Why the English language rules the world

In the musical ldquoMy Fair Ladyrdquo Professor Henry Higgins expresses outrage at the ldquocoldblooded murder of the English tonguerdquo The guilty parties are the Scots the Irish the Welsh mdash and of course Eliza Doolittle the Cockney flower girl from London with whom the linguistic purist falls in love If Americans escape his scathing verdict itrsquos because ldquoin America they havenrsquot used English for yearsrdquo What would Higgins say today Even on the BBC once a bastion of the ldquoQueenrsquos Englishrdquo the way presenters speak immediately identifies them not only as Irish Scottish and Welsh but as American Australian South African Indian Kenyan not to mention as hailing from South London or the wilds of northern England English has become a universal language There are many reasons for its dominance the heritage of the British Empire and the postworldwar economic hegemony and cultural influence mdash ranging from Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe to Elvis Presley and Snoop Dogg When the worldrsquos top business folks and politicians meet up in the Swiss ski resort of Davos whether on the podium a hotel bar or somebody elsersquos bed chances are they will be speaking English slurred broken groaned perhaps but English nonetheless English has become a universal language There are many reasons for its dominance the heritage of the British Empire and the postworldwar economic hegemony and cultural influence ranging from Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe to Elvis Presley and Snoop Dogg of the United States But the main reason is the elasticity of the language and the broadmindedness it communicates If English grammar is rudimentary the linguistic equivalent of rockrsquo nrsquo roll the English vocabulary is huge There are very few things that canrsquot be expressed in English and if it canrsquot be said in English then a word is lifted from another language like ldquokindergartenrdquo for example If it doesnrsquot exist in English and a word isnrsquot lifted from another language itrsquos because what it represents doesnrsquot make sense to thinking shaped by the English language a case in point ldquoSchicksalsgemeinschaftrdquo companions in fate The predominance of English in sciences economy culture and politics is overwhelming In Palestine in the days of Jesus of Nazareth Latin was the language of the military and government But to be considered educated you had to speak Greek if you were Jewish you also had to speak Hebrew and the language of the masses was Aramaic In the Europe of the late Middle Ages Latin was the language of the erudite Italian the language of trade and blossoming cultures used their own respective languages Karl Marx had an inkling of where things were headed In his 1848 ldquoCommunist Manifestordquo he wrote ldquoNational onesidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literaturerdquo Perhaps the universal language didnrsquot have to be English In his soontobepublished utopian novel ldquoDer Kometrdquo ldquoThe Cometrdquo German writer Hannes Stein imagines a world in which the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke of Austria which sparked World War I had not taken place As a result there were no First and Second World Wars there was no Russian Revolution and there was no Holocaust The AustroHungarian Empire is the cultural reference and the Deutsche Reich is the economic and scientific driving force It goes without saying that American scientists publish in German the language that is also spoken in the Turkish province of Palestine among Zionist settlers living under the protection of the Sultan Steinrsquos Utopia is compelling precisely because it isnrsquot all that improbable Yet one dares make the assertion that the world is lucky that it is English mdash that whore among languages mdash that has become the global lingua franca From its inception English showed the multicultural flexibility and openness that are the secret to success Originally a ScandinavianLow German dialect it was mdash after the invasion of England by the Frenchspeaking Normans enriched by a romancelanguage vocabulary to the extent that there are two words for virtually all objects Whatrsquos more the Germanic endings and similar nonsense were dropped so that mdash as every translator knows mdash English texts can convey the same thing as a German text that is onethird longer End rhymes without inflectional endings are easier something that is no less crucial to Shakespearersquos sonnets than it is to pop music lyrics So the triumph of the English language may not be so accidental after all Englishspeaking financial guru and philosopher Nassim Taleb who was born in Lebanon and lives in the United States has said that the survival of institutions depends on a quality he calls the ldquoantifragilerdquo Things are antifragile when they donrsquot fall apart under stress but adapt instead English is antifragile It is opportunistic Unlike French for example it doesnrsquot stand on rules and correct pronunciation It can even accommodate a Henry Kissinger mdash and that says a lotu00a0