English the Global Language
Learn well your English, boys and girls: English is the new global lingua franca. This is NO surprise at all to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of international language use. The very attempts by various nations (like France and Iran) to discourage English is simply another sign of the linguistic hegemony of English.
Take a look at this story in the NY Times, and I give you a piece of it here:
“It’s a lost cause to try to fight against the tide,” said Jacques Lévy, who studies globalism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and is a native French-speaker. English, he added, is just the latest in a line of global tongues. “It could have been another language; it was Greek, then Latin, French, now it is English.” In a report for the British Council, a government body that promotes English culture around the world, the linguist David Graddol cites figures saying that 500 million to a billion people speak English now, as either a first or second language. |
I can tell you that little kids in Taiwan are learning English; there are plenty of children's TV programs that teach English. Very fun!
So learn English, folks! I'm not saying you should stop speaking your own language, but English skills are highly advantageous.
Besides, it's a great tool for communication between different communities. There are lots of international students and professors on campus, for instance. They all speak their native languages (Korean, Russian, Japanese, German, Italian, etc.) But in a group of mixed nationalities, everyone speaks English, since that is the only language they can ALL speak and ALL understand.
Oh, I can't resist telling you a tale that was given me by a professor traveling in French Canada with a Parisian friend and a Quebecois friend. He had thought the two French speakers would speak to each other in French. But it turned out that Parisian French and Quebecois French are so different that the two couldn't understand each other. They ended up speaking English to each other . . . while the native English-speaking professor just laughed.
I do, FYI, encourage everybody to learn a foreign language or two -- because it's fun! And it widens your horizons.