During the Cold War era, the United Nations came up with a classification scheme that divided the countries of our planet into three broad categories in accordance with their level of economic development. The so-called “First World” comprised advanced capitalist nations such as the USA and most countries of Western Europe. The term “Second World” designated the communist nations of Eastern Europe that had already reached a certain degree of development. The designation “Third World” emerged to describe the developing or underdeveloped nations of Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. This categorization was largely based on economic and political factors, and the term “Third World” soon became a synonym for poverty and underdevelopment.
Today I would like to try and apply this classification scheme to languages. More specifically, I will explore how a language may prosper or languish in a given country or area, depending on a variety of factors. After establishing in this way the “degree of development” a language has reached, I will further look at how its literature is affected by this. Does it flourish? Does it thrive? Or is literary development hampered by difficulties the language is encountering?
Let us begin with the English language. Riding the crest of so-called globalization, English has long since become the global language. As a result, 1.3 billion Chinese wanted to learn the language as soon as the Cold War was over and China’s isolation ended. Another 200 million people in Russia and the Ukraine were also eager to jump on the bandwagon. Currently, there are at least fifty nations in which English is an official language, or at least one of two or more official languages. This includes of course all the countries where English is the native tongue of a vast majority of the population—and there are not too many of those in fact: England (i.e., the UK), the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with a total population of just about 400 million. This also goes to show that English has become the most important second language (or first foreign language) worldwide. The “First World” in this context would then include the homeland of the English tongue, England, as well as the US, followed by the “Second World” featuring Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The “Third World” in this scheme comprises a rather large number of nations, including South Africa, India, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong (and many others). And this picture of the language’s distribution is quite neatly reflected in the status of these countries’ national literatures, I’m afraid. Shakespeare, the great English bard, is still taken by many to be the be-all and end-all of English literature. The United States is simply a very young nation, which explains why no truly great writers appeared before the 19th century. Still, the British domination of English-language literature is today a thing of the past. Writers from other nations, such as the “Irish giants” Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became coryphées of European literature during the 20th century. And of course America also produced some outstanding literary talents over the past 200 years, so that today its literary status is by no means inferior to the United Kingdom’s. But the literary “Second World” (i.e., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and “Third World” countries such as South Africa and India still seem to be lagging behind a bit, unable to quite catch up with the “First World.”
When we look at the development of the Spanish language, a radically different picture presents itself. Of course Spain has to be named as the birthplace of the Spanish language and its literature, but once the language had entered and spread throughout Central and South America, it developed in many directions, generating many local accents and peculiarities in the wide lands of the New World. When surveying Spanish literature, we find that most of its more famous exponents do in fact come from Latin America, and not from Spain: The motherland’s output seems to pale in comparison to the status and renown of Mexico’s Octavio Paz, Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, Chile’s Pablo Neruda, or Argentina’s Jorge Luís Borges. Where would the “Third World” of Spanish literature lie? Should we assign this spot to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, or maybe to the Philippines?
Turning to the evolution of Chinese language and literature, I would like to first explain my approach. I take a closer look at the origins of the language, the total number of speakers as well as the percentage of Chinese speakers among the total population of a given country, and at the role Chinese plays within the educational system. When it comes to literature, I will examine the overall environment for writers, the conditions of the publishing market, general reading habits and the readers’ market. The “First World” of the Chinese language is of course Mainland China, followed by Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, which jointly make up the “Second World.” As for the “Third World,” that has to be Southeast Asia (Nanyang or “Lands of the Southern Seas” in Chinese), coming last since, in the countries of this region, the Chinese are as a rule only a minority, albeit often a substantial one (in Malaysia, for example, roughly one third of the population are ethnic Chinese). Singapore is an exception, with 77% of the population being Chinese. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Chinese-language education is facing serious pressures. In Malaysia, a student is not even allowed to submit theses or dissertations in Chinese.
In Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, all of which share a colonial past, the population is overwhelmingly Chinese. Add to that their geographical position within,...
*This was Yu Kwang-chung’s 余光中keynote speech delivered at the 2007 International PEN Asia and Pacific Regional Conference held in Hong Kong from February 2 to 5, 2007. |
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