Eng hw

The Process of English As Becoming the Global Language 2

Background

It was a long time ago that humankinds were believed to spoke just one speech and used only one language on Earth. According to Bible (Genesis 11:1-9, The King James Version), these people gathered around at a place near Babylon after The Great Flood to build a city and a tower, a tower so high that it can reach to the heaven, so their names can be remembered and people can avoid being scattered around the world. The Lord was not happy about this decision and he said that human can achieve anything they want because of the lack of language barrier, so let there be confusion and people would not be able to understand each other. After that, people left and the tower was never completed, but it still had a name: The Tower of Babel.

It is still doubtful whether or not the story recorded in the Bible truly took place in the past, yet it remains us a meaningful question: Why aren’t we using the same language in the world? Every nation has its own or at least similar language used by citizens, even American English and Australian English are quite different and yet they are both English, is it possible that we modify our civilization and create a universal language for every single human-being to speak and write? It seems like a very unlikely thought due to the one important theory about the revolution of language, which is highly related to tools and resources. Ancient humans passed on the knowledge about using tools and finding resource was the ability that based on the certain kind of vocabulary and structures of sentence which were agreed-upon, hence this group of people might developed a system of language that could only be recognized by themselves, if these people migrated or conquered the other group of people, that was the moment when language differ or died out (Edmonds, 2010).

As technology advanced and the time of globalization came, a concept of using one language as the communication medium for different nationals was created: the “global language”. A language can be easily learnt by most of the population and can be used widely with minor obstacles, these criteria decide which language can be global. Once upon a time Latin was the “global language”, it was in 117 AD when Roman Empire had its greatest extent throughout the Europe, Middle East and North Africa under the Emperor Trajan. Roman Empire was a powerful leader in the region due to its strong military force and wealthy economic to keep the empire status in leadership, it was not surprised that Latin held its position of having huge influence on Western world, both scholarly and literary (Sala & Posner, 2019) and the impact is still clearly visible in our vocabulary nowadays. Another example is Spanish, this language was spread rapidly when colonialism was occupying the world, Spanish Empire discovered the America and built colonies on that continent for century after one and another (Penny, 2002, p. 22); today Spanish has the second most speaking population worldwide.

So, what is the “global language” today? Is it the Chinese/Mandarin with the most using population in the world? Or is it the Spanish with the second most using population and has the most distribution area in the world? Neither of them is the “global language”; in fact, it is English, the one this research paper is written in, is recognized as global language these days. It might be taken for granted that English is no doubt the universal language and everyone has the obligation to learn, but since when elementary students were asked to take English lesson for their second language? If there must be a skill of second language, why not choose Spanish, French or Mandarin instead of English? Throughout the entire human civilization, no other language than English had been this successful as being the global language before, its strength of widespread is much greater than any other historical global language could achieved (Mastin, 2011).

What happened in the history let to the present situation? What had been done in order to modify the rules of the world? According to Jay Walker’s TED Talk “The World’s English Mania” (2009), there are two billion of the population worldwide trying to learn English, that is almost 30% of the total population on Earth. How is this even possible? What happen to those used-to-be global language? The following section will present the evidence and show the process of how English earned its standing in the human civilization history.

References

Edmonds, M. (2010, June 10). Why don’t we speak the same language? Retrieved from https://people.howstuffworks.com/speak-same-language.htm

Mastin, L. (2011). Language issues – English as a global language. The history of

English. Retrieved from https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/issues_global.html

Penny, R. J. (2002). A history of Spanish language (2nd Edition). Cambridge Univ.

Press.

Posner R., & Sala M. (2019, December 04). Latin language. Encyclopædia

Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Latin-language

Walker, J. (2009). The world’s English mania [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-world-s-english-mania-jay-walker