The need for an international language has always existed. Believe
it or not, English is now the global language of business. “More and more multinational companies are
mandating English as the common corporate language—Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler,
Fast Retailing, Nokia, Renault, Samsung, SAP, Technicolor, and Microsoft in
Beijing, to name a few—in an attempt to facilitate communication and
performance across geographically diverse functions and business endeavors.”
I’m twenty years old and obviously I wasn’t alive since English started to
expand around the world, around tourism, communication and through technology.
But this doesn’t implicate that I don’t know that in the past all was about
religion and intellectual debate, with the evolution of technology, today it’s
about communicating with others anywhere in the world. We are now experiencing
a globalization era.
When people of different places meet, they need to communicate
using a particular language as a lingua franca. English is now a world lingua
franca. All about the global language has a little to do with the number of
people that speak the language; it’s more about who those speakers are. For
example, Latin became an international language throughout the Roman Empire,
but it was not because the Romans where numerous but because they were more
powerful. The links between language dominance and economic, technological, and
cultural power, especially political and military power, all these together
made English a global one.
How
far back do we have to go in order to find the origins of global English? All
the English language came from northern Europe, and then arrived in England,
1500 years ago, beginning to spread and entered parts of Cumbria, Wales
southern Scotland and Cornwall, and the fortress of the Celtic languages. In
1066 after the Norman invasion, many nobles from England fled north to Scotland,
where they were welcome, and eventually the language spread throughout the
Scottish lowlands. Through invasions and the flow of people the language became
more popular. By the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman knights were sent across the
Irish Sea, and Ireland gradually fell under English rule. The language as we
know it, was the dominate language in Great Britain during the Middle Ages and
in Ireland during the 18th and 19th century. From there, many colonists
exported and spread the language to all four corners of the world.
The first permanent English-speaking colony was established in
North America in the early 1600s. The group of people was very mixed, different
ages, diverse regional and social economic. They landed in Virginia and New
England that is above New York. They were the early English-speaking with a
characteristic accent, the ones that were from the West Country brought with
them an accent voicing s sounds and the r strongly pronounced after vowels. By
contrast, the colonists that came from the east of England lacked and r after
vowels, and proved to be the dominant influence. It never settled in one place,
because of the constant movements and continuing inflow of immigrants from
different parts of the world. But the Americans invented many new words to describe
their lifestyles, and with this, new pronunciations of existing words emerged.
As a result of all the mixing areas, the shiploads of immigrants,
and all the people moving, the divisions between regional dialects and the
sense of who owned or use the correct rules of the English Language gradually
began to blur. What helped to set a concept of a Standard English and for
making distinct entitles between British English and American English were
first USA becoming independent from Great Britain in 1776, the spelling
conventions proposed by Noah Webster (1786) and An American Dictionary of the
English Language (1828). Meanwhile all this happened the British Empire
was expanding throughout the world during the 1700s.
In Australia and New Zealand, English was established as the
dominant language because the European settlers were more in number than the
indigenous population. In India and Africa it was necessary for the British to
teach English throughout all the empire because of the need to have people in
distant places to speak English so that the soldiers could understand their
British officers and so that the civil service could maintain civil order under
the leadership of British administrators. However, through centuries of
colonial rule English was imposed, in most cases Afrikaans speakers used it as
a second language. Also English was learned in mission schools, which was
influenced by various language backgrounds. Like American English, English
in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand has evolved such that they are now
distinct from British English. In Africa and India continent is used as an
official language even though countries are independent from British rule.
After the World War II many countries lost its power. The United
States that was an English-speaking country, was the only big Western power
that remained without any damaged, talking about education, science and
politics. They then helped its allies, gaining power by reorganizing the world
through the creation of the United Nation. English was then one of the four
official languages spoken in the UN, which made English gain stronger status in
the world. The first computer programs were written in English-like language
and the output was also English. Today 80% or 85% of all scientific and
technological information is written in English. All these facts help the
spread of English globally.
