Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks English, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if English has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized Island in the Northern Sea.<p>Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.

In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1].<p>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].<p>It can be argued that the European Union has failed&#x2F;is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.<p>In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Common_European_Framework_of_R...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinyin.info&#x2F;readings&#x2F;texts&#x2F;moser.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinyin.info&#x2F;readings&#x2F;texts&#x2F;moser.html</a>

The best point that the article touches on is that English is a good &quot;neutral&quot; language for countries like Sudan and entities like the EU with many different languages spoken. There is a bit of a snowball effect where any language having the advantage of being spoken as a cross-cultural communication language further incentivizes learning that language for people wishing to communicate in that manner. I think such a universal language existing is good for the world, it&#x27;s just somewhat unfair <i>how</i> such a language gets chosen. English is an adaptable language, but I think much more importantly, English has been native language of one superpower or another for the past 200 years<p>I completely understand how someone would feel attacked by the fact that their children or grandchildren may not fluently speak the same language due to the influence of English. But at the same time, though the author somewhat dismisses it, this seems pretty nationalistic - though we shouldn&#x27;t ignore that promoting English due to chauvinistic nationalism is just as silly.<p>I do think in the end, people will glad if in X*100 years the vast majority of the world will be able to communicate with each other in one language. The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination

Citrine (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citrine-lang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citrine-lang.org&#x2F;</a> I am the author) tried to change this with respect to coding (it is a programming language that allows everyone to code in their own language and translate between parties). However, it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats). So it has failed and I realize that (I continue to finish it until 0.9 though, because I cant stop in the middle - I am a very neurotic person). It&#x27;s hard for me. I feel hatred but I realize it just wasnt meant to be (but for some reason if something like this happens and you read an article like this the hate burns...). There is probably not even a way to save European languages anyway. So I just wanted to share this comment to let you know I was working on a technology that at least for coding tried to counter the influence of the English language and allows people to write code in their own language. However I also wrote this comment because I am very emotional because of the failure of this project. When I read an article like this - it&#x27;s just ...unspeakable. Maybe I was too arrogant. Maybe the problem is too difficult. Maybe I interefered with some globalist agenda, maybe it&#x27;s just Don Quixottish. Who knows? Anyway I had to share this train of thought. Maybe people just deserve to have their language (and culture) taken from them. Maybe it&#x27;s just the way it is.

I was surprised that such an in-depth article about linguistic dominance had so little to say about Latin. Historically, Latin in Europe seems to have filled a very similar role to that of English today, though not at the same scale perhaps. Even languages that weren&#x27;t full-on adaptations of Latin have adapted Latin alphabets and words. The modern English we speak today has funny little relics of Latin grammar norms that had been adopted for no apparent reason other than to improve the &quot;status&quot; of English by making it more latinized (things like, not ending sentences in prepositions).<p>Also, it&#x27;s interesting that the author proposed &gt; What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools?<p>Because I recall actually reading an article about how some schools in France were just now allowing the local language &quot;Occitan&quot; to be taught in some schools again, but historically they were very harsh on not allowing it. The fear back then was that if schools were allowed to teach in languages besides French, that the students would never bother learning French and would not be able to function as citizens. I think they&#x27;ve eased up, but I&#x27;ve seen that China has many of the same concerns about Mandarin adoption, especially in the far west portion.<p>I&#x27;m all for learning weird languages for the heck of it though. It&#x27;s not like most people can actually recall and use the Spanish or French they learned in high school, so might as well teach something interesting to examine linguistic principles in general. I&#x27;m a fan of Esperanto for this because it&#x27;s so easy, but every language has interesting differences (often with cultural implications) that learners can enjoy. But again, this is coming from a perspective of living in a country with the privilege of having English as the most common native tongue.

The internet is mentioned in passing, but the reason that English is dominating is that the vast majority of science, engineering and academia in general is published in English, and then is quickly added to the English language Wikipedia. If you want to be at the cutting edge of global technology, it is just easier (and sometimes important) to be able to read English directly. Translations can be problematic, particularly for technical subject matter.<p>As others have mentioned, other languages have played this role in the past, and probably will in the future.

