By: David Gradoll author of English First
One of the legacies of the British Empire is that, in many countries, access to English remains part of an elitest social process. In the old, modernist model, English proficiency acted as a marker of membership of a select, educated, middle
class group. In a globalised world, English is much more widely distributed, as is access to education generally. The increasingly
important role that English is now playing in economic processes, in providing access to the kind of global knowledges available in
English and the jobs which involve contact with customers and colleagues for whom English is the only shared anguage, has
brought with it the danger that English has become one of the main mechanisms for structuring inequality in developing economies. Lack of English in some countries now threatens to exclude a minority rather than the majority of a population.
EXPAT WORKERS
The stream of migrant workers flowing to richer economies threatens to impoverish the developing economies they come from – Bangladeshi construction workers in South-East Asia, Indian entrepreneurs in African countries. This exodus of talent has raised serious concerns.There is, however, another dimension to this. English is a necessary skill for many of these workers: for example, Malaysia in 2003 made basic proficiency in English a requirement for all foreign employees, just as Bangladesh signed an agreement to send 200,000 workers to Malaysia. Mexicans working in the USA are estimated to send back 18 billion dollars a year but remittances are known to be drastically underestimated by official statistics. Studies in individual countries, such as India,
Mexico,Philippines,Morocco,Egypt,Turkey,Lebanon,Bangladesh,Jordan,Dominican Republic,El Salvador,Colombia,Yemen,
Pakistan,Brazil,Ecuador,Yugoslavia, Thailand,China,Sri Lanka
ECONOMY
English is widely regarded as a gateway to wealth for national economies, organisations, and individuals. If that is correct, the distribution of poverty in the future will be closely linked to the distributions of English.
A WORLD IN TRANSITION
Nepal, indicate that the actual fl ow may be 10 times or more than that published. In many countries, such as sub-Saharan
African countries, there may be no offi cial statistics actually collected. In other words, remittance economies are probably of far
greater importance in development than recognised in statistics.Migrant workers not only remit money, but also often acquire
– or maintain during periods of employment diffi culty in their home country – skills and knowledge which they may later repatriate if the economic situation ‘back home’ improves.
INTERNAL MIGRATION
Internal migration to urban areas has a similar impact on rural economies. Workers may leave their children with grandparents in the country, sending home money which is vital to the support of not only their own families but also the rural economy as a whole. Such internal fl ows of money are even less well documented than international fl ows but there is a language implication here also. Many rural migrants seek employment in one of the hospitality industries where some level of English is expected. Because the language of the city s often different from that of their home area, new linguistic skills are acquired, and a linguistic conduit established between
the urban and rural varieties. If life in the city goes well, the worker may be joined by the children who will also acquire new languages.
A RESERVE ARMY OF LABOUR OFFSHORE
The classic marxist analysis of capitalism argues that maintaining a surplus labour capacity prevents labour costs from rising. Offshoring raises fears of increased unemployment but, to some extent, replaces it as a means of controlling labour costs in developed economies. This is how countries such as India and China have enabled a period of low infl ation with economic growth in the USA and UK, not just by reducing the cost of goods and services, but also by exerting downward pressure on wages and reducing he power of trade unions.