Mark A. Heberle reviews Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of English, which looks at how English dominates not only science and the internet, but also publishing, and what this means for other languages, especially Japanese. To quote from the article:

“This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when English has become the universal language of science and the default language of the internet. Even for creative writers, it is the virtually inescapable medium for those desiring to be taken seriously in an age of globalized discourse. …

“Mizumura’s experiences…ground the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical arguments that make up the book. Her experiences in Iowa with more than 20 ‘writers writing in their own language’—including literary artists from China and Korea, Norway and Lithuania, and a poet from Botswana who writes in English—were the origin of The Fall of Language, since they raised initial questions about the challenges facing local languages and literatures.”

Read the article on the website of The Clairemont Review of Books.

Photo taken from Nippon.com.