Instead, some national languages, among them German, gained great international prestige because of the quality of academic work in their countries. About half a century ago this multilingual period came to an end, at least in the natural sciences. The Second World War made the United States of America the leading power of the western world, not only in the political and in the military sense, but also in science. This rapidly increasing leadership of American science in a continuously growing number of research areas has been first and foremost the result of the enormous efforts the United States has undertaken to promote research in promising fields and to expand its institutions of higher learning. The steep rise in American publications presenting the latest scientific findings quite naturally increased the importance of English in the world of science. It also raised the attractiveness of American universities for young people all over the world, particularly for those with English as a first or second language, of which for historical reasons there is a vast number. In addition, English has attained the status of being the first foreign language in most, if not all, European educational systems. This is leading to an ever-growing number of people with considerable communicative competence in this language. Meanwhile, the United States can make use of well educated and highly motivated young people from all over the world to enhance its international leadership in science. A superficial assumption could be that the emergence of a world-wide culture speaking, writing and of course also thinking in English will be the inevitable outcome of this development. Together with the political power, the economic strength and the cultural influence of the United States this would, in fact, establish a new imperial culture, reducing the other national languages and cultures to a colonial status and making the so-called global

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village some people dream of nothing more than an American village or rather a place which would resemble the not so elegant districts of N e w York. But is this really the only perspective history has to offer? Of course it is true that if academic research is an international phenomenon and if universities are the most important institutions of research, the composition of their professoriate as well as of their student body should be international. Intemationality, however, cannot be achieved by domination and surrender, but should be based on equality and mutual respect. Hence, a community which is truly international cannot be monolingual but must be multilingual. So far this is only a necessity for the universities on the European continent, but that need not be the end of the story. The question we have to address is whether academic multilingualism has a basis in the reality of academic research and teaching. In other words, is it possible to distinguish between academic disciplines which on the one hand form a monolingual, almost entirely English-speaking international community, and other academic disciplines which, by the very object of their study, are closely related to a national culture? English, in contrast to the German concept of "Wissenschaft", makes the distinction between science and the humanities. There can be no doubt that science, or, to be more precise, the natural sciences today constitute an international culture whose language is English. The change to English has been so radical that famous German science journals not only publish in English but have even taken on English names. Of course the end of German as a language of science, which in the course of two centuries developed a particular literary quality, is also a severe cultural loss. At the same time we have to bear in mind that the natural sciences are characterized by a relatively clear separation between doing research and communicating about research. As has been shown by linguistic studies, it is definitely not the purpose of research articles when reporting about a particular piece of research in science to describe the stages of the intellectual process in its intricate complexity of trial and error, of assumptions and corrections. It is rather the intention to present and discuss the starting point of the work, the methods used and the results obtained in a standardized form which typically obeys particular stylistic conventions and rhetorical strategies. As has been shown by John Swales (1990) 17 in his analysis of "English in academic and research settings", following Hoey (1979) and others, the research article is a particular genre with "its own quite separate conventions, its own processes of literary reasoning and its own standards of argument, within all of which one powerful shaping paradigm is that of the problem-solution text type". 18 In other words, on the basis of the English rhetorical tradition, a highly standardized communicative

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repertoire has been developed for the natural sciences which may be referred to as a new lingua franca, because it is only a functional medium of communication on a restricted sphere of activities and purposes. In contrast, it is characteristic of the humanities that studying phenomena and defining insights into these phenomena are parts of the same intellectual process because it is the semantic potential of the particular language used which provides both indispensable instruments of analysis and the necessary material for expressing the results. Accordingly, it would be against the very nature of research in the humanities to separate the act of investigation from the act of communication. Instead it is only possible either - in a second step - to translate the results into another language (which so far has been the usual procedure in international communication) or to give up one's own language as an instrument of, as well as a potential for academic work. The latter alternative would have a disastrous effect on the rank of the language which is being excluded from the realm of academic and scientific thinking, because, as the eminent German scholar Karl Voßler once remarked, a purely poetic literature, without scientific writing, is nothing more than a written dialect. 19 Scientific thinking has a deep influence on modern society and this influence is increasing steadily. It is therefore hard to deny that a European country would face considerable consequences if the society and the academic community, particularly in the humanities, no longer spoke and thought in the same language. Moreover, both the object of study and the semantic potential of the language are often deeply influenced by a definite national culture and its intellectual history. This is especially true for literature, philosophy, law, history and related academic fields which are of great importance for the self-perception and the traditions of a national community. There are, admittedly, also academic areas outside the natural sciences where - together with new approaches in research - English has made its impact, such as in economics, which, for obvious reasons, is turning towards a globalised perspective, or in some areas of linguistics. Nevertheless it is difficult to imagine how the traditions in the humanities, in law and in the social and political sciences could be continued if the academic community abandoned the languages in which for centuries the cultural and intellectual treasures of the nations have been preserved. It would be either foolish or arrogant not to see the dangers which may result from such a far-reaching cultural break for the development and for the mental stability of a national community. Incidentally, the newly founded International University of Bremen which uses English as the language of instruction and regards itself as a model for higher education in Germany offers study programmes in the humanities which have practically no relation to German history or culture.

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The answer to the threat of cultural loss cannot, of course, be a return to the past. In the emerging global society internationality of academic work is no longer confined to the border-crossing exchange of ideas, methods and findings, but it is also an omnipresent linguistic reality of research and teaching. If we want to preserve and continue the cultural richness of mankind, the academic community will have to accept the task of working and communicating in a multilingual context - not only world-wide, but at any given place. In this multilingual academic community English will have a central position, not only as the lingua franca of the natural sciences, but also as one of the important links between the various academic fields, particularly between science and the humanities, because otherwise the distance between the "two cultures", which C. P. Snow deplored, would widen. Since, generally speaking, the object of academic study is the reality of our world in all its complexity and diversity, there is a chance for such a multilingual academic communication which could preserve and enhance the cultural richness of the world. A chance, however, is a challenge. Whether a national academic community will take up this challenge, depends on their interest in the life and the fate of their nation, of their culture and of their language. And this, in turn, will interact with and, to a large extent, depend on the intellectual attitudes prevalent in the national community. It is for this very reason that I am worried about the fate of German. Indeed, it is hard to find another European society in which so many people are ready and even eager to give up their national identity. A good case in point is provided by the present efforts of university reform. One important proposal is to divide the four or five year degree courses into two study cycles or study stages, each leading to a degree, so that we would have a sequence of two degrees instead of one final degree as at present. On the whole, I am very much in favour of this consecutive study structure, because it would allow for more differentiation, either between a more practical and a more theoretical orientation or between fundamental studies and specialized studies and because it would allow considerable flexibility in combining different study programmes. Lastly, it would promote international mobility, particularly with universities in the English-speaking world, because we would then no longer have one degree, but a first and a second degree. I also accept that as a consequence of this model we should give up the "Diplom" as the typical German final degree, because I know that the usual translation as "diploma" is misleading and discriminating. We should follow the Austrian example and call it "Magister", which would correspond to our mutual tradition. And we should revitalize the Baccalaureate as a first degree whenever this makes sense. Both names would be more or

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less correctly understood in the international academic community. And whoever has read or seen Goethe's drama on Dr. Faustus would recognize them as part of German culture. An ideal solution, or so one might think. Those, however, who take a look at the present public debate in Germany, may get the impression that the paramount aim of reform consists in abolishing the German degrees and introducing the English Bachelor and Master degrees, or rather the American degrees of Bachelor and Master, because the argument most frequently used in their favour is that these are the international degrees. Some even suggest introducing the PhD instead of the German doctoral degrees which would, in fact, be a kind of re-import, because the Doctor of Philosophy or rather the Philosophiae Doctor was modelled on the Humboldian Doctor Philosophiae. As this historical example shows it is indeed highly useful to study international experience in the academic field and there is undoubtedly a lot to be learned from successful American research universities. In fact, however, the new two cycle or two tier degree courses resemble the American degree structure only very superficially, because the German Bachelor is primarily intended as a professional qualification and not as an academic education. The surprising thing is that there isn't much thorough analysis of American higher education in the present German university reform debate, because the most important aim is to design shorter degree courses which provide a better-structured professional qualification. Nevertheless, particularly for the public, the aim seems to be to look as American as possible. One could even say this in the literal sense of the word. There is more than one publication about the new bachelor and master courses showing German graduates in American gowns with mortar boards. This is all the more ridiculous in a country which in the late sixties took foolish pride in destroying its own traditions in academic appearance and self-presentation. And it is especially astonishing as we today know quite a lot about the effects of signs and symbols in society But in their desperate attempt to defend or regain an internationally respected position for German academia too many people forget that second-hand products are often thought of as second-rate. In this respect, German academic policy is fully in line with strong tendencies in German society. This is true for politics and for the economy, for culture and for advertising and especially for the media, as one can easily see, hear and read everywhere. In fact, sometimes one gets the impression that German society is drunk with an idealized picture of American society In this respect, there is no difference between the political parties. It was the old German Government headed by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl which combined the reform of university studies with the experimental

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introduction of American degrees. It was the present German Government headed by the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder which continued this and, when starting their economic policy, held a conference on - as the English theme read - Germany as a pioneer square (I hope you've an idea what that could mean). Again, it was the students' organisation of my own party, the Christian Democratic Union, which has just recently organised a congress (or should I rather say 'staged an event'?) under the fascinating English motto "Education now". In all these cases, the message is clear: German is out and English, or rather American English, is in. Business has long shown a strong trend to dress up as American as possible, for instance by giving new products English names and even by renaming old German products and services. An especially repugnant example was set by German Telecom, a privatised former state enterprise. And when the Euro was introduced, German banks distributed so-called "starter kits" to their customers. The attitude behind all this was most poignantly expressed by a leading representative of German business who characterized himself as an American with a German passport. As can be easily imagined, entertainment and advertising have yielded almost totally to the temptation of appearing modern by using English. Most music bands have English names, for example, "Element of Crime" - crime against what, one is inclined to ask. My own university, the famous Humboldt University in Berlin, in the hope of appearing fashionable, put its annual ball under the intriguing motto "Landscape of Human Senses" (whatever that may mean). An increasing number of commercial advertisements are in English, ranging from witty to silly. Cities also hope to improve their international image in this way. Frankfurt on Main took the lead with the fanciful slogan "We make markets". And when I return to Dresden, I'll be welcomed at the airport by a large poster promising "Success included". There is an increasing number of shops, particularly those which are expensive and aim at appearing elegant, which take on English names. The leading German science organisations also contributed to this development when they gave their initiative to encourage public interest in scientific research the English name "PUSH" which is the abbreviation of "Public Understanding of Science and the Humanities". Examples like these could be given in large numbers. It is this trend which, intentionally or subconsciously, is creating and spreading the impression that English is the only language that symbolises progress and modernity. Meanwhile the preference of English has become so aggressive that I do not hesitate to call it a kind of public pressure. It would be unfair to ignore the fact that these trends also meet with disapproval and criticism. Outstanding scholars such as Wolfgang Frühwald 2 0

