FROM DEAD LATIN TO DEAD ENGLISH:
                      ON THE LETHAL EFFECTS OF LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALISM
 
 

Perhaps if Jesus were alive today, he would not on-ly be communi-cating via the Internet, but in English as well.
Walanne Steele (echoing Billy Graham) (1)

What language does Prague Daihatsu [car manufacturing plant] use? Purists might call it broken English, or perhaps "foreigner talk". Czechish-Japish may come close. "Autolish" comes closer. "Daihat-Pragulish" hits the nail on the head. The global chatter explosion, it seems, is blowing the language to smithereens.
Barry Newman (2)

This chronicle of a death not really foretold is no prophecy. I am not a prophet, not even a prophet of doom: I love the English language (in all its variants), and wish it could outlive the Thames, the Hudson River, the Ganges. I doubt it will. The universal law of nature (truism N°1) is that all things come and go, including languages, and that every single thing, even as it is born and staggers into life, is already undergoing a dying process. Not only, therefore, is English bound to vanish but it is already (despite, of course, every indication to the contrary) on its ironic way to extinction. The more so as the law of nature is confirmed by that of history (truism N°2): all empires die, however immovable they seem to be, (3) as do all imperial languages, although these, like Latin, may survive the demise of their parent empires for quite some time, until they finally wane into new forms of human expression. Death-in-life, life-in-death: such is the cycle in which all languages, including the English language, are caught (the only, though fluctuating, margin of uncertainty regarding this paradoxical extinction process is about when and how). Hence my central point [in this presentation], which might be summarized as follows: to say that English is becoming a universal language and to say that English is dying is one and the same thing. (4)

In the early 18th century, almost three hundred years before the British Empire—followed up by the American Empire (a unique conjunction in human history)—had catapulted English into world linguistic dominance, Jonathan Swift had such premonitions about the cyclical nature and destiny of his own language that he called for the establishment of a "Standard". In Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), he looked back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and came to the conclusion that any expanding language first proceeded toward a point of perfection, then became deteriorated by debilitating influences, and eventually disappeared into nothingness or into something else. Against all logic, including his own, Swift hoped that, as far as English was concerned, the cycle might be stopped some time in future, at its very point of culmination:

The English tongue is not arrived to such a degree of perfection, as to make us apprehend any thoughts of its decay; and if it were once refined to a certain Standard, perhaps there might be ways found to fix it forever. (5)
The English language was not to be any more "fixed forever" than any other previous language had ever been. Although he was aware that his mother tongue was not written or spoken only by a small London elite, Swift was unable to realize that the unpredictable future of English was in the hands, or rather in the mouths, of those who fashioned it day after day in the market-place, in the workshop, in taverns and theaters, on farms and plantations, at home and abroad. As Robert Burchfield beautifully put it some years ago, what Swift failed to see was that "out there in the provinces, and in the colonies, the death-watch beetles of language lurked". (6)

Imagine yourselves, at this very moment, in any part of the Roman Empire somewhere in the middle of the fifth century of this era. The Empire (unaware that its end is a matter of decades) extends from Spain to Turkey (as we call these countries today). Latin is, unofficially as well as officially, the dominant language, spoken and written from one end of the Empire to the other. The main Latin authors, orators or poets are not from Rome but from a great variety of distant provinces. The cultural vehicle of the Roman Empire, Latin, has become the most universal language ever used in human history, and is now close to its culmination. And then imagine some eccentric scholar from Gaul delivering a lecture on "The coming death of Latin" at the biennial conference of the Imperial Association for Latin Studies (IALS) held in Constantinople. This is exactly the situation in which I [I was in Warsaw where I first gave this lecture] am today at this microphone: a loony, provoking Americanist from France describing in [the remote capital of Poland] Warsaw (and in English so as to be understood by all) the ongoing decline and coming extinction of the English language!

Starting from a comparison (not an analogy) with what happened to Latin, I will first discuss "English as a world language", then the controversy over the "death of English", and I will end this presentation with a few remarks on linguistic universalism and the languages of paradise.
 

                                                                     I.

