Declaration: I declare that I wrote this thesis by myself and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography section. Brno, April 2012 Adela Pilátová Acknowledgements

3.2Speakers of English language

The Inner Circle (the first-language countries): is classified as first spread. Speakers from England carried the language to Australia, New Zealand and North America. The inner circle represents the traditional historical bases of English. English is native language or mother tongue of most people in these countries. The total number of English speakers is as high as 380 million people. The Outer Circle (the second language areas) represents the second spread of English throughout the colonization by Great Britain and the US in Asia and Africa. In this case the language is not the native language but serves as a lingua franca between ethnic groups. The language is classified as a second language. The trade, national institution, higher education uses English predominantly. This circle is represented by India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Pakistan, Tanzania, Kenya and others. The number of people is in the range between 150 million and 300 million people. The Expanding Circle (the foreign-language areas): in this circle we find countries where English has no historical or governmental role but it is used for international communication. In these countries the language is taught as a foreign language. This includes much of the rest of the world’s population. It is mainly used for business purpose therefore it is very difficult to estimate number of English speaking people. It ranges between 100 million to one billion people (Graddol “Future of English” 11; Crystal “Global language” 60).

The status of English language keeps changing in many parts of the world, says David Graddol. These changes, although they have not been documented yet, will have the impact on who the speakers will be in the future. In countries, such as Belgium, Denmark, Lebanon, Ethiopia or the United Arab Emirates grows the number of using English language in the intranational (internal) communication, therefore these countries can be considered to be shifted towards the second language areas. The growth of population in other countries, like India, Pakistan or Nigeria will again have an impact on the number of people who speaks English as a second language. However, nowadays in the second language area is a tendency to use English in middle class or professional communication; therefore people coming from the middle class society are becoming bilingual. There is a new trend when the English is becoming the first language outside the traditional territories. The number of people for whom the language is first, second or foreign will change rapidly in near future (Graddol “Future of English”11).

Some changes, especially the attitude towards the English language, are slowly seen even today. At the beginning of the 21^st century one-fourth of the world’s population is able to communicate in English to certain degree. Although there is more native speakers of other languages (Chinese, Spanish or Hindi), English is the language these speakers use when speaking across cultures, moreover their children are taught English to enable them better future. Almost in every part of the world is believed that be educated also means speak English. At the workplaces around the world can be heard English as a dominant language; pop-music is mostly broadcasted in English everywhere in the world. How much English is influenced by non-native speakers as a vast majority of those who uses the language can be demonstrated by the idea of Jean Paul Nerriér, a retired vice president of IBM USA, who comes originally from France. He said: “You have too many words in English. We [non-native speakers] are majority, so our way of speaking English should be the official way of speaking.” (qtd. in Mydans) Then he came up with an idea to reduce a version of English language that would use only 15 000 simple words. Simplifying of English may cause that native speakers will be forced to also know this Global English along their own to enable them to communicate with non-native speakers. Globalization provokes the need of Global language. The process of English as a Global language started with the rise of two English speaking countries, the Great Britain and the USA, this has been nowadays followed by the rise of another virtual community Internet (Mydans). Although there are few reasons stated above, why English gains such a unique position in the world, further can be thought if English is the language that is easily acquirable by anyone in the world and why it is so.

3.3Facts that can make English a Global Language

Crystal claims people often think that English language must have some essential feature of structure that makes the language easy to be learned. The thoughts are that it has less grammar, it has just few endings of words or there is no difference between masculine, feminine or neutral gender. Crystal also opposes these thoughts that how easily the language is learned do not have anything common with the idea of Global language. Latin used to be an international language and it has the inflectional endings and gender differences. French also has the gender differences and the language played an important role at the international field as well (Crystal “Global language” 7-8).

Below should be suggested and further investigated some of these thoughts and ideas of English as an easy language to be studied, therefore it is a language that easily reached its global status. Speaking about grammar, it is true that English is simpler than other languages. No differences in gender, familiar or formal addresses or case forms. Cases are applicable only to some personal pronouns, therefore verbs has mostly only 5 different forms, quite often it requires only 3 different forms whilst in German verbs may have 16 different forms and in Latin in some cases even 120. Another statement is that English is a very flexible language. When the word order is kept, the sentence can be changed to active or passive. Flexibility can also be proven that the same word can be treated as a noun as well as a verb and vice versa. New words are formed only by adding suffixes or prefixes or by compounding of existing words. Speaking about words, English is one of the richest languages in terms of vocabulary. Official the world’s largest dictionary is Oxford English Dictionary. It contains about 615 000 words. It is believed that every year almost 8 500 words are newly added to the list of dictionary. 200 000 words are in everyday use, in German this number is not higher than 184 000 and in French only 100 000. In comparison with other languages it is thought to be simple even with spelling and pronunciation. This statement is quite disputable, compare to Mandarin, Welsh or Gaelic this can be true. However, in comparison with languages as Italian where are 26 sounds or Hawaiian (13 sounds only), English has about 44 to 52 sounds. When the English is compared to Slavic languages where the words are spelled as heard, it also proves that English will not be so simple in this language feature. Few more things can be added, such as difficult pronunciation of some nouns for foreigners, such as ‘th’, makes English even more against this suggestion. Disadvantages are stated above, advantage that speaks for the language, are borrowings of foreign words. They are usually kept in their original spelling. This is the reason that many learners feel some kind of familiarity of English vocabulary (“Issues Global”). As it is seen the language has never become a global language only because of some linguistic features, amount of vocabulary or it is known for great literature, culture or reign. Language has always become an international language because of political, military or economic power (Crystal “Global language” 9). The power that English has nowadays due to the historical circumstances mentioned above in this work, can be best seen in numbers that were provided by the British Council. English language has a special status in 75 countries. One-third of books are published in English. Two-thirds of all scientists read in English. Three-quarters of the world’s mail is written in English. Four-fifths of all e-mails are in English. People are spending 2 billion dollars a year for learning English; it consists only of those coming to Great Britain to study English (Reynolds).

Download 153.35 Kb.

Share with your friends: