If you want to see the future, look to the publishing sector. Today, your average 12-year-old sitting at home can design and produce stuff that just a few years ago required costly visits to a graphic designer and an offset printing company with large presses.

You see, it wasn’t so much love for the BBC, CNN and Sylvester Stallone that made it visible the world over. It was more the fact there was nothing else like it available.

That’s not true anymore. Bollywood and Hong Kong movies have as good production values as any Hollywood film and plenty of lucrative markets around the globe. The best selling recording artists of the last 20 years, with Celine right at the top, followed by Shakira and Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias are not British, American or native English-speakers. (Little known fact: Céline Dion was the best selling recording artist in the world BEFORE she sold her first record in the US. I don’t even believe her early English language albums were ever released there. The US was just another market. A very lucrative one, mind you, but she would have be OK without it.)

Half the TV shows and the movies you see on American TV today are remakes of Dutch, French, of Spanish shows, bought and sold at big conventions in Cannes. On the international market, where audiences are not averse to dubbing like Anglo audiences, Mexican telenovelas sell just as well as American TV shows.

The media world dominated by Anglo-American products was perhaps only a temporary phenomenon due to the nature of mass satellite broadcasting in the early days.

That world has ended. Bandwidth is cheap. The pioneer of Satellite TV, MTV World, changed it’s programming to an increasingly local product over a decade ago. And that was before the Internet was a factor.

The idea that only a cultural product with the widest possible appeal around the world had a good enough cost:profit ratio does not make any sense in the MySpace age. Small niche bands can find their audience anywhere in the universe with no money.

There was a time when only Britain and the US, trough BBC and Voice of America, had the means to build the infrastructure and put out TV and radio broadcasts in many countries, be it in English or the local language. Today if people in those countries want to listen to the BBC (or CKOI or CBC Thunder Bay or any radio station in the fucking world) they just go online! That’s why the BBC announced that it is stopping production in 25% of the languages it used to serve by 2010 in order to concentrate on the more strategically important and somewhat less well served Arabic audience. There just isn’t a point in the British treasury buying up FM frequencies in saturated markets in Brazil or Asia.

You can find CNN anywhere in the world. You can find Al-Jazeera too.

As for McDonalds, the chain might have been a symbol of Western prosperity 25 years ago, but today, I can assure you, the Chinese don’t want burgers. They want beemers.

“English-speaking is not what I am, it’s something I do.”

I think most English-speakers feel the same way about English. Because English is so common in the global culture, they don’t identify with their language the way the Quebecois do with French

On the other hand:

“the new Chinese users of English, like the rest of us, don’t have any strong emotional attachment to the language or the Anglo-Saxon culture.”

Really? Then how do you explain the undeniable success of American movies, music and television. Or the worldwide success of BBC news, or fast food. Regardless of your own personal feelings towards these things, you can’t deny that many people worldwide have a strong attachment to anglo-saxon culture, more so than to any other culture other than their own.

“Native speakers haven’t realized this yet, but we are no longer speaking their English, they are speaking ours.”

Which “native speakers” are you talking about. American? British (and it’s numerous dialects) Canadian English? Irish English? Welsh English? Caribbean English? The many African English variations? The whole idea of standardized language is in fact a modern one. Read any old English texts and you’ll see there is no consistency in spelling (I assume other languages are the same).

Languages are not set in stone. They constantly evolve. “Users of English” have been changing and enhancing the language for centuries. That’s the beauty of the English language. It’s so malleable that people can pick it up quite easily.

“This does not mean that English will eventually lose its Lingua Franca status. It means that it is us, the users of English, speakers of English AND other languages who will make that call.”

This is all very true. Indeed, by definition it is the non-native speakers of English who will decide if it will remain the Lingua Franca. And non-English speakers are deciding in droves, to learn English. The underlying tone of your post reveals a false assumption. That us “English-speakers” somehow feel threatened by this is simply not true. We never had much control over it in the first place. Aside from a few old British twits, no “English-speakers” are getting upset about this.

“Awed by the fantastic success of English as the global Lingua Franca of business, diplomacy and scholarship, many did not notice that English was simultaneously losing ground in absolute numbers. While a generation ago English was the second most widely spoken first language after Chinese, it is now tied with Spanish and Hindi-Urdu. Arabic, the fastest growing language in the world today, is catching up fast.”

The fact that English is losing ground in absolute numbers is simply a result of demographics. It’s not as if English-speakers are switching languages. They are simply not breeding. The absolute numbers of Chinese and Arabic speakers has a marginal bearing on the status of English as a Lingua Franca. The Chinese aren’t learning Spanish, and the Arabs aren’t learning Hindi. They’re all learning English to communicate with each other.

