Cainntear wrote:I wasn't going to demand proof. Again, when I mentioned evidence before, it was because you were saying that what you said was objectively true and what I said was objectively false.
I'm actually quite surprised by that, though. As a professional historian, I would have expected you to understand that history is open to interpretation. History tells us correlation, but not causation, because there's no control experiment -- we can't say for sure things would have turned out significantly differently if one particular event hadn't happened. And as a professional economist, I would have expected you to understand about complex systems and emergent phenomena, rather than offhandedly poo-pooing the whole idea as "Woolworth's pick-and-mix".
Dear me. The thing is I'm not trying to work out various probabilities and suppositions or alternative histories, only describing two things: what is objectively the case right now; what research has shown as causal factors. Luckily the majority of this confirms the common-sense view of how English established itself. You may not want to hear it, but your view is a minority view not supported by any facts outside of obvious pockets of English take-up among individuals and groups feeding on English as an already-existing and established major language. There is no hiding behind the 'many points of view, all valid'.
Cainntear wrote:If English's strength comes through propaganda, one of the most powerful forms of pro-English propaganda came unintentionally from the eastern bloc authorities. By overemphasising the evils of America, they created a false dichotomy, and given that the regimes in communist countries were oppressive and authoritarian, in doing so they effectively presented the idea that America was the epitome of freedom and free expression. Not only did bootleg US recordings gain even more cachet than their legitimate counterparts in Western Europe, the act of learning the language became an expression of rebellion.
Aaleks has addressed this and I'd say that much more successful propaganda came from the West (particularly the US) than ever came out of the Soviet Union. There is going to be some evidence of people deliberately wanting to find out about and learn English through their own motivation, but you will have a very, very difficult time establishing this as a majority of individuals and the main motivation for English becoming global along the lines of some undirected 'free-market'.
Cainntear wrote:I suggest that the lifting of the iron curtain accelerated the uptake of English as a lingua franca, as the first eastern Europeans to break out into the wider world had pretty good English (by the standards of the time) and likely good German, but no knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian etc.
I can only echo Aaleks on this. It's a fairly astonishing suggestion. There's no doubt that English picked up speed leading up to the point of the opening of the USSR, but since only a minority had travelled - and not to English-speaking countries - I'd say the other languages like German and French had more currency. French in particular; have you never seen the long-existing fan base among Russians for old French music and TV? French has long been a major foreign language in Russia.
Cainntear wrote:Even within eastern European countries where Russian had served as the common language for decades, English quickly took over as lingua franca, not as a western imposition, but as a means of eliminating Russian.
Again I'm going to have to say this is largely irrelevant posited as a 'cause', because it is part of the momentum of something already in motion which is routinely maintained. You don't seem to be understanding the concept of 'soft power'. No doubt people began to associate English with the idea of 'western freedom' as talked about by Aaleks above, which turned out to be more of a disappointment. This itself flows from the promotion of 'western freedom' directly by western countries and natural curiosity.
Cainntear wrote:Now I'm not going to ask you to accept that I'm right, but I don't see how you can say I'm definitely wrong.
'Definitely wrong' is a classic black/white perspective and, I suspect, set up as an easy way to make me look rigid and ideological. I'd say rather that you are relying upon the piddling exceptions and putting these forward as a cohesive theory of the huge growth of English as some sort of massing of small contributions; without any deliberate political or economic decisions such as those carried out during the period of England's huge empire and the post-war successor empire of the U.S. It's a story of the language being impressed upon places and peoples' sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly as a means of maintaining administrative power in colonies, mostly through schooling in the colonist language. This caused the language to take root after a couple of centuries. Since then it has benefited by remaining as a lingua franca in decolonised countries where various groups have disputes over which native languages should take precedence .
Let us not pretend that maintaining and promoting English in Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East isn't beneficial for maintaining outsourced labour markets. At this point the work is being done by a lot of people themselves in order to be able to 'take part' in an English-dominated economy established through historical decree and deliberate decisions. It's now a self-perpetuating 'market' fed and maintained by foreign policy.
U.S. colonisation also has pre-WW2 origins, such as in the Philippines which they colonised and where they put in place schooling and administration in English only. This was likely a practical decision since there was no 'national' system or unified national language, but they didn't even attempt to go that route because they were economic colonists, not benevolent public servants aiming to broaden the cultural horizons of Filipinos.
After the war this is less directly the case. Such as in Japan, which was certainly nudged in a particular direction by the U.S. but where English is not as widely spoken as many other places.
I think this post is long enough.