It is through its written works (with poetry coming first, and prose next) that a language takes root and loses the fluidity it would have were it only a fleeting instrument of exchange and communi-cation. (7) Every single province of the Roman Empire provided Latin with illustrious writers and thus contributed to the romanization of the West: Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian were from Spain; Apuleius, Tertullian, Augustine from Africa; Varro, Ausonius and (maybe) Tacitus from Gaul. "Vulgar Latin", defined as the natural speech of uneducated people, developed as a spoken variant of the classical language. It took 500 years to create and expand the Roman Empire (from Augustus in 27 B.C. until the sack of Rome by Alaric in 476 A.D.). Latin as a living language outlived the Empire by more than a century: until the end of the 6th century, writes Joseph Herman, a famous Hungarian Latinist, there was no "insuperable chasm" between written and spoken Latin. (8) In most countries, bilinguism remained an important fact for several centuries until Latin finally asserted itself as the established language throughout the Empire. Just as in the case of Great-Britain and the United States, Latin, in its long march toward linguistic hegemony, imbibed a substantial influx of foreign elements (technical terms, Christian words introducing many Hellenisms into the language) which enriched it, but also resulted in a "territorial differentiation of Vulgar Latin". (9) Latin changed over time in part as a consequence of « incorrect » forms that prefigured future Romanic forms. The accumulation and sedimentation of those « incorrect » forms eventually gave rise to other, distinct languages : this process was one of the thousand deaths of Latin—just as, nowadays, it may be one of the thousand deaths of English.

When did people actually cease to "speak" Latin, i.e. to use it as a living language? A traditional answer is that Latin died when state papers and official documents drafted in classical Latin became unintelligible to users of Vulgar Latin: centrifugal forces were then free to destroy the common reference. According to Professor Herman, the divorce between written and spoken Latin as a dating criterion is irrelevant, because the existence, in varying degrees, of this kind of divorce is quite frequent and "almost inevitable" in the history of languages, "and does not mean that the language is dead or has lost its identity". (10) In order to determine the time when Latin went out of living usage and gave way to idioms originating from it, one can resort to two sets of disintegration criteria (which, as we shall see, also apply to English): internal criteria, i.e. the slow structural evolution of Latin—both syntactic and semantic—toward Romance languages, an evolution based on the simplification of formal systems and the least effort principle; external criteria, i.e. the disintegration of a linguistic unity which in the first centuries of this era was, throughout the Empire, much more homogeneous than English today. When did this unified language break down into the various idioms from which Romance languages eventually emerged? "The disappearance of Latin unity," Herman writes, "was a process which for the most part happened after the fall of the Empire . . . The dying out of Latin as the virtually single means of communication of a linguistically homo-geneous community took place somewhere between the 5th and 8th centuries". (11)
To sum up, I would say: 1) that Latin as a living language—spoken by the people, not just by lawyers, priests or philosophers—outlived the fall of the Roman Empire by more than a century; 2) that the disintegration process was both internal (simplification, least effort principle) and external (territorial differentiation); and 3) that, through the emergence of various forms of "pidgin" Latin, Vulgar Latin dissolved into new tongues which, in turn, achieved a complexity and creativity of their own—the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.).

With this in mind, let us now turn to that idiom boosted into glory and eminence by two successive empires—the English language.
 

                                                                          II.

Everything seems to indicate that English is in the process of becoming a world language or even a universal language. The demise of the British Empire, and the relative decline of the American Empire today—with the end of its nuclear monopoly, its historic military setbacks in Korea and Vietnam, the emergence of Europe, Japan and now China as serious economic competitors—does not prevent English, any more than Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, from spreading more and faster than ever, through American-dominated technologies, electronic media and other vehicles of linguistic and cultural dominance. It is quite clear that English is, if not the language with the largest number of native speakers, at least the most widely spoken language in the world today, the result of this being that, on whatever continent you happen to be, "the sun never sets on the English language". (12)
Three classes of people can be described as users of English. According to David Crystal and other sources, (13) the first group is made up of over 300 million mother-tongue speakers (from the British Isles, North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa); the second group, even larger than the first, comprises some 350 million users of English as a second national language, a kind of "official" or "semi-official" language that they have to learn, often at a very early age, at school or on the street (India,  Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Kenya, Puerto Rico, etc.). The third group is the fast-growing community of those, probably more in number than the other two combined, who learn and use English as an international (or sometimes intranational) auxiliary means of communi-cation. Not only can English help foreign speakers to communicate with each other in a language other than their own, but it can also contribute to the linguistic and therefore political unification of certain multi-ethnic countries (India has been a good example of this; China, with its hundreds of different idioms, might soon become one more case). This third category (to which I will soon return because it now has the ironic and important status of being the dominant group within the dominant language) I will call the "Barbarians".