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and Martin Gauger 21 have voiced their concern, although with an undertone of sadness and resignation. Jürgen Trabant 22 made a profound and highly critical analysis of the global impact of English on academic writing and thinking. Public figures have made thoughtful comments on the critical situation of German. 23 Recently, the Academy of German Language and Literature deplored the decline of German as a language of the sciences and warned of the negative effect this may have on the quality of the democratic discourse. Similarly, the conference of German faculties of the humanities supported the use of German in research and academic teaching, and, although much too late, encouraged the universities, also in new courses, to confer degrees which continue or resume German academic traditions. At the same time, some groups have been making furious attacks on the quickly rising number of Anglicisms, and there are even not very enlightened demands to introduce protective legislation like in France. Let me add that such a step would be without any historical precedence in Germany and quite certainly, to say the least, not very effective. Too often, however, this is said to discourage people from taking public action in favour of German, which would, possibly, be regarded as being against the spirit of political correctness, which in present-day Germany includes an attitude of national humility. This may explain why, on the whole, resistance against the cultural and academic degradation of German is weak and hardly dares to speak out, although it is wide-spread. Instead, there are two predominant trends in the intellectual discourse. The first is simply to deny that the German language is in danger, arguing that the influx of foreign words and phrases has been normal for a living language throughout history and will become even more so in the age of globalisation and that, at least so far, there is no reason to assume that the ability of German to integrate foreign elements has been weakened. One could call this the linguistic argument, which practically confines itself to repeating undeniable platitudes from textbooks. The other trend is less of an argumentative, but rather of a practical kind. People with influence in various sectors of the German society hail the increasing use of English as the language of the future, support this development actively and ridicule those who lament the inevitable consequences for German. This takes us to the core of the problem. The question is not whether the German language is impaired in its grammatical structures or in its lexical stock, although one could cite examples for both. Nobody can deny that an exchange with other languages as well as with other cultures may indeed be a source of enrichment. It is rather the cultural status and the role of German for expressing human ideals, insights and aspirations which is at stake. This

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position is not necessarily in danger because we are approaching a globalised world. German, not only in its international but also in its national role, will be threatened if this challenge is not taken up, because then, inevitably, German society would become part of an empire of American culture. In order to understand this situation, which is unique in present-day Europe, we must consider the crucial importance that the Westernisation of the larger part of post-war Germany had for the success of the Federal Republic and for the stability of German democracy. It was the myth of Germany's special way in history which played into the hands of the undemocratic and nationalist forces who strangled the Weimar Republic, unleashed the Second World War and drove the German nation into its deepest catastrophe. It was the alliance with the Western world and especially with the United States which gave the larger part of the divided nation a new historical chance. The longer the division of Germany lasted, the less hope there was of national unity. And more and more West Germans preferred to be citizens of the free World and of the uniting Western Europe. For an increasing number of Germans, Germany and her history was more a legacy than a heritage. To most Germans the chance of unity came totally unexpectedly. And for too many of the West Germans it meant nothing more than the addition of East Germany to the Federal Republic. Their expectation was that, with their financial support, the new East German states would very soon live and look just like the old Federal Republic. Only few recognized that, simultaneously, an historical era had irrevocably come to an end and that the unification of the country would provide an enormous chance for a renewal of the whole of German society. This chance has hardly been used. And the inevitable result is disappointment and frustration, both in East and in West Germany. The last decade of the 20 th century saw the beginnings of globalisation. In this new era, East German dreams could not come true nor could the West German success story be continued. Moreover, the end of the cold war did not lead to eternal peace, as many had assumed, but the quickly changing situation forced Germany to accept a much larger share of the burden of international responsibility. At the same time, the fact that for the first time in her history Germany was not only united in peace and partnership with her neighbours, but that finally, as the result of German unification, the concepts of nation and democracy had come together, did not play a decisive role in public thinking. For too long in the years before 1989, the hope of achieving national unity had been practically abandoned or had even been criticized in West German society, whereas the membership in the Western alliance had been generally accepted, although with some dissent concerning the military

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consequences. It cannot be my aim to analyse the German mentality of the last decade. But it is my conviction that this would provide at least part of the explanation for the accelerating speed with which in Germany, much more than elsewhere, English is being taken as the expression of modernity. It seems an attempt to escape from German history, to get rid of a country which is no longer successful, but proves to be slow in defining and accepting reforms, to repeat the West German miracle of the fifties by behaving like the star pupil of the western world. And as it is an individualistic solution to the problem, it is not only a comparatively easy way, but grants the satisfaction of being more modern and more westernised than others. In my view, this is yet another example of our national leaning towards extremist attitudes and of our lack of historical balance. There can be absolutely no doubt that we Germans have many good reasons to be thankful to the people of the United States of America for their support in defending or regaining our freedom and in re-uniting our nation. Today the United States bears the main responsibility in the world for peace, and it is our duty to accept our share of international responsibility in reliable solidarity with the United States. In addition, America is the leading power in almost every aspect of life and it is in our interest to have close and constructive cooperation. But all this cannot justify an attitude of cultural surrender, which is fashionable today in German society. It is not the bizarre mixture of German and English into so-called "Denglish" which really threatens the future of German. It is the wide-spread contempt for our own mother tongue which makes us an object of scientific curiosity and the theme of this conference. Nobody can predict the further course of history and of course I do not want to accept that German is seriously endangered. But if the rise of English to the position of the leading language in the emerging global society should seal the fate of German as the language of a living culture, this would not be the fault of the Americans or of the English-speaking world. It would be a self-inflicted tragedy.

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Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Cameron (2000), 38-42. See Braj B. Kachru (1996), 906-913, where the function of lingua franca or contact language is described as one aspect of the global role of English. In contrast to this: David Crystal (1997), 8 - 1 2 . He uses the temi "lingua franca" in a more general sense as a "common language". David Graddol (1999), 57-68. See also Crystal (1997), note 2. Graddol (1999), 67. Graddol (1999), 67. Marko Modiano (2000), 33-37. Modiano (2000), 34. Modiano (2000), 35. Modiano (2000), 35. Crystal (1997), 68. Graddol (2001), 47-55. Graddol (2001), 52. Graddol (2001), 53. Graddol (1999), 34. Graddol (1999), 35. Graddol (1999), 36. Swales (1990). Swales (1990), 119. "Eine lediglich poetische Literatur, ohne wissenschaftliches Schrifttum, ist geschriebener Dialekt, keine vollwertige Literatur." (Karl Voßler, Geist und Kultur in der Sprache, Heidelberg 1925, p. 236) Quoted by Lothar Hoffmann (1976) as an introduction to his book Kommunikationsmittel Fachsprache. Frühwald (3/2000), 10-15 and (1997), 385-394. Gauger (1999), 85-101. Jürgen Trabant (2000), 189-203. See e. g. "Plenarprotokoll" of the 212th session of the "Deutscher Bundestag", of January 24, 2002.

References Cameron, Deborah 2000 Good to talk? The cultural politics of 'communication'. The European English Messenger IX/1: 38-42. Crystal, David 1997 English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Frühwald, Wolfgang 1997 Die Sprache der Wissenschaft. In: Was kann Naturforschung leisten, 385-394. Halle (Saale) (Nova Acta Leopoldina, vol. 76/303). Frühwald, Wolfgang 2000 Deutsch als Sprache der Wissenschaft. Aviso. Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Bayern: 10-15. Gauger, Martin 1999 Die Hilflosigkeit der Sprachwissenschaft. In: Christian Meier (ed.), Sprache in Not? Zur Lage des heutigen Deutsch, 85-101. Göttingen. Graddol, David 1999 The decline of the native speaker. In: English in a changing world, ALLA Review 13: 57-68. Graddol, David 2001 The future of English as a European Language. The European English Messenger X/2: 47-55. Hoffmann, Lothar 1976 Kommunikationsmittel Fachsprache. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Kachru, Braj Β. 1996 English as lingua franca. In: H. Goebl et al. (eds.), Kontaktlinguistik / Contact Linguistics / Linguistique ele contact. Vol. 1: 906-913. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Modiano, Marko 2000 Euro English: Educational standards in a cross-cultural context. The European English Messenger IX/1: 33-37. Swales, John 1990 Genre Analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trabant, Jürgen 2000 Umzug ins Englische. Über die Globalisierung des Englischen in den Wissenschaften. In: Deutscher Hochschulverband (ed.), Glanzlichter der Wissenschaft. Ein Almanach, 189-203. Stuttgart: Lucius und Lucius.

English Rules the World. What Will Become of German? Rudolf Hoberg

Zusammenfassung Die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Deutsch und Englisch gehört zweifellos zu den am meisten diskutierten Sprachproblemen in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit. Es geht dabei um zweierlei: Um die Frage, welche Stellung das Deutsche - und andere Sprachen - bei der Vorrangstellung des Englischen heute einnehmen, weltweit und in Europa; und um die Frage, wie sich der englische Einfluss auf das Deutsche und auf andere Sprachen - auswirkt und wie er zu bewerten ist. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag werden beide Probleme erörtert und Lösungsvorschläge diskutiert.

1. Is German becoming Denglish? Without doubt many people in Germany will respond affirmatively to this question. Yet, further inquiry shows that most of them do not know what they are affirming or maintaining. Is German disappearing and being replaced by another language? Or is German simply changing in a manner that those who respond affirmatively consider false? A survey conducted by the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim in 1997 yielded this result: "Among those aspects of current language development viewed negatively, Anglicisms stand out the most" (Stickel 1999, p. 42). For a long time I have concerned myself with the question why this is so. Together with students in German Studies at the Technical University of Darmstadt I have evaluated and continue to evaluate letters sent to me personally, to the Society for the German Language, and to other persons and institutions.1 After the Commission for "better German" of the Society issued a paper I conceived (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache / Society for the German Language, 1999), the letters received in the first months of 2000 by the office of the Society were subjected to especially detailed analysis. It can be said without reservation that my previous comments

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on the critics of Anglicisms and my typology of the reasons for rejecting Anglicisms (see Hoberg 2000, p. 311 f.) retain their validity until today. Nonetheless, I have to emphasize that our results are not representative and could not be so, for the letters came almost exclusively from those who rejected Anglicisms. Consistently, the letter writers offered four reasons for their rejection: -

First assertion: Anglicisms are superfluous; there are enough German words or, alternatively, new German words could and should be coined. For example: Kids (still the most criticized Anglicism) in comparison to Kinder. Comment: There are no superfluous words, firstly because only exceptionally do languages contain totally synonymous words and secondly because for speakers and writers no word they use is superfluous; otherwise they would not use it. And of course Kids and Kinder have quite distinct meanings. This example, like many others, shows how those opposing Anglicisms often lack the ability to differentiate in the use of language.

