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,...
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