When we say that English is now regarded, and experienced, as the dominant language of world communication, what do we mean? We mean that: It is the main language of the world's books, newspapers, and advertising. It is the official international language of airports and air traffic control [known as "Airspeak"]. It is the chief maritime language [known as "Seaspeak"]. It is the language of international business and academic conferences, of diplomacy, of sport. Over two thirds of the world's scientists write in English. Three quarters of the world's mail is written in English. Eighty per cent of all the information stored in the electronic retrieval systems is stored in English. (14)

As David Crystal points out very clearly in The English Language (1988), « it is not the number of mother-tongue speakers which makes a language important in the eyes of the world (that crown is worn by Chinese), but the extent to which a language is found useful outside its original setting ». (15) A variety of factors may account for the spread of English, but only their combination can explain its irresistible promotion to world language status. If political power and influence was a determining factor, Russian would be more often used than French in international organizations. If Culture with a capital C was a crucial key, Italy, Germany or France might win the contest. If the central paradigm was wealth in natural resources, Arabic would be more used, internationally, than it is; and so would Japanese if the main criterion was technological advancement. Regardless of its history as the conquering language of two succeeding empires, the triumph of English—which, as we shall see, may be viewed as a fatal triumph—seems to have been amplified by an additional factor, not to be found in any other language: its openness, its outgoing extrovert flexibility. As linguistician Mickey Noonan (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) so beautifully explained to me some time ago: One saving grace of English is that it has no Academy. Contrary to French, it was never protected nor "frozen" by any official authority or institution. Therefore English has always tended to adjust to the political/economic/cultural evolutions of the world it spread into—i.e. to espouse the world instead of expecting the world to align itself on its most standard form. (16)

In English as a World Language, Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Görlach confirm this view, explaining that « the teaching of impeccable French to those born without that grace has long been the explicit policy of French governments, while the British have made little attempt to do the same for English ». (17) Nor have the Americans. Nor have either tried, like Mr Toubon in France, to protect their language from the infectious introduction of foreign words. (18) As a British commentator recently observed, « the English language is like a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless ». (19) The net result of this openness and absence of self-defense is that English has achieved the status of a lingua franca on all five continents, although it has done so at the cost of some of its so-called standard purity. This prodigy is all the more astounding as the birth and development of the English language was a most improbable venture. As Robert Burchfield explains in his excellent The English Language (1985), English "in its earliest period, was spoken by a few thousand people, most of them illiterate, who crossed the English Channel from Angeln in Schleswig and from the Cimbric peninsula in (modern) Holstein in primitive ships from the fifth century onward, and gradually wrested power from the earlier Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles." (20) One battle lost, one prince murdered, and I might be giving this lecture, not in English, but in some Gaelic vernacular.

It has been argued that the world-wide success of English was not generated only by its openness but also, when compared to other successful languages, by the fact that it is basically a "value-neutral" idiom—and not, as many believe, the vehicle of a willfully imperial and expansionist culture. As Joshua Fishman has rather convincingly pointed out: Much of the English mother-tongue world is itself quite unemotional about English, viewing it as a medium pure and simple rather than as either a symbol or a message. Most English mother-tongue countries are recent centers of mass immigration. High proportions of their populations . . . reveal no more than a single generation of association with English. This shallowness of association with "Mother English" is, in turn, related to Anglophonie's permissiveness toward non-native Englishes all over the world" . (21) [We shall soon go back to this central notion of « Englishes »].

Not only do most native speakers of English not object to their language being appropriated by non-native speakers, with English becoming for better or for worse the property of those who use it, but it would seem, at least according to authors like Larry Smith, that English does not rub off on its foreign users and leaves them culturally intact: "A Japanese doesn't need an appreciation of a British lifestyle in order to use English in his business dealings with a Malaysian. The Chinese do not need a background in western literature in order to use English effectively as a language for publications of world-wide distribution. The political leaders of France and Germany use English in private political discussions but this doesn't mean that they take on the political attitudes of Americans". (22) If additional evidence of this were needed, it might be found in the fact, often seen on CNN and other news programs, that the most anti-British or anti-American or anti-Western powers, movements or leaders deliberately choose English as the best medium fo them to promote and « whip up anti-English feelings ». (23) It is indeed tempting to see the ultimate (though ambiguous) proof of the cultural neutrality of English in the observable and astonishing paradox according to which English as a purely linguistic tool is increasingly used (in Lybia, Iran, Irak and other countries) as an effective weapon to combat English as the hated Trojan Horse of Western imperialism or civilization.

