It is known that restricting imports generally damages exports (FT View, FT Weekend, April 5). It is less known that one of America’s least recognised but most important exports — the English language — is particularly at risk from Donald Trump’s reversal of 80 years of pro-trade policy.
Nicholas Ostler, in his 2005 book Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, observes that the great languages have generally been the languages of the greatest traders and, especially, importers of their day.
Rome did not merely veni, vidi, vici. It also bought — and hugely. Not always on fair terms, but it bought in bulk, encouraging the conquered and those beyond imperial boundaries to learn the Latin tongue. The empire fell. But Latin lives on in the Romance language family, spoken more widely than ever Rome roamed. In Ostler’s words: “The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than the merchant.”
And the same can be said of the golden age of Greece and ancient Greek, of the coincident spread of Islam and Arabic, of the diffusion of Chinese across south-east Asia, of Spanish in South and Central America, and of English globally on the coat-tails of the British and American market-empires. That its speakers buy big is the best possible advertisement for a language.
Since 1945, the US has been the world’s greatest market. And the world has wanted to learn its language, to the great benefit, in turn, of Americans interested in travelling the world.
If Trump’s isolationism proves more than a blip, foreign travel may soon become a much more foreign experience for Americans and their cousins in the Anglosphere.
Angus Algie
Phillip, ACT, Australia
