Europe’s
Linguistic Challenge[1]
Philippe
Van Parijs
(in
European Journal of Sociology 45 (1), 2004, pp. 111-152.)
Along
with much of the world,
Most
of the trends in linguistic competence we can observe can be understood as the
product of the (sometimes explosive) interaction of two
micro-mechanisms.
What
I shall call probability-sensitive
learning simply captures the following two-dimensional fact. The extent to
which people maintain and improve their linguistic competence in some particular
language is strongly affected by the probability with which they can expect to
have to function in that language. This is in the first place a matter of
motivation: the more likely it is that competence in a particular language will
be useful to communication, the greater the effort one will decide, individually
or institutionally, to invest in learning it. But this differential learning is
also in the second place a matter of opportunity: the more often one finds
oneself in a context in which a particular language is actually being used, the
smaller the effort required to learn it. Moreover, these two dimensions of the
mechanism feed into each other: the motivation easily induces the creation of
more opportunities than those that offer themselves spontaneously, and the
actual enjoyment of the opportunities (over and above the expectation of further
opportunities) may nurture the motivation to learn by enabling people to
experience what difference it makes to possess the linguistic competence
required to understand what is being said and to take an active part in the
conversation.
I
am of course not denying that other factors — for example, how aesthetically
attractive one finds the language one considers learning, or how close it is to
one’s native tongue, or how large a literary corpus it give access to — may
affect significantly either the motivation to learn a language or the ease with
which one will learn it or both. All I am asserting is that, through these two
channels of motivation and opportunity to learn (and retain), the probability of
having to interact in a particular language will be a massively important
determinant of the extent to which average competence in a particular non-native
language tends to expand or shrink in a particular population. A greater
probability means both a larger expected benefit from any given level of
linguistic proficiency in the language concerned and a lower cost of acquiring
or preserving it. More sophisticated measures of the communicative value of a
language have been offered, for example Abram de Swaan’s (2001) stimulating
notion of Q-value. But none of them offers the promise of improving much, if at
all, upon the simple probability of interaction in that language, as a predictor
of differential learning and retention. (See Appendix
1.)
What
I shall call the maximin law of
communication captures a distinct, somewhat less obvious but hardly less
general mechanism, which can be sketched as follows. Suppose you have to address
simultaneously a set of people who each know to various extents a number of
languages and by all of whom you want to be understood. When deciding which
language among those you know you should pick, the question you will
spontaneously tend to ask yourself will not be which is your own best language,
or which language is the best language of the majority, or which language is
best known on average by your audience, but rather which language is best known
by the member of your audience who knows it least. In other words, you will
systematically tend to ask yourself whether there is any language that is known
to some extent by all. If, to the best of your knowledge, there is one and only
one, you will choose it. If there is none, you will tend to choose the language
which is known to some extent by most. And if there is more than one, you will
make a guess for each of them about the level of competence achieved by the
person least competent in it, and you will choose the language for which this
level of competence is highest.
This
“maximin” criterion amounts to maximizing the minimum competence. It can also be
described as a criterion of minimal exclusion. It has a number of direct
corollaries, such as the systematic victory, in linguistically mixed marriages,
of the language of the “worst linguist”, i.e. of the partner who knows least
well the language of the other and systematically tends to be the speaker of the
more widely spread of the two languages.
Again,
I am not claiming that this maximin law operates without exception. To start
with, deviation from it happens on a massive scale for pedagogical reasons. In
foreign language classes, for example, teachers often know the mother tongue of
their pupils (which may well be their own) far better that the pupils know the
language they are learning, but the mutually accepted rules of the teaching game
will frequently entail the partial or total banning of the maximin language. For
analogous reasons, some people choose (as I did) to speak their mother tongues
with their children, even though their children have been all along and they
have themselves become significantly more fluent in at least one other shared
language.
On
a less massive scale but often in a highly sensitive way, deviation may also
occur, even in informal contexts, for what could be called expressive reasons.
