How did English become the ‘global language’?
The world’s lingua franca
More people speak Spanish than English as their first language. Nearly three three times as many speak Mandarin Chinese in their family homes. Yet few would dispute that English is the leading world language.
This is because English is the world’s lingua franca or common second language, as this table shows.
English is the international language of business, commerce, science, medicine, and many other key areas. Even in diplomacy, where French once ruled supreme, English is now dominant in most regions of the world.
According to David Graddol’s extensive survey for the British Council, the number of non-native or second language speakers of English now outnumbers those of primary or native speakers.
international tourism is growing, but the proportion of encounters involving a native English speaker is declining (1.9). There were around 763 million international travellers in 2004, but nearly 75% of visits involved visitors from a non-English-speaking country travelling to a non-English-speaking destination. This demonstrates the … growing role for global English.
Increasingly, non native speakers use English as a
“practical tool” and also as a “working language” (Crystal 2003: 426), has emerged as a lingua franca used by millions of people to engage in a conversation with each other. (Tünde NAGY, 2016)
Why English?
The linguist, David Crystal, suggests that “a language becomes a global language because of the power of the people who speak it.” The ‘power’ of English was initially based on political and military factors, most notably the expansion of the British Empire.
It also became the common language of the scientific, industrial, financial and economic revolutions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centurues. This further increased its influence and prestige.
Crystal stresses that the increasing importance of English does not derive from the structure of the language itself. English, he points out, is not particularly accessible to speakers of other languages. Though the grammar is not especially complex, English has eccentric spelling and pronunciation patterns — cough, for example.
It also has the largest lexicon (number of words) of any European language. There are over a million by some estimates, though 3,000 will cover most situations.
Adaptability
Other linguists feel that Crystal undervalues the special nature of the English language. Robert McCrum argues that English “does a good job” in allowing non-native speakers to adapt to it. In an interview with the Boston Globe McCrum focuses on its ‘democratic’ nature:
Q. You make a distinction in the book between the imperial roots of English internationally, but the language not being imperious.
A. The French have always been very imperious … always top down. With English, it’s always bottom up… implicitly … there’s a quality to the English language which is different from German or French or Chinese. That quality is approachability, usefulness, adaptability.
English is a Germanic language in its grammar, syntax and key vocabulary. Though only 30% of English words are Anglo Saxon, they make up around 70% of those used in common conversation.
The top ten most commonly used verbs — be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get — are all irregular in that they do not follow the standard pattern of conjugation (paint, painted etc) This because they are survivors from old English.
Central to the flexibility of the English language is that it borrows heavily from other languages — particularly Latin, Greek and French. These ‘loanwords’ are either integrated through usage or disappear into obscurity.
Adopting loan words has been a useful evolutionary strategy for language survival. Just overthrown the government? Save on translation fees by writing the French coup d’etat on your application to rejoin the UN. Or perhaps something more soothing like from English, like regime change.
Generally the convention for loanwords is to leave them close to their original form. Of course, this is not possible with non alphabetic characters and these do not play nice with IT systems. English is happy to borrow futon from Japanese but (布団) will not help IKEA sales in Europe or north America. In contrast, the word ‘sofa’ is familiar to customers in Tokyo
The English language does not have august council like the Académie française determining what is or is not permissible. The only ‘official’ status for a specific word is inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary and the OED sees its task as
recording the entry of today’s new words into the {English} language. We use printed evidence of new words from magazines, newspapers, books, song lyrics, practical manuals — any published source. Slang and dialect words are also collected.
What McCrum calls the ‘bottom up’ nature of English leads to many quirks and inconsistencies. Why anglicize some loanwords but not others? Why pronounce the city Paris with a hard s but switch to French pronunciation when referring to the football team: Paris Saint Germain?
This glorious linguistic anarchy has been a source of frustration to some orderly minds. In the early twentieth century there was a determined effort to introduce a new world language, one without weird spellings and inscrutable pronunciation rules. It was called Esperanto.
