Chapter 4: A global language

Question 1

Global status of a language

Answer 1

Is achieved when it develops a special role that is recognised in every country.

● large numbers of people in a country speak it as a first language
● It is made the official language of a country
● Itis given joint-official or special-regional status and comes to be used as the primary medium of communication (government, law courts, broadcasting, press, educational system)
● it is made a priority in a country’s foreign-language teaching policy (no official status, but it is the foreign language which children are most likely to encounter when they arrive in school and the most available to adults in further education)

Question 2

Global English

Answer 2

Has a application in the first decades of the 21th century. The prospect that a lingua franca might be needed as a practical tool for the whole world emerged strongly only since the 1950. There was a post-war demand for a mechanism enabling nations to talk.
The UN hat 192 members. Thus there was an increasing reliance oon the concept of a working language, as an alternative to expensive and often impracticable multi-way translation facilities with Ehnglish more likely to be mutually accesible.

Question 3

First-language totals at the turn of the century

Answer 3

Swinging between 400 and 500 million.

between 400 and 500 million speakers, depending on whether pidgins and creoles are considered as a variety of English

Question 4

Non-native total

Answer 4

1 billion speakers (includes all learners, from beginners to advanced)
depending on the view how much competence in English a person needs before being counted as a member of the community of world English users

→ it is claimed that one in three of the world’s population are now capable of communicating to a useful level in English.

Question 5

Imagined simplicity of English
“intrinsic linguistic factors”
„English is easier…“

Answer 5

Frequently cited, with its lack of inflectional ending, absence of grammatical gender and lexical tone and the non-use of honorifics but an implausible argument.
Ignored are the matters as the language’s syntactic lexical and stylistic compexity or the irregularity in its spelling.

● there are properties=Eigenschaften in the language which make it especially attractive or easy to learn
● imagined simplicity of English

Latin and French, which are more complicated had a global stature.

Question 6

Extrinsic reasons

Answer 6

A language becomes a world language for extrinsic reasons only.

Power in this connection has a variety of applications in political, technological, economic and cultural contecs.

Politivas: seen in colonialism, that brought englih around.
Technologigal power: presented in the sense that the industrial Revolution was a very English-language event.
Cultural power: manifestet in through the spheres of American influence.

English is dominant in politics, economics, press, advertising, broadcasting, motion pictures, pop music, travel and safety, education and communications.

Question 7

Politics

Answer 7

“Why world English? The growth of the British empire.”
● League of Nations was the first of many modern international alliances to allocate a special place to English and its proceedings (official language along with French)
● English now plays an official or working role in the proceedings of most major international political gatherings

Question 8

Economics

Answer 8

● Beginning of the 19th century: Britain had become the world’s leading industrial and trading nation
● During that time no country could equal its economic growth
● Britain called the “workshop of the world”; textiles and mining manufactured goods for export
● Over half of the leading scientists and technologists worked in English, people travelled to Britain (later USA) to learn about it had to do so in English
● Early 19th century: rapid growth of international banking system (GER, UK, USA), London and NY becoming the investment capitals of the world
● “Economic imperialism”, fresh dimension to the balance of linguistic power

Question 9

The press

Answer 9

● English language has been important medium of the press for nearly 400 years
● 19th century: new printing technology, new methods of mass production and transportation
● Censorship and other restrictions continued in Continental Europe during the early decades provision of popular news in languages other than English developed much more slowly
● Mid 19th century: growth of the major news agencies, especially following the invention of the telegraph
● Today 1/3 of the world’s newspapers are published in countries where English has special status and the majority of these will be in English

Question 10

Advertising

Answer 10

● Towards the end of the 19th century: combination of social and economic factors led to an increase in the use of advertisements in publications (especially in more industrialised countries)
● New printing techniques
● Posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs became part of the every-day scene
● By 1972 only three of the world’s top thirty advertising agencies were not US-owned

Question 11

Broadcasting

Answer 11

● English was the first language to be transmitted by radio
● First commercial radio station (Pittsburgh Pennsylvania) November 1920 → over 500 broadcasting stations licensed in the USA within two years
● Similar dramatic expansion affected public television 20 years later
● Only speculate about how these media developments must have influenced the growth of world English
● Many other countries showed sharp increases in external broadcasting during the post-war years

Question 12

Motion pictures

Answer 12

● New technologies followed the discovery of electrical power
● Home and public entertainment: provided fresh directions for the development of the English language
● Years preceding and during the 1st World War stunted the growth of a European film industry, and dominance soon passed on to America (Hollywood, California)
● As a result, when sound was added to the technology in the late 1920s, it was spoken in English → suddenly came to dominate the movie world → despite the growth in other countries, English language still dominates
● Unusual to find a blockbuster movie produced in a language other than English

Question 13

Popular music

Answer 13

● Cinema was one to two new entertainment technologies which emerged at the end of the 19th century → recording industry
● English language was here too early in evidence
● 1877 Thomas A. Edison devised the phonograph → first machine that could record and reproduce sound
● Major recording companies in popular music had English-language origins
● By the time modern popular music arrived, it was almost entirely an English scene
● Pop groups of two chief English-speaking nations were soon to dominate the recording world
UK: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones
USA: Bill Haley, Comets, Elvis Presley
● No other single source has spread the English language around the youth of the world so rapidly and so pervasively