This may happen in negative fashion, for example when post-1989 East-Europeans
struggle to communicate with one another in English, even when it would be
(linguistically) far easier for them to do so in Russian. It may also happen in
positive fashion. For example, it happened to me more than once to address a
Brussels audience in Dutch rather than French, despite the fact that all would
have understood me adequately in French, while some did not in Dutch, for
example because the organisers felt that some fair time sharing between French
and Dutch needed to be kept. At least in part for an analogous reason, a vade
mecum dispatched by the French foreign ministry insistently instructs France’s
representatives in all European institutions that, even at informal meetings or
after the interpreters have gone home, “les Français parlent leur langue”
(Ministère des affaires étrangères 2002).[2]
Providing the number of mother tongues involved does not exceed two or three,
this sort of consideration may also lead one to operate, as often done at
interpretation-free federal-level meetings in Belgium and Switzerland, according
to the rule “Each speaks his/her own language”.[3]
However,
as soon as efficiency in communication prevails over pedagogical or expressive
concerns, perceptible inequalities in the minimum knowledge of the various
languages involved will generate a hardly resistible pressure for all to adopt
the maximin language: What’s the point of uttering beautiful sentences with
carefully chosen words if my audience would understand me far better were I to
express myself more clumsily in a language far more familiar to them. Hence,
although didactic effectiveness and symbolic impact may sometimes strongly
constrain language choice, this will not prevent the maximin criterion from
running the show whenever communication is the prime concern, i.e. in the bulk
of spoken and written language use.
Needless
to say, these two mechanisms powerfully interact with each other. The more a
particular language is being learned in some section of the world population,
the more likely that language is to be the maximin language in contexts of
interaction involving members of that section of the population. And the more
often a particular language is picked as the language of interaction, the
stronger the motivation for learning it and the more frequent the opportunity to
learn it. It is worth noting that this positive feedback loop would also exist
if the speech partners systematically tended to pick the language for which the
average knowledge is greater (call it the maxi-mean language), or even the best
language of the majority, but it would then operate at a considerably slower
pace.
To
illustrate this difference, take the situation that used to prevail before the
Swedes and the Finns joined the EU. Both the maxi-mean and the maximin language
in contexts of informal interaction between multilinguals within and around the
European institutions then tended to be English and French in varying
proportions (with German far more often maxi-mean than maximin). Given how small
a percentage of the total population of speech partners they represented, the
arrival of the Scandinavians did not change much in terms of maxi-mean. But it
made a big difference in terms of maximin. For while the second best language
for most British and Irish people was and is French, the Scandinavians’ average
competence in French was far poorer, and therefore tended to make English a
clear winner in terms of maximin (though only marginally better than before in
terms of maxi-mean) in any context in which they turned up. It is obviously far
easier for newcomers to upset the prevailing choice of a language under maximin
than under maxi-mean: it suffices for them to be about totally ignorant of the
prevailing language, while everyone else knows at least some more of at least
one of the languages they know better. And once the switch is done, language
learning is accordingly redirected for both incentive and opportunity reasons,
leading further contexts to do the switch, and so
on.
Undoubtedly,
this analysis is very rough. Its basic assumptions need to be qualified and its
implications should be modelled out in detail to provide precise answers to
questions such as the following. Under what conditions does this twofold
mechanism lead to a convergence to a single lingua franca? Under what conditions
is it on the contrary consistent with the lasting coexistence of two or more
linking languages? Under what conditions does it imply the decline of
multilingualism (as opposed to bilingualism), and indeed of any bilingualism
that does not consist in combining a mother tongue and the lingua franca? Under
what conditions is it consistent with stable universal diglossia — competence of
all members of a community in both their mother tongue and the lingua franca —
or does it imply a long-term threat to the very survival of linguistic
diversity? I do not know the answers to these questions (and would be interested
in finding out). But I have been, from the day of my birth, a participant
observer in enough thousands of situations of multilingual interaction, and seen
enough figures, tables and graphs depicting existing trends, to feel confident
about the nature and power of the twofold mechanism outlined
above.
Whatever
the power of the mechanism just described, one may want to pause to ask whether
we really need the one lingua franca which it tends to bring about. Given the
values to which I am committed, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that
we need a way of communicating directly and intensively across the borders drawn
by the differences of our mother tongues, without the extremely expensive and
constraining mediation of competent interpreters. We need it in particular if we
do not want Europeanisation, and beyond it globalisation, to be the exclusive
preserve of the wealthy and the powerful who can afford quality interpretation.
If we want all sorts of workers’, women’s, young people’s, old people’s, sick
people’s, poor people’s associations to organise on the ever higher scale
required for effective action, we must equip them with the means of talking to
one another without interpreting boxes and highly skilled and paid professionals
in them. One way of putting this is by saying that we need to meet the
linguistic preconditions for turning Europe, and ultimately the world, into one
demos, without this needing to mean
that Europe, or the world, is thereby turned into a single ethnos: a forum can be shared thanks to
a common language without the culture, including the language, becoming one. It
cannot be taken for granted, however, that the linguistic preconditions for the
existence of a single demos involve the adoption of one lingua
franca.
