The Nuremberg trials, just six months after Nazi Germany surrendered, marked several global watersheds, including a little-recognised linguistic one, writes Tony Kinsella.
The judges from the four victorious powers were nominated for their legal rather than their linguistic skills, the defendants were German-speakers, the lawyers and witnesses spoke the languages of a dozen countries. The traditional approach of consecutive interpretation, with the speaker stopping every couple of paragraphs to allow for translation, would have made the trials almost technically impossible. Nuremberg was the birthplace of simultaneous interpretation with the appearance of the microphones, headphones, and booth-bound interpreters.
This innovation signalled the end of the dominance of international affairs by linguists, and the emergence of English as the international language. It is hard to imagine now, but less than 70 years ago there was no such thing as a global language.
Latin and German were the languages of science. French was the language of diplomacy, and English of the sea and maritime affairs.
All other languages were essentially regional in character. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch were languages of their home countries' empires. German was the business language of much of the European mainland, Russian confined to the USSR, and Chinese to China. Interaction between these worlds was minimal and haphazard, and at the official level, normally conducted in French.
Foreign tourism was small, and air travel in its infancy. Both were largely confined to wealthy elites and the cossetted destinations they frequented.
The sheer scale of the US economy meant that English was already appearing on global horizons before the war. Hollywood was beginning to overshadow Europe's film industries. US corporations from Ford to Kelvinator, having achieved global scale in their domestic market, were expanding. Musicians, records and radio stations were laying the foundations of what would become a global music business.
The world in which the Nuremberg trials began favoured a global language unlike any our planet had ever seen. France and the UK were bankrupt, the USSR retrenching behind what would become known as the Iron Curtain.
Into this vacuum would step the US and to a lesser extent Australia, Canada and New Zealand with food, goods, finance, and the only operational economic model on offer - all wrapped in English.
All previous imperial languages were confined to local elites, with ordinary people continuing in their local idioms - generations of pre-Reformation Christians assisted at religious services conducted in Latin, a language they neither spoke nor understood.
We of the early 21st century live with a language, and the culture it transmits, that reaches into the nooks and crannies of our everyday lives, affecting our business and lifestyle models, cinema, music, television, computer software and right down to the labels on our machines.
English has become the language of global business, communications and politics. German exporters negotiate with Chinese clients in English. It is the language of summer conversations between, say, Spanish and Estonian tourists. The vital informal negotiations at summit meetings are conducted in English - to the extent that linguistic ability risks becoming a criterion for the selection of national leaders. Presidents Putin and Sarkozy are working to improve their English.
This new reality has been astonishingly accelerated by the internet. Computer operating systems and software packages do come in other languages, but they are designed in English. A command of English is a prerequisite for participation in the information age. The only IT artefacts that acknowledge other languages are survivors of another age - keyboards.
Having grown up with this reality we find it normal. Yet its originality, not to say abnormality, need to be recognised, analysed and, at the very least, addressed.
A real "Béarla barrier" has emerged. Those who do not have a reasonable grasp of English risk political illiteracy and exclusion. Globalisation, information technology, social trends thus become closed books to many.
The first foreign language in the Soviet bloc was Russian. Italians and Spaniards learned French, while the French studied German. Many now in positions of authority, aged 40 and over, find themselves forced to rely on junior staff for their global access. They risk feeling isolated, even alienated, from the world they are supposed to help govern.
The rise of extreme nationalist groups, radical religious sects, an inarticulate desire to shout "stop" and to return to some putative Golden Age, may all owe something to living in a world where your mother tongue acts as an obstacle to, rather than a vehicle for, communication.
Ironically, the fear of globalisation is no less strong in its country of origin. US politics, business and culture are all finding it difficult to adjust to the need to compete in the global playing field they worked so hard to create.
There may be a national cut-off point at about 60 million. Those of us from countries with smaller populations realise that success in any given field requires international experience and cultural compromises. You can become a world class neurosurgeon, ballerina or football player within China, Germany, France, India, the UK or the US. If, however you are Bolivian, Dutch or Irish, your natural horizons must be broader.
It would be a delicious irony if those from smaller nations reaped the wind of globalisation, for it is a dynamic process. The pizza of the Neapolitan poor has become a global staple, as the Celtic winter festival of Samhain has mutated into a planetary Halloween - via the USA.
Those of us from our small island may be uniquely well placed. We abandoned our national language when it became a handicap, embracing one that has, fortuitously, become the global standard. That very globalisation threatens our already fragile native tongue, confronting us with awkward questions of identity and culture. Yet we live the reality of different linguistic traditions even when our Gaeilge is restricted to the cúpla focal.
We should be careful to avoid knee-jerk defensive postures for, as Daniel Cassidy eloquently points out in How the Irish Invented Slang, the process is decidedly two-way.
Some of us speak Irish, most can manage standard English, and all are at home in the strongly Hibernicised version of the Bard's tongue which has become our everyday idiom. This idiom may be on its way to becoming a language in its own right, but we have yet to invent a name for it.