-

Second assertion: Anglicisms make communication difficult. Comment: No one has ever attempted to prove this general assertion. Of course new words, including German words, can make communication difficult or even impossible when they are introduced into the everyday language from technical or special languages.

-

Third assertion: The use of Anglicisms is often nothing more than pretentiousness and swagger. Comment: Without a doubt there is a kernel of truth in this statement. The use of English words serves many contemporaries as the token of a modem attitude toward life; one is in, if one uses Anglicisms. Institutions such as the media have also proven susceptible to this fashion, so that for instance television stations in Germany employ the English word "news" instead of the German "Nachrichten" or entitle a program "Best of Fröhlicher Alltag" (Südwestrundfunk, 4.8.1998). But one can show off, make oneself seem important, and express ones' modernity by using German words as well. For the most part, such fashions have a short lifespan.

-

Fourth assertion: Due to identity problems - above all related to the Nazi past - Germans flee their language.

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Comment: This hypothesis has also yet to be in any way substantiated or proven. Though I am not able to go into the identity problems of the Germans here, it must be pointed out that English influences other languages, and this is especially true of the German used in Switzerland (though it is well known that the Swiss did not participate in the Nazi crimes). Linguists are often accused of only registering and analyzing data while they abstain from evaluation. The reproach is groundless in its all-inclusiveness, and above all it does not apply to those who employ scientific methods to develop criteria for the critique and cultivation of language, as is the case with the Society for the German Language. And such a cultivation of language must above all guard against any currying of populist favor and against any purely intuitive criticism of language. Moreover, it must admonish the public to judge according to the facts. In regard to Anglicisms, one must consider above all: -

It is true that the influence on German has greatly increased since 1945 and especially in the last few decades. Still such complaints are not new. They have been raised for over 100 years. I cite three texts from circa 1900 to exemplify this. In 1899 the General German Society for Language, an organization with many members, held its general assembly in Zittau and unanimously approved the following declaration: "With the ever growing influence of things English the number of foreign words borrowed from the English language is increasing in a dubious fashion. In this language phenomenon the old inherited defect of the German people emerges again: The overestimation of foreign things, a lack of self assurance, and a contempt for one's own language" (Dunger 1909, Foreword). The president of the language society Herman Dunger, who formulated this text, adds in his "Englanderism in the German Language": "The highest ambition of many a young German is to be taken for an Englishman. Much as the Germans earlier aped the French, they are now aping the English" (Dunger 1909, p. 3). And I have frequently cited Theodor Fontane who, in his novel of 1899 " D e r Stechlin", has the old man of Stechlin ask: "Does one still say déjeuner à la fourchette?" The reply to this: "Hardly, Papa. As you know, everything is now in English" (Fontane 1980, p. 65). Such comments and explanations could come from today's guardians of language if one simply replaced "Englishman" and "English" by "American."

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-

Compared to the total German vocabulary, but also to the lexical borrowings from other languages, the number of Anglicisms is still very low (see e.g. Busse 1999).

-

Anglicisms are found in great number only in certain types of texts and above all in advertisements, in certain specialised languages such as the language of cybernetics, and in certain radio and television programs. Contrary to popular opinion the language of youth does not contain an excessive number of English words. And in one special type of text written by young people, the Abitur-essay (high school examination essay), the proportion of English nouns is 0.06 %, while the total number of nouns deriving from a foreign language is 14% (see Grimm 2003).

-

The question is rarely raised why words from other languages and especially from English are viewed so negatively or even sensed as a threat. Should one not view them as an enrichment given that foreign words which have found a place in the German language are incorporated semantically and grammatically into the German system of language (today cool in German has a different meaning than cool in English)? Should one not adopt the understanding of foreign words expressed above all by Goethe in his "Maxims and Reflections" when he writes: "The power of a language lies not in its rejection but in its assimilation of what is foreign." (Goethe 1994, p. 508).

2. About the place of the German language in the world and in Europe In academic literature there is disagreement about the number of languages in the world. Recently it is above all Harald Haarmann - without question one of the most competent researchers in this area - who has dealt with this question (Haarmann 2001a and 2001b). As he points out, the answer to the question depends on basic criteria for which there is no generally recognized scheme of organization. So as a measure one can for example use the communication barrier. "Cultural anthropologists prefer to use this barrier to identify local communities of language. However where exactly the barriers occur between local language varieties is again a subjective matter and depends upon the language capabilities of the individual speaker. To many North Germans, Bavarian is absolutely incomprehensible, while others with a high sensitivity to language are able to deal with the German spoken in the South" (2001a, p. 36). Or one can use the linguistic criteria of the lexical disparity as a measure. "According to the proportion of common elements

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in the vocabulary, the language formation may be categorized either as a dialect of a language (e.g. when a majority of lexical congruence exists) or as an independent language (when there is a preponderance of deviation)" (2001a, p. 37). The role the written word plays among distinct varieties of language may also be of significance for qualifying them. "The status of Bavarian or Swiss-German with regard to the barrier of communication may be very different in comparison to other German dialects, but because both are under the umbrella of standard German (in terms of the interregional written language), they belong to the dialects of German" (2001a, p. 37). Finally, the view of the speaker of the language with regard to linguistic self-identification should not be ignored. "Among the most recent occurrences of linguistic differentiation is the separation of Croatian from Serbian, which according to the self-identification of their speakers, no longer form part of a Serbo-Croatian continuity. Rather they are seen as independent national languages with distinct cultural as well as social-political orientation" (2001b, p. 8). Based on such criteria Haarmann, as he modestly notes, "attempts an estimate", and concludes that there are 6417 languages in the world. Most of these languages are spoken by very few people: only 273 languages are spoken by more than a million people and these speakers comprise more than 85% of the world's population. Furthermore, only twelve languages are spoken as first and second languages by more than 100 million people. They are: Table 1. (All statistics from Haarmann 2001 b, p. llff.) Language

Number of Speakers (millions)

% of the world s population

Chinese English Hindi Spanish Russian Arabic

1210 573 418 352 242 209

23.6 11.3 8.2 6.9 4.7 4.1

Language

Bengali Portuguese Indonesian French Japanese German

Number of Speakers (millions)

% of the world s population

196 182 175 131 125 101

3.8 3.5 3.3 2.5 2.4 2.1

With regard to Europe I will draw on earlier publications by Haarmann (1993, p.50ff), which rank European languages by the number of speakers (only the first language speakers; the data refers to the period around 1990).

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At the top are the following 14 languages that have more than 10 million speakers: Table 2. (From Haarmann 1993, p. 53) Language

Number of Speakers in Europe

Russian German French English Italian Ukrainian Polish

135,769,000 91,473,000 58,120,000 56,390,000 55,437,000 43,235,000 38,231,000

Language

Number of Speakers in Europe

Spanish Romanian Dutch Serbo-Croatian Hungarian Portuguese Greek

28,616,000 23,741,000 20,230,000 14,604,000 12,425,000 10,100,000 10,075,000

The tables rank German, in terms of the number of speakers, twelfth in the world and second in Europe; it is ranked first in the European Union. The number of people speaking a language as a mother tongue certainly does not play the most important role for the transnational relevance; otherwise most people in the world would learn Chinese or Russian. But the number is also not insignificant, for the only languages of international import are those with comparatively large numbers of first and second speakers. So today English also occupies the top position as a foreign language because it is so widespread as a mother tongue. Two additional factors determine above all the transnational rank of a language: -

the historical-cultural factor; herein still lies for example the reason for the significance of French

-

the political-economic factor, which has been decisive in establishing the primacy of British and American English.

These factors, and above all the last one, determine the significance of a language for transnational scientific communication and for the decision about which language is used in publications, lectures, conferences, or teaching. The following graphics supply information about the development in the natural and social sciences and the humanities over the last 20 years (from Ammon 1998, p. 152 and p. 167):

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77,1

74,6

90,7

87,2

• English —X— Russian Japanese —A— French — · — German

10

Figure 1. Proportion of the languages in natural science publications from 1980 to 1996 (percentages): English - Russian - Japanese - French - German.

100

10 •

82,5

71,7

70,6

69,9

69,1

66,6

8

1 Τ

1 1974

1 1978

1 1982

1 1986

1 1990

1 1995

Figure 2. Proportion of the languages in social-science and humanities publications from 1974 to 1995 (percentages): English - French - German - Spanish.

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English is by far the most frequently used foreign language in Europe, German ranks second, French third (see Auswärtiges Amt 2000, p. 9).

3. Consequences If I understand it correctly, then today a widespread unanimity exists about two points. Firstly, all languages are equal. It is true that they differ in their structures, which has all kinds of consequences; but there are no linguistic or other reasons to refute this basic equality. From this derives an imperative to preserve and "cultivate" a plurality of languages with their distinct structures of meaning and perspectives and to foster a multilingual world. It is in the m o d e m and ever more uniform world that one must preserve or sharpen people's awareness that the demise or repression of a language always signifies a loss not only for the speaker of the language but, moreover, for all of humanity. In the second place, it is the modern world with its transnational and trans-regional communications (communicative relationships) that forces one to use rational criteria to reevaluate the significance of languages within the framework of these communications. N o one can deny that English occupies first place. English is the dominant language in the whole world; indeed it is the first world language in the history of mankind. Previous transnational languages such as Latin, Greek, or German, were only employed in certain regions of the world - in the case of the aforementioned languages in the Near East and in Europe. Today one can travel to all the continents: Everywhere English serves or will serve as the most important means of communication among the citizens of different nations. The primacy of English has led to, and will maintain, the role of English as the second language wherever it is not spoken as the mother-tongue. Consequently, English influences all languages, not only German. Only too seldom has consideration been given to the roles other languages beside English assume in international communication. One may love Estonian or Czech, but no one - not even Estonians and Czechs - would suggest lending these languages a special status in the communication between different peoples. In Europe, and especially in the European Union, two languages besides English have to be conceded a special status, German and French, and not for nationalistic reasons: German, because German speakers represent the largest language community in the European Union, because it has a tradi-

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tion as a foreign language - especially in Northern and Eastern Europe that still persists, and because today it occupies the second position after English as a foreign language; French, because it holds the third place among the mother tongues of Europe, because it has a long tradition as a foreign language, and because currently - in Europe and above all around the world - it remains one of the most important foreign languages. In recent years various institutions and associations - especially in Germany - have come out in support of multilingual capabilities, for instance -

in the "Tutzinger Theses about Language Policies in Europe" (see Deutscher Germanistenverband 1999); these were supported by various organizations including the Society for the German Language

-

in two resolutions of the General Assembly of the International Association of German Studies (IVG) concerning the use of German as a working language in the European Union and as an additional language in international commerce (see Internationale Vereinigung für Germanistik 2000a and 2000b)

-

in the declaration "German in a Multilingual Europe" of the Society for the German Language (see Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache 2000)

-

in a "Memorandum: Policies for the German Language" (see Stickel 2001)

-

in a "Call by the Society for the German Language and the Editorial Board of Duden", which was supported by many people and which requests that beside English and French German should serve as a working language in all European bodies and that the federal government and the governments of the German states ("Länder")do more than previously to support the German language and culture, both domestically and internationally (see Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache 2001)

In many parts of the world other languages besides English have gained a special significance: Spanish and Portuguese in the United States, for example. The importance of both languages will extend beyond the United States, given that - as the table above shows - they rank fourth and eighth respectively in the number of their speakers worldwide.

