Anyone spending their Christmas holidays on the European mainland will likely have observed that it is quite common to meet staff in shops and hotels who can hold a conversation in English, and to read signs and menus in the language. This fact should come as no surprise, and it is no accident: the spread of English skills in Europe is largely the result of educational policies that have intensively promoted its teaching in public schools over the past decades.
The reasons are diverse and well known. English is a major language of culture, and it is the third most spoken language in the world as a native language, after Chinese and Spanish. Native speakers of English number about 373m (roughly 5% of the world population), mostly concentrated in six advanced industrialised democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US), which together produce 33% of the world’s gross domestic product in nominal terms. As a result of the colonial legacy, English is an official or co-official language in many countries of the world, mainly in Africa.
The communication value of English is therefore high, and so is the interest in learning it. Many people use English as a second or foreign language. Precise estimates are risky but taken together, native and non-native speakers in the world total between 1 billion and 1.5 billion, depending on the definition of “speaker”. This amounts to 12-19% of the global population. Proficiency levels, however, are very uneven.
The emergence of English as the predominant (though not exclusive) international language is seen by many as a positive phenomenon with several practical advantages and no downside. However, it also raises problems that are slowly beginning to be understood and studied.
The most important challenge is that of fairness or “linguistic justice”. A common language is a bit like a telephone network: the more people know a language, the more useful it becomes to communicate. The question of fairness arises because individuals face very different costs to access the network and are on an unequal footing when using it. Those who learn English as a second language incur learning costs, while native speakers can communicate with all network members without incurring such costs. It’s like getting the latest smartphone model and sim card with unlimited data for free.
François Grin, of the University of Geneva, estimates that western European countries spend between 5% and 15% of their education budget on foreign language teaching. In the EU, most of these resources go to the teaching of a single language, English. With the obvious exception of Ireland, English as a foreign language is taught in schools in all EU member states, usually as a compulsory subject. About 84% of pupils in primary schools, 98% in lower secondary education and 88% in upper secondary education learn it, according to figures published by the European Commission. The percentage studying other languages (typically French, German or Spanish) in secondary education is much lower, averaging 20% to 30%.
In English-speaking countries, by contrast, foreign language teaching has long been in decline because younger generations feel less need to learn other people’s languages, turning to other subjects instead. This trend translates into considerable savings for the education systems of English-speaking countries, which can then be allocated to other productive public investments.
A second type of inequality relates to the use of a common language. In most professional contexts, a person is more effective and persuasive when using their native language. This inequality is difficult, but not impossible, to quantify. In scientific research, English is often required for publishing in international journals and obtaining research funding.
A team led by Tatsuya Amano at the University of Queensland recently published a study of 900 researchers in environmental sciences revealing that non-native English-speaking researchers require as much as twice the time needed by native speakers to read, write or review publications in English. When submitting papers for publication, non-native speakers are about 2.5 times more likely to have their work rejected for linguistic reasons – and they are 12.5 times more likely to have to make language-related revisions. So, even with equal or greater technical competence, they may have fewer career opportunities.
It is certainly easier to identify a problem than to find solutions, particularly when it comes to global issues. However, some compensatory measures may help reduce global linguistic injustice. Philippe Van Parijs, of the University of Louvain, has, somewhat provocatively, proposed a linguistic tax on English-speaking countries to compensate for the costs of teaching English in other countries. This would involve establishing a global tax on countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a native language and distributing the revenue to countries where English is taught in schools as a foreign language.
Yet other forms of indirect compensation could be considered; for example, a partial weakening of industrial property rights, such as patents. The maximum duration of the legal protection of patents is 20 years. This duration could be shortened by a few years when businesses based in an English-speaking country register a patent in a non-English-speaking country. This would mean that these patents could be commercially exploited without a license more quickly than patents belonging to inventors based in other countries. The World Intellectual Property Organization could promote a reform of rules in this direction.
Other proposals include more intensive use of machine translation and artificial intelligence in scientific publications, with the costs borne by the publisher. Criteria rewarding multilingual researchers in applications for funding for international projects could be designed, following the example of policies to promote gender equality in academia.
Of course, the problem of linguistic justice is not confined to English. The very same problem would arise if the dominant language of global communication were another, such as Spanish or French (but not a neutral language such as Esperanto). But right now, English is the predominant international language. For many this is a blessing, but should we not also think of those for whom it is a cause for concern?
Michele Gazzola is a lecturer in public policy and administration at Ulster University, Belfast, and editor of the journal Language Problems & Language Planning