The trend of using English in the future

THE NEED FOR A GLOBAL LANGUAGE

By Lindsay Crawley

You can hear English in almost every part of the world. It is people’s first language in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and it is the official language of several other countries like India in Asia and Nigeria in Africa. There are about 400 million native speakers of English and over one billion non-native speakers of it.

Millions of people are learning English at present. Some of them are learning it to communicate with people from non-English speaking countries. A Japanese businessman is talking on the phone with a colleague from Germany. They are speaking English. But it is not British or American English. It is Global English, the world’s lingua franca, the language that people use to communicate across cultures.

Is this tendency to use English going to continue in the future? Some researchers think that multilingualism is going to be the trend. With improvements in translation technology, people are going to speak and write in their own language and still communicate effectively. Other experts think that Mandarin, the most widely spoken language, is going to expand its influence. But many people believe this Chinese dialect is too difficult to become a lingua franca.

English is the language of ship captains, airplane pilots and air traffic controllers. It is also the language of diplomacy, science, technology, business, international competitions and education. Half of the world’s technical and scientific documents are in English and universities worldwide give courses in English so students can come from anywhere in the world to study science, in them. 80% of the world’s e-mail is written in English, the top language of internet users. With so many uses by so many people, the future of English seems clear – it is with us to stay!

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