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During the last few years I have had the opportunity to study the situation of German Studies and the teaching of German as a foreign language in many countries. This allowed me to establish two things: firstly that universities, schools, and other educational institutions are accomplishing an impressive amount with regard to linguistic, literary, and didactic studies, curricula, teaching materials and the practice of teaching; secondly that the numbers of those learning is not very high - for the most part the numbers have decreased starkly in recent years - above all because it is difficult to motivate people to learn German. In my view the motivation problem is the greatest one in the area of German as a foreign language. Even people who highly appreciate Germany and Germans or residents of other German-speaking countries often do not understand why they should learn German. After all, they can get along well with English in the center of Europe and more generally in contact with those whose mother tongue is German. Thus it is appropriate to conclude with three short considerations or recommendations that could perhaps increase the motivation to learn German. -

It is first important that German speakers do more for their own language. Whenever Germans make efforts to address foreigners in their native languages or in English, it may well be taken as a sympathetic gesture and it certainly does not suggest the presence of nationalism in language use 2 ; but this behavior may also cause the German language to be regarded less highly and learned by fewer people. More and more frequently frustrated foreign colleagues tell me that their students do not find positions as interpreters, because ever more frequently Germans in foreign countries are abandoning the use of their native language, even when translators are available. One often applies the term "loyalty to language" in this context. Yet to me the term hardly seems suitable because it describes the individual's relation to his native language in a much too legalistic manner. Still, it is correct that the German population - especially its politicians and businessmen - needs to be repeatedly reminded not to neglect the German language.

-

With regard to the task of teaching German as a foreign language, one should focus on two goals, which at first glance may appear contradictory: On one hand as far as possible the teaching must be oriented toward practice. This task has gained preeminence during the last few decades mainly because the teaching of German related to the professions - and, lately, especially business German - has received more

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emphasis and attracted more and more students. On the other hand, one needs to be aware not only that the learning of a foreign language advances communication and the exchange of information, but also that knowledge of another language has a value in itself. The structures, the semantics, and the "world view" (Humboldt) of another language offer a new way of seeing and new perspectives and serve to open the way into another culture. And let us not forget that through learning a difficult language one expands one's mind. -

Much is to be gained from learning a language like German, with its complex grammatical structure, merely receptively, so that it can at least be understood. Such learning is considerably easier and takes less time, but nonetheless offers important insights and enables communication between people who have a passive knowledge of each other's language. Each can speak and write in his or her mother tongue and thereby express him- or herself in a more differentiated manner than in a single foreign language.

Among the current commonplaces is one that says the world is changing ever more quickly and that globalization is increasing. Thus plans for language policies and promotion can only have relevance for the next few years or at best decades. No one knows how long English will maintain its preeminence. The proportion of English in the internet has already decreased while that of German has increased, so that German now "surpasses all other languages beside English" (Ammon 2000, p. 5). Will our grandchildren increasingly learn Chinese? Or Russian, which will probably attain a stronger position in Europe? However the world develops, everything must be done so that not just one but several languages are used for communication purposes in the world and in Europe, and so that through the increasing and receptive learning of language the speakers of the "little languages" will also have as many opportunities as possible to speak in their own language with those from other language communities.

Notes 1. I would especially like to thank Aram Pohosyan, Bettina Wallot and Alexander Winter for their detailed evaluations. 2. "The German should learn all languages, so no foreigner discomfits him at home, but also so he is at home everywhere" (Goethe 1994, p. 508).

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References Amnion, Ulrich 1998 Ist Deutsch noch internationale Wissenschaftssprache? Berlin. 2000 Wird deutsch verdrängt? Hinweise zum Bestand, zur Erklärung und zu Förderungsmöglichkeiten. Redetyposkript (masch.). Auswärtiges Amt - Kulturabteilung 2000 Auswärtige Kulturpolitik. Berlin. Busse, Ulrich 1999 Keine Bedrohung durch Anglizismen. Der Sprachdienst 1: 18-20. Deutscher Germanistenverband 1999 Tutzinger Thesen zur Sprachpolitik in Europa. Der Sprachdienst 6: 220-222.

Dunger, Hermann 1909 Engländerei in der deutschen Sprache. Berlin. Fontane, Theodor 1980 Werke, Schriften, Briefe. Abt. 1, Bd. 5. Darmstadt Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (ed.) 1999 Stellungnahme der Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache zum englischen Einfluss auf die deutsche Gegenwartssprache. Der Sprachdienst 6: 217-220. 2000 Deutsch im vielsprachigen Europa. Der Sprachdienst 6: 201-203. 2001 Aufruf der Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache und der Dudenredaktion. Der Sprachdienst 1 : cover page 4. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1994 Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Vol. 12, 12lh ed., München. Grimm, Hannelore 2003 Veränderungen der Sprachfähigkeiten Jugendlicher. Frankfurt/Main. Haarmann, Harald 1993 Die Sprachenwelt Europas. Geschichte und Zukunft der Sprachnationen zwischen Atlantik und Ural. Darmstadt. 2001a Babylonische Welt. Geschichte und Zukunft der Sprachen. Frankfurt/ Main. 2001b Kleines Lexikon der Sprachen. Von Albanisch bis Zulu. München. Hoberg, Rudolf 1994 Die Rolle der deutschen Sprache in Wissenschaft und Technik. DINMitteilungen 5, 329-35. 1996 Fremdwörter. Wie soll sich die Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache dazu verhalten? Der Sprachdienst 5: 137-142. 2000 Sprechen wir bald alle Denglisch oder Germeng? In: Karin M. Eichhoff-Cyrus and Rudolf Hoberg (eds.), Die deutsche Sprache um die Jahrtausendwende. Sprachkultur oder Sprachverfall? Mannheim, 303-316.

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Überlegungen zur aktuellen Sprachenpolitik. In: DAAD (ed.), Germanistentreffen Deutschland - Dänemark - Finnland - Island Norwegen - Schweden. Bonn, 25-29. Hoberg, Rudolf 2002 Zur Stellung der deutschen Sprache in der Welt und in Europa. In: DAAD (ed.), Germ anis ten treffen Deutschland Argentinien, Brasilien, Chile, Kolumbien, Kuba, Mexiko, Venezuela. Bonn, 15-22. Internationale Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) 2000a Resolution zur Verwendung von Deutsch als Arbeitssprache in der Europäischen Union. Wien (masch.). 2000b Resolution zur Verwendung von Deutsch als weitere Sprache im internationalen Wirtschaftsverkehr. Wien (masch.). Stickel, Gerhard 1999 Zur Sprachbefindlichkeit der Deutschen: Erste Ergebnisse einer Repräsentativumfrage. In: Gerhard Stickel (ed.), Sprache Sprachwissenschaft - Öffentlichkeit. Berlin, 16-44. 2001 Memorandum: Politik für die deutsche Sprache. Sprachreport 2: 8-10.

Language Policies in East and West. National Language Policies as a Response to the Pressures of Globalization Petra Braselmann

Zusammenfassung Eine der Antworten auf den Globalisierungsdruck ist ein deutlich zunehmendes Interesse an der Abgrenzung der eigenen Identität, vor allem durch die Sprache. Sprachpflege bekommt in den einzelnen Ländern einen gewaltigen Auftrieb, Sprachgesetze werden erlassen oder gefordert. Das französische Sprachenschutzgesetz von 1994 wird dabei zum nachahmenswerten Prototypen (ohne dabei allerdings den Umbruch in der französischen Sprachpolitik zur Jahrtausendwende zu beachten), der aber nicht einfach auf andere Länder übertragen werden kann: Zu unterschiedlich sind die jeweiligen historischen, ideologischen und politischen Voraussetzungen, zu anders sind die jeweiligen „Feinde", vor denen man sich schützen will. Der Beitrag analysiert aktuelle sprachpolitische Konzepte in West (Frankreich, Deutschland, Italien und Spanien) und Ost (Polen, Lettland, Slowakei, Rumänien und Ungarn) und arbeitet die unterschiedlichen Einstellungen zum Englischen bzw. zu anderen „erdrückenden" Sprachen heraus. Danach bedeutet „Globalisierung" durchaus nicht immer „Amerikanisierung", damit kann auch „Russifizierung" oder „Germanisierung" gemeint sein.

Languages and their speakers tend to resist linguistic and cultural amalgamation which in most cases is directed against English. Nevertheless, English leaves traces in the respective European languages and has, beyond that, become the language of international communication at the expense of the other "great" languages. English has become the most important (modern) "umbrella language". 1 Anglo-America assumes a model function and is transformed into an "umbrella culture" in virtually all walks of life. 2 Maintaining language standards internationally has thus gained substantial significance. Language protection laws according to the French model are passed or at least demanded. Until recently this process only applied to the countries of Western Europe. However, since the breakdown of the Iron Curtain Eastern European countries have also been infected by the "American Virus".

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Following a brief overview of the function of English in the world (1), recent developments in French language policy - which has become a model for other nations - are outlined (2) and subsequently recent developments in language politics in the East (4) and West (3) are discussed.

