Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parentās dream and a studentās misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.
From the start, the author shows himself to be an anti-Trump bigot. But, the above paragraph is right on target and bespeaks a simple truth.
One major symptom is how English words have infiltrated foreign languages. I wonder how many places in this world āCheeseburgerā is known and understood.
De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the āperipheral languagesā, which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the ācentral languagesā, though a more apt term might be ānational languagesā. These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.
Following these are the 12 āsupercentral languagesā: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili ā each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nationās colonial past.
Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls āthe hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system togetherā.
Much more @ How the English Language Is Taking Over the Planet - The Guardian - Pocket
From the start, the author shows himself to be an anti-Trump bigot. But, the above paragraph is right on target and bespeaks a simple truth.
One major symptom is how English words have infiltrated foreign languages. I wonder how many places in this world āCheeseburgerā is known and understood.
De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the āperipheral languagesā, which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the ācentral languagesā, though a more apt term might be ānational languagesā. These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.
Following these are the 12 āsupercentral languagesā: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili ā each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nationās colonial past.
Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls āthe hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system togetherā.
Much more @ How the English Language Is Taking Over the Planet - The Guardian - Pocket