“Globalization is not colonization. It is no longer the benevolent British and Americans who are teaching us the white man’s language, but ourselves, teaching ourselves.”

This is not a new phenomenon. Americans have been “teaching” themselves English since the Mayflower landed. The Indians and Pakistanis have been doing the same for almost as long. In fact, the English themselves have been teaching themselves English since, as a “Simpsons” character once said, “the Angles met the Saxons.” The French language in all its forms evolved in a similar way.

“Global English is bigger than any one country or organization, but if any political entity in the world can influence significantly the future of the language today it is not London, Washington or the UN. It is Beijing.”

I’ve never heard of any English-speaking government claiming (or seeking) such influence in a long time. In fact, I’ll take it one step further. What you say about Global English is true of virtually all languages. It’s the people themselves who make the language what it is. Sure, governments can encourage the general use of some languages over others (e.g. Quebec), but they can’t really influence HOW the language is spoken. Think of all the anglicisms in French (both here and in France). My government-sanctioned French teacher in high school really tried to teach me “Standard French” here in Quebec, but it didn’t do me much good out in the real world. Once I tried asking a unilingual francophone store clerk for “4 piles AA” instead of “4 batteries” and she looked at me like I was from outer space. And when have you ever heard someone say “chien-chaud” without chuckling inside.

The battle for a standardized speech in any language is a losing battle. I think English speakers (and governments) have come to grips with this fact more than any other language, which if anything enhances the ubiquity of its use. Sure, the kids can’t spell and their grammar isn’t perfect (I’m a teacher), but it’s no different for French-speaking students, who are drilled with spelling and grammar for years.

“China invested massively in English but it is not converting to English. Chinese schoolchildren are still learning Mandarin. Mandarin AND English.”

It’s actually quite a testament to the English-language that the Chinese government is encouraging its citizens to learn English, given the British colonial history in China.

“Now, with the exception of Singapore, there is no significant trend toward the adoption of English as a first language in any of these countries. English is just the language these countries use to speak to the rest of the world”

I don’t think there ever WAS a significant trend toward the adaption of English as a first language in any of the old British colonies in any practical sense, aside from the ones colonized by British settlers themselves (U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa etc..) Certainly, the American interest was never to linguistically colonize its possessions. They’re interest was economic. Sure, the British introduced English to places like India. But it was really just the elite who learned English. The common people never learned English. It was in their interest to keep the vast majority of the population illiterate and incapable of speaking English. In fact, I’d say that France was more successful in exporting its language to its colonies than the British ever were. The French language is predominant in all of the old French colonies, less so for English in the old British colonies (Egypt, for example).

“English is just the language these countries use to speak to the rest of the world”

You seem to be implying that in the past, English was more than just the language these countries use to speak to the rest of the world. The fact that so many people speak English today is not detrimental to the English language. In fact, it enriches it.

“Today the world speaks English. But it is not English-speaking.”

The world never was English-speaking, and no English-speaking society ever had such grand designs for their language.

You separatists really are a paranoid bunch, aren’t you? No worries, just pass a few more laws, and you can probably run out the rest of us that haven’t left.

You are correct in pointing out that Bill 101 has been tremendously successful with the younger generation, and will bear even more fruits in the future as the children of Bill 101 spawn their own families. Aleksandra Wozniak could I suppose be an example, although for all we know her mom could be a francophone born and bred in Quebec. Still, Bill 101 is now also producing 100% Québécois francophones out of young people who have absolutely no family ties to the people who settled New France. As such, this is a tremendous change from just a generation ago.

There is still of course the issue related to the fact that most immigrants to Quebec (or anywhere else for that matter) are working-age adults, and how they are integrated into Quebec society. Some of the evidence suggests that winning them over to French is a much tougher battle. But who knows, maybe the Montreal that their French-educated kids will help build will be so predominantly francophone that adult immigrants 10 years from now will see French as even more of a “must-have” than they do today.

Acajack’s reaction to my last post is revealing. He immediately gets defensive and accuses me of Don Cherryism, a very serious accusation in Quebec, where Don Cherry, rightly or wrongly, is seen as the symbol of everything that’s wrong with the ROC.

He frets on about old Mr. Wosniak, who apparently doesn’t speak while French, while ignoring Aleksandra who is 100 % québécoise. Its what I call fighting battles that are already won, or worrying about perceived problems that are disappearing naturally. Its very common among sovereignists and its why I assumed Acajack’s solution was sovereignty and for making such an assumption, I apologize to Acajack.