The future of English and its place in the world

Creating a bond of unity to increase the cooperation between all of the countries has proven to be a difficult task to realize. As of today English has a prominent place when it comes to business, scholar and science topics.

It’s impossible to determine if it will effectively become a global language when it comes to their interactions with other countries, but it shouldn’t be taken lightly. When it comes to probabilities every possible outcome and their reasons need to be examined in detail.

There are different theories trying to explain why English has reached a prominent position in today’s world, cultural globalization has been took as the logical answer. Professors Li Wu and Dan Ben-Canaan agree that cultural globalization plays an important role, but they also introduce two more factors, as stated that “can be attributed to educational, economic, or cultural globalization” (Wu. Ben-Canaan, 3)

1.    The language of science:

The world has changed in many ways and it would be impossible to count them all. Science language used to be polyglot, meaning that scientific research were published in different languages, but in recent years it has tended to be monoglot, using English as the preferred language.

Michael D. Gordin in his article “Absolute English”, remarks that it’s reliable having a global language because scientists won’t need to spend time learning new languages. It’s curious however, that the majority of scientists today are not native speakers from English speaking countries. The rise of the U.S. in scientific research since the end of the Second World War and the eagerness of other countries to publish their discoveries in English contribute to this trend.

The problem with this system is that it becomes more difficult to keep track of the work of scientists who publish their researches in other language.

2.    Economy and the importance of being a global power:

The growth of English can be traced back to the industrial revolution started in England, also the expansion of their empire, and continued in the United States. This increase of new materials and technologies to manufacture them helped both countries to gain a place as global powers. When a country reaches this position it attracts the interest of other countries to do businesses with them.

The concept of trend is important to understand the position English has in this world. Viorica Banciu determines that economic trends play a key role for a language to became global, “international business means communication between countries; communication between countries means a common language of speech.” (Banciu, 71). The main purpose of a business is to grow; it can be assumed that the cooperation with other businesses, in another part of the world for this case, leads to the necessity of having a common language.

The implementation of English in other countries as part of their school programs demonstrate the importance of the language in hopes for their students to study abroad or in the future to establish deals with companies of other countries.

A valid argument is that there is always a possibility for these trends to end. In recent years China’s economy and population has been growing to the level that it’s competing directly with the United States, and several countries in Asia have the interest of incorporating Chinese as part of their schools programs.

Banciu acknowledges the existence of this data, and thinks that it would be hard to remove the status of English has today in a short period time. But he also states “(people are driven by money and they will probably do anything to achieve it), it is not improbable that a new process of language initiation on the world scene could begin in slow steps.” (Banciu, 72)

Population can’t be considered as a determinant for a language to become global. Shengyong Zhang notes that although Chinese and Hindu, in an individual level, have more speakers, but English is more popular because “it dominates so many fields of endeavor and frequently is considered the standard for multicultural settings.” (Zhang, 168)

Economy, and not population, is then playing an important role to be acknowledge in other countries and to expand in a slowly pace. But it won’t have radical effects like taking the place English has, mostly because it solely relies on China’s economy, meanwhile English was helped by events that can hardly repeat again, for example the expansion of the British Crown.

Despite all this information, Chinese can be considered as an emerging language, which is slowly having a significant position on the Asian region.

3.    The role of the Internet in global culture:

The way people interact has been changing as time passes. A century ago it would be insane to think of sending a message to another person located in another continent in less than a minute. With an internet connection, people can find a different range of contents, from recreational to educational ones.

English is a language that has adapted for each country that has adopted it, introducing new words and expressions. The Internet is no exception, and the constant interaction of its users have created new words or “slangs” that are now being used outside of the internet. Wu and Ben-Canaan note this by stating “has also an ever growing impact on the lexical, phonetic, syntactic standards of language” (Wu. Ben-Canaan, 3)

On the educational part, people want to learn English they can use the Internet can enlist in online courses or find free material related to it. On the recreational part, interacting with people from all over the world in forums or looking up at videos can help to know new terms.

In conclusion, every language is in constant evolution, with new words being introduced in their dictionaries. Because the United States is currently one of biggest English speaking powers in the world and it’s expected to maintain there; English’s expansion will be helped by the U.S. economy, the interaction and material shared between users on the Internet, and a better management of scientific research papers.