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International travel
The reasons for travelling abroad are many and various. They
range from routine business trips to annual holidays, and from
religious pilgrimages and sports competitions to military inter-
ventions. Each journey has immediate linguistic consequences – a
language has to be interpreted, learned, imposed – and over time
a travelling trend can develop into a major influence. If there is a
contemporary movement towards world English use, therefore,
we would expect it to be particularly noticeable in this domain.
And so it is.
In the tourist industry, for example, worldwide international
arrivals approached 700 million in 2000. The leading tourism
earner and spender is the USA. In 2001, according to the World
Tourism Organization, the USA earned over $72,000 million
from tourism – over twice as much as its nearest rival, Spain; it
also spent nearly $59,000 million on tourism – ahead of Germany
and the UK. The predominance seems set to continue, notwith-
standing the initial impact on international travel caused by the
terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in New York.
19
Money
talks very loudly in tourism – if only because the tourist has
extra money to spend while on holiday. In the tourist spots of
the world, accordingly, the signs in the shop windows are most
commonly in English. Restaurant menus tend to have a paral-
lel version in English. Credit card facilities, such as American
Express and Mastercard, are most noticeably in English. And
among the destitute who haunt the tourist locations, the smat-
tering of foreign language which is used to sell artefacts or to
beg money from the passing visitor is usually a pidgin form of
English.
19
Estimated to be only 0.6% down by the World Tourism Organization,
reported in its regional series, Tourism Market Trends (September 2002).
Other data in this paragraph are derived from this series.
104
Why English? The cultural legacy
Move away from the regular tourist routes, however, and
English soon becomes conspicuous by its absence. It is impor-
tant not to forget the fact that, even if one third of the world
is now regularly exposed to English, as was suggested in chapter
1, this still means that two thirds are not. We need only to walk
up a side street in a city, or pause at a village on our way to a
destination, to experience the world’s remarkable linguistic diver-
sity. The more we know about the language(s) of the country we
are exploring, the more we shall be rewarded with a visit that is
insightful and comfortable.
By contrast, for those whose international travel brings them
into a world of package holidays, business meetings, academic
conferences, international conventions, community rallies, sport-
ing occasions, military occupations and other ‘official’ gatherings,
the domains of transportation and accommodation are mediated
through the use of English as an auxiliary language. Safety in-
structions on international flights and sailings, information about
emergency procedures in hotels, and directions to major locations
are now increasingly in English alongside local languages. Most
notices which tell us to fasten our seatbelts, find the lifeboat sta-
tions, or check the location of the emergency stairs give us an
option in English. In some cities, the trend towards English has
been especially noticeable. An English-speaking visitor to Tokyo
in 1985would have found city travel a largely impenetrable ex-
perience without an English-language map; but by 1995, English
road signs had become commonplace.
The role of the military, in the spread of English, is difficult
to evaluate. It is obvious that the language of an invading army,
or an army of occupation, must have an immediate effect on a
community, but how long this effect lasts is an open question.
American songs were exported both in the Boer War and the
First World War, and American Forces Network radio, in particu-
lar, ensured that English was widely heard in Europe during and
after the Second World War. The presence of US and British forces
in large numbers would certainly have brought the local inhab-
itants into contact with English-speaking culture more rapidly
than would otherwise have been the case, if only in such areas
as advertising and popular music. It is even possible that in some
105
ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE
instances the effects would be long-lasting – perhaps as individuals
returned to marry or work in a former war zone. This especially
happened in Europe after 1945. But there is little evidence to
go on.
A similar point could be made about the 1990s, which saw the
presence of English-speaking troops on peace-keeping missions
in Bosnia, the Middle East, Central Africa and elsewhere and in
Afghanistan since 2001. UN officers are routinely heard on TV
commenting on the way a crisis is developing, and the language
used to the cameras is almost always English. But is it likely that an
English-language presence of a few months, or even years, would
have a long-term influence on local language awareness? We can
only speculate.
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