English's Stranglehold

Over the last few months I’ve been completing some pieces of my masters thesis which delves deeply into the realms of African philosophy - a significantly untapped trove of insights which has been mostly ignored by Western academia. One of the key patterns that I’ve noticed is how a lingua franca potentially gets in the way of global intellectual progress.

The thought was sparked by an interesting point made by Nigerian philosopher Ada Agada, who said:

“The ambitious African philosopher finds herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She has to convince the West that she has something interesting say about philosophy.”

I don’t want to write another woe-is-me tale that might be construed as a far-left post-modern trope, as these seem to be clogging up mainstream thought at present. I just think that it is interesting to draw some attention to the negative sides of a global language because they never really get mentioned.

The dominance of English as the language of business and of Western intellectual thought gives it tremendous power. And thus the benefit of such a global language is touted as being a form of standardisation that enables global thinkers to align themselves with one another and share information much more effectively - reducing the costs of translation (and mistranslation).

However, the major downside that tends to be skipped over is that there is so much intellectual talent that never has the opportunity to enter this world because they don’t have the opportunity or the desire to learn English. As English has a stranglehold over academia and intellectual thought - these ideas are not scalable and are isolated within the cultures in which they appear. If I dramatise it and take it one step further - we might acknowledge that these missing ideas could potentially be our greatest opportunities for moral and intellectual progress, precisely for the reason that they are not influenced or biased by the wave of western thought that dominates intellectual life today.

The second point I want to make is slightly more hidden from view but is just as powerful. I believe that to be articulate or charismatic is to have power, regardless of the merit of the content. So it favours those who speak and write most comfortably in English as their ideas are naturally more persuasive and thus taken more seriously. How many amazing ideas, insights and arguments haven’t made it into mainstream philosophy just because the writer was trying to express himself in his third language and thus the arguments weren’t made as persuasively as they could have?

For both points, I’m of the belief that this will be solved through advancements in machine learning and natural language processing but I think it will take a long time to get there. The conclusion for now is that even though English is a powerful tool for world-building, it should never be used at the expense of affirming cultural individuality and unique thought. We have to think more broadly when considering where our next intellectual breakthroughs might come from.