Marginal Revolution: How American is Globalization?

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How American is Globalization?

Extending the analysis to 1999, we see that the percentage of the world's population who are native speakers of English actually declined from 9.8 to 7.8 percent. The percentage of native speakers of the world's leading language, Mandarin, also declined slightly, from 15.6 to 15.2 percent...The language groups that have increased dramatically as a percentage of the world population are Arabic and Bengali, which each accounted for 2.7 percent of the world's speakers in 1958, but rose to 3.5 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively, in 1992. Hindi speakers rose from 5.2 to 6.4 percent, and Spanish speakers from 5.0 to 6.1 percent. English as a first language has fallen from its mid-century position of second place to fourth as the millennium ended.

That is from William H. Marling's How "American" is Globalization? This wide-ranging book is the definitive current source on which cultures are gaining and losing in respective cultural areas. The bottom line of this book? The world is not becoming Americanized. Very highly recommended.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 7, 2006 at 04:44 AM in Data Source | Permalink

Comments

The relevant indicator is the population of adults that can speak more than one language. Data on native speakers just reflect differences in population growth rates. I'd like to know how many Chinese today can speak English and how many Americans can speak Mandarin today in comparison with 1980. In every place I have visited and lived in the past 25 years--from Tierra del Fuego to Mongolia, from Chile to China--apparently the number of people that can speak two or more languages has increased sharply and one of the languages has always been English.

Posted by: edgardo at Jul 7, 2006 6:17:45 AM

The cover of that book is hilarious.

Posted by: Steven Schreiber at Jul 7, 2006 6:45:27 AM

Yeah, I don't see that "Americanization" is the same as "declining numbers of native English speakers". I would guess that there's more data to support the claim in the book.

Posted by: A Tykhyy at Jul 7, 2006 7:10:05 AM

As Edgardo at least hinted at, an interesting and perhaps more relevant indicator would be the number of people that speak English as either a first or an 'extra' language. In Hong Kong there's strong demand from parents to have their children educated in English (at even the elementary school level) even though their first language is Cantonese, because English offers more economic opportunities. There was talk that they would move instead to Mandarin as the main second language after the handover, but Mandarin has few uses outside of China, whereas English is widely useful for careers, for education and for travel.

Posted by: Ann at Jul 7, 2006 7:40:46 AM

In S. Korea parents go to great expense to have their children tutored in English as a second language. No doubt this is so in other countries as well. English is also the primary lanuage used by commercial pilots, I believe in most parts of the world. The thesis that the world is not being Americanized is sufficiently vague, depending upon the meaning of "Americanized", that it defies rigorous testing (without clear definitions).

What share of world economic activity is American? This, for example, seems a more fruitful question to ponder as opposed to looking at whether the world is being Americanized (vaguely defined).

Posted by: jim at Jul 7, 2006 9:35:53 AM

I expect native language share is highly correlated with fertility. With Western Europe, Japan and much of native English speaking America running below replacement levels (and so having outsourced child-rearing to other societies) and China's lingering one-child policy, the language shifts are expected.

Posted by: mkl at Jul 7, 2006 9:45:43 AM

In addition to the other comments about language, how about English words that have been injected into the local language? Colloquial Mandarin is now full of English words like "cool" and even "party." Further, in China, Christmas used to be as relevant as Ramadan is to most Americans. Now it's a pretty major holiday. They use the Mandarin "sheng dan jie" to describe it, but there's no doubt that its ascendance is the result of Americanization.

Posted by: Derek Scruggs at Jul 7, 2006 10:42:14 AM

Defining globalisation as a simple
linguisitic process is too narrow.

The question should be not if the globe
is becoming 'Americanised' but whether America
is becoming globalised.

From what I read, that seems the more
pertinent question; and the one with
the more uncomfortable answer.

Posted by: Martin Kelly at Jul 7, 2006 11:05:20 AM

Here's something I've always wanted to measure - the restaurant surplus or deficite of a country.

Are there more foreign-cuisine restaurants in America, or American-cuisine restaurants in the ROW?

(Similar questions can be asked for any country. Italy and China, for example, are likely net cuisine exporters)

Posted by: secret asian man at Jul 7, 2006 2:01:56 PM

Another dog on the barbie as far as English is concerned: English is the default language used for business between people who don't otherwise speak a common language. My wife worked for a freight forwarder in Shanghai, and interacted primarily with shippers in Africa and the Middle East. She used English exclusively to talk with them, although none of the countries she shipped to was a native English-speaking country.

Posted by: Foobarista at Jul 7, 2006 2:23:30 PM

In S. Korea parents go to great expense to have their children tutored in English as a second language.

That's still probably true, but as opportunities open up for Koreans in China, a fair number are switching to having their children tutored in Chinese. The way it was for the preceding thousand or two years up to the Japanese occupation.

apparently the number of people that can speak two or more languages has increased sharply and one of the languages has always been English.

I was greatly distressed, in Constantinople, to discover that there was no language I knew that would give my conversations the remotest privacy from the young men strolling about the street, trying to entice people into tours terminating at rug shops. English, Japanese, German, French -- they knew them all. Or at least enough to get by.

Posted by: Taeyoung at Jul 7, 2006 3:56:49 PM

Brazil, by almost 2-to-1 voted down gun control last year after almost 70% of
the population was for it.

Reason?

Ads run the last 3 weeks before the vote stating that it took away their "rights."

People around the world know their "rights."

Which they didn't have before. It's not the language, it's the vision.

Posted by: Sandy P at Jul 7, 2006 4:35:00 PM

"The Business of America is Business" blog has a recent post on empirical measures of globalization. (Not as boring as it sounds!)

http://www.thebusinessofamericaisbusiness.biz/2006/06/measuring_globalization.html

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