Firstly,
one can try to imagine a situation in which technological development will have
made informal communication possible between different language groups without
requiring the learning of a single common language. It suffices to combine the
best of voice recognition and translation softwares to convey instantaneously
through earphones in any chosen language what is being said in any other. Both
kinds of software, we are told, are making fast progress. But those who have
experienced some of the oddities generated by translation software even when
having to cope with only slightly casual style, and by voice recognition
software even under favourable acoustic conditions, can imagine how stilted and
contrived a spontaneous interchange would need to become in order for its
participants to feel reasonably confident of being understood. [4]
Moreover, any interacting group soon develops a small culture of its own, with words being used between inverted commas, as it were, or proper names turned into nouns, or short-lived imports from another language. Even very imperfect mastery of a common language would provide for a far better medium than beautiful mastery of one’s own language constantly threatened by ridiculous stiffness on one side (if one bears the technology in mind) and ridiculous misunderstandings on the other (if one does not). Techno-freaks can keep dreaming about it. But there is no salvation to be hoped from these quarters in my view.
If technology does not enable us to dispense with a common language, why not opt for a neutral one? This second solution is less fanciful. It is vigorously defended on grounds of neutrality and simplicity. But these two advantages look far greater than they really are. And in addition, the spreading of Esperanto faces a prohibitive hurdle.
Take neutrality first. Esperanto is of course far from being neutral
in the sense of equidistant from all existing languages. It belongs
unambiguously to the Western group of Indo-European languages, with identifiable
Latin, Slavic and Germanic ingredients. Even within
It is true that, unlike English, Esperanto would be a learned language for everyone, and hence its adoption as a lingua franca would definitely be more egalitarian than that of English or French. This advantage, however, would only be transitional. Just assume that Esperanto successfully spreads and starts being used in a growing number of contexts, including by mixed couples in the upbringing of their children. Nothing would then prevent it, after some generations, from thickening from a lingua franca into the mother tongue of some — as happened to Swahili, for example —, with the consequence that once again neutrality would be lost and the whole process of designing a neutral language, in the modest sense of being the mother tongue of no one, would need to be relaunched from scratch.
Secondly, consider the ease of learning. Syntactic and morphological rules are exceptionless in Esperanto, and therefore undoubtedly far simpler to learn from a grammar book than are those of natural languages. Moreover, compared to languages like English and French whose spelling was established long ago and very conservatively managed, Esperanto offers a sensible relationship between oral and written forms. However (usually shorter) irregular forms are rarely, if ever, sheer irrational nuisance. Natural languages operate complex trade offs between least effort in memorising and least effort in pronouncing, and the more intensively a language is used, the more the latter matters relative to the former. Esperanto turned into a really living language would soon be subjected to such pressures. Moreover, Esperanto made relevant for all contexts would need to beef up its lexical stock massively through imports from other languages. Like all other languages today, it would import massively from English, and probably more than others because of its smaller initial stock. Hence, it would not take long for it to start looking like a bulky language, with a slim Esperanto component that can be learned in a couple of days and a huge English vocabulary with subtle nuances which it could take years to master. Most fundamentally, however, the notion that Esperanto unambiguously has the upper hand over English in terms of learning rests on a very schoolish picture of language learning. As pointed out earlier, the learning of a language is essentially a matter of having the opportunity to play, whisper and quarrel, listen to music, watch TV and scan the web in that language, and a matter of being motivated to do all these things, especially at an early stage in one’s life. If this more realistic picture of large-scale language learning replaces that of enthusiastic but lonely xenophiles confined to grammar books and vocabulary lists, it is no longer that clear that Esperanto is, in the relevant sense, easier to learn.
With
its claims to neutrality and simplicity thus drastically qualified, Esperanto is
hardly in a strong position to face the formidable hurdle it faces, precisely as
long as it is not the mother tongue of a significant group. Investing in the
learning of such a language is definitely cheapened by the exceptional
simplicity of its morphological and syntactic rules. But as long as speech
partners, films, music and TV broadcasts in that language are not all over the
place, it still comes at a significant cost for someone with average learning
skills. In the case of widespread natural languages, there is a secure minimum
return to the learning investment, thanks to the tens or even hundreds of
millions of people with whom one can be sure one acquires the capacity to
communicate. Even in the case of Esperanto, the most widespread among the
artificial languages currently advocated, this minimum return is not guaranteed,
as all depends on whether a sufficient number of people will be willing to make
and keep making the deliberate effort of learning the language, which is itself
dependent on which language learning choices they expect others to
do.[5]
The
size of this handicap, relative to English, keeps growing as English keeps
expanding in terms of native speakers, mainly thanks to continued net migration
into English-speaking countries, and, at a much faster rate, in terms of the
total number of people competent in it: English is probably the only natural
language today, and certainly the only major language, with (far) less native
speakers than people who learned it as a second language.[6]
Given the twofold mechanism sketched at the start — probability-sensitive
learning and maximin —, dislodging it from this position will become an ever
more impossible task. Esperanto is a wonderful way of linking up a fantastic
bunch of generous and hospitable people around the world, but it is no more
hopeful than clever software as an alternative Europe-wide or world-wide medium
of communication.
