Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it. It is much more to do with who those speakers are. Latin became an international language throughout the Roman Empire, but this was not because the Romans were more numerous than the peoples they subjugated. They were simply more powerful. And later, when Roman military power declined, Latin remained for a millennium as the interna¬tional language of education, thanks to a different sort of power - the ecclesiastical power of Roman Catholicism.
There is the closest of links between language dominance and economic, technological, and cultural power, too, and this rela-tionship will become increasingly clear as the history of English is told (see chapters 2 -4). Without a strong power-base, of whatever kind, no language can make progress as an international medium of communication. Language has no independent existence, liv¬ing in some sort of mystical space apart from the people who speak it. Language exists only in the brains and mouths and ears and hands and eyes of its users. When they succeed, on the in¬ternational stage, their language succeeds. When they fail, their language fails.
This point may seem obvious, but it needs to be made at the outset, because over the years many popular and misleading be¬liefs have grown up about why a language should become inter¬nationally successful. It is quite common to hear people claim that a language is a paragon, on account of its perceived aes¬thetic qualities, clarity of expression, literary power, or religious standing. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and French are among those which at various times have been lauded in such terms, and English is no exception. It is often suggested, for example, that there must be something inherently beautiful or logical about the structure of English, in order to explain why it is now so widely used. ‘It has less grammar than other languages’, some have sug¬gested. ‘English doesn’t have a lot of endings on its words, nor do we have to remember the difference between masculine, fem¬inine, and neuter gender, so it must be easier to learn’. In 1848, a reviewer in the British periodical The Athenaeum wrote:
In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflection, in its almost total disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs, not less than in the majesty, vigour and copiousness of its expres¬sion, our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization to become the language of the world.