Is English really global?

David Nunan

HANDS up everyone who believes that English is the global language!

Do you believe that English is a global language? Of course you do. Everybody does, right?

"English'' and "global'' are paired together in practically every publication that you care to pick up these days.

Let's look at the facts. On a major engineering project in Southern China, the Japanese consulting engineers communicated with their Chinese peers in English.

Domestic airlines in most countries make public announcements in English as well as their home language.

Most world leaders, when interviewed by the international media, use English if they do not use their first language.

Then, of course, there is the media. English is the language of the entertainment industry. It is also the language of the Internet. Most estimates say more than 80 per cent of all Internet sites are in English (although this percentage is beginning to drop as other languages play catch-up).

This dominance by English is a major stimulus for many people, particularly younger individuals, to learn English.

There is no end to the impressive list of statistics that we can cite to support the notion that English has become the language of choice to the world. It is a fact of life. Those who don't like it had better get used to it. English is here to stay.

This is great news for monolingual speakers of English. It won't be long before they are able to communicate with the rest of the world in their own language. There will be no need for them to undergo the arduous, humiliating and often expensive experience of attempting to learn another language.

Or will there? Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Wallraff questions the widespread assumption that English has achieved global dominance.

"English is not sweeping all before it, not even in the United States. According to the US Census bureau, 10 years ago about one in seven people in this country spoke a language other than English at home, and since then the proportion of immigrants in the population has grown and grown. Ever-wider swathes of Florida, California and the Southwest are heavily Spanish-speaking.

"From 1980 to 90 the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States grew by 50 per cent,'' Wallraff writes. "Over the same decade, the number of speakers of Chinese in the United States grew by 98 per cent. Today, approximately 2.4 million Chinese-speakers live in America, and more than four out of five of them prefer to speak Chinese at home.''

"How can all of this, simultaneously, be true?'' Wallraff asks. "How can it be that English is conquering the globe if it can't even hold its own in parts of our traditionally English-speaking country?''

The answer, paradoxically as it may seem, is that these data affirm the fact that English is becoming a global language.

It is no longer the preserve of Britain, nor of the United States. It is true that the United States is becoming increasingly heterogeneous linguistically. On the other hand, this year for the first time the number of people speaking English as a foreign language outnumbered the number of first language speakers of English. This disparity is set to increase, and, as it does, the English language itself will be transformed.

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David Nunan is the director and chair professor of Applied Linguistics for the English centre at the University of Hong Kong. An advocate of task-based language learning, he has taught in Asia, Australia, Latin America and the Middle East.