1. The "killer language" English English has outgrown the function of a national language and become "denationalized" as the lingua franca of the world. This first genuinely common language in the history of the world is fragmented along country lines into a bunch of new languages. Historically this fragmentation of English has been abetted by the British, who care little about the purity and correct usage of their language. They traditionally display a laissez-faire attitude contrary to the French, who have left no doubt that they want to spread an uncorrupted version of their language. In places such as the Ivory Coast, where French has been accepted as the lingua franca, it is true that the language has been simplified, but such varieties have been largely ignored (Görlach 2000: 630-632). After World War II America began to set the standards, and like the British the Americans did not pursue any specific language policy. There are different reasons for the predominance of English in the world (Braselmann 2002a: 298-302). One lies in the peculiar structure of the language, in so-called intertranslatability and, as Ineichen (2003: 405) notes, in the fact that other languages lack the flexibility, e.g., to serve as a computer language. This certainly applies to French with its stark normative tradition. The English understood by most people around the world is losing its similarity to British English. So Euro-English is not the English of the British or of the Americans, but rather the international English often only mastered by native speakers of English if they have had the experience of learning other languages. Yet this happens rarely: approximately 66% of the British lack knowledge of a foreign language. The "notoriously monolingual" British lack flexibility in adapting to other cultural and linguistic requirements, which causes them problems in the globalization process. The British government has recognized this in the mean time.3 America's increasing power and its influence on the media have called forth world-wide reactions. Americanisms are often stigmatized. Until recently this was even, or especially, the case in Great Britain, where at least such an "allergy to language" has been overcome, because the Americanisms are hardly recognized as such any longer (Görlach 2000: 626). World

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wide the "allergy" to the "killer language" obtains, mainly for four major reasons: 1. English is displacing other languages as the lingua franca national communications.

in inter-

2. English is replacing other languages in their role as a first foreign language. 3. English is "undermining" other national languages, so that one speaks of "Germeng", "Spanglish", and "Franglais". 4. English functions in competition to regional languages and is responsible for the demise of languages. To each point in detail: English or rather Anglo-American has become the lingua franca of an era marked by global networking, the New Economy, and the internet. Globalization has created a situation that necessitates such a world language. Now about 80% commercial negotiations worldwide take place in English, making it a prerequisite for participating in world trade. If these facts primarily affected the first and second tier in corporate hierarchies a decade ago, now the relevance of the lingua franca extends to the lower levels, and even workers and salaried staff increasingly attend language schools. Though in the 1960s the European Commission still composed 80% of all its texts in French, today French texts comprise only about 40%. And the proportion is still decreasing despite the immense efforts of the French government. Diverse studies, (e.g. Amnion 2002, 1998) indicate how the other great languages have lost their previous functions - how, for example, in science and international communications, German has given way to English. Countries acceding to the EU as part of its Eastern extension have to use English when communicating with international bodies. Thus, in future we will have three classes of member states: those privileged to have English as a mother tongue, those employing the working languages of German and French, and finally those, like the new member-states, that will be precluded from using their mother tongues. Switzerland with its four languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh) offers a special case in point: the increasing international need for English reduces the motivation to learn the languages of the country, especially Italian and Romansh (Koller 2000: 563-609). Ineichen (2003) relates how French has lost its status under the new school law, which regulates language instruction in the upper level of the common schools (Volks-

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schule) of the Confederation (2000). After English became obligatory beginning in the 7th grade (beside German in the Romansh and Italian speaking Cantons, beside Romansh or Italian in the German ones), French has become an elective. Since perestroika the influence of the Anglo-American model has spread to Eastern Europe. To the detriment of French and German, English is increasingly the primary foreign language. That - e.g. to most Russians - the United States epitomize economic well-being has engendered imitation of Anglo-American behavior and patterns of communication. This expresses itself linguistically in numerous Anglicisms and borrowings that, in many cases, replace older French borrowings or even German ones (Ohnheiser 2002: 149-165). While the above points (1 and 2) certainly correspond to a realistic assessment, this is less true with regard to the following points (3 and 4). Based on their corpus analysis of Anglicism usage in individual languages, linguists have long allayed fears: contrary to expectations and even in areas prone to Anglicisms (e.g. the press, the language of youth, music magazines, advertisement, and commercial texts) their usage is low.4 Yet this does not necessarily contradict the prognosis of the undermining and overwhelming effects of Anglicisms made so vehemently by their opponents and certain language preservation societies. Since the 1990s they have argued on another level and evaluated phenomena against the backdrop of their history of mentalities and not within but beyond the sphere of language (in political, ideological, social, and historical areas). 5 Their meta-discourse typically enlists the metaphors of threat, war, sickness, and death.6 Finally we come to the death of languages attributed above all to the "killer function" of English. In an impressive manner, Haarmann (2002: 152-170) not only demonstrates that the danger to "small languages" should be seen independently from the undeniable globalization of language through English, but also that the most endangered languages lie outside English speaking countries or more precisely in countries not directly influenced by English or ones in which it has little currency. The dissolution of the little languages takes place under the pressure of assimilation to dominant languages other than English: among them are Russian, Chinese, Portuguese in Brazil, and Spanish in Latin America. Where English is responsible for languages dying as in the United States or Australia, not the globalizing function of the language but the pressures of assimilation in everyday life are the cause. Once one has detected the supposed "killer function" of English - a call for the "language police" à la française seems the obvious response. Below

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we shall address the differences between countries answering that call, the instruments available to them, and the intentions behind their responses.

2. French language policy as a model French language policy has served as a model for other countries. But there is a problem in this, in that the international reception of French language legislation ends with the last law, Loi Toubon of 1994, and decisive changes have been made since then. After some painful experiences and digressions, France has found its way back to the normative power of usage, to the inviolability of normative use. One can ask why France has gained the role of the pioneer. There are at least two answers to this: one reason is that the French have had the longest ongoing debate about language norms; no other nation has such a tradition of language laws, which can be traced back to at least the 16th century.7 It is the special attitude of the French toward their language, their consciousness of norms, and their loyalty to language 8 that gives rise to legislation that is quite unique. Another reason is that, compared to other languages, the fixation on the classical norm in France led to inflexibility and reduced willingness to innovate whenever a new French designation was necessary. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely this that encouraged further borrowings. At the beginning of the 1970s those responsible for the cultivation of the language realized (much too late) that the traditional battle against Anglicisms would have to be extended into a terrain that had been hitherto willfully ignored, namely into areas of specialized terminology. The government constituted the first terminology commissions, which were supposed to cleanse the specialized language of Anglicisms and replace them with French neologisms. To the traditional arbiters of language neologisms were always suspect, because they seemed incompatible with bon usage. Yet instead of offering the traditional critique of neologisms, the highest authority now produced them. In this alone, however, lies an innovative potential quite distinct from the traditional cultivation of language. More and more the Academy is losing influence. In 1975 the traditional retrospective norm was superceded by one the state decreed in the form of the first modern language law. In 1994 the second law, the Loi Toubon followed. It is now in effect. Intended to tighten restrictions, this law was supposed to extend the prohibition of Anglicisms to the private sector as well. Yet, a ruling of the constitutional court citing "the right to freedom of expression" prevented this.9 During this period politically decisive action was taken to support the

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law protecting language: in 1992 the constitution was changed ("The language of the Republic is French"); citing the Treaties of Rome (1958) and Maastricht (1992) the French language was declared an object for preservation much like historic monuments - this occurred due to a concern about the displacement of French in a unified Europe. Currently (since the Decree of 1996)10 the orientation of language policy is receiving a different emphasis. The institutional organization is being reformed, the Academy re-evaluated. All official lists of words have to be revised. The government mandate resulted in Répertoire terminologique of 2000, a collection of approximately 3,500 words, and the database CRITER (2. July 2001). Initial analyses show that Anglicisms are now clearly being treated in a more liberal fashion; the prohibitions against English borrowings long established in French have been lifted (e.g. spot, groggy, manager), among them are many internationalisms. 11 The present shift in emphasis is partially due to the increased activity of the EU-Commission, which views some aspects of the law as incompatible with the principles of the European Union. The French are being forced to make emendations thus softening the rigid enforcement of the Loi Toubon. This is documented in the annual report to Parliament. One should also note in this context that France has not yet ratified the EU-Charter on the Support of Regional and Minority Languages. Article 21 (Loi Toubon) merely acknowledges the Charter in a non-committal manner: "The stipulations of this law ... do not oppose their use (i.e. the regional languages)". Five facets of the turning point and shift in attitude are documented in the following: 1. The official stance on language is becoming more lenient: the Academy now emphasizes that basically there are rather few Anglicisms in French and even admits that many government attempts at intervention have been unsuccessful, as can be read in the foreword to the government's Répertoire. 12 2. The law stipulates that all consumer information such as posters, instructions, labels, etc. are to be written in French or translated into French and employ the same size of lettering. This passage was weakened by an EU intervention, which made it clear that protecting the freedom of international trade took precedence over French national consumer protection (and not vice versa, as provided for by the French law). In France this led to the Circulaire du 20.9.2001, which offered pictograms and symbols to make a French translation superfluous. According to a ruling of the

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European Court of Justice on 12.9.2002 even the food labels no longer had to be translated, because English was easily comprehensible to the consumer. 3. According to the law, academic colloquia and conferences taking place in France have to be conducted in French. Documents not in French are to be translated. 13 Nonetheless, in France such events are increasingly conducted purely in English. 4. The implementation of the 1992 EU Charter on regional languages was rejected with a reference to the changed Constitution: "The language of the Republic is French". The incompatibility of this paragraph with the Charter (esp. article 7) that also grants the speaker of regional languages special rights beyond the purely private and familiar sphere was emphasized in the decision of 16.6.1999 by the Conseil constitutionnel. Those in favor of ratification in France invoked the example of other countries which had signed the Charter and which in part have already ratified it (Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Slovakia, Croatia) despite a corresponding article in their constitutions regarding the official language. 14 Moreover, one can cast doubt on the credibility of the French, who have committed themselves to a multilingual Europe 15 on one hand, but on the other hand have prohibited multiple languages within their territory to favor traditional uniformity. 16 The urgency of the problem for the French government evinced itself, when the Délégation générale à la langue française was renamed Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France in November 2001. The two axes of the new emphasis in French language policy are synthesized in this organization: the cultivation and promulgation of the national language and (now in addition) the support of regional languages. This seems to mark a clear turning point, one which the new director Bernard Cerquilini articulates clearly: he calls the still dominant, French monolingualism of the Revolution 17 a danger to the Republic, a historical catastrophe, and a terrorist conception of language. 18 Legislative measures underpinning this new beginning are exemplified in the Décret η. 2001-733 of 31. July 2001, which established the Conseil académique des langues regionales within the Academy to support regional language policies. 5. It is also noteworthy that the last Rapport au Parlement of 2002 19 is markedly shorter than its predecessors. It now only contains two parts; the first one rather tersely reports on national measures such as control actions, offers statistics exclusively concerning infringements against Article 2 (consumer information) of the law, and describes new edicts and

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activities in support of regional languages. The report about controls and punishments comprised the major part of the previous Rapports. Perhaps one can conclude from this that the "language police" are generally more reserved in their actions. The second part of the report deals with measures to advance the status of French in international bodies. The appendix is of interest in its report about a number of court findings. These evince the changing disposition toward language policy; for in contrast to the preceding years, the law is interpreted in a very lenient and flexible manner. On 9. May 2001 a court in Paris thus ruled that the English expression "The fashion awards" (instead of the suggested "Trophées de la mode") could be easily understood even by persons with limited knowledge of English; professionals well-acquainted with the international fashion milieu would in any case know the Anglo-American expression; the English phrase may therefore be employed. Similarly there exists no danger of confusing "playboy" and "play in the house" even among the French with only rudimentary English knowledge (Ruling on 21. February 2001), etc. To recapitulate: diverse indications suggest that a new orientation and liberal attitude toward English has been pursued in a consistent manner since the middle of the 1990s20: English or, as the case may be, knowledge thereof by the French is officially accepted as a fact, and the protection of the consumer no longer applies as the main legitimization for legislating language use as it still did with regard to the laws passed in 1975 and 1994 (Braselmann 1999: 128-130). The problem of the regional languages is also being addressed seriously. In other words, a gradual accommodation to EU principles is taking place, though certainly not always on a voluntary basis. The following considers aspects of language policy in other western and eastern countries against the background of the French prototype for language policy.

