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For Mongolians, E Is for English, F Is for Future
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: February 15, 2005
ULAN BATOR, Mongolia - As she searched for the English words to name the razor-tooth fish swimming around her stomach on her faded blue and white T-shirt, 10-year-old Urantsetseg hardly seemed to embody an urgent new national policy.
"Father shark, mother shark, sister shark," she recited carefully as the winter light filled her classroom. Stumped by a smaller, worried-looking fish, she paused, frowning. Then she cried out, "Lunch!"
Even here on the edge of the nation's capital, in this settlement of dirt tracks, plank shanties and the circular felt yurts of herdsmen, the sounds of English can be heard from the youngest of students - part of a nationwide drive to make it the primary foreign language learned in Mongolia, a landlocked expanse of open steppe sandwiched between Russia and China. "We are looking at Singapore as a model," Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia's prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed in graduate school at Harvard. "We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world."
Its camel herders may not yet be referring to one another as "dude," but this Central Asian nation, thousands of miles from the nearest English-speaking country, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language. Fueled by the Internet, the growing dominance of American culture and the financial realities of globalization, English is taking hold in Asia, and elsewhere, just as it has in many European countries.
In South Korea, six private "English villages" are being established where paying students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English-language immersion, taught by native speakers from all over the English-speaking world. The most ambitious village, an $85 million English town near Seoul, will have Western architecture and signs, and a resident population of English-speaking foreigners.
In Iraq, where Arabic and Kurdish are to be the official languages, a movement is growing to add English, a neutral link for a nation split along ethnic lines. Iraqi Kurdistan has had an explosion in English-language studies, fueled partly by an affinity for Britain and the United States, and partly by the knowledge that neighboring Turkey may soon join the European Union, a group where English is emerging as the dominant language.
In Chile, the government has embarked on a national program to teach English in all elementary and high schools. The goal is to make the nation of 15 million people bilingual within a generation. The models are the Netherlands and the Nordic nations, which have achieved proficiency in English since World War II.
