The Awful English Language

Abstract

The ever-increasing dominance of English within analytic philosophy is an aspect of linguistic globalisation. To assess it, I first address fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. Steering a middle course between linguistic universalism and linguistic relativism, I deny that some languages might be philosophically superior to others, notably by capturing the essential categories of reality. On this background I next consider both the pros and cons of the Anglicisation of (analytic) philosophy. I shall defend the value of English as a lingua franca, while denying both the feasibility and the desirability of English as the sole universal language of philosophy. Finally I turn to the linguistic inequality in contemporary analytic philosophy. While it does not per se amount to an injustice, there is a need to level the playing field. But the remedy does not lie in linguistic academic sectarianism. Instead, what might be called for are piecemeal measures to reduce explicit and implicit biases against analytic philosophers on the geographic fringes, biases that are only partly connected to the predominance of English.

Acknowledgements

For assistance I should like to thank Meret Polzer. I am particularly grateful to Peter Hacker, not just for having shaped my thinking about conceptual relativism over many years, but also for curbing my excessive confidence in the conceptual parity of all natural languages. I should also like to thank two anonymous referees and the Editors of this special issue for their comments, corrections and suggestions, in particular concerning the need to address the relation between linguistic inequality and gender discrimination and the ‘waste of talent’ drawback of academic monolingualism.

Notes

1 See the exchange between two prominent politicians, Jens Spahn of the Christian Democrats and Robert Habeck of the Greens in Die Zeit, Nrs 35 (August 24, 2017) and 36 (August 31, 2017).

2 A superficial comparison between English and German suggests that as a foreign language English may be easier to learn in some respects and harder in others. On the one hand English is paratactic rather than hypotactic, thereby militating against convoluted sentences. It has fewer cases, lacks a grammatical gender, and the word order is relatively rigid. On the other hand, English has a much larger vocabulary, and revolves to a greater extent around idiomatic phrases that have to be learnt by rote. Finally, as even Twain intimates in parentheses, English is very unphonetic: in our English lessons we were told in jest that the British spell ‘Liverpool’ and pronounce ‘Manchester’.

3 I remain neutral on the question whether a definition of ‘globalisation’ should incorporate other features, for instance the intensification of communication, the acceleration of social change or the creation of novel inequalities. See Held 2000: ch. 1.

4 The latter category includes both analytic philosophers who confine themselves to languages other than English and those who write and lecture in English without it being their first language. But it will be obvious that some of the points made in the sequel apply unequally to those two sub-groups.

5 There is disagreement over whether there are typological differences between the languages of hunter-gatherer societies on the one hand, agrarian societies on the other. Among some anthropologists, this difference is regarded as a proxy for the one between ancestral and innovative societies. Even if that is correct, however, there appear to be no significant differences as regards the languages spoken by these societies (see Bickel and Nichols: forthcoming in 2019).

6 The former include most Indo-European languages and, for instance, Kgalagadi (Botswana), the latter Belhare (Nepal) and Haillom (Namibia). See Bickel 2017.

7 Ironically, it is rarely noted that Whorf was a linguistic pluralist without being a linguistic relativist. He regarded the world-views engendered by some languages as superior to others, notably preferring Hopi to SAE (Whorf 1956: 55, 262).

8 ‘[…] daß die griechische Sprache philosophisch ist, d.h. nicht: mit philosophischer Terminologie durchsetzt, sondern als Sprache und Sprachgestaltung philosophierend. Das gilt von jeder echten Sprache, freilich in je verschiedenem Grade. Der Grad bemißt sich nach der Tiefe und Gewalt der Existenz des Volkes und Stammes, der die Sprache spricht und in ihr existiert. Den entsprechenden tiefen und schöpferischen philosophischen Charakter wie die griechische hat nur noch unsere deutsche Sprache.’

9 For the latter, see Glock 2016.

10 For linguistic globalisation, i.e., Anglification as a whole, see Crystal 1997 and Phillipson 2009; for the ascendancy of English as academic language see Altbach 2007; Gordin 2015; Mittelstraß, Trabant and Fröhlicher 2016: Ch. 4 plus the references given therein. Alas, I must leave it to others to document the degree to which English dominates (analytic) philosophy in quantitative detail.

11 Another constellation is equally obvious. The role of classical Arabic within Islamic thought was both universal and exclusive. Alas, it is also obvious that I am not qualifed to dwell on it.