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April 25, 2005

English: Language for Detouring the United States

{Ana Alfaro is a regular contributor to La Prensa, the premier newspaper in Panama, and writes the Lingua column for the paper's Sunday magazine, MOSAICO.}

The March 7, 2005 edition of Newsweek International ran a story about the English language which stated that three fourths of the English speakers of the world are not native speakers. That is, they are not British, Canadian, Irish, U.S. or Australian citizens. And that eighty percent of the electronically stored information is in English, and sixty six percent of the world's scientists read in it.

English is no longer one of, but THE most important workskill for the global Agora--just as Latin was in the heyday of the Roman empire.

What happened to the Roman Empire? It was too large, too unwieldly, and finally, had frontiers that were too porous. The conquered peoples wished to become citizens, and they simply marched into--and out of--the Empire on those very fine roads built by the Romans themselves.

Nowadays, the road is English, and the information superhighway knows no frontiers. Like Rome in its final century, the roads that all once led there are now spinning off into a thousand new tributaries. And those roads are paved with English-language textbooks and dictionaries.

Dorothy from Des Moines has absolutely no idea that the voice confirming her air travel reservations is that of a twenty-three year old in Panama City, Panama. And the English she has mastered is also a tool she can use to contact her peers in all the corners of the new empire--where English is the master key to all gateways.

A couple of centuries ago, the British Empire began laying down the groundwork for the current world domination of English, which was picked up and carried forward by the United States. English was the export vessel for U.S. technology and pop culture. The rest of the world wants some of that dollar bounty: The Chinese (and Japanese) traditional pictogram for the United States is the same used for “rice;" whoever has plenty of rice, has plenty, period.

But now the Internet, the headless monster created for defense purposes, has made it possible for the rest of the world to become connected--and makes it possible to bypass the U.S. altogether. When China buys beef from Argentina, when Mexico buys airplanes from France, the common denominator is always English. English has, in effect, allowed the rest of the world to bypass the United States and create new strategic alliances, new trade pathways, which herald the end of the world as we know it, dominated by the Northern hemisphere and by the Caucasian English-speaking elite.

Add to that the diminishing popularity of the current U.S. administration in other countries, more and more of whom are reporting mistreatment at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities. In 2003, the heir to the Spanish crown, Prince Felipe and his then fiancée, journalist Letizia Ortiz, were detained by a U.S. Immigration agent in Miami, and held for interrogation for several hours. The incident was not given much press coverage in the United States, but soon thereafter, Iberia, the national airline of Spain, moved its Miami hub to Costa Rica. The general feeling is that the U.S. behaves as if the rest of the world's inhabitants are second class citizens.

Let the U.S. not forget that no man is an island. Neither can a country live in isolation, and the U.S. and its citizens make precious little effort to learn the languages of the rest of the world. Now the Global Village is learning theirs, and leaving them out of the equation. Rejection is a two way street.

Posted April 25, 2005 12:00 AM

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