The article is incorrect in its description of South Korean children increasingly having their tongues snipped in order to pronounce English words better.<p>That procedure was only done rarely, as far as I can tell from about 2002 to 2004. Immediately attracting heavy news attention there was even a government-sponsored video to scare people away from the procedure, which is virtually non-existent today. Fret not, there are still plenty of other opportunities for plastic surgeons in South Korea...<p>One thing to notice, however, is that Korean people would even consider that their tongues aren&#x27;t naturally suited for speaking English, that&#x27;s to say that their tongues could be different from other tongues. The idea of <i>minjok</i> (민족, 民族), meaning ethnicity or race -- the word itself a loan from fascist Japan during the Japanese Empire when Korea was annexed, though most Koreans are unaware of this --, is so strong in South Korea that indeed it might not seem strange for Koreans to believe foreign pronunciation naturally unsuited to Korean tongues. Similarly I recently saw Korean packaging that portrayed Korean digestive tracts as longer and more complex than those of &quot;foreigners&quot;. In the South this &quot;race&quot;-based consciousness is fading away, in part surely because of English, the language that allows South Koreans to connect to the world. In North Korea it is far far stronger. There, along with the cult of the leader, the <i>minjok</i> really is the national religion, adapted from fascist Japan, which itself learned it from the German military (which trained the Japanese Army, which occupied and ruled Korea) and more generally the racist West of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Not that they didn&#x27;t have their own home-grown prejudices in the region. Far from it, sadly.<p>Edit: All this said, it&#x27;s both hopeful and ironic that even in North Korea the kids study English.

Considering that English has basically emerged as a &quot;pidgin&quot; languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it&#x27;s only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion -- French, Spanish.

Leading off with a word long naturalized from Hebrew suggests that perhaps the English language has all along been letting the planet take it over.

The article glosses over the fact that the US (and to a lesser extent UK) is a great exporter of its culture and language through movies, TV, and music. This is aided by the fact that the US has a values-based society where you don&#x27;t need to be of a particular race or ethnicity to identify with it. I can&#x27;t tell you how many people I&#x27;ve met traveling abroad who learned English by watching American shows and films.

English has also spread due to the enormous influence of English-speaking TV, film, radio and popular music. The internet has only accelerated this. But it&#x27;s not all in one direction. People also have much more exposure to non-English media too.<p>I think many native English speakers probably don&#x27;t realise just how smaller the internet feels when you&#x27;re browsing in a language with a much smaller number of speakers than English.

English is also nice in that there is no &quot;baked in&quot; formal or informal use of the language. I think it breaks down barriers in conversations with a superior or a random stranger. I wonder if this has any larger scale effects...

The article laments the loss of oral languages as if this was a modern phenomenon. Oral languages were always being lost, for the simple reason that they drift. It&#x27;s doubtful an oral language would be intelligible to its descendants after only a century or two.<p>Writing slows this down a lot, but what really slowed it down was the advent of the printing press.<p>It&#x27;s still drifting. New words like &quot;sexting&quot; appear, and just read some Shakespeare for lost words.

The influence still goes both ways--I read that American movie studios cut out dialogue that they don&#x27;t think foreign viewers will understand because of English-specific wordplay or culture-specific references. (See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-01-10&#x2F;saving-hollywood-from-the-chinese-box-office" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-01-10&#x2F;saving-ho...</a>)

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

If you&#x27;re interested in this topic, you might like this podcast: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;historyofenglishpodcast.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;historyofenglishpodcast.com</a><p>It&#x27;s a very interesting version of history as it relates specifically to the english language.

