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This is a paper in two parts, both dealing with the localization of the concept of English as a “world” or “global language”. In the first part, a number of general notions like “globalization” are discussed, and a plea is made for studying the role of any language in a given context ecologically, i.e. in relationship to, and in interaction with, other languages. 1. What is global English? In 2012, Tsedal Neeley published a paper in the Harvard Business Review with the title “Global Business speaks English”. In the same year, Francis Hult had a paper in TESOL Quarterly with an abstract starting “The globalization of English in Sweden ...”. What is interesting here is that the title of Neeley’s paper is ambiguous. It could mean ‘business speaks English globally’, but also ‘when business goes global, it speaks English’. That these are not necessarily the same things became clear to us in Denmark in the LInGCorp2 project: even local businesses can be globalized and 1 I would like to thank my colleagues in both the CALPIU (2007–2013) and LInGCorp (2013–2016) Projects, especially Bent Preisler, Anne Fabricius, Sonja Barfod, Dorte Lønsmann, Kamilla Kraft, Spencer Hazel, Janus Mortensen and Ole Nedergaard Thomsen, for inspiring discussions and data sharing. Thanks also to Sharon Millar and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas for helpful comments. The two papers are based on my Keynote given at The Fourteenth International Conference on English and American Literature and Culture. New Perspectives in English and American Studies, 20 April, 2017 at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. 2 Language and Interaction in the Globalized Corporation, see Part 2 of this article. 254 HARTMUT HABERLAND will then face language choice. But Hult’s abstract points to another issue: globalization is also a local phenomenon and can look quite different in different places. This also applies to the role of the supposedly global language, English. The way English is globalized in Sweden can differ from the way it is globalized elsewhere. 2. What is globalization? A colleague3 of mine was in Winnipeg, Manitoba on the evening of October 3, 1993, while the White House in Moscow was burning on October 4, 1993; CNN, several time zones behind, showed live pictures with the subline “Moscow live, tomorrow morning”. This anecdote illustrates nicely one of the current definitions of the ongoing globalization processes, the “compression of social time-space”, as articulated in 1990 by David Harvey. But is this compression of time-space really only a feature of recent globalization? It could be as old as the “first modernization” at the end of the 19th century. In Theodor Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin from 1899, the old Stechlin, a representative of the old, pre-modern world, says, Und dabei diese merkwürdigen Verschiebungen in Zeit und Stunde. Beinahe komisch. Als anno siebzig die Pariser Septemberrevolution ausbrach, wußte man’s in Amerika drüben um ein paar Stunden früher, als die Revolution überhaupt da war.4 There is considerable disagreement about when globalization as we know it started; Ulrich Beck (2000: 167) lists five widely divergent dates between the 15th and the 20th century for its onset. It may be useful to introduce a distinction that helps to disentangle several connected but distinct phenomena and processes: Beck distinguishes between globalization as a historical process, globality as a property phenomenon, and globalism as the ideology that, as Florian Coulmas (2005: 9) has described it, “turns former friends and enemies into competitors”. Seen in this way, globalization is not a condition or state of the world, but an ongoing process. For a long time, globalization as a process has produced an ever increasing degree of globality for commodities and structures, and it is accompanied by its own ideology (the latter might be the truly new aspect of it). 3. English is not everywhere It has been claimed that the present role of English in the world is a symptom of globalization, that English has become “the world’s lingua franca” and that it is used 3 Thanks to Robin Cheesman for sharing his experience with me and correcting my memory about the place where it occurred. 