Having
granted that we need a natural language, perhaps we should not rush into
asserting that we need only one. To avoid the drawbacks and dangers of the
dominance of a single language, many (especially, but not exclusively, among
those whose language stands a chance of being picked as one of the lingua
francas in the event that the proposed formula were implemented) have proposed
that there should be two or three lingua francas side by side, with an identical
status.
A
first way of understanding this lingua franca pluralism consists in viewing the
selected lingua francas as alternatives to one another: each person learns one
of them and only one. But reflection on some very modest arithmetic exercises
should suffice to make us quickly discard this version of the idea. In a
population of six people with three distinct mother tongues, a balanced choice
between two lingua francas provides a common medium to randomly grouped people
far more frequently than a random choice of a second language. It does so,
however, with a decreasing frequency as the size of the grouping rises.
Moreover, this frequency decreases sharply as the number of distinct mother
tongues increases. By contrast, the learning by all of the same lingua franca
provides a common medium in 100% of the cases, whatever the size of the
groupings and whatever the number of mother tongues. Moreover this can be
achieved with a sizeable discount, as those whose mother tongue is being learned
can be exempted from the learning of any second language. (See Appendix
2.)
There
is, however, another interpretation of lingua franca pluralism which performs
just as well as the single-lingua-franca option in ensuring inter-communication
in all groupings. It consists in viewing the two or more languages granted
lingua franca status not as alternatives but as supplements. In other words, the
rule is no longer that each individual is supposed to learn one of the lingua
francas, but that he must know them all. This may sound at first sight like a
wasteful overkill: two or three times more learning without any gain in
inter-communication, as one lingua franca is sufficient. It is, however,
reasonable to conjecture that the passive knowledge of a language is easier to
acquire (and even easier to be believed to be acquired) than an active knowledge
of it. Therefore, the cost reduction that flows from the fact that natives of a
language promoted to lingua franca status no longer need to acquire an active
knowledge of the original lingua franca must be matched against the cost
increase flowing from the fact that others need to acquire a passive knowledge
of that language. In
The
trouble comes again when the number of native languages increases. In the
European context, French is keen to share the lingua franca status with English.
But this would mean that Germans, for example, still need to acquire an active
knowledge of either French or English, while in addition having to acquire a
passive knowledge of the other. As they form the largest native language group,
they find this understandably hard to accept. If francophones are to have a
chance of winning their case, they therefore realise that they need to broaden
their alliance by proposing to further share this lingua franca status with
German. [7]
But how will the Spanish, the Italians, and all the rest feel? Making life more
comfortable for the Germans and the French by exempting them from acquiring an
active knowledge of English makes things considerably worse for all others, now
forced to acquire a passive knowledge of two more languages without being
exempted from acquiring an active knowledge of one of them.
What
may make sense in the presence of two native tongues, possibly even three, does
not make the slightest sense when there are many. Any attempt to press for the
adoption of one’s native tongue as a second lingua franca in this supplementary
sense will immediately be perceived for what it is: trying to get greater
comfort for oneself at the expense of increasing the burden on those who enjoy
the privilege of having had their native tongue picked as the only lingua franca
so far — which is defensible enough —, but also on all other language groups who
are not better situated than oneself — which is indefensible. Any attempt to assuage some of these by
offering to extend the lingua franca status to them at the same time risks
turning the net benefit to oneself into a net cost, unavoidably further
increases the burden on any group still left out, and further boosts the global
cost of the whole scheme.