This does not mean that the value-neutral character of English as a world language prevents its users from using it in perverse or immoral ways. While Belgians were being evacuated from Zaïre as a result of ethnic and political violence in the early 1960s, Edward Behr, an American journalist, heard a British TV reporter elegantly shouting his way through the crowd with a microphone in hand: "Anyone here been raped and speaks English?"  24
In a recent and very stimulating book entitled The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, Alastair Pennycook forcefully challenged the view that the world-wide spread of English was a "natural, neutral, and beneficial" process: "natural" because the post-colonial expansion of English is often seen as "a result of inevitable global forces"; "neutral" because it is assumed that, once detached from its original British or American cultural contexts, the English language tends to become a "transparent medium of communication" that is not "ideologically encumbered"; "beneficial" because the spread of English is viewed as a free choice occurring "on a cooperative and equitable footing". Pennycook's interpretation is antipodal to this kind of approach:
To view the spread as natural is to ignore the history of that spread and to turn one's back on larger global forces and the goals and interests of institutions and governments that have promoted it. To view it as neutral is to take a very particular view of language and also to assume that the apparent international status of English raises above local social, cultural, political or economic concerns. To view it as beneficial is to take a rather naively optimistic position on global relations and to ignore the relationships between English and inequitable distributions and flows of wealth, resources, culture and knowledge.

Adopting as his own the ideas of a well-known South-African scholar [and writer], N. S. Ndebele, Pennycook maintains that to speak is "to assume a culture" and that habits of thinking can be "deeply infused into the language". He even talks of a "guilt of English" that should be recognized, and hints at the possibility (which I will go back to in a moment) of a linguistic Nemesis: "What is not acknowledged, he writes, is that 'English' may indeed be fragmented, struggled over, resisted, rejected, diverse, broken, centrifugal and even incommensurate with itself." (25)

Whether neutral or ideologically encumbered, (26) English seems to be more than ever spinning its world-wide web through the new information highway known as the Internet. With the sudden explosion of this new network, born and developed in the United States, there are growing fears, recently reported in the New York Times, that CyberEnglish might become « the lingua franca of the computer world » and cast « other languages into shade. » (27) The American dominance of cyberspace appears to some as an additional threat to their own culture, while others consider that, instead of inevitably increasing the use of English, the American-dominated Internet is an "off-putting" obstacle. Says a South-Corean Internet access provider: "It's not only English you have to understand, but American culture, even slang. All in all, there are many people who just give up." (28) The samereluctance is to be found in France—which does not prevent the government from contemplating a counter-attack based on the development of French-speaking servers. In a speech given in Benin in December 1995 at the sixth Francophonie Summit, Jacques Chirac called on the Francophone community "to take the lead of a huge drive for linguistic pluralism and cultural diversity on information highways." (29) The French economist, Jacques Attali, replied that the recurrent debate over the world dominance of English would soon be made obsolete by the introduction onto the Web of instant and automatic translation programs: "English then, Attali argued, will be nothing but a universal language in much the same way as Basic." (30) If such is the case, if such is the destiny of English in Cyberspace (an English more and more reduced to acronyms and graphic symbols), (31) the odds are that its rôle will shrink rather than increase, with the electronic hegemony of English being growingly contested and the Internet becoming over time multilinguistic as well as multicultural. (32)
This possibility provides me with a convenient transition to my central point: the counterproductivity of universalism.

English seems to be caught in a double bind: the more it spreads, the more it is internally and externally torn apart; the more users it gains, the less substance and unity it retains. Implosion, explosion: the spectacular but Pyrrhic victories of English may indeed (as already noted above) end up in fatal triumph.