English is the PHP of languages. Good enough to solve your problem, and easy to understand, but not really elegant (and not without its quirks).<p>And maybe due to the fact that it didn&#x27;t have a &quot;standards body&quot; (like the Académie Française) and much less &quot;protection&quot; than others meant it was more free to evolve.<p>And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers. (Japanese systems had support for Katakana later, Cyrilic wouldn&#x27;t be so complicated and Arabic probably would have been harder, Korean would be hard and Kanji would just be plainly impossible in 8-bit systems)

English: Diverse, comprised of many elements from many languages, lots of little quirks, ability to express the same thing multiple ways, far from perfect but totally dominant.<p>Javascript: ditto

Thought experiment, or maybe just a crazy thought: what if the European Union would prefer to stop using English after a hard Brexit and starts looking for an alternative <i>lingua franca</i>.<p>What if a EU directive was then issued, mandating Esperanto as a <i>de jure</i> national language in each of the member states, in addition to the existing national languages. Schools all over the EU start to offer it as the first choice for a second language to learn. Cultural works in Esperanto are subsidized.<p>Having established a big base of speakers and being constructed to be very easy to learn, the language then spreads virally and becomes the new global lingua franca.<p>Plausible?

One complaint about English is that double negatives are not grammatically correct. The word &quot;not&quot; is so important it should be re-enforced in someway. Spanish supports double negatives. The French add redundancy with &quot;ne&quot; and &quot;pas&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that American gangsters often talk with double negatives and the U.S. military use the phrase &quot;repeat NOT&quot; since their discussions are often mission critical. But I am certain their are countless examples of harm because someone in a hurry, omitted the word &#x27;not&#x27; in a discussion or email.

This English dominance is pretty strong in coding, most Chinese coders in China use English to code because programming languages are written in English (aka the if loops and more advanced and they occassionally sprinkle in Chinese characters as variables, comments can also be Chinese) and I&#x27;ve seen Latin American friends using English as well to code when they come over and can&#x27;t speak English well even. It is pretty much the lingua franca in coding.<p>Its an expected but quite interesting phenomenon.

I think this attitude, from more liberal media, towards English is interestingly, alternative. I would say after WWII, in a post colonization world, learning English, is a self-conscious, choice. It means access to, not even arguably, the biggest&#x2F;best&#x2F;most up-to-date information pool, on this planet, and the economical opportunity comes with it.<p>As a Chinese national, I would sincerely say learning English is probably the best investment I made during my college, the ROI is incredible. Not to mention, since it is so pervasive, learning English is actually much cheaper than other languages, the barrier is much lower.<p>Whatever history behind it, English, for its current status in the world, should be considered as an asset for us mankind, that we are finally blessed a pragmatical global lingua franca.

English is a very easy language to learn the basics and be understood (say unlike German), but a difficult one to master. It could do with some major spelling reform and simplification of some of the archaic grammar, but overall it is not a bad common language for the world.

I think instead of chiding people who use English as a second language &quot;poorly&quot;, we should look at their mistakes for what they are - the influence of another language - and see if we can&#x27;t incorporate the ideas that caused them into English, if the ideas are good. Newspeak isn&#x27;t fiction, languages really do shape how you think. We should continue evolving English to be suitable for expressing more modes of thought.

English gained popularity as it was THE language of popular movies, music and then later Internet. Just like in the past you needed Latin to be able to read books and communicate with educated people around the world, today you need English. And in my eyes it&#x27;s OK, we need some standardization in communication to be able to understand each-other, and English is a good practical choice as it&#x27;s fairly easy to learn.

The trend towards English isn’t universal. In Vietnam universities have just scrapped English as a requirement and replaced it with Chinese. And in tourist areas all over the country people are scrambling to learn Chinese in order to serve the deluge of Chinese tourists. I imagine this is going on in many other parts of Asia too, accelerated by China’s “Belt and Road” policy.

The biggest advantage of English: no central authority or standard. You can invent your own neologisms&#x2F;slang&#x2F;loanwords at your leisure and it will spread virally if useful. There isn&#x27;t any cultural resistance to language change, the competition is for efficient&#x2F;descriptive communication not adherence to &#x27;correct&#x2F;proper pronunciation&#x27;.

