Auld lang syne for English speakers

And as far as 1.3 billion Chinese people are concerned…New Year’s usually falls on the day of the second new moon after the winter solstice. The Year of the Pig doesn’t succeed the Year of the Dog until Feb. 18. So that’s at least 40% of the world’s population who didn’t sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at midnight on December 31. Come to think of it, only a tiny and dwindling minority of Earth’s inhabitants know even the first verse of Robert Burns’ song, and only a fraction of them have a clue what it means, since it’s written in Old Scots (literal translation: “old long since”)…

Ironically, this Scottish song will mainly have been heard last night in English-speaking countries… in those places the American writer James C. Bennett has called “the Anglosphere”. This is a concept worth pondering as a new year dawns. Bennett defines it as a “network civilization” whose “densest nodes” are the United States and Britain but that also extends to “the Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa.” He also acknowledges, as honorary members, educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa and India.

The historian Andrew Roberts, by contrast, regards only Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the US as the true homes of the “English-speaking peoples”… Perhaps it would be more correct to speak of an Anglo diaspora rather than an Anglosphere. More than three centuries of commerce, conquest, migration and missionary work by the inhabitants of the British Isles have, after all, left few regions of the world untouched.

The key point, however, is that this Anglo diaspora’s glory days lie precisely in “old long since.” …Demography isn’t always destiny. For the English-speaking peoples, however, it looks a lot like doom. At their zenith in the 1950s, even using Roberts’ narrow definition, they accounted for roughly 1 in 11 of mankind. Today the figure is closer to 1 in 15. By 2050, it may be as low as 1 in 17…

Some people get dyspeptic about this kind of thing, just as they get nostalgic about the days when the English speakers ruled the world. But the study of history has made me a fatalist. To me, the Anglosphere and Anglo diaspora resemble the ruins of Nineveh and Tyre: exhibits in the great Museum of Defunct Empires…

Excerpted from a piece which appeared in ‘Los Angeles Times’, January 1