When scholars or journalists discuss the decline or even the possible demise of English, when a member of the British Royal family says that the dominant language today is not English, but "bad English", (33) what English are they talking about? As I have pointed out, English has become the main communication interface between its non-native users as well as among foreigners with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. But as  Braj B. Kachru explains, if the term "English" no longer captures the sociolinguistic reality, "the term 'Englishes' does." (34) The plural form naturally applies to Britain (I saw Good Soldier Schweyk in Glasgow three years ago and did not understand a single word!), but it is also admitted that English is far from being a universal language inside the United States itself. Not only is this nation of immigrants a fairly largely non-anglophone country, but the development of Black English for instance—or should we say "Black Englishes"?—as a growingly autonomous, not to say ghettoized idiom, contributes to the internal disintegration of the language. This evolution has, among other things, resulted in the birth of linguistic defense organizations such as the English Only Movement, an outgrowth of the anti-immigration lobby, or in a Mexican-American woman being recently taken to court in Texas on the ground that she spoke only Spanish to her 5-year old daughter. Said the judge: "You're abusing that child and you're relegating her to the position of housemaid. Now get this right. You start speaking English to this child because if she doesn't do good in school, then I can remove her because it's not in her best interest to be ignorant. The child will only hear English." (35) In England, Brigid Brophy was not less severe when, in 1982, she wrote that, « having lost the thread of syntax », Britain was « becoming a linguistic desolation. » (36)

Whether internally or externally, whether pidginized or creolized or nationalized or otherwise appropriated, English seems to be breaking up into a variety of sub-Englishes that may soon cease to be mutually intelligible. No single Standard is now universally recognized. It is doubtful that BBC English and CNN English can resist the fast-growing emergence of the "destandardized standard" of International English. If, as some still maintain, the ultimate reference is Shakespeare's English, then the die is cast because, except in translations, this founding and essential reference has become utterly incomprehensible to the vast majority of those who speak or use English in the world today.

It may well be that the future of English will depend less on what is to become of it in the British Isles or in North-America than on its uncontrollable evolution as a lingua franca. Is International English—the now overwhelmingly dominant phenomenon—going to move toward some form of Basic English or Esperanto? My view, here, is that this would mean death, because a language dies when it ceases to be a creator and vehicle of poetry, when it is no longer sufficiently sophisticated to express what is most refined and elevated in man. (37) A merely utilitarian language is no longer a language. A language dies when it is principally a means of communication for non-native or foreign users, when it is basically vehicular instead of vernacular. English will be in great jeopardy the day when the mass of those who use it as a second or additional language will no longer understand the classics of Anglophone literature and when modern or contemporary authors writing in English will be as foreign to them as Shakespeare is today. (38)

English is imperilled in at least three different ways: 1) by the breaking-up of a unity which used to be embodied by the British and American standards. This disintegration leads to a babelization and sometimes to a tribalization of English; 2) by the counterproductive effect of its spread—a gain by loss—which may result in the appearance of a language disconnected from geography and devoid of a genius of its own: in that case, we would be moving, through constant linguistic simplification and impoverishment, toward a "degree zero" of  language, some lowest common denominator—a kind of poor man's English; 3) by the fact that modern electronic media, although they may have certain stabilizing effects, seem to be more influential as a means of spreading impoverishing forms of English than literature which, historically, has always been the creator, provider and guardian of human language. (39)

All mother-tongue speakers of English are of course proud at the triumph of their language as it spreads around the world, but many of the changes they perceive are viewed as instances of deterioration, whether these changes bespeak a kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the language into barely recognizable idioms, or a compulsive drift toward one poor, basic, unpoetic World Language.

The hypothesis of a withering away of English, caused by (among other things) the possible decline of American hegemony, was first made in the late 1970's by Robert Burchfield, then Chief Editor of The Oxford English Dictionary. As the second or additional language of many speakers in countries throughout the world, English, he wrote, "is no more likely to survive the inevitable political changes of the future than did Latin, once the second language of the governing classes of regions within the Roman Empire."   As he saw it, nothing, no government, no technology could prevent this kind of evolution : « No form of linguistic engineering and no amount of linguistic legislation will prevent the cycles of change that lie ahead. » (40)

There is one basic distinction, it seems to me, that most of those who have written on the subject, including Burchfield, have failed to make, at least in a clear convincing way: the distinction between World Language and Universal Language. The former one could be defined as a language used all over the world either as a native or second or foreign language, and which pays due respect to local idioms. In contrast, a universal language would more or less consciously aim at dislodging existing languages and becoming the "dominant" or, even worse, the only language left for men to speak. In some places, like Jamaica, the locals tend, as a political act of retaliation, to appropriate the language imposed on their enslaved ancestors and to turn it into a form of English that no outsider can understand, but to which they dance and sing (reggae, dub poetry). (41) In other places, like Guam or the North Marianas, English has posed such a threat to local languages that this process has been called "linguistic genocide". To quote R. Day (1985), as long as these islands "remain under the control of the United States, the English language will continue to replace Chamorro [the local idiom] until there are no native speakers left." (42)
 

                                                                         III.

