6/11/2023

In the 1950s no one knew that English would become:

A “world language” a global and Universal language. All these adjectives lead to one meaning which is that English is at
everybody’s disposal.
A political reality. International meetings are held in English.
A cultural reality. Cultural means a lot of things. Culture embodies many different things, culture in this case refers to the
people.
It used to be English and American but right now it has become one global language.

70 years later, what questions?

How could such a dramatic shift take place?
Why did it take less than 70 years?
Why has English and not other languages achieved such a status?
And most importantly,
Why do we need a global language

When and where we find global English

You hear and recognize when there are political happenings on TV spoken by politicians all over the world.
Politicians all over the world are able to use English in their political debates.
If you travel, signs and advertisements are in English.
If you enter a restaurant or a hotel abroad, they understand English. Every touristic site, hotel, restaurant, and so on, use
English to communicate with tourists.
In Italian restaurants, the words in English are misspelled.

But what does Global exactly mean?

Does it mean that everyone in the world speaks English? No, not necessarily.
Does it mean that the whole role recognizes English as an official language? No.

According to David Crystal

“A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country”
A language achieves a global status when it is recognized as important in every country.

To achieve a global status, a language has to be taken up by other countries around the world.
This can be done in two main ways:
1) by making the official language of a country be used as a medium of communication. In which domains?
In the media.
In politics.
In law courts.
In the educational system.
This has happened and has finished (expanded circle), this process of colonizing countries has finished. Colonizers were
imposing their own rules on their colonies, severely affecting their own cultures and making them adhere to their own,
making them lose part of their identities, if not almost or all of it, and adopt their culture.

2) By making the language a priority in a country’s foreign language teaching, even if this language has no official status
and it becomes the language taught to children at school and it becomes the most available language to adults who
never learnt it, in their early education years.
Nowadays English is the most widely taught language in over 150 countries and it is displacing another language in this
process.

Why is a particulate language chosen as a favored foreign language?

The reasons might be:
Historical tradition.
Political expediency.
The desire for business for commercial contact and activities.
The desire for cultural contact.
The desire for technological contact. If you’re dealing with technology, it is brought to you in English.

What we still need to ask ourselves is:

What makes a global language?
As seen:
It has little to do with how many people speak it. Chinese is the most spoken language in the world; however, it is not a
global language.