4 ‘And these strange dislocations in time and hour. Almost funny. When the Paris September revolution broke out in in the year of 70, they knew it in America a couple of hours before the revolution actually happened’ (my translation). English as a world language in Scandinavia and elsewhere (Part 1) 255 “in every corner of the globe” (Hu 2008: 35). While one can hardly doubt the global spread and presence of English, i.e. the globality of the English language, which has been increasing in a possibly unprecedented manner, this can show itself in very different ways in different areas of the world. Even in the former British colony of Hong Kong, English is – as is said about well-brought up children – seen but not so much heard. The communicative value of English in Hong Kong is actually quite limited outside the commercial centre and certain shops, as many a tourist has realized when trying to communicate with a monolingual taxi driver or the staff in a 7–11 outfit or a small cafeteria. In Tokyo Central Station a sign was displayed in 2006 at the Marunouchi South Entrance: We are very sorry, there is not a English speaker here. So please go to the information counter. They can help you in English. (cf. Haberland 2011: 38)5 This both proves and disproves that “English is everywhere”. Undoubtedly, the sign is in English, but if English really were everywhere, the sign would not be necessary. The explicit message is contradicted by the message conveyed by its medium, but in a dialectic way: both messages are true and relevant. Medieta, Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (2006) point out – on the basis of figures from the Index translationum – that far more books are translated from English than into English. This is taken as a sign of the cultural dominance of English: literature written in English is considered more worthy of, and suitable for, translation than literature written in other languages. But it also underlines that the dominance is far from total: if it were, translation would be superfluous, because everybody could read English and there would be no market for these translations. Phillipson’s ground-breaking work since 1992 on Linguistic Imperialism has taken the innocence away from our experience of the increasing globality of English. But Philipson himself has warned against overgeneralizing attempts to attribute every aspect of this process in every country of the world mechanically to an imperialist scheme: English is currently expanding in Europe in hegemonic ways, as a result of internal and external pressures, but in each western European country, whether this amounts to linguistic imperialism is an empirical question that probably would be answered in the negative. (Phillipson 1997: 238) As I have argued in Haberland (2009), it is precisely the term “hegemonic” that is central here: not a conspiracy (as pointed out explicitly by Phillipson 1992: 63) but the propagation of hegemonic thinking which persuades people to accept the present global role of English as natural, as if it could not possibly be otherwise: according to Guha (1997: 23), hegemony occurs when persuasion outweighs coercion in the configuration of power. 5 The sign had been removed by 2013. 256 HARTMUT HABERLAND 4. Ecology of English We need an ecological approach: English is not to be considered in “splendid isolation” (Haberland, Mortensen 2012: 2), but in relationship with other languages with which it sometimes competes and always interacts. In this paper, the scope of the ecological is taken in a narrower sense than in Wendel’s definition: “The ecological approach to language considers the complex web of relationships that exist between the environment, languages, and their speakers” (Wendel 2005: 51), since I do not focus on the physical, including the biological environment. Instead I want to see English in its “complex web of relationships” with other languages in two local contexts: Scandinavia, especially Denmark, and in a glimpse also Japan. In 1992, a team of Danish researchers published results from a survey of foreign language competence in Denmark (Bacher et al. 1992: 13–15). I have summarized their results in Table 1 (where answers “to a high degree” and “to some degree” are combined). in English in German in French have an everyday conversation 57% 33% 3% give directions 66% 46% 6% read instructions 60% 42% 4% follow a movie 64% 42% 4% read a novel 43% 27% 3% read a newspaper 46% 30% 3% write a private letter 51% 30% 3% Table 1. Danes’ self-reported competence in three selected foreign languages in the early 90s These figures are based on self-reports, which are not always fully reliable, and in the literature it has been commented that it was likely that people overrated their own English and underrated their German and French (e.g. Holmen, Risager 2003: 94). Still, it is striking how close English and German are in the self-assessment of Danes and how far French lags behind. If we look at the historical development, this becomes even clearer. In the 1960s, Einar Haugen could still provide anecdotal evidence for the use of German between fellow Scandinavians when they did not understand each other’s languages: “A Norwegian school man said, ‘When I am in Copenhagen, I ask the waiters to speak German.’” (Haugen 1966: 296).6 Things have changed so much that today the Norwegian “school man” probably would choose English instead of German. 6 Quoted in Barfod (2018: 178). English as a world language in Scandinavia and elsewhere (Part 1) 257 Several surveys have been conducted over the years, and although they are not completely compatible and comparable, the tendencies are clear (see also Haberland 2014: 259):

ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE IN SCANDINAVIA AND ELSEWHERE (PART 1)