Hence,
for quite a different reason, lingua franca pluralism is no more promising in
the supplementary sense than in the alternative sense. Whatever the language
historical fate happens to have picked, we definitely need convergence to a
single lingua franca. Those saddened by the fact that it is not the one they
learned as infants will have to come to terms with it. Their narcissism should
not jeopardise the satisfaction of our urgent communicative needs, in
The
twofold mechanism sketched in section 1 and the feedback loop between its two
components enable us to understand what is now leading to the dominance of
English. No hidden conspiracy by the Brits, let alone the Americans, but the
spontaneous outcome of a huge set of decentralised decisions, mainly by
non-anglophones, about which language to learn and which language to use. Next,
our exploration of imaginable alternatives in section 2 led to the conclusion
that the increasing dominance of one natural language as the single lingua
franca simply makes a lot of sense: to communicate with one another, we need one
and only one idiom, and it will need to be a natural language. Both unavoidable
and wise then? Undoubtedly. Fair too? Certainly not. I now turn to four possible
characterisations of the nature of the unfairness involved and briefly indicate
in each case how I believe it is best to respond to the problem, as
characterised.
First,
convergence towards a lingua franca that is the mother tongue of a subset of the
population concerned unavoidably provides the members of this subset with
undeserved advantages over the rest. They can express themselves with more ease
and therefore tend to be more active and more persuasive in discussions
conducted in the lingua franca, whether of a business, political or social
nature. In addition, some jobs restricted to native speakers of the lingua
franca — such as a far more than proportional number of language teachers and
language editors paid for by non-natives, a more than proportional number of
translators and interpreters into that language paid for by international
organisations — would not exist without the privileged status enjoyed by that
language. Moreover, a large number of jobs that are not specifically linguistic
in content are explicitly or implicitly restricted, or far more easily
accessible, to native speakers of that language, because of the central
importance of being able to communicate in that language.[8]
This booming demand for people proficient in the lingua franca unavoidably tends
to boost the relative pay of people with native competence in that language,
whether, for example, through being able to ask for high fees for private
language tuition or through faster promotion in inter- or supranational
organisations.
The
undeserved inequalities thus created are by no means restricted to inequalities
between natives and non-natives of the lingua franca. Among non-natives, there
are also huge and increasingly consequential social inequalities in terms of the
extent to which the family environment provides children and adolescents with
both the opportunity and the motivation to learn the lingua franca. There is a
big difference between children whose parents have both a rich set of foreign
connections with whom the lingua franca is commonly spoken and a purse large
enough to fund Summer courses in Oxford, and those who have never taken part in
any English conversation and whose parents would not know how to start to give
them the chance of however modest an immersion.
Thus,
growing unfairness there appears to be. Before considering what can and must be
done about it, it is worth pausing briefly to get a sense of
perspective.
First,
the problem thus characterised is far from being unprecedented. In most nation
states, the majority of the population had a mother tongue, typically labelled a
“dialect”, that differed notably from the national language, as used in the
media and the educational system, in high culture and political life, and in
business transactions beyond the local level. Indeed, in many places, there is
still a big discrepancy between the home language of many families, especially
rural ones, and the nationally imposed lingua franca. In most cases, linguistic
distance was not as great as between most European languages and English, but in
some cases it was, and in all cases it involved forms of disadvantage in
economic and political life, often even forms of blatant discrimination, closely
parallel to those now encountered as English becomes just as much of a
trans-national must as the dialect of the capital was a national
must.
In
the national context, the task of drastically reducing the resulting inequality
of opportunities was (regarded as) accomplished through compulsory schooling in
the national language. In the case of a trans-national lingua franca that no one
would dare to try to impose as the main language of the various national
populations concerned (and rightly so, as I shall argue later), the job looks
far trickier. But let us bear in mind that the average number of years spent at
school and the resources devoted to education in today’s European context are
enormous in both a historical and a comparative perspective. For example, when
we are demanding that a country like the Congo, whose educational system is in
shambles and whose formal political life is entirely conducted in an alien
language mastered by no more than an estimated 7% of the population, should
operate democratically, and hence at the very least enable a majority of the
citizens to more or less follow what is going on, we are demanding something
incomparably more utopian, in terms of its linguistic preconditions, than
universal competence in English throughout Europe.
