The future of English language: Will English retain its

current global position in the next 50 years?

ASM Mustafizur Rahman

English has been the dominant global language in present world. But what is the future of the
English? Before giving this answer, it is very important to see the present situation of English
language which will help to give the exact answer. Today English plays the global role as
a lingua franca – used as a means of communication among speakers of other languages. It is
spoken in many countries around the world. After Mandarin and Spanish, there are about 375
million native speakers of English. About 400 million more people speak it as a second
language and: 600–700 million people speak as a foreign language, and there are many
people who are learning it, which makes English the second most spoken language as well as
the most international one in the world. According to this estimate, almost 80 percent of
English speakers in the world are non-native speakers.

Though English is not spoken by people everywhere in the world, it has acquired global
status because of “it has repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time”. And other
people can change it without consulting its “authority” because English becomes a global
language that means it is no longer owned by anyone.

According to David Crystal, a British linguist, academic and author, “Language is an

immensely democratising institution. To have learned a language is immediately to have
rights in it. You may add to it, modify it, play with it, create in it, ignore bits of it, as you
will.” So, English language is going to be influenced by second or foreign language learners
as by those who speak it as a mother tongue. And it is true that the total number of mother
tongue speakers in the world is steadily falling as a proportion of world English users. Joseph
Osoba, English Linguistics professor at the University of Lagos, says, “In Nigeria or
elsewhere, I think, as far as America remains the world’s number one superpower, the
English language will attain the status of a true and sole international or global language. It
will still be the language of science and technology, international educational research,
including space research, and international diplomacy. It will still remain the most dominant
and enduring international language, though with more local varieties.”

1
On the other hand, Ganesh Devy, language scholar and head of the People's Linguistic
Survey of India, states, “If we have moved to an entirely digital medium for communication
and knowledge acquisition, the Englishes of the world may emerge in the form of a new mix
which has a reasonable global ability to communicate effectively but has stronger local
inflections. These local inflections could be emerging partly as a result of the sheer size of the
English language. Counting the number of words in a language is notoriously difficult, but
linguists generally agree that English has far more words than other comparable languages,
likely due to its absorption of words from Latin, French, German and other tongues. Devy
also adds, “As it happened to Latin in the past, as also to Sanskrit, when a language reaches
its peak carrying capacity, it enters a phase of a slow breakdown. English is governed by the
same principle and is likely to respond to the stress in exactly a similar manner.” Devy's view
on English’s future isn't too different from the view of Joseph Osoba.

In English as a Global Language, David Crystal says, “Linguistic history has shown us
repeatedly that it is wise to be cautious when making predictions about the future of a
language. If in the Middle Ages someone had dared to predict the death of Latin as the
language of education, scholars would have laughed in his face – as they would, in the 18th
century, if one had suggested that any language, other than French, could be a future norm of
polite society. A week may be a long time in politics, but a century is definitely a short time
in linguistics.” It doesn’t necessarily mean English will follow the same path as Latin,
though, where the language itself dies but a number of descendants live on. Latin declined
with the rise of feudalism and, later, the nation state. But the English language has evolved to
become functional around the globe as well as in smaller localities, and could continue this
way. Regarding the future of English, David Crystal also points out some aspects. A first
aspect regards the rejection of English in the case of the people from a country who feel
antagonistic or ambivalent about English, so that they are likely to reject the option of giving
English a privileged status, either as an official language or as a foreign language. It is the
case of Kenya, Malaysia and Tanzania where the people expressed a strong reaction against
using the language of Britain as the former colonial power and were in favor of maintaining
and promoting the indigenous languages. This argument has to do with identity and with
language as the most immediate and universal symbol of this identity. People prove a natural
wish to use their mother tongue, to see it survive and grow and they do not kindly accept it
when the language of another country is imposed on them.

2
Malaysia has phased out schools that teach in English since independence from the British in
1957. By the early 1980s, most students were learning in the national language of Malay.
“We’ve seen a drastic reduction in the standard of English in our country, not just among the
students but I think among the teachers as well,” says political commentator Ong Kian Ming.
In Singapore, nearly three-quarters of the population are ethnic Chinese but English is one of
the national languages and very widely-spoken. Nowadays, the dominance of English is now
being challenged by the rise of China in Singapore. English is becoming less important
financially because businessmen are taking to western clients to do business in China. So,
they obviously need to learn English but also need to know Chinese. However, there is also a
dilemma that many writers have to face: if they write in English, their work will have the
chance of reaching a worldwide audience; but to write in English also means sacrificing their
national and cultural identity.

The emergence of the new Englishes that leads to the eventual fragmentation of English into
a range of mutually unintelligible languages is the second aspect regards the rejection of
English. This was the pattern of Latin which gave rise to various languages over 1000 years
ago, namely French, Italian and Spanish. In Dissertations on the English language, Noah
Webster points out that ‘such a development would be necessary and unavoidable, because a
language in North America must be as different from the future language of England, as the
modern Dutch, Danish and Sweden are from German or from one another’. At the same time,
Nicholas Ostler, a linguist whose insights are often brilliantly surprising, observes, “If we
compare English to the other languages that have achieved world status, the most similar – as
languages – are Chinese and Malay.” However, this assertion is not an accurate prophecy.
English has indeed developed new varieties: American English, Australian English, New
Zealand English, Canadian English, South African English, Caribbean English and within
Britain, Irish, Scottish and Welsh English. New “inter-languages” are emerging, in which
features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.

In Singapore, the government’s attempts to promote the use of Standard British English
through the “Speak Good English Movement”, the mixed language known as “Singlish”
remains the variety spoken on the street and in the home. “Spanglish”, a mixture of English
and Spanish, is the native tongue of millions of speakers in the United States, suggesting that
this variety is emerging as a language in its own right. The effects are complex. It would
seem, some are not as intended. Even as vast amounts are spent on spreading British English,
the reality is that English is taking on more and more local colour in the different places

3
where it is used. Accordingly, while the number of languages in the world is diminishing, the
number of Englishes is increasing. But the varieties are by no means mutually unintelligible,
and these examples are meant to illustrate the fact that these varieties are so individual that
speakers of Standard English would be at a loss to understand them. This is due to the
presence of the speaking norms and the standard written English that contribute to
familiarizing people with English, even if there still remains little variation in the different
English-speaking countries.

However, in conclusion, from the above discussion, it is very difficult to predict that English
will retain its current global position in the next 50 years. But, we can at least speculate that
the development of automatic translation software (E.g. Google Translate) which may come
to replace English as the preferred means of communication employed in the boardrooms of
international corporations and government agencies. Moreover, according to David Crystal,
“Predicting the linguistic future is always a dangerous activity.”

References:

Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language. (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Felter, C. (2014). Prospero. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/

Science-Notebook/2015/0423/What-will-the-English-language-look-like-in-100-years

Hitchings, H. (2011). Salon. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from http://www.salon.com/2011/11/06/whats_

the_language_of_the_future/

Horobin, S. (2015). The Conversation. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from http://theconversation.com/

what-will-the-english-language-be-like-in-100-years-50284

Ives-keeler, K. (2014). VOICES Magazine. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from https://www.britishcouncil.

org/voices-magazine/whats-future-english

Noack, R. (2015). The Washington Post. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/24/the-future-of-language/

Pak, J. (2012). BBC News. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-

17105569

Radu, L. (2015). RATE Issues. Retrieved 9 April, 2016, from http://rate.org.ro/blog2.php/ri/the-future-

of-english