Abstract:
This paper examines Englishization as the linguistic component of economic globalization and the implications for other world languages. As the language of globalization, English is exerting appreciable ‘green gas’ effects on global languages and in the process fossilized into an effective instrument of homogenization and hegemonization. This process equally throws up the English language as the main driver of imposed global monolingualism. Nonetheless, the overweening ease and instrumentality of Englishization in the globalization process is being checkmated by the forces of economic globalization, which have interests in penetrating local markets through local languages and turning these languages into commodified tools of communication. The increased presence of these languages on the Internet attests to the fact that the invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of what it was at cyberspace’s birth, that is, an architecture that predisposes every user to use his/her language. Given the increasing multilingual character of the cyberspace, it behooves speakers of world languages other than English to maximize this window of opportunity by valorizing them for optimum utilization first, as languages of the Internet and second, as commodified tools of communication in the globalized market system. The foregoing imposes urgent demand on Nigerians and indeed Africans to increase the Internet presence of their languages. Perhaps, in this way, the dwindling fortunes of African languages can be stymied and the corroding ‘green gas’ effect of English as the rampaging language of homogenization and hegemonization can be checkmated.