Whether or not English posits itself as a potentially universal language, its fate in today's and tomorrow's world will be that of all human speech—torn since the dawn of time between two simultaneous but conflicting aspirations: one single tongue for all, and Babel; the need for linguistic diversity and the utopia of universal language; adamic unity and post-adamic confusion. As Hobbes put it in Leviathan, "all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel, when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language." (43)

But what was his former language? What was the language of paradise which Adam used to name every beast of the field and every fowl of the air? Many distinguished thinkers, including Augustine, Descartes, Gassendi, Comenius, Newton or Leibnitz, have given serious consideration to this question, and many attempts have been made at promoting or creating universal languages, especially in the last three centuries. (44) Augustine believed that the original human language was Hebrew, but others, like Andreas Kempe (1688), described Eden as a garden where God spoke Swedish and Adam Danish, while the serpent who seduced « voluptuous Eve » was a francophone snake (Eve also spoke French). (45) Behind all these linguistic schemes and cogitations lurks a religious nostalgia, the desire, best expressed by Comenius in 1668, to devise a "language absolutely new, absolutely easy, absolutely rational, in brief a Pansophic language, the universal carrier of light", capable of reuniting men into a single God-blessed commonwealth. (46)

Because it is not an artificial language, English today is, in that respect, much more likely to succeed in establishing itself as a World if not as a Universal Language than were Schleyer's "Volapük" (1879), Zamenhof's "Esperanto" (1887), Peano's "Interlingua" (1903), de Beaufront's "Ido" (1907), Jespersen's "Novial" (1928), Freudenthal's "Lincos" (1960) or Diego Marani’s "Europanto". (47) But English, as I have tried to show, is subject to the laws of nature and history and may finally be a victim of its own success, as if there were certain thresholds of expansion beyond which any language or civilization inevitably becomes diluted, loses its substance and is increasingly threatened with extinction even though most people still believe it is gaining strength.
We may also wonder, with Joshua Fishman, what a "massive shift in the balance of econo-technical power"—for instance to the advantage of Asian countries—would do to the preeminence of English. Due to inertia, English would probably continue to spread in wider and wider, but thinner and thinner ways "for decades or longer, but ultimately a shift would take place", and if this happened, as few people would cry as when Latin died, because, Fishman concludes, "the world has no tears left." (48)
 
 
 

