The march of English yields surprising losers
By Michael Skapinker
Published: November 30 2009 19:52 | Last updated: November 30 2009 19:52
Anthony Bolton, veteran star stock-picker at Fidelity International,
is moving to Hong Kong to set up a China fund. He is following Michael
Geoghegan, HSBC's chief executive, who has already announced he is
moving from London to Hong Kong. "The centre of gravity is clearly
shifting," Mr Bolton says.
It certainly looks that way, although it is worth recalling that it
was not that long ago that Japan was tipped to be the new number one.
Economies have their ups and downs – look at Dubai.
What we can forecast with some confidence is that English will remain
the world's leading language for as long as anyone reading these words
is alive. Economies can tip into crisis, fund managers can switch
their investments at the click of a button and executives can relocate
to the other side of the world, but it takes a lot more to topple the
global language.
If Mandarin – or Spanish, or Arabic – is to replace English as the
world's lingua franca, children in São Paulo, St Petersburg and
Auckland had better start learning it now. Forget all those
advertisements promising you can learn a language in three months. You
can't. You may be able to summon up a few phrases. Perhaps you could
engage a taxi driver in a minute of conversation before you seize up.
There are many ways to learn a language, but they all require years of
graft, getting new words to stick, mastering grammatical forms and
endlessly watching television and films until the indistinguishable
babble separates itself into the odd word you recognise. It takes much
of a lifetime to master a language and the world's pilots, seafarers,
traders and academics have already devoted their best years to
learning English. They would not relish the prospect of starting out
again in, say, Portuguese or Hindi.
English will endure, but its predominance is throwing up some
surprising winners and losers. A British Council report, English Next
India (I hope the Council can find a way of punctuating that before it
comes out), says India may now have fewer English speakers than China.
This is an extraordinary outcome, given India's colonial past, the
fluent English of its cricketers and its profusion of call centres
providing train times and computer support to the English-speaking
world.
The report points to various reasons why India's English has fallen
behind China's. First, India's colonial heritage has left it with an
ambivalent attitude to English, along with a desire to preserve local
languages. Second, much Indian schooling is poor and the teaching of
English is often inadequate.
This year, the government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu asked the
British Council to test the English-speaking skills of a group of
primary teachers. The teachers had Bachelor of Arts degrees in
English, which meant they were above the average. Yet, while most were
able to make themselves understood, they made the sort of mistakes
that cause misunderstandings. Very few had reached the level of
English that would have allowed them to play an active role in a
business meeting or academic seminar.
No one is sure how many Indians speak English. In one survey, over a
third claimed to be able to. The consensus figure of those who really
do is 5 per cent, although the Indian National Knowledge Commission
this year put the proportion who speak it well at 1 per cent.
This is troubling because, the British Council report says, it is not
only technology and outsourcing workers who will need English. If
Indian tourism is to develop, taxi drivers and waiters will need it
too.
The suggestion that the number of English speakers in China is higher
than in India is an estimate, but it does indicate how much effort the
Chinese are putting into learning English and how serious China is
about becoming the world's leading economy. The report says that
China's government schools are better-equipped than India's.
The key for any country that wants its children to learn English, the
report says, is to start teaching them in the first years of primary
school, to teach at least part of the secondary school curriculum in
English and to provide some university courses in English or ensure
that students can read English-language text books.
As English continues to sweep the world, there could be another set of
losers: native English speakers. The rest of the world is not just
learning English. It is becoming multilingual. International companies
are already full of senior executives who manage in English, but speak
Italian or Spanish or Urdu too. Even if only 1 per cent of Indians
speak English well, that is still millions of bilingual or
multilingual people for native English speakers to compete with.
Mr Bolton is a talented stock-picker, but he does not speak Chinese.
Good luck to him.
Send your comments to michael.skapinker@ft.com
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