“The fall of a language is set in motion when [bilinguals] begin to take more seriously what they read in English. It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip. It’s set in motion when bilinguals hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fine books written in their own language. (Watching American or British television dramas rather than their own is not unconnected to this process.) Finally, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English—especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon. A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. […] Through the process of negative selection, writers who continue writing in their own language would be those whose books do not deserve to be called texts. This cycle, once it began, could only gain in force. Not only bilinguals but true readers of literature—not mere consumers of books—would eventually cease to expect their own language to bear the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burdens it once did.”
—Minae Mizumura,The Fall of Language in the Age of English, tr. Julia Winters Carpenter & Mari Yoshihara