Question 14

International travel and safety

Answer 14

● Package holidays, business meetings, academic conferences, international conventions, community rallies, sporting occasions, military occupations and other “official” gatherings
● Domains of transportation and accommodation are chiefly mediated through the use of English as an auxiliary language
● Safety instructions, information about emergency procedures are increasingly in English
● Language has come to be used as a means of controlling international transport operations, especially on water and in the air. → see Seaspeak and Airspeak in the glossary below

Question 15

Education

Answer 15

● Since 1960s English has become the normal medium of instruction in higher education for many countries – including several where the language has no official status
● English language teaching (ELT) business has become one of the major growth industries around the world in the past half century
● Relevance to the growth of English as a world language goes back to the final quarter of the 18th century

Question 16

communications

Answer 16

● The internet began as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency network) in the late 1960s in the USA → its language was English
● When people in other countries began to use this network, it was essential for them to use English
● Turn of the century (2000) it was thought that 70% of usage was in English (at least on the World Wide Web)
● English is the most widely used language on the internet in 2010

Question 17

English Globalisation

Answer 17

al the factors described have contributed to the emergence of English as a world language are examples of social processes which can be grouped together under the term globalisation. .

Increased interconnectivity is affecting the way things operate in the world. There are many different social effects that globalisation is producing. Key to the concept of globalisation is the way that new technologies – especially communication and transport technologies – are offering different ways for people to relate to one another. It’s easier now to interact and communicate with a person on the other side of the globe (send information, money and goods) → “shrinking world” and even more interconnected. Society is no longer so “local” but instead people are likely to move across or connect with different cultures and communities on a far more regular basis.

Role of a language in the processes of globalisation…
There are two different forces at work here:
● One which created the need for a common language which can be used and understood across national and cultural boundaries
…It is important to have a common working language → English has emerged as that language
…transcends national boundaries
● Another one which results in continued and greater diversity in the language
…English is used in even more diverse context
…language contact results in new varieties of English developing

Question 18

The future of English as a world language.

Answer 18

It is likely that tje language is going to be indluenced by thoses who speaki as a non-native language as by thoses who speak it as a mother tongue.

The total number of mother-tongue speakers in the world is steadily falling, as a proportion of world English users. It is possible for a linguistic fashion to be started by a group of non-native learners. Usages which were previously criticised as “foreign” can become part of the standard educated speech of a locality and may appear in writing. (E.g. three person, furnitures, he be running, …)

Political, social and sociolinguistic issues which accompany the diversity in the language:
● Adopted, local usage
e.g. Maori Words in New Zealand English → Local words begin to be used at the prestigious levels of society. Using local words is then no longer to be seen as slovenly or ignorant, within a country; it is respectable; it may even be “cool”
● Politicians or important people start travelling abroad → international gathering during which senior visitors use a word or phrase from their own country which would not be found in the traditional standards of British or American English.
● Regional and national varieties of English are increasingly being used with prestige on the international scene
● Problem with the “New Englishes” or varieties of English:
The view that there can only be one kind of English, the standard kind and that all others should be eliminated → e.g. Singapore: do something about Singlish
● It has to do with national identity but also with establishment

In 50 years time we could find ourselves with an English language which contains within itself large areas of contact-influenced vocabulary, borrowed from other languages and being actively used by its people. Everyone else would recognise their words as legitimate options (passively at least, with occasional forays into active use). The contract-language words of the future will include more alternative rather than supplementary expressions (e.g. words for everyday notions, table/chair, regional fauna and flora).

Question 19

Future of world English

Answer 19

Likely to be of increasing multidialectism.

The pull imposed by the need for identity, which has been making New Englishes increasingly dissimilar from British English, could be balanced by a pull imposed by the need for intelligibility (Verständlichkeit). → make them increasingly similar (both ways possible). Nevertheless, intelligibility has little support for an English “language family” as it leaves out the criterion of identity.

To promote an autonomous language policy, two criteria need to be satisfied:
● Have a community with a single mind about the matter
● Have a community which has enough political-economic “clout” to make its decision respected by outsiders with whom it is in regular contact

There are few examples of English generating varieties which are given totally different names, and even fewer where these names are rated as “languages” (as opposed to “dialects”). There are some cases among the English-derived pidgins and creoles around the world. (e.g. Tok, Pisin, Gullah).

In all cases of emerging linguistic status, such as the Ebonics example, the number of speakers involved has been a minority within a much larger sociopolitical entity.

English as a first language speakers (politicians, diplomats) in Brussles have been heard to comment on how they feel their own English is being pulled in the direction of these foreign-language patterns (use of simplified sentence constructions, avoidance of idioms, colloquial vocabulary, slower rate of speech, …). This is a natural process of accommodation, which in due course could lead to new standardised forms in Europe, and even beyond.

Question 20

Ebonics

Answer 20

a blend of Ebony and phonics,
proposed for the variety of English spoken by African-Americans, and which had previously been called by such names as “Black Vernacular English” or African-American Vernacular English
→ criteria for an autonomous language policy did not obtain: the US black community did not have a single mind about the matter and people who had the political-economic clout to make the decision respected also had mixed views about it.

The number of soeakers involved has been a minority within a lager sociopolitical entity.

Question 21

EuroEmgöosj

Answer 21

Referes to distinctive cobaulary of the Union (Eurofighter, Eurodollars, Eurospectics) which now must be extended to include various hybrid accents an grammatical constructions and discourse patterns.

Question 22

English as a lingua franca (EFL)

Answer 22

a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different. (e.g. mixture between French, Italian, English etc.)

people argue that common patterns of non-native usage will emerge around the English-speaking world, resulting in a new version of English as a Lingua Franca.