Teach English in Meixing Zhen - Aba Zangzu Qiangzu Zizhizhou —

The emergence of a global language is an attractive idea. It would allow all people, across all countries and cultures, to understand each other and share thoughts and ideas at an exponentially greater degree than we do now. Will this ever happen and will English be the that global language? There are many who think so, but there are also many who do not. There are an uncountable number of factors to consider when considering English as a global language, and in this essay, I'll cover five major factors, namely, 1) the number of English speakers in the world, 2) internet, 3) business, 4) science, and 4) the natural evolution of a language. One factor that is largely cited by the proponents of English as the inevitable global language is the number of English speakers in the world. This count is based on the sum of native English speakers and those who claim to have taken or are taking English classes. By that logic, does a college student who's taken a semester of Chinese count as a "Chinese speaker"? A reasonable answer would be no, they do not. Therefore, to classify someone in China who's taken a few months of English classes as an "English speaker" is a stretch. Granted, there are numerous articles online which claim that English is the global language, but these articles often lack any source citations, and the articles which do list citations also state that this number derived as the number of people who "speak" English as a foreign language is educated guesswork at best. Some articles will throw around numbers like how English is the an official language of over 60 countries. While that may seem like an impressive number, it is a number that is taken out of context, and without further supporting evidence such as the population of these countries, inclusion or exclusion or immigrants from non-English speaking countries, etc., to say that such a number supports this or that is a false correlation. It is true that the majority of the internet is written in English, estimated at about 80%. It's also estimated that about 44% of current internet users are non-native English speakers, and their numbers are rapidly increasing. Does this mean that they're all English speakers and using English websites? Not exactly. Historically, the internet was developed in America, and for many years, Americans were the only ones to create websites and the only ones using them. Not to mention, in many countries, computers were not widely available. Currently, the number of internet users in Asia is rapidly increasing. Surveys strongly suggest that they'd like an easier time using the internet. Does this mean that they'll learn English? Well, it seems that they'd rather have the internet in their own language instead. Although the two previous factors don't point towards English as a global language, there are areas of international human interaction that do undisputedly use English as the universal language: business and science. The business world uses English because of the dominant presence of countries such as the America and England in the business and finance. It is also taught as a second language across schools in Northern Europe from early elementary school primarily to improve their citizen's future possibilities. But, in a recent survey of about 4,200 Europeans who claim to have a strong command of the English language, when asked to read some paragraphs published in an American journal and then state in their native language what the text was about, less than 10% actually could report back with a high degree of accuracy. In the world of the sciences, English has been officially declared the primary language, and major scientific conventions are only held in English. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is participating. It seems that the international health community could have been warned about the H5N1 bird flu virus 8 months in advance, had they tried to read over a medical report written in Chinese that warned of this avian flu spreading of birds to pigs, and therefore likely to pass to humans next. The international health community learned about this report 8 months later, after which they rushed to have it translated. Could this issue have been prevented if the Chinese researcher wrote the report in English? Yes. But, by the same token, it would also have been prevented had the international health community not overlooked the paper simply because it was written in Chinese. If we look at English as it's spoken in the world today, we'll encounter the term "World Englishes", meaning the different types of English spoken across the world. This includes all Englishes varieties, such as American and British English, Scottish English, Australian English, Jamaican English, and dialects such as Creole and Pidgin. The majority of English speakers actually will not be able to understand fluent speakers of every variety of English that exists in the world. This is due to the countless cultures and subcultures that exist and the different trending micro and macro scale events that influence how the people of different cultures and regions and their use of English and/or any other language. English, as we know it and use it today, has been formed from the continuous interactions of people around Europe and America and other parts of the world over thousands of years and has fragmented into so many cultural varieties that Americans and even some Brits cannot understand a Scottish movie without subtitles. And so, if English actually is or will be the global language, would it be so in actual usage, or in name only? If everyone around the world spoke "English", but an American could not understand a Chilean who could not understand a Ugandan who could not, etc., etc., would it be accurate to summarize all of these branches of "English" as a global language? The future of something such as a "global language" is extremely difficult to predict, and this essay does not purport to do so. However, it seems that the more critically one analyses the evidence used to claim English as a global language, the more dubious the more dubious that claim becomes, outside of areas such as business and science. And while business and science do create a large part of life, they are certainly not major factors to those not involved in these specific fields.