Moreover,
as reflected in recent surveys, the process is well under way. In
To see
what this could be, just reflect for a while on the distribution of competence
in English across European countries, as revealed by Eurobarometer (see Table
3). If we leave out the
Table
3. Percentage who say they “know” English (EU
15)
United
Kingdom
99
98
Ireland
95
96
Luxemburg
19
27
Source:
Eurobarometer 54.[10]
There is
however, a second conjecture that turns out to be far more consistent with the
data as soon as some attention is paid to the two remaining countries. Greek and
even more Finnish are uncontroversially far more remote from English than either
the Latin or the Germanic languages. As one moves from Finnish to Greek and next
to the Latin and the Germanic group, one would therefore expect competence in
English to rise monotonically. Yet for the population as a whole, the profile
yielded by the data is 61% for
To find a
better predictor, let us partition our eleven countries according to the number
of native speakers of their official language worldwide: less than 10 million
(
My
conjecture is that the key intermediate variable is the relative frequency of
dubbing versus subtitling in the broadcasting of English-language series, films
and other programmes. It is estimated that the average cost of one hour of
dubbing is about fifteen times the cost of one hour of subtitling (Luyken &
al. 1991). Hence, the threshold, in terms of number of viewers, as from which it
starts making sense to incur the cost of translation is far lower in the case of
subtitling that it is in the case of dubbing, which a majority of viewers seems
to prefer.[11]
Consequently, the extent to which English-language productions are dubbed,
rather than subtitled, can safely be expected to rise steadily as one moves from
countries whose language is spoken by comparatively few people, such as Denmark,
Sweden, Finland, Greece and the Netherlands, to countries populated by the
members of larger linguistic groups.[12] As
revealed by incipient research, the watching of undubbed foreign programmes
provides, under appropriate conditions, a powerful way in which children learn
foreign languages. [13] No
wonder, therefore, that we should find a strong negative correlation between
size of the language group and competence in English.
In
order to motivate the proposal I am about to make, I do not need to assert that
no other factor plays a significant role. It is sufficient for me to be able to
assume, as the available evidence strongly suggests I can, that the learning
mechanism in question is a powerful one. We cannot do much about linguistic
distance between languages, nor about the numbers of native speakers of the
various languages, nor therefore about the relative profitability of subtitling
and dubbing. But we can outlaw dubbing. And if we do so, while providing
supportive language teaching and letting MTV music, web chats and other less
virtual trans-national contacts do the rest of the job, competence in English
will become all over, in the space of one generation, even less of a problem
than it now is in the most English-literate parts of the European
continent. [14]
Refusing
to ban dubbing in those countries in which it is currently common practice
amounts to unnecessarily inflicting a linguistic handicap to the most
disadvantaged layers of the populations concerned and therefore strengthening
the privilege enjoyed by the elite whose access to competence in English is far
easier through quality schooling and foreign contacts. It also amounts to
perpetuating an increasingly costly disadvantage for many members of their
populations who are any likely to be involved in the global economy, in
supra-national organisations or in the trans-national civil society. If we want
to be serious about fighting linguistic injustice in the sense of unequal access
to linguistic advantage, therefore, my recipe is simple and inexpensive: Ban dubbing![15]
One
possible objection is that such a ban would violate the fundamental freedom of
expression. Note, however, that it applies indiscriminately to all languages,
that it involves no restriction whatever on the content of what is being
subtitled or dubbed, and that it does not deprive anyone from addressing
directly through the media an audience with whom it has no language in
common.[16]
This objection is therefore bound to be regarded as ludicrously formalistic,
especially if the ban it incriminates can persuasively be shown, along the lines
sketched above, to better equip a large proportion of the population to express
themselves in a language in which it will be increasingly crucial for them to be
able to express themselves if they are to be heard by those by whom they will
need to be heard.
A second objection is that the ban would hurt head on the interests of professionial actors, who use dubbing as a way of securing more regular incomes than film or theatre contracts can provide. There will undoubtedly be an effect of this kind, but it will be buffered, if not offset, by a significant increase in the demand for local production if it remains the case, beyond the transition period, that a majority of people prefer dubbing to subtitling. A residual net negative effect on professional actors taken as a whole cannot be ruled out. But the vested interest of a tiny minority cannot legitimately block a move that would massively benefit a large, comparatively disadvantaged majority.
Finally,
there is the risk that the ban would be by-passed as a result of people going to
the cinema or watching videos and DVDs not subjected to the same ban. While the
ban seems easy enough to extend to cinemas, it seems more difficult for videos
and DVDs. But the fall in demand from TV channels and cinema distribution may in
itself be sufficient to make quality dubbing unprofitable for videos and DVDs
alone, even if some boosting of the demand for dubbed videos is triggered by the
ban. Needless to say, if the effect of the ban were that people would shift
entirely to programmes in the native language, or to cartoons with a sound track
in the native language, or to dubbed videos, or to a combination of these, the
intended effect would not be achieved. But although some shift in each of these
three directions can be expected, it is most doubtful that it would inhibit a
lasting and expanding impact, especially as tolerance for subtitling develops
through practice and as teletext technology makes it possible to open a wide
range of individual choices for subtitle languages and to optionally get rid of
subtitling altogether as competence in English (or any other non-native
language) makes it superfluous for a growing number of non-native people and for
a widening range of programmes.
