review on Q-value based global language system

There are over 5000 languages in the world, but a few of them are widely used. The users of English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Bengali, Bahasa Indonesian Chinese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Russian and Japanese cover over 90% of the world population. In terms of language use, we human beings are highly concentrated. With the purpose of figuring out why some languages are popular among people, we can regard language as economic commodity. This book mainly describes how a language gains its position as core or hyperconcentrated/superconcentrated language. It is a pinioning work as the same time a controversial one.
The author of this book, Abram de Swaan (born January 8, 1942, Amsterdam) is a Dutch essayist, sociologist, professor emeritus and Chairman of the Amsterdam School of Social Research (ASSR) at the University of Amsterdam. He received the P. C. Hooft Award for 2008.
This is a monograph of world language, in the book, specifically include the category and approach of the study, languages as hypercollective goods, text as goods for international exchange, languages in India, the disappearance of Dutch in Indonesia, language policy and language system of post racial segregation period in South Africa etc.
Taking the whole world as study category, this book makes comparison among five important language constellations and applies comprehensively the concepts in economics, linguistics, history studies, politics and sociology.

Introduction
Human beings are divided in over 5000 groups and speak different languages. Although language difference exists, human beings are tied into an entirety for the reason that many people can speak more than one language. Language groups connected by multilinguists form an efficient network, directly or indirectly connect 7 billion habitants of this planet.
In the first chapter, the author introduce some basic concept will be used in this book. The author regards the whole system as galaxy, language group as constellation, some popular languages like French, Spanish as supercentral languages and English, hypersentral language. By using historical atlas, the author analyzes how the super or hyper central language groups evolve. At the end of this chapter, the author gives a brief introduction of the scope and approach of the whole book and also the plan of the following chapters.

The political economics approach of analyzing languages
In chapter 2 and chapter 3, the author uses political economics approach regard language as hypercollective goods. Language has some features of collective goods. Likewise, languages can bring external network effects. People will be attracted by one languages and abandon another one. This attractiveness lies on the status of the language group. The status manifests as the communicative value of the language. The author use Q-value to evaluate the status. Q-value depends on two elements: the proportion of its users of the whole population of the language group; the proportion of its multilingual users of the all multilinguists.
In this case, the relationship between different language groups is extremely unequal. Preponderant languages will be more popular while some small languages will vanish.

Case study
In chapter 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, the author analyzes the situation of different language groups.
In India, Hindi, English and Dravidian languages are relatively in a balance. In the south, Dravidian speakers use English to resist Hindi. Gandhi’s ideal, the Hindustani, finally failed to become the national language.
In Indonesia, the most popular language at the same time the language of the elite group, the Javanese and Dutch, are replaced by Bahasa Melayu (Malay). The latter is only a bazaar language, whose users only cover 10% of the population. This is a special case that native language triumphs in a post-colonial society.
In sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa, the official languages remain the colonial languages. The elite groups monopolize the interest of these collective goods. Besides, the “language jealousy” might be another reason for this situation. Native language groups are not willing to be dominated by other language, so they continue to use the colonial language.
In Europe, even if there are 11 official languages of European Union to ensure the equality of language of each member, English is more likely to be used in different occasions.

Conclusion
At the end of the book, the author synthesizes all the discussion made previously; raise some questions regarding the language policy.


Q-value is a feasible measurement of languages. In today’s world, English has the position of lingua franca. However, once English become the real lingua franca of the world, no one would be happy with it except native English speakers. Leaving “language jealousy” aside, if that happens, native English speakers will benefit a lot from it. Historically speaking, ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had long time being the lingua franca for a large region, but hundreds of years later, the former prevailing languages wither away.
Many people share a same dream with Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. They wish to construct a language as an auxiliary language for people to communicate. But through a hundred years, Esperanto remains a hobby for a small group of people. On the contrary, English has replaced French in diplomacy and German in technology. The Q-value theory can explain this phenomenon. And also, the smaller languages are endangered, the protection will be hard.