Karshi state university foreign languages faculty

Background

According to de Swaan, the global language system has been constantly evolving since the time period of the early 'military-agrarian' regimes.¹ Under these regimes, the rulers imposed their own language and so the first 'central' languages emerged, linking the peripheral languages of the agrarian communities via bilingual speakers to the language of the conquerors. Then was the formation of empires, which resulted in the next stage of integration of the world language system.

Firstly, Latin emerged from Rome. Under the rule of the Roman Empire, which ruled an extensive group of states, the usage of Latin stretched along the Merranean coast, the southern half of Europe, and more sparsely to the North and then into the Germanic and Celtic lands. Thus, Latin evolved to become a central language in Europe from 27 BC to 476 AD.

Secondly, there was the widespread usage of the pre-classical version of Han Chinese in contemporary China due to the unification of China in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang.

Thirdly, Sanskrit started to become widely spoken in South Asia from the widespread teaching of Hinduism and Buddhism in South Asian countries.

Fourthly, the expansion of the Arabic empire also led to the increased usage of Arabic as a language in the Afro-Eurasian land mass.

Military conquests of preceding centuries generally determine the distribution of languages today. Supercentral languages spread by land and sea. Land-bound languages spread via marching empires: German, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese. Languages like Bengali, Tamil, Italian and Turkish too are less considered as land-bound languages. However, when the conquerors were defeated and were forced to move out of the territory, the spread of the languages receded. As a result, some of these languages are currently barely supercentral languages and are instead confined to their remaining state territories, as is evident from German, Russian and Japanese.

On the other hand, sea-bound languages spread by conquests overseas: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish. Consequently, these languages became widespread in areas settled by European colonisers and relegated the indigenous people and their languages to peripheral positions.

Besides, the world-systems theory also allowed the global language system to expand further. It focuses on the existence of the core, semi-peripheral and peripheral nations. The core countries are the most economically powerful and the wealthiest countries. Besides, they also have a strong governmental system in the country, which oversees the bureaucracies in the governmental departments. There is also the prevalent existence of the bourgeois, and core nations have significant influence over the non-core, smaller nations. Historically, the core countries were found in northwestern Europe and include countries such as England, France and the Netherlands. They were the dominant countries that had colonized many other nations from the early 15th century to the early 19th century.

Then is the existence of the periphery countries, the countries with the slowest economic growth. They also have relatively weak governments and a poor social structure and often depend on primary industries as the main source of economic activity for the country.

The extracting and exporting of raw materials from the peripheral nations to core nations is the activity bringing about the most economic benefits to the country. Much of the population that is poor and uneducated, and the countries are also extensively influenced by core nations and the multinational corporations found there. Historically, peripheral nations were found outside Europe, the continent of colonial masters. Many countries in Latin America were peripheral nations during the period of colonization, and today peripheral countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Lastly, the presence of the semiperiphery countries, those in between the core and the periphery. They tend to be those which started out as peripheral nations and are currently moving towards industrialization and the development of more diversified labour markets and economies. They can as well come about from declining core countries. They are not dominant players in the international trade market. As compared to the peripheral nations, semi-peripheries are not as susceptible to manipulation by the core countries. However, most of these nations have economic or political relations with the core. Semi-peripheries also tend to exert influence and control over peripheries and can serve to be a buffer between the core and peripheral nations and ease political tensions. Historically, Spain and Portugal were semi-peripheral nations after they fell from their dominant core positions. As they still maintained a certain level of influence and dominance in Latin America over their colonies, they could still maintain their semi-peripheral position.

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most well-known theorists who developed the world-systems approach, a core nation is dominant over the non-core nations from its economic and trade dominance. The abundance of cheap and unskilled labour in the peripheral nations makes many large multinational corporations (MNCs), from core countries, often outsource their production to the peripheral countries to cut costs, by employing cheap labour. Hence, the languages from the core countries could penetrate into the peripheries from the setting up of the foreign MNCs in the peripheries. A significant percentage of the population living in the core countries had also migrated to the core countries in search of jobs with higher wages.

The gradual expansion of the population of migrants makes the language used in their home countries be brought into the core countries, thus allowing for further integration and expansion of the world language system. The semi-peripheries also maintain economic and financial trade with the peripheries and core countries. That allows for the penetration of languages used in the semi-peripheries into the core and peripheral nations, with the flow of migrants moving out of the semi-peripheral nations to the core and periphery for trade purposes.

Thus, the global language system examines rivalries and accommodations using a global perspective and establishes that the linguistic dimension of the world system goes hand in hand with the political, economic, cultural and ecological aspects. Specifically, the present global constellation of languages is the product of prior conquest and domination and of ongoing relations of power and exchange.¹

Q-value

{\displaystyle Q_{i}}  is the communicative value of a language i, its potential to connect a speaker with other speakers of a constellation or subconstellation, "S". It is defined as follows:{\displaystyle Q_{i}=p_{i}\times c_{i}=\left({\frac {P_{i}}{N^{S}}}\right)\times \left({\frac {C_{i}}{M^{S}}}\right)}

The prevalence {\displaystyle p_{i}}  of language i, means the number of competent speakers in i, {\displaystyle P_{i}} , divided by all the speakers, {\displaystyle N^{S}}  of constellation S. Centrality, {\displaystyle c_{i}}  is the number of multilingual speakers {\displaystyle C_{i}}  who speak language i divided by all the multilingual speakers in constellation S, {\displaystyle M^{S}} .

Thus, the Q-value or communication value is the product of the prevalence {\displaystyle p_{i}}  and the centrality {\displaystyle c_{i}}  of language i in constellation S.

Consequently, a peripheral language has a low Q-value and the Q-values increase along the sociology classification of languages, with the Q-value of the hypercentral language being the highest.

De Swaan has been calculating the Q-values of the official European Union (EU) languages since 1957 to explain the acquisition of languages by EU citizens in different phases.²

In 1970, when there were only four language constellations, Q-value decreased in the order of French, German, Italian, Dutch. In 1975, the European Commission enlarged to include Britain, Denmark and Ireland. English had the highest Q-value followed by French and German. In the following years, the European Commission grew, with the addition of countries like Austria, Finland and Sweden. Q-value of English still remained the highest, but French and German swapped places.

In EU23, which refers to the 23 official languages spoken in the European Union, the Q-values for English, German and French were 0.194, 0.045 and 0.036 respectively.