NOTES

1. Walanne Steele, « Is the End of History a New Beginning for American Studies in Central Europe ? », in Zoltán Kövecses, ed., New Approaches to American English (Budapest : Eötvös Loránd University, 1995) 105.
2. Barry Newman, "Global Chatter," The Wall Street Journal 24 Mar. 1995: 1, 6.
3. See : Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London : Heinemann, 1987), in which the author argues that the United States might be subjected to the same cycles of supremacy and decline as the ancient empires of the East and the European nation-sates of the Renaissance.
4. As part of a broader cultural perspective, a very similar view was recently expressed by Jean Baudrillard : « Toute culture qui s’universalise perd sa singularité et meurt » (Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies »), in « Le mondial et l’universel », Libération 18 Mar. 1996 : 7.
5. Quoted in Robert N. Burchfield, « The Point of Severance », Encounter 51 (Oct. 1978) : 130.
6. Ibid.
7. Pierre Grimal, La littérature latine (Paris: Fayard, 1994) 10.
8. Joseph Herman, Le latin vulgaire (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, third ed. 1975) 15.
9.  Ibid. 26.
10.   Ibid. 115.
11. Ibid. 119-20.
12. Joshua A. Fishman, « Sociology of English as an Additional Language », in Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue : English Across Cultures (Urbana & Chicago : University of Illinois Press, sec. Ed., 1992) 22.
13. David Crystal, The English Language (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988) 1-6.
14. Ibid. 7.
15. Ibid. Crystal notes that "the 17 languages which have 50 million or more native speakers, in order of decreasing magnitude, are: (1) Mandarin, (2) English, (3) Spanish, (4) Russian, (5) Bengali, (6) Hindi, (7) Arabic, (8) Portuguese, (9) Japanese, (10) German, (11) Wu (Shanghai), (12) Italian, (13) Javanese, (14) French, (15) Telegu [or Telugu, a Dravidian language spoken in Andhra Pradesh], (16) Cantonese, and (17) Korean." Since French ranks 14 on this list of 17, "we are forced to conclude," Crystal goes on to say, "that the total number of native speakers does not correlate directly with the frequency a language is used as an international auxiliary language".
16. Interview, Milwaukee (Wis.), 9 Aug. 1995.
17. Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Görlach, English as a World Language (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982) 2-3.
18. As a rule, the apparent possessiveness of English people with regard to English is nothing but pretense. Eccentric defenders of the language nevertheless exist, as is evidenced in this quotation from an article by Enoch Powell: "Others may speak and read English more or less – but it is our language, not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is read or used". Quoted in Robert Burchfield, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1994) 17. The "longstanding resistance to anything resembling an academy in the British and American traditions" is convincingly described by David Simpson in "Global English, Local Language: The Currency of American Speech", in Zoltán Kövecses, ed., New Approaches to American English 20. "John Adams", he writes, "said he wanted one, prompted perhaps by the optimism about social planning that was current after the French Revolution, and the argument has reappeared from time to time. But most British and American commentators have taken the line set forth by Samuel Johnson, that this kind of attempted control is first, empirically hopeless and second, metaphysically hostile to the spirit of liberty and laisser-faire that governs the two homelands of the British language."
19. Robert Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford & New York : Oxford University Press, 1985) 173.
20. Ibid. 4.
21. Joshua A. Fishman, « Sociology of English as an Additional Language », in Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue 24.
22. Larry E. Smith, « English as an International Language : No Room for Linguistic Chauvinism », in Larry E. Smith, ed., Readings in English as an International Language (Oxford & New York : Pergamon Press, 1983) 7.
23. Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue 355.
24. Quoted in Alastair Pennycok, The Cultural Politics of English as an Inter-national Language (London & New York: Longman, 1994) 3.
25. Ibid. 9, 20, 23-24, 28.
26. It has also been argued that the destiny of English, as a reflection and vehicle of a specific culture, was historically linked to the emergence, spread, and (unlikely) fall of liberal democracy (see Walanne Steele's chapter in Zoltán Kövecses, ed., New Approaches to American English 99-112). We are here quite close to Francis Fukuyama's notion of the end of history – that is, "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" (quoted in Steele 99). One may wonder whether the Navajo nation or the Favella children of Rio would agree that liberal democracy is the last word in the field of political organization or, to use a phrase once applied by Sartre to Marxism, the ultimate horizon ("l'horizon indépassable") of political thought. As regards the historical link between English and liberal democracy, there is some evidence that it was a felicitous accident rather than a built-in necessity. Nelson Mandela is one of those who learnt the hard way that the English language was no intrinsic garantee against political tyranny. And so did, before him, American slaves and Native Americans. And so do nowadays the growing number of excluded minorities in most, if not all, English-speaking countries. It would not therefore be unfair to suggest that English is not, any more than French in times past, the God-elected language of political paradise.
26. The New York Times 7 Aug. 1995 : C1.
27. Ibid.: C4.
28. SVM, Science & Vie Micro (January 1996): 27.
29. Ibid. BASIC, as used here, refers, not to "Basic English", the international second language invented in 1930  by C.K. Ogden (the acronym "BASIC" meaning: British American Scientific International Commercial), but to the basic electronic language used in computer programming. On Ogden's invention, see: David Simpson, "Global English, Local Language", in Zoltán Kövecses, ed., New Approaches to American English 24-29. Alatavista offers a free service for the translation of Web pages; the free translation of any given document (not exceeding 2 Ko) can also be obtained by going to www .lorraine-internet.com/traduction/index.html [see "Internet multilingue," SVM, Science & Vie Micro (October 1998): 152]. Jo Lernout, manager of Lernout & Hauspie, predicts that the language barrier will disappear within less than a decade as a result of the combination of a variety of techniques. Thanks to simultaneous translation, he argues, it will even be possible for two correspondents using two different languages to communicate instantly with one another "each in his own native language" (see "La fin de la tour de Babel? " Ibid: 149).