To
phrase as sharply as possible our second problem of linguistic injustice, let us
next assume that competence in English has spread massively to the non-native
speakers, and pretty equally among them, so that the adoption of English as a
lingua franca no longer gives a great advantage in discussion or competition to
English natives or to non-natives with a privileged access to English.
Language-related injustice has not disappeared. For unlike the community of
natives, the non-natives have had to spend a considerable amount of time and
resources to the learning of a foreign language.[17]
It is estimated that the average time required to master adequately a foreign
language is 10.000 hours — compared to a standard school year totalling less
than 1.000 hours in the classroom.[18]
However speculative such estimates, it is clear that the cost in time and
resources of acquiring proficiency in a foreign language is huge. This heavy
effort obviously benefits the community that performs it — otherwise it
would not bother —, but also, in some cases possibly even to a larger extent,
the community whose language is being learned.
In
other words, there is a public good— the creation of a lingua franca — being
enjoyed by all linguistic groups throughout the world involved in global
communication, but produced only by those groups whose language has not been
picked as the lingua franca, with the lucky ones whose native language happens
to have been picked enjoying a free ride. This is the second sense in which
“linguistic injustice” can be said to be involved. What can be done about
it?
Scandinavians,
who speak the least widely spread of the EU’s current eleven official languages
have tended to be pretty blunt about admitting the dominance of English, while
being quite imaginative about suggesting how the induced fairness could be
reduced. Thus, the first Danish delegation to the European Parliament is said to
have made the following proposal. They conceded upfront that they could not
expect others to understand Danish and agreed to speak English, but only on
condition that the others, including the French, did the same with the sole
exception of the British, who would have to speak French. The British were no
doubt quick to point out that this would be grossly unfair to them as they would
be forced to express themselves in a language only a minority would grasp, while
everyone else could be understood by all. As they were still allowed to speak in
English at that stage, the others must have understood they had a point, and the
idea was dropped.[19]
More
recently, the Swedish Prime Minister, somewhat scared at the prospect of a near
doubling of the number of official EU languages, made a distinct proposal.
Instead of having all countries paying jointly (roughly according to their
wealth) for the translating of everything into every language, why not have a
system in which the cost of language services would be systematically shared
equally between the countries whose language is being used and the countries
into whose language the translation is being made. As an ever greater majority
of texts is being produced in English and as the Swedes are competent enough in
English not to need a translation for most documents, the rule would end up
practically exempting the Swedes from any contribution. Fairly, it might be
said, as this counts as a compensation for their investment in the learning of
English. Efficiently too, it may be added, as this would provide other countries
with an incentive to follow suit, thereby facilitating massive savings in
translation costs. At the limit, all translation costs would be eliminated as a
result of all countries conforming to the Swedish pattern. However, while
translation costs may then be down to zero, unfairness would not, as one
linguistic community would still get away with not learning a foreign language,
while all others would need to.
As
argued persuasively by Jonathan Pool (1991), the only real solution to this
problem, the only real way of reconciling communicative efficiency and
linguistic fairness in this second sense, consists in introducing a subsidy from
the linguistic group whose language is being learned to those who do the
learning. How high should this subsidy be? Various criteria are worth
discussing. For example, Pool (1991) proposes that each language group should
contribute to the cost of the learning of the lingua franca according to its
numerical size, while David Gauthier’s (1986) general conception of co-operative
justice as maximin relative benefit would amount, in this case, to requiring
equality between the per capita benefits derived from the existence of the
lingua franca by the various language groups.[20]
I
argue elsewhere (Van Parijs 2002) that neither of these prima facie attractive
criteria is defensible and that a distinct one is to be preferred: the
equalisation of cost-benefit ratios across language groups or, put differently,
proportionality between (total or per capita) contribution of each group to the
cost of the existence of the lingua franca and (total or per capita) benefit
derived from it. Suppose we measure roughly the benefit to a language group of
the existence of the lingua franca by the number of people with whom the latter
enables members of the group to communicate. And suppose we measure the
contribution of a language group by the amount (in money and time) its members
spend on acquiring the lingua franca, if any, plus the taxes paid in this
connection to other language groups, if any, minus the subsidies received in
this connection from other language groups, if any. What the proposed criterion
requires is that, across all language groups involved, the total contribution
(taking taxes and subsidies into account) be proportional to the number of
people the language group can communicate with thanks to the lingua franca.
