TEFL Shaoyang

In today’s global society, communication is key. Through the push for a global economy, the united states was able to influence the world into learning english as a baseline language. english can be seen as the global language because of its growing population of learners, specifically in china and india, and the use of english on the internet. In today’s global economy, the use of the internet is paramount. There are more business relations going on through use of the internet than ever before. The inventions of smart phones are critical to business in any company, where the employees are on call 24 hours a day. Many companies that have satellite offices world wide rely on the internet to keep business moving. According to internetworldstats.com, 26.8% of the total internet users are english speaking. While this number seems small, 24.2% of total internet users are chinese, and the chinese are about 20% of the total population of the Earth. The next highest percent of of language users on the internet are the spanish, which come in at 7% of total users. While this information might seem more favorable to chinese as a global language, it does prove that there is a high percentage user of english speakers on the internet. And when compared to the fact that only 5 countries in the world have chinese as an official language, compared to the 115 that have english as an official language (www.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.html) , the overwhelming sense that english is a dominant language on the internet becomes more apparent. This can be dotted line linked to making the assessment that because the internet is so critical to the use of business, and that most internet users are english speaking, the dominant language in the world according to the internet is english. On a more quantitive level, when looking at the population of the planet and more specifically, how many people on the planet are currently learning english, it is easy to find data to show that english is becoming a global language. There are over seven billion people on the planet currently. More than there have ever been in the combined history of the human population. According to nationsonline.org, there are 4 billion people living in Asia, over 1 billion people living in Africa, 942 million people living in North and South America, and 740 million people living in Europe. Out of all of those people, 340 million people speak english as their native language (vistawide.com) but a total of 510 million people speak english. On their own these numbers are not indicative of english being a global language. Comparatively the most spoken languages on the planet by population are chinese, Hindi and spanish. According to vistawide.com/languages approximately 873 million people speak chinese as their native language, 370 million speak Hindi, and 350 million speak spanish. Comparatively chinese is only an official language in 5 countries, Hindi is only an official country in 2 countries, and spanish is an official language in about 20 countries. Although the aforementioned countries out rank english in terms of population of speakers, they do not cover the widespread use of their language like english does. When two of the languages that are most spoken happen to be the two countries that contribute to almost 40% of the worlds total population, their languages are not considered global languages. That is just math indicative of an over population of a region. On that same note, china and india are reaching to become dominate powers in the world economy, and to do this, both china and india are quickly teaching their populations english as a second language to help their economies complete with the Western world. This means, according to the British Council, close to 1 billion people are learning english, most of which are in Asia. If close to 15% of the world population is learning english currently, in the future we can expect that this number is expected to increase due to the global economy, making english the global language.