The internet has given impetus to the global adoption of English becuase that is how most of the internet&#x27;s functionality is exposed.<p>The internet supports many languages, but if you want the latest&#x2F;best&#x2F;coolest stuff tends to appear in English, especially for young people, but they are the ones who are most likely to adopt a new language.

My favourite quote about the English language:<p>“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”<p>— James Nicoll

It is all America fault. I think this British newspaper protests a bit too much.<p>Who was it that spread colonies around the world? Colonies where all schoolchildren were taught English?<p>America may get most of the credit or blame but the English did their part in spreading the language.

Behemoth is actually a Hebrew word.

&gt; An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better<p>Sigh

&gt; Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years<p>I wonder if there’s a country without a manufactured language where that’s not true.

What I don&#x27;t like about the English language is the pronunciation. I would like to pronounce English like Spanish or any system in which every letter has a unique sound.

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

I don&#x27;t think this is so much as an argument against english as it is an argument for a diverse language education.

English is such a horrible language to learn, I pity non-native speakers. On that basis, the rule is: you&#x27;re not allowed to criticize another person&#x27;s English, unless it&#x27;s their native one.<p>They didn&#x27;t ask for this language, it was forced upon them.

What a dumb article. You might as well put any language in there. Chinese, Spanish, English or Farsi... trying to say English is a problem in its title when it’s clearly people (and few, loud people at that) that are the problem

I&#x27;m a native English speaker who learned Spanish, and some Russian &amp; Esperanto.<p>I&#x27;m thinking about Esperanto. Perhaps most relevant to this discussion is its benefit of being by far the cheapest workable global route to everyone being able to talk to and understand each other, even if haltingly. For some people, learning English is simply too hard. For the rest, it&#x27;s still a very big effort, and Esperanto is extremely easy by comparison. In terms of global cost&#x2F;benefit, Esperanto seems like a big win. (And it&#x27;s fun.)<p>Further, I have started thinking that Esperanto should be everyone&#x27;s 2nd language, simply because it&#x27;s so easy to learn yet seems ~&quot;complete&quot;, and more importantly, has been shown to make learning other languages easier to the point that overall you learn, say, more French (or probably English) if you learn Esperanto first, than if one spent the entire time studying French. So learn whatever you would have learned as a 2nd language, for the 3rd, and you saved time and got farther, overall (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Esperanto#Third-language_acquisition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Esperanto#Third-language_acqui...</a> [wikipedia.org]). And it seems to me the easiest way for someone to better understand the grammar of their own native language, by seeing a simple &amp; clean example. (Some in one forum I saw dismissed the studies, but when I read the dismissals it seemed a case of believing what you want, with the studies being more persuasive to me as they put much more work into it, but I would be interested in more info.)<p>(I don&#x27;t think most users see it as a replacement for a first (or native) language, though that has been done intentionally by some (per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Native_Esperanto_speakers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Native_Esperanto_speakers</a> [wikipedia.org], or search <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Esperanto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Esperanto</a> for &quot;native&quot;).<p>(There are other interesting constructed languages each with their pros &amp; cons, but none with nearly the same amount of traction or interest as Esperanto. It&#x27;s interesting to consider, given all that has been learned in the field so far, how to &quot;optimize&quot; a constructed human language, considering various factors like ease, familiarity, beauty, efficiency, computability, or whatever one sees as most important. ... )<p>Claude Piron made an interesting&#x2F;enjoyable video, I think in different languages, showing some benefits of Esperanto. Here is the one in English:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU</a><p>(edit&#x2F;ps: I hope to use Esperanto when my personal organizer gets the ability to use multiple languages for the same &quot;knowledge&quot;. AGPL: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onemodel.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onemodel.org</a> .) (pps: had i noticed the &quot;more&quot; button I would have realized others in the discussion already wrote about this.)

English is the de facto lingua franca, and the fact I can use that phrase and you all know what it means proves there’s no “taking over”, English is uniquely welcoming to others

The English language is a scalpel. It&#x27;s more expressive than any other language in history. As far as I&#x27;m concerned, the more widespread it becomes, the better.