“Oh.” He grinned, and made an annoying clucking sound with his tongue.
“Such a question—from an historian! Indira, what’s the language that all bright young kids all over the world want to learn—as soon as they get to school?”
“English.”
“Yes. But why? It’s a completely foreign language—comes from a small little island half way around the world from most of them. Originally spread by rapacious imperialists, in fact.”
Indira sighed. “Because it’s one of the global languages. The dominant one, in fact. And because much of the world, especially Africa and large parts of Asia, are still so fragmented linguistically that knowing how to speak your own tongue doesn’t get you very far in the big, wide world.”
“Exactly. My best friend in college was from Pakistan. His English was better than mine. So was his accent, according to everybody except Noo Yawkers. But he barely spoke Urdu. I asked him why, once. He asked me if insanity ran in my family.”
“But none of that’s true here, Julius,” protested Indira. “No human language occupies that position on Ishtar.”
“True—and not true. I’m interested in something. You just called this planet `Ishtar.’ Why? You’re always chiding me for being a linguistic chauvinist, Indira. But here you are using a name for this planet which was adopted on Earth over a century before we even got here. Why not use the native word?”
Indira took a deep breath. “Which one? Each language has a different name for `the world.’ Most of them mean `the Meat of the Clam,’ but—”
“But which one should you use? Without offending the others? So you took the practical course—you fell back on a name that’s not offensive to any local foibles because it’s so utterly alien.”
Indira’s eyes widened. “You think—”
“I think you’re underestimating these people, Indira. I think you’re dealing with some very intelligent people. Visionaries, in fact. Who are struggling to forge a universal faith which can be common to gukuy from all cultures.”
He reached out and stroked her cheek. “So give them the universal language they need, love. The language brought by demons from beyond the sky, that all peoples and tribes can learn to speak without fearing their own culture will be subordinated.”
She initially thought to teach the gukuy Spanish, but finally settled on English. True, English was a notoriously difficult language to learn. In many ways, Chinese would have been the best choice, since all of the gukuy languages tended to be tonal. But Chinese was a difficult language in too many other respects. The Chinese themselves had struggled for centuries to fit the precise rigidities of technological society into the amorphous grammar of their language. (The ideogrammatic writing style had been abandoned completely almost a century earlier, in favor of a modified version of the Latin alphabet.)
In the end, her decision was not determined by narrow linguistic factors. It was a simple fact of history that English was well on its way to becoming the universal language of the human race. At the historic Singapore Convention, where the world’s language practices were finally agreed upon, English had been listed as simply one of the four accepted “global languages.” The decision had been a compromise. Even then, English was obviously in a league of its own as an international language. But there had been no reason to ruffle the feathers of the Chinese, who were prone to complain that as many people spoke their language as did English (even though, in private, their representatives would admit that Chinese had never spread very far beyond the boundaries of those who were ethnically Han). And the French, outraged at their own demotion to a “regional language,” had made clear that they would under no conditions agree to the elevation of English to the world’s sole accepted global language. (For the first time in centuries, the phrase “perfidious Albion” had echoed in the corridors and chambers of diplomacy.) So, wisely, the representatives of English had cheerfully agreed to the polite fiction that English was only one of four “global languages,” trusting to the logic of history and the common sense of the world’s population to settle the question in practice.
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