3. Language policies in western countries In Germany there were vehement attempts to introduce a language law à la française. If, in mid-1990s, the media still poked fun at the French law of 1994, one can ascertain an increasing sensitivity toward the incursions of English into German since the end of the 1990s. This finally led to the demand for a German purity law proposed by the CDU politician Werthebach (cf. Braselmann 2002b). Responding to inquiries on 31 October 2001 and 7

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February 2002 21 from both major factions of the Bundestag, the Federal Government held that a language law was neither worth striving for nor desirable and therefore decidedly rejected that legislative option. Only the procedures of the Berlin municipal administration have been revised (8 May 2001) and now enjoin the 140,000 employees of the public sector to avoid "unnecessary" Anglicisms. However, this is not backed up by sanctions. 22 Apart from these attempts, in Germany the attitude toward Anglo-Americanisms is principally tolerant or indifferent. This derives, in good part, from experience of the Second World War, after which the Germans have not been able to treat the cultivation of language and identity in an uninhibited manner. 23 The Spanish Constitution of 1978 lists Castilian as the official state language; the regional languages enjoy a co-official status in the corresponding regions. There is no official cultivation of language or language policy. Certainly at times a language law à la française has been demanded, but it was never realized.24 Instead the self-imposed cultivation of language by the large newspapers (FA Pais, El Mundo, ABC, La Vanguardia, etc.) and the news agency Agenda Efe and cultivation in the form style books (libros de estilo) play an important role. Analyses show that these media clearly deal with Anglicisms in a more descriptive fashion than French language policies 25 and much more so than French style books, which are even more restrictive (Braselmann 1999: 123-125). In the Spanish style books the Academy sets the norms but on occasion one decides against them and disposes liberally.26 The success of the style books in Spain can be attributed to this openness and to a basically descriptive stance, which play a prominent role in the normative discussion. Drawing on his empirical findings Lilienkamp (2001: 453) characterizes this as follows: "In Spanien formulieren die Gegner [von Angloamerikanismen] nicht so drastisch und emotional wie die Puristen in Frankreich, und die Befürchtungen äußern sich nicht so geringschätzig und spöttisch über Sprachreinhaltungsmaßnahmen wie die Laxisten in Deutschland". 27 Such a statement needs to be seen against the background of the actual goals of the hispanophone policies in the Post-Franco era: the unidad de la lengua and the convivencia de las lenguas take clear precedence over the traditional cultivation of purity (pureza) (Braselmann 2002a: 324-327). Although Italy - similar to France and Spain - has an academy and also participates in international language organizations, it ranks - compared to France and Spain - last on a scale measuring activities in language cultivation and policies. It has hardly any organizations for the cultivation of language.28 Books on style do not play the same role in Italy as in Spain.

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Empirical studies demonstrate that though such books are at times evaluative, setting norms is exclusively the function of the Academy, which, for its part, does not prescribe but rather advises descriptively (Sachs 2003). A m o n g the countries considered, Italy is the most open toward English, as proven by corpus analyses (Berger 2001). One possible explanation lies not least in the distinctive behavior of the speakers toward their language. Italy's efforts with regard to language policy center on so-called italianità, the spread of Italian at the expense of the numerous dialects. This could be the reason for never declaring English as a disruptive factor. One more reason for the Italians' tolerant attitude towards English lies undoubtedly in the fundamentally descriptive mode not only of the Academy but also of the non-professional linguists. 29 Normative questions are decided from the perspective of the majority of the language users, with reference to the present and not the past (as in traditional France).

4. Language policies in the countries of Eastern Europe Since the upheaval of 1989, but above all with the projected entry into the European Union, the countries of Eastern Europe have participated in the process of globalization, which has elicited policies of linguistic self-assertion and delimitation. Due to their distinct historical, political, and ideological circumstances, however, they react in a manner different f r o m the West European countries and choose to assert themselves against more languages than just English. Since 7 October 1999 Poland has a "Law about the Polish Language", which became effective on 9 May 2000. This law, which came into being during the negotiations for entry into the EU, aims to strengthen the Polish language and to stem the influence of German, Russian and English. The Preamble reads: ...given the experience, that historically the occupiers' and oppressors' campaigns against the Polish language were a tool of de-nationalization, (and) discerning the necessity to protect national identity in the process of globalization the Parliament of the Republic of Poland decrees... the present law.30 Here the term "occupiers and oppressors" refers to Germans and Russians. The law draws on the painful history of attempts to "Germanize" or "Russify" the indigenous population, which fell to Austrian, Prussian, and Russian rule after the Partition of Poland, as well as on the experience of persecution in

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the German and Soviet occupied areas during World War II; an integral element of that persecution aimed at the use of Polish (Grucza 1998: 118-136). "Globalization" cannot be equated with "Americanization" here, rather it relates more to the consequences of the entry into the EU and not least to the fears about a "United Europe of the German Nation". Only in Article 7, Paragraph 1, in which "foreign-language" product names, service designations, offers, advertisements, instructions, forms, invoices, receipts, etc. are expressly prohibited, does the demarcation against English become apparent. Article 11 responds with exceptions to these restrictive proscriptions: the use of proper names, foreign newspapers, magazines, books and computer programs, activities in the universities and schools, technical and commercial terminology. In contrast to the French law the Polish law does not introduce any radical changes into the language. Yet only the future will show whether against the background of this law a demand for the Polonization of international English terms will arise. There are already initial indications of this (Cirko 2001: 4). The articles 6, 7 (paragraph 2), and 8 also stipulate the use of Polish for international legal communication, a fact that Cirko (2000: 4) considers "important and sensible", but one that led to a reminder from the EU that such stipulations, in the limitations they put on the exchange of goods, contradict the ban on trade restrictions. In this regard one can expect the law to be amended (Gärtner/Hempel 2001: 9-14). Offenses against the law are punishable with (largely symbolic) fines equal to 50 to 100 Euro (Article 15). The Latvian language law of 6 October 1989 was passed to counter the influence of Russian. Latvian, which had been forced out of education and public administration in the course of Russification, has now become the official language of the country. After the Republic of Latvia declared independence on 4 May 1990, the law regulating the official language was variously emended and could take effect (Eckert 2002: 601, 602). Offenses are to be punished by fines: up to the equivalent of 200 Euro. Russian is now associated with occupation and violence, whereas the English language, which is also increasingly leaving its mark on Latvian (especially in the lexical area), is considered the language of the Free World (Blinkena 1995: 168-169). A second law, passed on 1 September 1999 and in effect since 1 September 2000, protects the status of minority languages and is therefore welcomed by the EU. 31 After separating from the Czech Republic on 1 January 1993, Slovakians became an independent people with their own state for the first time. On 15 November 1995 a law was passed declaring the Slovakian language the language of that state. When the law took effect, Czech reverted from the offi-

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cial state language to become a minority language. This law was changed on 1 June 1999 with respect to ratification of the EU Charter concerning minority languages, which grants minorities of 2 0 % in any community the right to use their mother tongue when communicating with the authorities. This arrangement relates to 513 localities with Hungarian inhabitants and to four other localities, two with German and two with Croatian minorities (Gladrow 2002: 493). The protective function of the law is directed against the dominance of Hungarian and the Hungarians, and only secondly against English (Ohnheiser 2004). In the language one easily detects a decrease in Germanicisms and Russianisms in favor of an increasing lexical presence of Anglicisms in the areas of politics, business, sports, music, and entertainment (Gladrow 2002: 487). Since 1989 the political and social importance of Russian has also more generally declined in favor of English (Kacala 1995: 93). The debate about a law to protect the Romanian language began on 10 November 1997 and is yet in its early stages. Different drafts exist; the last consideration in the Senate took place on 19 December 2002. 32 The likelihood that the law will pass is good: the last Senate vote counted 72 for and 10 against with 6 abstentions. Above all the question here is the protection of Romanian in public places, texts, and institutions. These, for example, include advertisements, posters, consumer information, packing, television and radio programming. Material in foreign languages have to be translated, in the case of written materials with letters in the same size as the original, in oral transmission "just as loud and starkly accentuated as the model." The requirement of oral transmission cannot be found in any other language law, not even in the French one. Paragraph 5 offers numerous exceptions: the law cannot be applied to registered brand names, scientific or literary-artistic texts, publications in foreign languages, including those of minorities, radio and television programs in the languages of minorities, programs with religious content of those with minority languages. Paragraph 7 threatens violators with sanctions, in fact with substantial fines (up to about 1446 in euros), which are graded according to which paragraphs have been violated. Traditionally and historically Romania has adopted much from France and this also extends to the area of language legislation: some adopted aspects can be found, e.g. in parts of the application area and the duty to give translations in letters of the same size as the original. Admittedly the Romanian case differs from the French in the explicit acceptance of minority languages (as noted above France is still working on this) and more generally in the abundance of exceptions. The law is not very precise, offering no examples.

