English as a global language

by Dan Dascalescu - 2008-Sep-21

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Introduction

I am a native Romanian speaker, and English is my second language.

After working for a few years in the globalization industry, I developed a strong opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone also spoke a common language in addition to their mother tongue. Here are some major reasons for that:

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1. Just consider the huge amount of online and offline knowledge that's simply unavailable to you for the stupid reason that it's written in a language you don't understand. Should we encourage this by learning more languages so that people can generate more knowledge in more languages? Should we encourage this by translating from English into a myriad of languages? How about instead we focus on one language, and better knowledge?
2. Did straying away from standards ever help in the long run? Aren't you glad all power outlets are the same in the US and hate it when you have to buy adapters for Europe, or the other way around? Language is pretty much the same: a vehicle for communicating ideas among humans. I claim that ideas are more important than language itself.

Today, it appears that the language with the best chances of becoming the global language is English:

• Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca,78 is the dominant international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy. [...] A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of fields, occupations and professions such as medicine and as a consequence over a billion people speak English to at least a basic level.
  -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language.

• Generally speaking, English is the universal language on the Internet [...] The position of English can only be altered by major world-scale political and economical changes, such as increasing importance of the European Union or a coalition between Japan and China.
  -- English - the universal language on the Internet?

• //English is without a doubt the actual universal language. It is the world's second largest native language, the official language in 70 countries, and English-speaking countries are responsible for about 40% of world's total GNP.English can be at least understood almost everywhere among scholars and educated people, as it is the world media language, and the language of cinema, TV, pop music and the computer world. All over the planet people know many English words, their pronunciation and meaning.//

  -- English as a Universal Language?

I have presented this argument in numerous 43things? entries and collected the feedback. There seems to be a consensus among my opponents that everyone speaking a common language would be beneficial for humanity, but however, that language should not be English! Therefore, I'll skip expanding on why a common global language would be beneficial. I'll instead challenge my opponents to explain exactly what language should become universal, and how they'd go about teaching it to the whole world.

I'll address below several common attacks my proposal has received; feedback is welcome. Before replying, please read my argument in its entirety, and click hyperlinks when not familiar with the hyperlinked item.

Advocating English as a universal language is ethnocentric

I am not advocating the propagation of English culture (particularly not pop culture). I advocate teaching English purely as a vehicle for worldwide human communication. I don't advocate my native language for this position, and I'm curious which non-English speakers would seriously advocate their own language. So far, the second best candidate would be Mandarin Chinese as a spoken language and Classical Chinese as the written form, but that's thanks to China's huge population. I don't think any Chinese speaker in their right mind would advocate learning tens of thousands of characters?. China's own government realized the problem and has issued a number of simplification reforms?.

The point is that for a universal language you have to either invent one, or make a pick among languages. I'll demonstrate below why I think the best pick would be English.

English is a bad choice for a universal language

English is full of irregularities?, its spelling is counter-phonetic (which explains why even native speakers have such a terrible time spelling it), there are all sorts of dialects from Aussie to Ebonics, and it's full of slang. If people prefer to learn Esperanto, I'm very fine with that. Interlingua? would be even easier to learn. Work has also been done on simplified and normalized versions of English?.

However, English is still a very simple and easy language to learn, compared to Asian languages (with the notable exception of Bahasa Indonesia? -- see the Comments below). Even when compared to major Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, English has simpler grammar, in particular much simpler verb conjugations. English has no gender or number inflection for adjectives, articles and adverbs. More details about how much simpler English grammar really is can be found in this article by Carlos Carrion Torres?.

Finally, English is (sadly for some), the most popular candidate, as I indicated in the very beginning of this article. Also,

//As a non-native speaker you are always an outsider. [...] If you want to get noticed in your field, you absolutely have to publish in English.// -- from a University of Michigan article?. Dismissing this argument as ad numerum? won't help with the reality of English's spread.

"it would be boring if everyone understood English"

Consider this: how fun would the cyberspace be, if we still had all the disparate, incompatible networks that couldn't talk to each other, back in the dawn of the Internet? Fortunately, the Internet started using gateways to translate between these networks, until the networks understood it's much more efficient to just speak the same protocol directly.

All I'm asking is that we accelerate skipping the translation stage we're mired in nowadays. There are far more interesting regional aspects than language: culture (which is translatable to a very high degree; and that which is not translatable would not be accessible to non-speakers anyway), geography, society, cuisine, customs etc.

Culture would be lost

Let me tell you why it won't, taking as an example the Chinese culture. Now, Chinese culture that's not translated in English is only accessible to Chinese speakers. For all others, it's as good as lost. If future Chinese speakers keep writing in Chinese, more culture will be lost. If, as I propose, everyone learns English as well, those Chinese writers will realize they can expose their culture to a much larger audience if they write in English.

To clarify my point: I propose mandatory education in a universal language (English, nowadays) starting with every child's general education. After 4 generations, assuming that everyone spoke the same language (be it English or Esperanto): * existing works in some language X are lost anyway to those who don't speak language X, regardless of whether everyone speaks (also) English or not * which is easier, and propagates culture more: translating from language X into tons of languages A, B, C etc., or translating into just English?

Learning another language is "fun", a good challenge and helps expand your thinking.

This is something I agree with. However, not all languages are equal. If you're keen on learning a spoken language, it has been demonstrated that Esperanto is about 6 times as beneficial to learn as English:

//What Helmar Frank's research at Paderborn and for the San Marino International Academy of Sciences shows is that one year of Esperanto in school, which produces a communication ability equivalent to what the average pupil reaches in other European languages after six to seven years of study, accelerates and improves the learning of other languages after Esperanto.// -- from Propaedeutic value of Esperanto?.

But, if you actually want to develop your thinking, then learning a programming language is much more beneficial to one's intellect and rigorous thinking, than learning another human language.

Final thoughts

Finally, ask yourself what all social networking sites would look like and how useful they would be and how many friends one could make from all over the world, if right now we had no de-facto common language. Heck, I'm not sure the Internet would have spread outside of the US. Does anyone remember Minitel?? It was "one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services" ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel|1]])... in France, and in French.

So, please, stop this post-tower-of-Babel language mess. Please help me: * Point out that learning a language takes YEARS. To those who want to learn a foreign language other than English?: is your life so in order, and have you accomplished all your other goals, that this is the best thing left to do? * Point out that the huge amounts spent by multi-billion dollar companies on translation would be better spent on educating children in poor countries (if you haven't clicked any link so far, click this one - it's a superb inspirational Youtube music video clip).

I myself have quit my job as a translator and stopped producing any public content in Romanian. What can you do? 1. If you are a bilingual speaker, write all globally-relevant public content in English (even blogs about your city in Japan - there may be international tourists looking for information about it). This will also help yourself and your readership pick up more English. 2. When asked to translate something from English, consider imparting some English knowledge to the asker. 3. Encourage members of discussion groups or forums in languages other than English to join the English group if their topic is universal (e.g. computers). See for example how I discourage Romanian users from discussing JavaScript in Romanian?. 4. If you are learning a language other than English, double-check your reasons. If you travel to China frequently, learn some basic Chinese expressions, but don't embark on learning Chinese. 5. If you have the resources, or just want to experience a radically different culture ([[http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.whyvol|Peace Corps]] anyone?) consider teaching English to children: * http://www.globalvolunteers.org/projects/teaching.asp * http://www.teachabroad.com 6. Spread this idea!

See you in 50 years. I hope you will have made a difference. I trust that natural selection, applied to languages, will. media type="custom" key="2040908"?