Pop stars once had to sing in English to win global fame. Now Spanish and other languages are taking over

As Leonard Cohen sang: “We are ugly but we have the music.” He referred – rather harshly – to himself and Janis Joplin, but some might apply it more widely to the British and Americans.

“Rock and pop are American and English, and we understood that immediately,” French rocker Little Bob said recently, at home near the old bell tower in Le Havre that called dockers to work each grey dawn. Everyone knows English is the lingua franca of pop music. Less widely acknowleged is that the gyre is turning, that other languages, especially Spanish, are eroding the hegemony of pop and other genres.

According to data last week from IFPI, representing the recording industry worldwide, the top single of 2018 was Havana by Camila Cabello, a Cuban American, which included a Spanish-language remix. Be Apart by Tia Ray, who is Chinese, and Despacito by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, both Puerto Ricans, also made the top 10.

Sebastian Krys, a producer for Colombian singer Shakira, told Rolling Stone last year: “You simply can’t have a global No 1 any more without a hit in Mexico and Spain.” Tim Ingham, who writes for the magazine, says: “Not only is non-English language repertoire dominating key territories today – it’s also taking over the world.”

In the long game, this is a return, not an innovation. For centuries, the lingua franca of much music was Latin. While folk and sacred music in Asia and the Americas was sung and chanted in the tongues of nation or tribe, the church permitted and encouraged, up to a point, international settings of scriptural text to Gregorian chant and later – though it became contentious – polyphony.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shakira, who has been part of the avant garde of the Latin wave. Photograph: Noam Galai/Getty

Long narrative songs recorded history in the Mongghul of north-east Tibet, while in the Americas, Aztec poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin posited that the language of song must imitate the call of the coyolli bird if it were to convey “the innermost part of heaven”, as only music could. As the Renaissance challenged divine vision with that of humankind, Latin’s closest descendent, Italian, became music’s international language: after Monteverdi wrote the first operas in Venice, Gluck in Germany and Handel in London followed in his tongue. By the time Verdi had made opera into folk music and vice-versa, his funeral drew the largest crowd ever assembled in Italy.

When, then, did the ascent of song in English begin? Arguably when British and Irish planters and pioneers took folk song to what they called the “new world”. And arguably with the holler of those they and their legacy enslaved – anglicised from west Africa – which became the blues. Unarguably when blues and jazz urbanised in the 1920s. And certainly when they were adopted by whites, when gramophones and radios spread, and when Elvis and the Beatles conquered not just the west but the world.

How many times have I arrived to work in a country to be translated by a bright young person who learned fluent English from Humphrey Bogart or John Lennon? Pop, along with movies and later the internet, created a proliferation of English as a common language. Robin Lustig – presenter of The Future of English on the BBC World Service – posited that “there are probably more people in China who speak English as a second language than there are Americans who speak it as their first”, noting that 20% of Americans speak another language at home.

But the more the planet arranges itself in forms of English so a counter-dynamic occurs: the decline of respect for America and the UK as role models, especially now, and of the hegemony of English in pop music. This is a shift in the plates, not a novelty. Italy, for instance, has always had its own style of American music: when Fabrizio De André translated Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row as Via della Povertà, he may have insulted purists, but rightly delighted his fans – it’s a masterpiece. Vasco Rossi can sell out Rome’s Stadio Olimpico as fast as any Anglo-American band, but nowhere of that size outside his native land.

Shakira and the Spanish singer Enrique Iglesias were an avant garde of pop music from outside the Anglo weave seeping into and fraying it. Now songs such as Despacito and J Balvin’s Mi Gente dominate the charts in both Spanish- and English-speaking worlds, spawning versions in other languages. Narcocorrido began as a folkloric genre glorifying Mexican drug-trafficking cartels; now Los Tigres del Norte are the U2 of the Americas, the voice across the hemisphere of poor Hispanic defiance of gringo oppression, and megastars in Latino US.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fabrizio De André at a studio in Milan in 1974. Photograph: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty

In the Guardian in February, Caroline Sullivan recalled London gigs by Reggaeton star Maluma, Monsta X and the Korean boy-band BTS, at which audiences “sang along and generally did their nut… What was different was that almost none of the songs were in English”. Rap from the US was adapted to French and Arabic as soundtrack to the disturbances of 2005 across France.

With the rise in popularity of world music, more people in the Anglo orbit discovered songs that were never in English. Sting may have re-opened the Bataclan after the 2015 Isis attack, but Tinariwen from Mali claimed back its soul.

Simon Broughton, founder and editor of world music magazine Songlines, thinks “our musical world is becoming global. Of course, the term ‘world music’ is increasingly redundant as young people in a globalised world are picking and mixing and tuning into sounds from everywhere.

Technology and the internet have created a global jukebox which anyone can access and share.”

The US record producer and writer Joe Boyd is preparing a vast book on world music, having just produced an album of Albanian folk. He once played a pivotal role in Anglo rock: stage-managing Dylan’s first electric performance, at Newport in 1965. Now, however, he says: “I look back at it as rather sad.”

Why? “I was thrilled at the time. But pretty soon all the great folk music and jazz of the late 50s and early 60s was overrun by electric guitars, and the brilliance of Hendrix, Townsend and Clapton soon became power chords and heavy metal riffs. So not really a happy ending,” he says.

A visit to see Boyd’s vinyl collection is humbling: music from country after country, arranged in alphabetical order, some in English, but not much. “For me,” he says, “real music comes from the land.”

Ed Vulliamy is the author of When Words Fail: A Life With Music, War and Peace, published by Granta