The English Language as an Imperial Legacy

The English language is the most obvious cultural legacy of the British Empire, and the most ambiguous. English is spoken as a first or second language by perhaps two billion people, and it is the dominant language of international business, science, aviation, computing, and diplomacy. It is also a language in which a long history of racial violence, extractive economics, and political domination was administered. Whether the global position of English is a cause for celebration or a problem to be solved is, increasingly, a contested political question. The post-2020 African and South Asian debate about the politics of English-language curricula has been one of the most significant developments in the global conversation about the legacy of empire. (For the historical narrative, see The British Empire and the Spread of the English Language: A Global History.)

The Global Reach of English

English is now the most widely spoken language in the world, with around 400 million native speakers and an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion second-language speakers. The major concentrations of English speakers are in the former British Empire (the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean), in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), in West and East Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda), and in the Philippines and other post-colonial states. The scale of English use is, however, only part of the story: English is also the dominant language of international communication, and the use of English as a second or foreign language is, in most cases, a function of the imperial past.

The Varieties of English

The English language that emerged from the imperial experience is marked by a great diversity of regional and national varieties. Indian English is one of the largest varieties in the world, with perhaps 100 million speakers. Nigerian English, used in literature, broadcasting, and politics, has its own distinctive features. Singlish (Singaporean English) and Philippine English are post-colonial varieties that have developed in multilingual contexts. The post-colonial African English varieties are among the most distinctive: East African English shares features across the region, and West African English has a distinctive phonological and lexical profile. The World Englishes paradigm, developed by Braj Kachru and Larry Smith, has been central to the field since the 1980s. The decolonial critique, articulated most forcefully by the Nigerian novelist and critic Akin Adesokan and by the Kenyan literary scholar Tom Odhiambo, has insisted that African Englishes are not “deficient” varieties of metropolitan English but legitimate, autonomous languages in their own right.

English in International Business and Science

The dominance of English in international business and finance is a direct, if unintended, consequence of the British Empire and the post-1945 American economic dominance. The City of London, which became the world’s largest financial centre in the nineteenth century, used English as the working language of the sterling system and the international bond markets. The post-1945 international financial system, anchored in the Bretton Woods institutions, the dollar, and the New York financial markets, was an English-language system, and the use of English has been entrenched by the contemporary financial system.

The dominance of English in science is the result of several factors: the dominance of English-language journals (with publications such as Nature, Science, The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine being the principal outlets), the use of English as the working language of major international research collaborations, and the spread of English-language tertiary education in Asia. The post-2010 rise of Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian scientific research has, paradoxically, reinforced the position of English, as researchers in those countries publish in English-language journals to reach an international audience. The 2023 Sci-Hub data showed that more than 80 per cent of the most-cited scientific articles are published in English. The implications for the politics of knowledge — and for the marginalisation of non-English-language scholarship — are increasingly the subject of debate.

English in International Diplomacy

The dominance of English in international diplomacy dates from the founding of the League of Nations after the First World War, continued by the United Nations in 1945, and entrenched by the 1946 ICAO decision making English the international language of civil aviation. The post-1945 international order, designed by the United States and its allies, was an English-speaking order. The Bretton Woods institutions, the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, and the United Nations Security Council all operated in English. The continuing use of English in European Union institutions, even after Brexit, is evidence of the lasting importance of the imperial linguistic inheritance in international relations.

The dominance of English in popular culture, particularly in film, television, and music, has reinforced the global reach of the language. Hollywood films, American popular music, and British television programmes have been the principal vectors. The post-2010 rise of streaming services, social media platforms, and video-sharing sites has spread English as a global lingua franca of popular culture. The 2024 UNESCO data show that English remains the most-translated language on the internet and the most-used language of the major social media platforms.

The future of global English is the subject of vigorous contemporary debate. Some linguists argue that the rise of Chinese and the post-colonial African and Indian varieties of English will reshape the global language ecology. The 2023 World Atlas of Language Structures suggests that the long-run picture is one of multilingual pragmatism: English as the default international medium, but a richer and more politically contested ecology in the former colonial spaces. The varieties of world Englishes, the post-colonial Englishes, and the new Englishes of the digital age will continue to multiply, and the result is likely to be a more diverse but no less English-dominated global linguistic ecology.

Historiographical Note

The “World Englishes” paradigm developed by Braj Kachru and Larry Smith in the 1980s has been the most influential framework in the field. The 2010s saw a vigorous decolonial turn, exemplified by the work of Salikoko Mufwene, Akin Adesokan, and the contributors to the Journal of Sociolinguistics’s 2019 special issue on the politics of English. The post-2020 scholarship, including the Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes (2024) and the essays collected in The Politics of English (2023), has stressed the contested politics of language policy in the former colonial spaces. The most useful contribution to the field, Achebe’s “English and the African Writer” (1975), remains a starting point for thinking about the politics of the language.

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