Whose the future?

One of my English students is quite a talker. He does not formulate his sentences grammatically correct, but he gets his ideas across, all the time scrutinising your face and looking for signs that he has been understood. When he concludes that you did not get him, he tries again in a different way. He is not easily put off.

His English is clearly of one who has acquired enough knowledge of the language to get by but who never advanced beyond the stage of throwing nouns and verbs at you without connecting them in the right way. He knows his deficiency and one day he confessed to me that he had made a big, a very big mistake. At asking what he meant he replied that he should have attended English courses 25 years ago, when he first arrived in the UK. Now his memory was full and it was very difficult for him to unlearn the broken English which he had picked up during all those years of trying to converse with neighbours and colleagues.

His big mistake would not have mattered so much, he added, within 50 years time or so, but alas he would not live that long. I did not know whether I understood him correctly, but apparently I had, because he continued to explain half-jokingly that by that time the UK would be mostly populated by Asians and he would not need English anymore. I started to say that migration was getting more difficult, but he cut me short and made it clear that he did not have migration in mind. "We big families", he said, "many children". And making a wave with his hand indicating a few generations he said half-jokingly again: "the UK will be ours".

I did not begrudge him his little enjoyment of being in power one day, even though I don't believe for a second that it will ever happen. I rather expect birth rates of cultural communities to fall with the rise in education, particularly of the women, as has been the case everywhere in the world. But why bring in sobering remarks? After all, as a member of a minority grouping he is rather powerless and he knows it: his limited English is a constant reminder.

Ton