English is the first language of 350-400 million people, and an effective second language for maybe 500 million more. By some counts, a grand total of 2 billion people do or can use it. That requires some heroic use of the word can. But the first-ever global language it certainly is, and rapidly spreading. And now —by 2012, if all goes well — it is to have its own museum.

Not that “museum” is quite the word. The plans which a body called The English Project will formally launch today (March 5) do not centre on glass cases of historic artefacts. The sponsors’ word is a “language multicentre”— there’s a piece of new-look English — full of IT and interaction, and as busy with the present and the future of the language as the past. Nor will it cover only British English: at the launch, David Crystal, a leading expert, will lecture on “the future of Englishes”, suggesting that English may break up, as Latin (and Sanskrit) did, into a family of distinct languages.

The centre will be sited in Winchester, a south-English city with as good a claim to it as any outside London. This was the capital of 9th-century King Alfred, once familiar to all English school children as the king who “burnt the cakes” while his mind was on other things. More to the point, he was a champion of the Anglo-Saxons of his day, getting laws and notable works translated from Latin, indeed translating some himself.

Winchester has later links to the language. The parish of Jane Austen’s father lay some miles to the north, and she lived her last weeks in the city. My wife for a time in the Eighties inhabited the same house. A plaque in the cathedral commemorates Austen — remarkably, without mentioning her work as a novelist. There’s also a window honouring Izaak Walton, whose 17th-century The Compleat Angler is one of the English classics.

Healthy interest

The sponsors, notably Winchester University, reckon the centre will cost £25 million to set up. Thereafter, they hope, it can draw 100,000-150,000 visitors a year and support itself. Visuals and recordings will display the development of English, its worldwide spread and its ongoing rapid changes. Temporary exhibitions will look at specific fields: the English of science or the mobile phone, for example. Visitors will be able to compare their own accent with those of others, and add their own speech to the archives, becoming in effect exhibits themselves.

Beside such on-site activities, the sponsors plan wide on-line outreach, not least to teachers and students in Britain and elsewhere. One of the project’s trustees, Christopher Mulvey, emeritus professor of English at the university, last month was at a Delhi conference on “English, India and Globalization”. He found plenty of interest there, he told me, especially if the centre’s website takes into account the Cambridge University examinations applied worldwide to English teaching and learning by people of other mother-tongues.

India’s competent English-speakers by now, some claim, outnumber America’s. It should and surely could have a big influence on the project. Those British-based steel magnates — Swraj Pal and Lakshmi Mittal — could finance it from their small change, I guess, though I wouldn’t suggest the fund-raisers use quite that phrase. Among the historic “events” of English planned to be recreated or reproduced, such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and Martin Luther King’s I have a dream, are the speeches of Gandhi. I fear my esteem for the father of the nation does not, from my reading, extend to his English oratory; I’ve proposed Nehru’s Tryst with destiny speech from August, 1947. If any reader has suggestions, I’ll happily pass them on.