The most notable thing about the Pope's essays for Radio Four is that he does not speak English, or hardly any. He himself has repeatedly said that he has no ear for it. Visiting Ireland in 2018, he spoke in Italian, preached in Spanish, and chatted in French to people from Burkina Faso. But he only gave a blessing in English.
He did not speak it much, if at all, when he visited the United States, either. But then, although he will not live to see it, his own mother tongue will be that country's principal language soon enough.
The "Anglosphere" is as dead as the EU.
Getting out of the latter, and arguably out of the former in that sense, is our chance to deal instead with the great rising powers of Eurasia, Latin America, and Africa. India has less and less of an Anglophone, Anglophile elite; it is still there, but it runs things less and less. China has never had one.
And yes, I do speak French. A bit of Spanish, too; I must brush up. But mostly French. I love it, and that is reason enough in itself. But it is also the key to much of Africa. And there will soon enough be a President of France who understood which way the world was heading.
Britain, however, seems determined to take longer to catch up.
French!? Don’t be ridiculous. English was and remains the passport to the world, by far the world’s most widely spoken language. The ability to trade with a combined Commonwealth and Anglosphere, that legacy of the biggest Empire in world history, is one of the great prizes of Brexit.
ReplyDeleteThe customs union’s tariff wall cut us off for 43 years from our own former Commonwealth and Anglosphere trading partners.
"Former" is the word in the Commonwealth's case, but we are already America's biggest foreign investor. The Customs Union cuts us off from the world, that is the point.
DeleteAnd the age of English linguistic supremacy is coming to an end. Power is shifting to countries where the elites never spoke it, increasingly do not, or do not speak it very well. English formed without reference to the literary tradition is no English at all. I mean, have you ever heard it, or read it? It would be much better, in every way, to learn the languages of the rising powers, in all the richness of those languages, than to submit to such rule of that as there will be in 30 years' times.