These two books are different in tone, approach, and disciplinary perspective. But both broach a topic that has been the center of considerable debate among sociolinguists: the role of English in countries where it is not a native language. While neither author taps the existing scholarship on what is often referred to as global English or English as a lingua franca, both books can be viewed as contributing meaningful interventions.
The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a translation of Minae Mizumura's 2008 book, written in Japanese. Her original audience was her co-nationals engaged in a national debate on the role of English in the aftermath of Japan's lost decade. Mizumura, a novelist who “writes in her own language” (see chapter 1), approaches her first nonfiction work as a literary critic. The Japanese version of the book won the Kobayashi Hideo Award, affirming her impact as a public intellectual. Mizumura's public is not, and should not, be defined as exclusively Japanese. Her book is a “text to read” in the “universal library,” to use her terms. That it had to be translated into English to enter this library is the particular Japanese dilemma that she grapples with in the book.
English is, for the Japanese, an “external language,” according to Mizumura (see chapter 3). It is not the only language to have “exerted its influence” on Japan (p. 72). Chinese, more precisely the Chinese writing system, influenced the development of Japanese from a “local language” to a “national language.” A local language is spoken; national languages and universal languages are written. A national language is dependent on a national literature. Writing and, more importantly, reading literature in a shared, common language, is imperative for “imagining” a nation, an argument that Mizumura derives from Benedict Anderson's seminal work (pp. 74ff). Mizumura worries that, in the “age of English,” Japanese literature, and hence language, is “falling.” Fewer and fewer contemporary Japanese are reading the classics of Japanese literature, mainly because they cannot: the influence of Chinese ideograms on the development of Japanese literature has been forgotten, replaced by an obsession with “phoneticism” exemplified by English as the hegemonic universal language (pp. 124–25, 184–90), bringing about a “disjunction or ‘sudden twist’” (p. 147) in modern Japanese literature.
Mizumura's description of this disjunction as a “sudden twist” is taken from Natsume Sōseki, “who single-handedly [has] com[e] to embody [the] historical process” of the formation of modern Japanese literature (p. 138). Mizumura seems to identify with this turn-of-the-century literary icon: both are “bilinguals” who forfeited university positions to write in Japanese. Mizumura defines bilinguals as “those people who can read and write a language other than their own,” given that her “discussion centers solely on the written language” (p. 73). She explores “the miracle of modern Japanese literature” (the title of chapter 5) and the impending fall of the Japanese language through such bilinguals: the book is both personal reflection and a careful reading of Sōseki, in particular his 1909 novel, Sanshirō. The bilinguals in Sanshirō are “seekers of knowledge” (p. 86), obsessed with learning and reading and translating the external language which is understood as the medium of universal knowledge. Yet if this is the extent of their bilingualism, if they are incapable of translating and relating the universal to transcend and critique the particular (p. 142) or representing the particular to engage the universal, then both the nation's language and literature will fall.
Hence Mizumura's policy recommendations in the recent debate in Japan on the role of English: all Japanese students should be exposed to English but not all need to become bilinguals (see chapter 7). Furthermore, the task of bilinguals should not be limited to translating the universal into the particular but should also represent the particular to the universal—and that is dependent on reading and writing in the national language. It is this second task that is in danger of being forgotten in Japan in the age of English. Hence the importance of translating Mizumura's book into English: she is representing the Japanese particulars of a universal debate on global English or English as a global lingua franca. The accusation that she is elitist and even reactionary in her policy recommendations also resonates beyond the particulars of Japan: the notion that English is the bastion of a privileged class or caste who do not want to share their privileges has informed, for example, the debate on English in India.
But India is much more linguistically diverse than Japan. Linguistically diverse Asian countries (by years) are Amy Liu's units of analysis in Standardizing Diversity (p. 83). Liu's policy recommendations are very different from Mizumura's. Liu argues that the “optimal” language regime for most Asian countries, given their linguistic diversity, is to adopt a “third-party” language, a lingua franca, as the official language. For the most part, this means adopting English as the official language and medium of instruction in schools (see p. 180), although Liu also uses Indonesia's adoption of Bahasa Indonesia as her background case. For Liu, a government that adopts a lingua franca is choosing a “power-neutralizing” language regime. Other choices that are rarely as optimal—in terms of “balanc[ing] cultural egoism, communicative efficiency and collective equality” (p. 18)—are power-concentrating (where the cultural egoism of the dominant group is satisfied by adopting its language as official and as the medium of instruction, and communication is efficient but collective equality can suffer), power-sharing (where multiple languages are officially recognized and used as the media of instruction, but communicative efficiency is impeded), and neutralized-sharing (a combination of adopting English as an official language but also recognizing a number of native languages, as in the case of India).
Liu addresses a very narrow audience of political scientists and economists in her work. As a result, she makes claims about knowledge that are unsubstantiated. For example, she repeatedly claims that a negative relation between linguistic heterogeneity and economic growth is well established (e.g., pp. 10, 57, 153, 194). This “knowledge” has been “established” through econometric analyses of large-N data sets that have been widely critiqued (by scholars other than Liu's audience) as deeply flawed. The independent variable identified in the data sets that Liu uses are “politically relevant linguistic groups” which “nature draws” (p. 69). In this large-N data universe, China has forty-nine politically relevant linguistic groups whereas India has seventeen (p. 85). This is unquestionably accepted by Liu—it is a data set and therefore knowledge—although earlier she discusses how India officially recognizes twenty-two languages in the constitution's Eighth Schedule (which she erroneously identifies as being established by the 21st Amendment on p. 35). Liu does not speculate which five languages of the Eighth Schedule are not spoken by politically relevant language groups in India. The assumption that language groups, let alone their political relevance, are primordial and can be counted remains unexamined despite the social constructivism approach to understanding language and linguistic identity prevalent in most social sciences and the humanities.
Liu contends that, despite the “advantages of ethnolinguistic homogeneity [being] well documented” (p. 57), linguistically heterogeneous countries are not “condemned” (p. 196). “[E]ven if a country is not blessed with a homogeneous population” (p. 58), the government can intervene to “redirect[…] away from the negative effects” (p. 11) by adopting a lingua franca, thus establishing a language regime that is positively correlated, according to Liu's mathematical formulas, with economic growth through the mechanisms of social capital and foreign direct investment (FDI). Indeed, according to Liu, “[a] shift from where a lingua franca is half the education curriculum (0.5) to one where the lingua franca is the exclusive language can increase FDI inflow level by more than 25 percent, from $725.21 million to $914.073 million” (p. 197). Such a claim and its unexamined assumptions and implications seem facile and contribute little to understanding the issues of “the English language [as] … the global lingua franca” (p. 180).
Despite such problems riddling the text, Liu makes a significant contribution with her analysis of the role of political coalitions in structuring language regimes. In her qualitative analysis of Malaysia, she details the contradictions between Malaysia's de jure power-sharing language regime and its de facto power-concentrating regime, a distinction that cannot be captured in her quantitative data analysis. Her treatment of Singapore, her second qualitative case study, is more problematic: for example, she differentiates the Communists from the People's Action Party in the late 1950s on the basis of language.
Liu's text is her doctoral dissertation. One should not expect her to have the maturity of Mizumura. One should expect, however, better editing. The book's title, Standardizing Diversity, is never explained. And surely someone should be held accountable for allowing the statement, “In … South Africa, there is no (significant) English ethnic group” (p. 28), or the identification of “Hindis” as the dominant language group in India (p. 158), to be published by a university press. Perhaps Mizumura's, and Sōseki's, disenchantment with university scholarship should give us all pause.
