Posted on 06/09/2012 11:02:34 AM PDT by James C. Bennett
There have been few languages in world history that were spoken by more people as a second language than as a first. English has had that distinction for several decades already. Now, there are more people learning it in a given year than it has native speakers
The second President of the United States, John Adams, predicted in 1780 that “English will be the most respectable language in the world and the most universally read and spoken in the next century, if not before the end of this one.” It is destined “in the next and succeeding centuries to be more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.”
It was a bold prediction, for at that time there were only about 13 million English-speakers in the world, almost all of them living in Britain or on the eastern seaboard of North America. They were barely one percent of the world’s population, and almost nobody except the Welsh and the Irish bothered to learn English as a second language. So how is Adams’s prediction doing now?
Well, it took a little longer than he thought, but last week one of the most respected universities in Italy, the Politecnico di Milano, announced that from 2014 all of its courses would be taught in English.
There was a predictable wave of outrage all across the country, but the university’s rector, Mr Giovanni Azzoni, simply replied: “We strongly believe our classes should be international classes, and the only way to have international classes is to use the English language. Universities are in a more competitive world. If you want to stay with the other global universities, you have no other choice.”
The university is not doing this to attract foreign students. It is doing it mainly for its own students who speak Italian as a first language, but must make their living in a global economy where the players come from everywhere — and they all speak English as a lingua franca.
Many other European universities, especially in Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, have taken the same decision, and the phenomenon is now spreading to Asia.
There is a huge shift underway, and it has become extremely rare to meet a scientific researcher or international business-person who cannot speak fluent English. How else would Peruvians communicate with the Chinese?
But wait a minute. Peruvians speak Spanish, the world’s second-biggest language, and Chinese has the largest number of native speakers of any language. Why don’t they just learn each other’s languages?
Because neither language is much use for talking to anybody else. Chinese won’t get you very far in Europe, Africa or the America — or, indeed, in most of Asia. The same goes for Spanish almost anywhere outside Latin America. Since few people have the time to learn more than one or two foreign languages, we need a single lingua franca that everybody can use with everybody else.
The choice has fallen on English not because it is more beautiful or more expressive, but just because it is already more widespread than any of the other potential candidates.
Mandarin Chinese has been the biggest language by number of speakers for at least the last thousand years, and is now used by close to a billion people, but it has never spread beyond China in any significant way. Spanish, like English, has grown explosively in the past two centuries: Each now has over 400 million speakers. But Spanish remains essentially confined to Central and South America and Spain, while English is everywhere.
There is a major power that uses English in every continent except South America: The US in North America, the United Kingdom in Europe, South Africa in Africa, India in Asia, and of course Australia (where the entire continent speaks it). All of that is due to the British empire, which once ruled one-quarter of the world’s people. For the same reason, there are several dozen other countries where English is an official language.
Of course, the British empire went into a steep decline almost a century ago, but the superpower that took Britain’s place was the United States, another English-speaking country.
After another century during which everybody dealing in international business and diplomacy — indeed, any independent traveller who went very far from home — simply had to learn English, the die was cast. English had become the first worldwide lingua franca.
There have been few languages in world history that were spoken by more people as a second language than as a first; English has had that distinction for several decades already. Never before has any language had more people learning it in a given year than it has native speakers; English has probably now broken that record as well.
Most of those learners will never become fully fluent in English, but over the years some hundreds of millions will, including the entire global elite. And the amount of effort that is being invested in learning English is so great that it virtually guarantees that this reality will persist for generations to come.
No other language is threatened by this predominance of English. Italians are not going to stop speaking Italian to one another, even if they have attended the Politecnico di Milano, and no force on Earth could stop the Chinese or the Arabs from speaking their own language among themselves. But they will all speak English to foreigners.
- Genesis 11:5-8.
The "Tower of Babel" again, anyone? LOL.
For the author to say the Irish “bothered to learn English as a second language” might be taken as offensive by many Irish. For many years they were forbidden by the English to speak their native language...
As long as all of America's greatest combat heroes are named Murphy it's all good.
Murphy and Rubinowitz
First is that English is the required language for international aviation. Not suggested, REQUIRED!
"The International Civil Aviation Organisation has decreed that from 1 January 2008 all Air Traffic Controllers and Flight Crew Members engaged in or in contact with international flights must be proficient in the English language as a general spoken medium and not simply have a proficiency in standard ICAO Radio Telephony Phraseology."
Second involves computer languages and operating systems. Almost all that I know of use English as their base. Yes they can be vey cryptic and compressed but still, a familiarity with English helps others to comprehend programming almost everywhere!
On the other hand, anyone listening to the numerous "help desk" operations based in foreign lands will recognize that there is a vast difference between idioms of English!
A little Hindi goes a long way.
As does a little proficiency in the native languages of the people one is trying to do business with. With that and the occasional help of a bilingual employee of the same or an experienced interpreter for hire an American can do business anywhere on the globe. Most business people do speak some English, sometimes better than a few native speakers I know, or at least they make sure they have someone on staff who does.
When I took some part time courses in French with my wife (we were living in Brussels) after numerous mistakes and flubs I asked the instructor if Americans were her worst students. She said "Oh no. They're usually among the best because they're willing to make mistakes, laugh about them, and learn from them. The worst are the British. If they make a mistake they'll either deny it was a mistake at all or clam up in embarrassment and give up". I thought the comment was interesting.
Not so much a Tower of Babel situation as an analog to Marketplace Greek of 2,000 years ago. Commerce is a powerful motivator.
The choice has fallen on English not because it is more beautiful or more expressive
I am hugely biased in favor of English and so I have to ask, what language is more expressive? I'll concede beauty to the Romance languages, but I'm thinking English might have expressiveness locked up.
God bless the Brits and their mostly benevolent reign.
Are you saying that you do not approve of the global reach and the common communication medium that the English language is creating?
Are you saying that you do not approve of the global reach and the common communication medium that the English language is creating?
I think globalism serves the globalists. The larger the structure of government, the more oppression, corruption, disloyality and ignorance dished out by the ones who make the rules.
The West’s elite designed and orchestrated the current form of globalism. They picked English as the “universial” global language because North Americans and Europeans know English and it gave them an advantage over the rest of the world. When and if China rises into global economic dominance, they will want Chinese to be the “universial” language of their globe.
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