Chatter: Geopolitics and the Rise of the English Language with Rosemary Salomone
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2023
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The English language has recently developed a historically unique dominance in the global marketplace--a situation that brings plenty of benefits and just as many downsides. Rosemary Salomone, Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John's University, has researched and analyzed various perspectives on English's supremacy in her recent book The Rise of English, which has a paperback version with a new preface coming early in 2024.
David Priess spoke with Rosemary about her background in linguistics and education studies, the origins of the English language's dominance, the role of pop culture in the balance between English as spoken in the United States and as spoken in the United Kingdom, divergent official language policies of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union, the Anglophone bubble, English as a marketable skill, the debate about the English language within France, French vs Chinese inroads in Africa, the role of the French and English languages in the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, the controversy over the People's Republic of China-funded Confucius Institutes, the rise of English as the language of protest internationally, the culture around foreign language learning in the US, views about computer coding as a "foreign langauge," Ukrainian President Zelensky's use of the English language, the possibility of Spanish replacing English as the most global language, and more.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
The book The Rise of English by Rosemary Salomone
The book True American by Rosemary Salomone
The book Visions of Schooling by Rosemary Salomone
The book Madam Speaker by Susan Page
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband and Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.9 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:35.4 | Welcome to chatter. I'm David Priest. This week, Professor and author Rosemary |
| 0:40.2 | Salamone on Geopolitics and the rise of the English language. |
| 0:46.2 | There is a value in having a common language. It can change, could become Spanish, you know, |
| 0:51.7 | if I had to think of a candidate, but for now it's English. And there really is a value |
| 0:56.1 | to having a common language, to for people to be able to communicate one-on-one. |
| 1:02.1 | Across the world, young people know if you can speak English and read and write it very well, |
| 1:09.7 | you have better, you cannot job opportunities than if you don't. So there is this concern |
| 1:18.3 | in some of these countries that we're losing our identity, we're losing our culture to English. |
| 1:23.8 | To what extent that's real, I don't know. To what extent their languages will be used for |
| 1:30.4 | knowledge production, that's real, that's real. |
| 1:39.6 | Rosemary, welcome to chatter. Well, thank you for inviting me. You've done a really interesting |
| 1:46.1 | project that just begs for some explanation as to how you got into it. You have looked at the |
| 1:52.4 | story of the English language, not linguistically, grammatically as such, but looking at how English |
| 2:02.5 | essentially has come to reign supreme in today's world in so many ways. But what that means in |
| 2:09.7 | terms of populations and markets and education and a whole bunch of areas that touch on everything |
| 2:19.6 | from national security to national identity to equity and inclusion. So tell me, how did you decide |
| 2:28.1 | to work on this project and what was your background that prepared you for it? |
| 2:32.8 | The background is very broad. I was a language major in undergraduate school that |
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