30. See: Brad Spurgeon, "E-Mail Correspondents Reinvent Hierogly-phics", International Herald Tribune 26 Jan. 1996: 9. The author claims that the hieroglyphics increasingly used on the Net "are becoming a complex international language of their own". Known as "emoticons" (meaning "emotion-showing-icons"), these new hiero-glyphics, including pictographs called "smileys", take us much further back in time than when people wrote letters on tablets. Here are a few examples taken from "The Unofficial Smiley Dictionary", a compendium available on the Net: (-: User is left-handed; :-& User is tongue-tied; :-Q User is a smoker; K:P User is a little kid with a propeller beanie; C=}>;*{)) A drunk, devilish chef with a toupée in an updraft, a mustache and a double chin. I owe this stimulating information to Divina Frau-Meigs (University of Paris III).
31. The threat posed to English as an electronic world language by instant translation programs was recently echoed in the British press by John O'Leary, one of the main editors of The Times: "In the long term," he wrote, "the British Council fears that instantaneous translation could see English replaced as the main international language by Chinese within three generations" (The Times 24 Mar. 1995: 2; see next note for complete reference). Although well-grounded, this fear seems to be ill-directed: if English is to be replaced in Cyberspace as a result of instant translation programs, it will not be by any new dominant language (like Chinese), but precisely by any one of the national or regional languages still at hand. As regards the availability of reliable "click-and-pick" translation programs, a decade of R&D might be needed, certainly not "three generations".
32. See: John O'Leary, "Prince hits out over bad English used by Americans", The Times 24 Mar. 1995: 2. Backing the British Council's English 2000 Project, the Prince of Wales argued that the only English worthy of the name was "English English" (not even British English), and by no means American English which, as he viewed it, was "very corrupting" if only because of its tendency to "invent all sorts of nouns and verbs that shouldn't be..."
33. Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue 357.
34. The New York Times 30 Aug. 1995: A12.
35. The London Review of Books 4-18 Feb. 1982: 17.
36 Esperanto literature exists, but its renown—as well as the recognition of its "universal" genius (if any)—are proportionate to the number of those who can read the language, and are limited by the inevitable lack of "cultural" roots affecting that kind of literature. Bill Auld, a Scottish poet, seems to be the "best-known" Esperanto writer today; he has published about fifty books and translated into Esperanto the works of Robert Burns as well as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Regarded as the greatest living poet in the Esperanto language, he has been proposed for the 1998 Nobel Prize by the "Poets, Essayists and Novelists International" association (Le Monde, August 23-24, 1998: 18).
37. In The Other Tongue, Braj B. Kachru maintains that creativity is undoubtedly present in non-native English literatures – as evidenced by the work of a variety of well-known authors, notably Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka. These literatures, he argues, "actually expand the canon of English" (p. 9). This is certainly true, but it might be objected that the kind of creativity mentioned by Kachru is displayed only by speakers of institutionalized English – not by speakers of performance English, i.e. the fast-growing mass of occasional users of the language (those I call the "Barbarians"), who pose a very serious threat to English in that they tend to reify or depoeticize it and demote it from the status of an end to that of a means.
38. In the field of media, and as far as the spread of English (or forms of English) to non-Anglophone countries is concerned, it seems that more is to be "feared" from American popular music and compact discs than from television. In most of these countries, American feature films, serials and sitcoms are dubbed and therefore appear on TV screens in languages other than English. (This is also true, though to a lesser degree, of what is seen on the larger screens of movie-theaters). On the other hand, the lyrics of American pop songs (including rock, rap and other forms of contemporary popular music) are nowadays memorized in a most astounding way by an equally astounding proportion of teen-agers across the planet (even by those who do not learn English at school) – a development mostly due to the commercial explosion of portable radio-sets, stereo-systems, compact discs, walkmen, etc. TV, here, seems to be playing second fiddle.
39. Robert N. Burchfield, « The Point of Severance » : 133.
40. Robert N. Burchfield, The English Language 173.
41. Robert McCrum, William Cran & Robert MacNeil, The Story of English (New York : Viking, 1986) 310 ff.
42. N. Day, « The Ultimate Inequality : Linguistic Genocide », in N. Wolfson, J. Manes, eds., Language of Inequality (Berlin : Mouton, 1985) 180.
43. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) I. IV. 12.
44. See in particular : James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600-1800 (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1975).
45. Maurice Olender, Les langues du Paradis: Aryens et Sémites, un couple providentiel (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989) 14.
46. James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes 10.
47. For further details, see : Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue 2. Linguistically, the closest men ever got to universal communication was through « morse » (Samuel F.B. Morse, 1832), but morse is an alphabet, not a language. On Diego Marani’s "Europanto", see : Le Monde, 24 April 1998 : 28 ("L’Europanto, novlangue bruxelloise de Diego Marani" by Luc Rosenzxeig).
48. Joshua A. Fishman, "Sociology of English as an Additional Language", in Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue 25.

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