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In Hungary the system began to change in 1988, and this was reinforced by the elections of 1990. Radical political, economic and social changes took place and continue to take place, which affect the language (Balász 1995: 171-181). Public streets are marked by signs in foreign languages - especially German and English - but this does not disturb the Hungarians (Balász 1995: 176). Since 27 November 2001 a language law has existed that regulates the presence of the Hungarian language above all in the media and in public signage. The preamble stresses that Hungarian is a flexible language which has derived much from other languages. The new media and the internet, however, threaten to infiltrate the language with foreign elements from which Hungarian needs protection. Every Hungarian has the right to be informed about the "new world" in his/her own language. In this the attempt to guard against English becomes apparent. Still the law, with its many exceptions, is rather tame: so it still allows foreign language designations e.g. for company and product names, in the press, on the radio and television, and in advertisements (§ 1), in businesses, show windows and on posters (§ 2.1). Accepted designations such as e.g. "Speis" (German or Austrian) or "k.u.k.-Monarchie" may still be employed (§ 5.1). Otherwise translation is required, just as in France, and in letters exactly as large as the foreign-language original (§ 3.2). The only sanction for transgressing the law as of 1 January 2003 is the removal of the foreign language posters and signage. - The dependence on the French model is evident in that the law addresses the danger of English infiltration. However, for economic reasons (to strengthen the economy the settlement of German and American companies in Hungary is greatly desired), apart from some exceptions the law is a pro-forma law.

5. Concluding considerations Our observations about "Language Policies in West and East" are subtitled "National Language Policies as a Response to the Pressures of Globalization". From them several things should have become clear: Due to the threat of globalization, an increasing interest in protecting one's identity, above all in the area of language, has arisen in all countries. While among the western countries only France has a language law, the legal protection of language in eastern countries has high priority, especially in ones that have recently regained their sovereignty. Currently among the West European countries a tendency is becoming evident not only in Italy but also in Spain and even in France, which rejects a purist and retrospective ideal norm. This is not only

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the result of convictions, but also, as the case of France demonstrates, of the nonnative power of language usage on a national level and of the pressure from the EU on an international one. At the same time in these countries, one is able to detect a significant interest of speakers in protecting their own languages. France's language policy is becoming a prototype worth emulating. This only became possible at the tum of the century after the French changed course and replaced (internationally derided or criticized) claims supporting the "exception culturelle" of the French and France with the official demand for a multilingual Europe. 33 The French language policy cannot simply be applied to other countries, for each has distinct historical, ideological and political requirements. The "American Virus" reached the East after the political transformation, but there the attitudes toward English (still) vary. In the West the "allergy" to English is pronounced; it is the single linguistic and cultural "enemy". In the East English still stands as the language of the Free World, whose economic, political, and cultural norms appear worthy of imitation. As the discussion of language laws shows, these countries want to restrict the influence of dominant and domineering languages, i.e., German (Poland), Russian (Poland, Latvia), and Hungarian (Slovakia). Language policies directed toward English have just been initiated (e.g. in Poland, Romania, and Hungary) and, given the economic power of the United States, they will be instituted only half-heartedly. This is more or less evident in the symbolic punishments for transgression, such as the threat of removal for foreign-language signage in Hungary or in Poland or extremely minimal fines. To remain with the image of the "killer language": English is replacing other languages in international communication, it replaced French as the first foreign language in the West, Russian, French, or German in the East, and thereby English assumes the prestige they once held, something which expresses itself in the increase of borrowings from English. Globalization certainly does not always mean "Americanization", it can also mean "Russification" or "Gennanization" or something similar and it must moreover be distinguished from "Internationalization." 34

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

"Überdachungssprache". See the chart in Lilienkamp (2001: 22). See Braselmann (1997: 445-464). The Nuffield Report drafts strategies to advance knowledge of foreign languages on all levels (Durrell 2002: 286-297). See for instance: Braselmann/Hinger (1999: 287-292), Glahn (2002: 220-223), Hoberg (2000, 2002), Ketteman (2002: 61-86), Noll (1991), above all the empirical analyses of French, Gemían, and Spanish music magazines in Lilienkamp (2001), refer also to the discussion of recent literature, pp. 76-82 et passim. See above all the consistent argumentation of the distinct strategies for evaluating language in Spitzmüller (2002: 247-265). For the prototypical French normative discussion see Klein-Zirbes (2001: 47-60). See Braselmann (1999: 4ff. and 2002c: 26-29). Regarding the loyalty to language of the French see Lilienkamp (2001: 249-280). For the genesis of the law see Braselmann (1999: 9-25). Décret η. 96-602 du 3 juillet 1996 relatif à l'enrichissement de la langue française. For more on the new activities see Braselmann (2001, 2002a). For a more extensive treatment see Braselmann (2002a: 321-324). See Albert Salon, presentation at a conference in Beirut am 28./29.9.2002 (www.voxlatina.com - Nr. 66 v. 9/10/2002). According to sources by 3.7.2002 (http://conventions.coe.int) the following lands had ratified it: Armenia, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Finland, Croatia, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland (as the first land already in 1997), Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Hungary. For more on the French postulate concerning multiple languages that is sometimes pushed forward, see Braselmann (2001: 171-173). Available at: http: www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/europe/france.htm. For the language politics of the French Revolution see Schlieben-Lange (1987: 26-38), Brumme/Bochmann (1993: 63-190). For the linguistic influence on the neighboring romance lands, see Brumme/Bochmann (1993: 191-238). Available at: http://www.culture.fr/culture/dglf/entretien-BC.htm. Available at: http://www.culture.fr/culture/dglf/rapport/2002/index.htm. At first this can be ascertained in the professionalization of the commissions and the democraticization of the language cultivation (Braselmann 2001: 167-179), then in the revocation of prohibitions on Anglicisms and the acceptance of common English words (Braselmann 2002a: 321-324). Drucksache 14/7250 Dmcksachel4/8203. Interior Ministiy of the Senate, Pressemitteilung 42 (9/5/01), § 49, Abs. 2. For a differentiated presentation of the German loyalty to language see Lilienkamp (2001: 361-392). See Lebsanft (1997: 96-99), Braselmann (2002a: 324-327). See Braselmann/Hinger (1999: 289-292).

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26. Thus books of style often leave Anglicisms in their original (for instance: traveling Jazz), which the academy allows to transpose into Castilian (travel in, yaz). See Sachs (2003: 104-107) and Braselmann 2004. 27. Unlike the purists in France, in Spain the opponents [of Anglo-Americanisms] are not drastic or emotional, and they express themselves in a less deprecating or ridiculing manner about the preservation of language than the indifferent observers in Germany. (Translation by the author) 28. However, refer to the newly association formed by parliamentarians from different political parties, La bella lingua, whose puipose is to protect Italian from the influence of other languages, whereby regional languages are meant as well as global English (Metzeltin 1988: 377). 29. See Schmitt (2001: 464ff). 30. Translation by the author. 31. http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/europe/lettonie.htm. 32. The origins of the drafts are well documented, see http://www.cdep.ro. 33. Cf. Braselmann (2002c: 31-39). 34. Cf. Braselmann (2002d: 959-978).

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Noll, Volker 1991 Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente im französischen Argot. Frankfurt a. Main/Bern a. o.: Peter Lang. Ohnheiser, Ingeborg 2002 Sprachkontakt - Kulturkontakt. In: Christian Todenhagen (ed.), Text text structure - text type. Festschrift für Wolfgang Thiele, 149-165. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. 2004 Sprache(n) und Sprachsituation in den EU-Beitrittsländern. In: Lew Zybatow (ed.): Translationswissenschaft im interdisziplinären Dialog. Innsbrucker Ringvorlesungen zur Translationswissenschaft III. Frankfurt a.M./Berlin a. o. : Peter Lang. Okuka, Milos (unter Mitarbeit von Gerald Krenn) (ed.) 2002 Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens. Klagenfurt/Celovec: Wieser (Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens 10). Pfandl, Heinrich 2002 Wie gehen die slawischen Sprachen mit Anglizismen um? (Am Beispiel des Russischen, Tschechischen und Slowenischen). In: Rudolf Muhr and Bernhard Kettemann (eds.), Eurospeak. Der Einfluss des Englischen auf europäische Sprachen zur Jahr tau sen dw en de, 117154. Frankfurt a.M./Wien a. o.: Peter Lang. Rathmayer, Renate 2002 Anglizismen im Russischen: Gamburgeiy, Bifsteksy und die Voucherisierung Russlands. In: Rudolf Muhr and Bernhard Kettemann (eds.), Eurospeak. Der Einfluss des Englischen auf europäische Sprachen zur Jahrtausendwende, 155-180. Frankfurt a.M./Wien a. o.: Peter Lang. Sachs, Eveline 2003 Laienlinguistisches Normbewusstsein in Itcdien und Spanien dargestellt anhand von Stilbüchern. Innsbruck: Diplomarbeit. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte 1987 Das Französische - Sprache der Uniformität. Zeitschrift für Germanistik 8/1: 26-38. Schmitt, Christian 2001 Sprachnormierung und Standardsprachen. In: Günter Holtus, Michael Metzeltin and Christian Schmitt (ed.), Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik, vol. I, 2, 435-492. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Spitzmüller, Jürgen 2002 Selbstfíndung durch Ausgrenzung. Eine kritische Analyse des gegenwärtigen Diskurses zu angloamerikanischen Entlehnungen. In: Rudolf Hoberg (ed.), Deutsch - Englisch - Europäisch. Impulse für eine neue Sprachpolitik, 247-265. Mannheim/Leipzig/Wien/New York: Duden (Thema Deutsch, vol. 3).

The Impact of English on the Vocabulary and Grammatical Structure of German

German as an Endangered Language? Peter Eisenberg

Zusammenfassung Über den Zustand des Deutschen wird in den vergangenen Jahren mehr und lauter geklagt. Auch scheint die Zahl der Stimmen, die das Klagelied anstimmen, zuzunehmen. Immer gibt es Sprachkritiker, die von Verfall und Bedrohtheit sprechen, aber inzwischen sehen fast sechzig Prozent der Deutschen die Entwicklung ihrer Sprache als bedenklich oder sogar als beunruhigend an. Wissenschaftler befürchten einen Verlust der universellen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten, Politiker erinnern bei ihrer Meinung nach passender Gelegenheit an die marginale Rolle des Deutschen in internationalen Organisationen und einige Sprachwissenschaftler halten die Kraft des Deutschen zur Assimilation oder Integration fremden Sprachmaterials für nur noch gering. Meist wird dabei dem Englischen eine besondere Rolle zugeschrieben, und zwar sowohl was seine internationale Stellung als auch was seinen Einfluß auf das Deutsche betrifft. Was aber kann genau gemeint sein, wenn wir in einem solchen Zusammenhang von unserer Sprache selbst reden wollen und nicht einfach ein kulturkritisches Lamento auf die Sprache übertragen? Der Beitrag möchte diese Frage emst nehmen. Er spricht eine Reihe von Möglichkeiten an und wendet sich dann ein wenig genauer einem der Paradefalle für den Einfluß des Englischen auf das Deutsche zu, nämlich der Flexionsmorphologie. Wie geht das Deutsche mit den fremden Wörtern um? Kann es sie assimilieren oder gar integrieren? In welchem Sinn oder welcher Richtung verändert es sich dabei? Könnte eine Bedrohung entstehen?

