1The Persistence of EnglishBy Geoffrey NunbergIntroductory Essay to the Norton Anthology of EnglishLiterature, Seventh EditionThe triumph of English?If you measure the success of a language in purely quantitative terms,English is entering the twenty-first century at the moment of its greatesttriumph. It has between 400 and 450 million native speakers, perhaps 300million more who speak it as a second language -- well enough, that is, to useit in their daily lives -- and something between 500 and 750 million whospeak it as a foreign language with various degrees of fluency. The resultingtotal of between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion speakers, or roughly a quarter of theworld's population, gives English more speakers than any other language(though Chinese has more native speakers). Then too, English is spoken overa much wider area than any other language, and is the predominant linguafranca of most fields of international activity, like diplomacy, business, travel,science, and technology.But figures like these can obscure a basic question: what exactly do wemean when we talk about the "English language" in the first place? There is,after all, an enormous range of variation in the forms of speech that go by thename of English in the various parts of the world – or often, even within thespeech of a single nation -- and it is not obvious why we should think of all ofthese as belonging to a single language. Indeed, there are some linguists whoprefer to talk about "world Englishes," in the plural, with the implication thatthese varieties may not have much more to unite them than a single nameand a common historical origin.To the general public, these reservations may be hard to understand;people usually assume that languages are natural kinds like botanical species,whose boundaries are matters of scientific fact. But as linguists observe, thereis nothing in the forms of English themselves that tells us that it is a singlelanguage. It may be that the varieties called "English" have a great deal ofvocabulary and structure in common, and that English-speakers can usually2manage to make themselves understood to one another, more-or-less(though films produced in one part of the English-speaking world often haveto be dubbed or subtitled to make them intelligible to audiences in another).But there are many cases where we find linguistic varieties that are mutuallyintelligible and grammatically similar, but where speakers nonethelessidentify separate languages – for example Danish and Norwegian, Czech andSlovak, or Dutch and Afrikaans. And on the other hand, there are caseswhere speakers identify varieties as belonging to a single language eventhough they are linguistically quite distant from one another: the various"dialects" of Chinese are more different from one another than the Latinoffshoots that we identify now as French, Italian, Spanish, and so forth.Philosophers sometimes compare languages to games, and the analogyis apt here, as well. Trying to determine whether American English andBritish English or Dutch and Afrikaans are "the same language" is like tryingto determine whether baseball and softball are "the same game" -- it is notsomething you can find out just by looking at their rules. It is not surprising,then, that linguists should throw up their hands when someone asks them todetermine on linguistic grounds alone whether two varieties belong to asingle language. That, they answer, is a political or social determination, not alinguistic one, and they usually go on to cite a well-known quip: "a languageis just a dialect with an army and a navy.There is something to this remark. Since the eighteenth century, it hasbeen widely believed that every nation deserved to have its own language,and declarations of political independence have often been followed bydeclarations of linguistic independence, as well. Until recently, for example,the collection of similar language varieties that were spoken in most ofcentral Yugoslavia was regarded as a single language, Serbo-Croatian, but oncethe various regions became independent, their inhabitants began to speak ofCroatian, Serbian, and Bosnian as separate languages, even though they aremutually comprehensible and grammatically almost identical.The English language has avoided this fate (though on occasion it hascame closer to breaking up than most people realize). But the unity of alanguage is never a foregone conclusion. In any speech community, there areforces always at work to create new differences and varieties: the geographicand social separation of speech-communities, their distinct cultural and3practical interests, their contact with other cultures and other languages, andno less important, a universal fondness for novelty for its own sake, and adesire to speak differently from one's parents or the people in the next town.Left to function on their own, these centrifugal pressures can rapidly lead tothe linguistic fragmentation of the speech-community. That is whathappened, for example, to the vulgar (that is, "popular") Latin of the lateRoman Empire, which devolved into hundreds or thousands of separatedialects (the emergence of the eight or ten standard varieties that we nowthink of as the Romance languages was a much later development).Maintaining the unity of a language over an extended time and space,then, requires a more-or-less conscious determination by its speakers thatthey have certain communicative interests in common that make itworthwhile to try to curb or modulate the natural tendency to fragmentationand isolation. This determination can be realized in a number of ways. Thespeakers of a language may decide to use a common spelling system evenwhen dialects become phonetically distinct, to defer to a common set ofliterary models, to adopt a common format for their dictionaries andgrammars, or to make instruction in the standard language a part of thegeneral school curriculum, all of which the English-speaking world has doneto some degree. Or in some other places, the nations of the linguisticcommunity may establish academies or other state institutions charged withregulating the use of the language, and even go so far as to publish lists ofwords that are unacceptable for use in the press or in official publications, asthe French have done in recent years. Most important, the continuity of thelanguage rests on speakers' willingness to absorb the linguistic and culturalinfluences of other parts of the linguistic