Global language system
[1] Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan developed this theory in 2001 in his book Words of the World: The Global Language System and according to him, "the multilingual connections between language groups do not occur haphazardly, but, on the contrary, they constitute a surprisingly strong and efficient network that ties together – directly or indirectly – the six billion inhabitants of the earth.
According to de Swaan, the global language system has been constantly evolving since the time period of the early 'military-agrarian' regimes.
Military conquests of preceding centuries generally determine the distribution of languages today.
Land-bound languages spread via marching empires: German, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese.
On the other hand, sea-bound languages spread by conquests overseas: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish.
They also have relatively weak governments and a poor social structure and often depend on primary industries as the main source of economic activity for the country.
Much of the population that is poor and uneducated, and the countries are also extensively influenced by core nations and the multinational corporations found there.
They tend to be those which started out as peripheral nations and are currently moving towards industrialization and the development of more diversified labour markets and economies.
Semi-peripheries also tend to exert influence and control over peripheries and can serve to be a buffer between the core and peripheral nations and ease political tensions.
The abundance of cheap and unskilled labour in the peripheral nations makes many large multinational corporations (MNCs), from core countries, often outsource their production to the peripheral countries to cut costs, by employing cheap labour.
Specifically, the present global constellation of languages is the product of prior conquest and domination and of ongoing relations of power and exchange.
[2] In 1970, when there were only four language constellations, Q-value decreased in the order of French, German, Italian, Dutch.
In EU23, which refers to the 23 official languages spoken in the European Union, the Q-values for English, German and French were 0.194, 0.045 and 0.036 respectively.
Subsequently, they use the official language to dominate the sectors of government and administration and the higher levels of employment.
It assumes that both the established and outsider groups are able to communicate in a shared vernacular, but the latter groups lack the literacy skills that could allow them to learn the written form of the central or supercentral language, which would, in turn allow, them to move up the social ladder.
The hypercollective nature and Q-value also help to explain the accelerating spread and abandonment of various languages.
The hypercollective nature and Q-value also explain, in an economic sense, the ethnic and cultural movements for language conservation.
The next level constitutes about 100 central languages, spoken by 95% of the world's population and generally used in education, media and administration.
These are the languages of record, and much of what has been said and written in those languages is saved in newspaper reports, minutes and proceedings, stored in archives, included in history books, collections of the 'classics', of folk talks and folk ways, increasingly recorded on electronic media and thus conserved for posterity.
Level 2: Central position — German and French each hold 10% of the global translation market.
Level 4: Peripheral position — Languages from which "less than 1% of the book translations worldwide are made", including Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Swahili, Turkish and Arabic.
Despite having large populations of speakers, "their role in the translation economy is peripheral as compared to more central languages".
[6] According to the Google Scholar website, de Swaan's book, Words of the world: The global language system, has been cited by 2990 other papers, as of 25 August 2021.
In another paper, Cook and Li (2009)[8] examined the ways to categorise language users into various groups.
However, Cook and Li argues that this analysis is not adequate in accounting for the many groups of L2 users to whom the two areas of territory and function hardly apply.
Thus, Cook and Li argue that de Swaan's theory, though highly relevant, still has its drawbacks in that the concept behind Q-value is insufficient in accounting for some L2 users.
Robert Phillipson questioned why Japanese is included as one of the supercentral languages but Bengali, which has more speakers, is not on the list.
Morris also believes that any theory on a global system, if later proved, would be much more complex than what is proposed by de Swaan.
He claimed that there is a lack of consideration about the effects of globalization, which is especially important when the theory is about a global system: "De Swaan nods occasionally in the direction of linguistic and cultural capital, but does not link this to class or linguistically defined social stratification (linguicism) or linguistic inequality" and that "key concepts in the sociology of language, language maintenance and shift, and language spread are scarcely mentioned".
[9] On the other hand, de Swaan's work in the field of sociolinguistics has been noted by other scholars to be focused on "issues of economic and political sociology"[11] and "politic and economic patterns",[12] which may explain why he makes only "cautious references to socio-linguistic parameters".