In
all circumstances, this criterion will require a net transfer from the
linguistic group whose language is being learned to the groups who do the
learning, and the per capita size of this language tax will grow, other things
being equal, as more and more people learn the language. The size of the
transfer will never exceed the benefit to lingua franca natives, as the
criterion requires the ratio of contribution to benefit to be the same for all,
and the learning only makes sense if the cost exceeds the benefit. Yet, it is
clear that the criterion justifies massive transfers from those countries in
which the bulk of the English natives live — in particular the United States,
home to 70% of them— towards the rest of the world.
This
conclusion needs to be qualified in four ways. Firstly, as the biggest language
groups in the world — the Mandarinophones and the Hispanophones — fully join the
global game, the English natives will not be the only ones from whom fairness
will require a subsidy. For as one moves from a larger to smaller language group
that learns the lingua franca, it is not just that the total amount of the
subsidy justified by our criterion shrinks, but also its per capita level,
because smaller groups unavoidably gain more speech partners than large ones
thanks to the lingua franca. So much so that for small language groups learning
the lingua franca along far bigger ones, this subsidy may be negative. Thus,
overall equality of cost-benefit ratios may require small learners such as the
Danes, the Dutch and even the French, to pay, along with the Americans and the
Brits, for part of the learning of English by such potential big learners as the
natives of Mandarin, Castillan, Hindi and Bengali. [21]
Secondly,
as English spreads as a world lingua franca, the quantity of learning may be
rising, but its per-unit cost is bound to fall at some point for two reasons.
One is that there are more and more opportunities to speak English as the number
of (non-native) English speech partners expands, and the expansion of costless
opportunities to speak is the surest way of cheapening language learning. The
second reason is that the local spread of competence in English makes it
possible to provide prospective learners far more cheaply with the competent
teachers they need — it is no longer necessary to import natives at high cost or
to send children to immersion courses in native territory. For this reason the
swelling of the global cost of lingua franca learning is bound to be far less
than proportional to the swelling of its quantity. At the limit, if it ever
became as easy and natural to learn the lingua franca as it is to learns one’s
mother tongue, i.e. if our first problem of linguistic unfairness had become
solvable at no cost, our second problem of linguistic unfairness would vanish
altogether.[22]
Thirdly,
one has to draw the full implications of the fact that talking to some willing
native speakers of a language in a context in which it is natural to speak that
language is one of the most widespread and most effective ways of improving
one’s knowledge of a language — this is precisely the opportunity side of the
probability-sensitive learning mechanism at the core of the language dynamics
sketched in section 1. But it is its reverse side which I now want to draw
attention to. As competence in English spreads worldwide, there are ever less
circumstances, because of the maximin dynamics sketched earlier, in which
English natives will have a natural opportunity to speak another language and
improve their knowledge of it. The advantage of being able to use one’s own
language in an ever growing number of contexts therefore has the side effect of
making it increasing difficult to learn other languages. Even though the
importance of knowing other languages for communication purposes decreases
accordingly, this is a genuine disadvantage. One way of putting it is that
language learning is to a large extent made up of free riding on patient speech
partners. As English spreads, interaction between English natives and others
happen more and more, soon nearly exclusively, in English. Consequently, this
type of free-riding of English natives on others will get reduced to very
little, relative to the symmetric free-riding of these others on English natives
(even though an ever growing majority of the people with whom non-English
natives will be talking English will be other non-English
natives).[23]
This growing asymmetry in learning assistance may be far from offsetting the
growing asymmetry in exemption from learning, but it does qualify the assessment
of the size of the unfairness involved.
Finally, one must be aware of the fact that both the incentive and opportunity to learn any foreign language but English will decrease as English increasingly suffices to get by wherever one is. As a consequence, English will become more and more a globally public language, while other languages will remain or increasingly become globally private languages. Having no private language means being far more liable to give away information to any outsider who cares to listen or read. This may take some minor forms: whatever your mother tongue, you may benefit from overhearing two American tourists telling each other, in the queue to the museum, that the door to the toilet is locked. Had they been Finnish, you would have lost in vain your position in the queue. Trivial asymmetric benefiting of this sort may seem hardly worth mentioning. But as more and more information gets loaded onto the web, easy to access, copy and use worldwide, this asymmetry is taking gigantic proportions. Whatever is being made available in this way to the 350 million English natives is being made available simultaneously to the 700 million or so non-natives who bothered to learn English (and are massively over-represented among web users from their respective countries). By contrast, practically nothing of the information that these 700 million put on the web in their native languages can be “overheard” by English natives, because so few of these know other l