Several factors contribute to the increase in status of a language: economic power, political and military strength, cultural and religious influence, the need for a common code of communication. It is precisely that need that suggested the creation of artificial languages that would not favor any of the national languages; however, the idea did not prove feasible in practice. There is no doubt that the dominance of English as a world language has been facilitated by the economic and cultural power of the Anglo Saxon countries, especially the United States. As a consequence, science and technology, business, politics, the film industry, sports, and transportation have all adopted English as their main language of communication.
Yet, how can the unprecedented rise
of English to its present day world status really be explained? First of all, by its linguistic qualities; it is fluid, elastic, open and absorbent, greedy for new words, ever ready to rework and reclaim them as its own. It is this thirst for new words from other languages that has given English such a vast and eclectic vocabulary.
Another strength of English is its impurity. It began life as a mongrel language when Danes mingled with Anglo Saxons in Britain in the 6th century AD, and it has never lost that character. Three hundreds years later, the Norman invasion added thousands of French words and helped to simplify grammar. British colonial expansion from the early 17th century further exposed the language to contamination from abroad. But growing impurity only increased the mongrel’s vigor.
As David Crystal puts it, "You can't have it both ways. If you wish to preserve the identity of your language, it is to some extent at the expense of making it more difficult for people from outside to learn it." However, this could be the main danger, as while the language becomes used in all corners of the world by people from all walks of life, it begins to develop new spoken varieties which, in time, might become mutually unintelligible.
It is only natural that a global language like English does not need to have some standard or reference point. Hence, he need for international standard English as a widely used tool of communication across cultural boundaries all around the world.
Despite voices foretelling the rise in importance of major regional languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Arabic or Spanish, to ever think that the ascension of English can now be stopped seems totally unrealistic.
Who Owns the Copyright of the English Language? written by Herminne Tonita for FamousWhy.com
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by Herminne Tonita -