The Rise of English

Description

A sweeping account of the global rise of English and the high-stakes politics of language

Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca—its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "rise of English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy.

But the rise of English has very real downsides at times generating intense legal conflicts. In Europe, imperatives of political integration, job mobility, and university rankings compete with pride in national language and heritage as countries like France attempt to curb its spread. In countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency and devalued commonly spoken languages. In Anglophone countries like the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages.

In The Rise of English, Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to China's use of language as "soft power" in Africa, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English—and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders.

Rosemary Salomone, Kenneth Wang Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law

Rosemary Salomone is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law (USA). Trained as a linguist and a lawyer, she is an internationally recognized expert and commentator on language rights, education law and policy, and comparative equality. An elected member of the American Law Institute and fellow of the American Bar Foundation, she is a former faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, lecturer in Harvard's Institute for Educational Management, and trustee of the State University of New York. In addition to The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language (awarded the 2023 Premio Pavese in non-fiction by Italy's Fondazione Cesare Pavese), her books include True American; Same, Different, Same, Different, Equal (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title for 2005" by Choice Magazine); Visions of Schooling; and Equal Education Under Law.

Table of contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The English Divide
Part I: Multilingual Europe
Chapter 2: Myth or Reality?
Chapter 3: A High-Stakes Movement
Chapter 4: Shakespeare in the Crossfire
Chapter 5: Headwinds from the North
Part II: Shadows of Colonialism
Chapter 6: The "New Scramble" for Africa
Chapter 7: Adieu to French
Chapter 8: Redress and Transformation
Chapter 9: Confronting the Raj
Part III: Defying the Monolingual Mindset
Chapter 10: Defining the Deficit
Chapter 11: Reshaping the Narrative
Chapter 12: A Revolution in the Making
Chapter 13: Marketing Language
Conclusion
Chapter 14: Looking Back, Moving Forward
References

Index