1. E n d a n g e r e d n e s s B y conversational m a x i m the title of the N e w York conference - "The Fate of E u r o p e a n L a n g u a g e s in the A g e of Globalization: The Future of G e r m a n " has to be read as a request. We should be concerned about the future of the G e n t i a n language in the age of globalization. We should w o r k out an honest diagnosis and think about possible remedies. Perhaps one can take c o m f o r t f r o m the fact that the f u t u r e of G e r m a n is closely related to the fate of European languages in general, but this might be some kind of cold comfort. It seems evident and therefore to be presupposed that there are indeed prob-

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lems for the future of German. More radical formulations can be heard at many places and in many contexts, calling German a dying, a threatened, or at least an endangered language. Linguists and modern linguistics as their academic discipline, are blamed again and again for not being really interested in their subject matter. This is all the more the case as in the German tradition there has never been a simple division between academic work on language on the one hand and popular or even populistic language criticism on the other. At all times we find professionals who were concerned about the state and the development of the language, such as Joachim Heinrich Campe, whose attempts to translate foreign words into German are now labelled as some kind of 'enlightened purism' (Campe 1813; Schiewe 1998: 125-150; Haß-Zumlcehr 2001: H i l l 8). Jacob Grimm - who is still considered the founder of the discipline now called Germanistik - was worried about the German language during the greater part of his working life. This tradition has never been interrupted and is still alive (see Schiewe 1998 for an overview touching on today's situation and Schrodt 1995 for an elucidating report on the intricate relationship between German philology and language criticism in the 19th and 20 th centuries). Walter Krämer's Verein deutsche Sprache (VdS), which was only founded in 1992 and which is the most influential private organisation fighting the influence of English on German, had no problem in constituting a highly reputable academic advisory board. It is from this side that we hear the reproach: "Die Sprachwissenschaft und die sprachpflegenden Institutionen haben diese Entwicklung ignoriert und sich so aus ihrer Verantwortung für unsere Sprache gestohlen" (Glück and Krämer 2000: 90; see also Glück 2000). German philology cannot simply ignore the public language debate, if only because a large majority of the Germans consider the development of their mother tongue to be alarming or disquieting ("beunruhigend oder bedenklich", Stickel 1998: 42). We have to be involved, but of course we have to insist on retaining the most important achievement of modern linguistics, that is its status as an empirical discipline. Descriptive linguistics can contribute in an essential way to the language debate by clarifying what could be meant if one talks and worries about "endangeredness" with respect to a language such as German. Within linguistics the term is used for such, and only such, languages which are in danger of becoming extinct by the loss of native speakers. Some years ago the Society of Endangered Languages (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen) was founded. The main goals of the society are the collection and distribution of information about the language situation world wide, and

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raising funds for the documentation of at least some of the about fifty languages dying every year (for further information see http://www.unikoeln.de/GbS/). When talking about a language with nearly 100 million speakers and more than 20 million learners one should carefully avoid even the slightest associative links in this direction. A more specific aspect of endangeredness applies to what has been called the universal character of a language. The group of languages fulfilling the conditions is not very large. They are standardized as spoken and as written languages but nevertheless include numerous dialects and technical terminologies, all kinds of registers for special purposes, an extensive literature and a subtle social stratification. What has been deplored during recent years is first of all the decreasing importance of German as a language for international scientific communication. And even worse, certain scientific terminologies have not been transferred, or not completely, to German regardless of whether this would be easily possible or useful (Pörksen 1994; Ammon 1998; 2002). But even if it is true that the Germans are less active and more opportunistic in this respect than for instance the French, this aspect of language globalization has nothing whatsoever to do with German. Differences between German and languages comparable in size and status are gradual in nature. This again is not to state that we should stay inactive. Yet it seems of some importance not to give the impression that there is anything special here with respect to German. The kind of language threat which constitutes the long and ongoing history of German purism is completely different in nature. Motivations have been manifold in this heterogeneous movement, even if one only takes into consideration the attempts to purify or protect the language from foreign words. If arguments or at least something like reasons can be found for the claim that the language is threatened, they are in most cases neither linguistic nor can they be directly related to linguistic argumentations. If purity is a value in itself, if etymological facts are sufficient to mark a word as 'strange', 'alien' or 'nonnative' and therefore replaceable by a 'domestic' or 'native' word, then there is not very much left for linguistic reasoning. Furthermore Peter von Polenz in his overview (Polenz 1999: 264-293) makes it quite clear that at several points in its history purism was not even able to identify the areas of influence from other languages on German. For the period of a rapidly developing language movement as part of the nationalistic euphoria after 1871 he states: "Über der Fremdwort-Jagd an der Oberfläche der Sprache (Ausdrucksseite) wurde der viel größere innere Lehneinfluß auf den ,Geist' der deutschen Sprache völlig ignoriert" (Polenz 1999: 270). And as far as the foreign vocabulary is concerned he identifies a lack of difieren-

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tiation as the main problem: "Trotz häufiger Erklärungen und Dementis über maßvolles, differenziertes Vorgehen wurde der Unterschied zwischen zu ersetzendem Fremdwort und unentbehrlichem Lehnwort zwar postuliert, aber niemals definitorisch geklärt [...]" (Polenz 1999: 270). The distinction between 'Fremdwort' and 'Lehnwort' is by no means uniform and uncontroversial in the literature, but most authors make use of 'integration' when explicating it. We will use the following section 2 to go a bit further into terminological questions. At the moment it will suffice to remember that at least one reading of 'integration' is 'adapted to the core grammar' of the borrowing language, where 'grammar' in turn can simply be understood as a description of the phonological, morphological and syntactic systems, possibly augmented by a description of the graphemic system. By this step one gains access to the tools designed for the systematic exploration of language contact as it has been developed and applied e.g. in the epochal work of Uriel Weinreich (Weinreich 1967). Nonnative words can then be described with respect to their structural properties as integrated or not integrated, and these properties can eventually be related to the respective ones in other languages. As we will see, this simple and seemingly evident kind of analysis has not become dominant or even influential in the discussion of the status of loan words in German. To agree upon a satisfying terminology we will now briefly review some of the literature proposing a classification of nonnative words and especially anglicisms (section 2). We will then attempt to identify some of the relevant properties of German anglicisms on one level of grammatical description, namely the level of inflection (section 3). Section 4 draws some conclusions by returning to the question of what can be said about endangeredness.

2. Alien anglicisms Academic as well as public interest in loan words was awakened to new life so to speak in Germany after World War II by Peter von Polenz' article "Fremdwort und Lehnwort sprachwissenschaftlich betrachtet". The article was first published in 1967 in the journal Muttersprache (Polenz 1979). It was the same year in which Polenz edited the second German edition of Saussure's "Cour", and the article appeared in the same journal as many chauvinistic and racist language articles before 1945. Muttersprache had been the official organ of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein. These and some other circumstances clearly signalized that fundamental changes were taking place in the field.

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For the questions we are discussing the most important issue was Polenz' appeal to synchronic linguistic analysis. Two main points can be made. First Polenz argued that a purely etymological perspective can end up in all kinds of racist reasonings about the status of words in general and above all of loan words. What he criticizes is "Der methodologische Irrtum eines Philologen, man brauche zur Beurteilung des gegenwärtigen Zustands einer Sprache nur die Etymologie anzuwenden [...]" (Polenz 1979: 13). Instead he suggests considering words with respect to their sociological and structural properties. The fundamental question is formulated as "Wie verhalten sich Wörter fremdsprachiger Herkunft im Systemzusammenhang des Wortschatzes zu den sinnbenachbarten Wörtern aus heimischem Sprachmaterial?" (Polenz 1979: 17). The second point is of equal significance. Polenz (1979: 2 6 - 2 9 ) gives many examples and describes some basic regularities of productive word formation with foreign stems and affixes. He analyses the morphological processes involved as part of the German language system, i.e. explicitly not as part of the Greek or Latin system, though most of the morphs in question are borrowed from these languages. So it becomes evident that most foreign words do not even exist in the languages from which they are supposed to originate. Instead they are elements of the German, and possibly only of the German, vocabulary, but they are nevertheless foreign words. It seems to have been largely unthinkable or at least not realized in the German tradition that it could be of some interest to consider such words not exclusively from an etymological perspective. Despite the reliance on synchronic linguistics Polenz left the range of words to be treated as foreign words or loan words as it was. Of course he discussed in some detail the necessity to differentiate 'Lehnwörter' (as integrated) from 'Fremdwörter' (as not integrated), where the criteria could be either sociolinguistic or structural in nature. The basis for the whole discussion was nevertheless the origin of the units to be analyzed from languages other than German. Within this domain of 'foreign' elements in the literal sense of the word any question may be asked, all kinds of properties can be explored. But first of all the foreign origin has to be assured. Polenz takes it that one is considering "Wörter fremdsprachiger Herkunft" (1979: 17), "Wörter und Wortstämme aus anderen Sprachen" (1979: 26) or, citing Hans Marchand, one is in general occupied with "Wörtern mit aus Fremdsprachen stammenden Bestandteilen" (1979: 27). We do not want to suppose that there is anything wrong with this approach. But we do want to bring to attention the fact that etymological considerations still play a basic role in that they define the domain of the vocabulary in question. And it has to be added that

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this is also the case in most of the later attempts to define notions such as, for instance, 'anglicism in German'. The term is defined, for example, as "Oberbegriff von Entlehnungen aus dem britischen Englisch, dem amerikanischen Englisch, sowie den übrigen englischsprachigen Ländern [...]" (Yang 1990: 1) or somewhat more abstract as for use in the Anglizismen-Wörterbuch (Carstensen and Busse 1993) as "[...] jede Erscheinung der deutschen Sprache [...], die auf Transferenz der englischen Sprache zurückgeht" (Busse 2001: 134). Under such headings we then find elaborate classifications of linguistic units starting with morphemes and ending up with phrases, which are used in German and whose form or meaning or whose form and meaning can be said to originate in English. One tries hard to detect these units no matter whether identifiable by their properties as anglicisms or not. If it can be shown that words such as starten, streiken, kiììen, kicken, tanken, Killer, Kicker, Tanker were first used in English and only later on in German, then they are seen as anglicisms despite the fact that they are fully integrated into German and behave in every respect like German words from the core vocabulary The same holds for so called loan translations (Eierkopf, Arbeitsessen, Umeltschutz, 'Lehnprägung'), for loan creations (Klimaanlage air conditioner, Helligkeitsregler