World English April 26, 2012
Posted by cantueso in history, language.trackback
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Is English the final world language ?
There are more than twice as many speakers of Chinese, but English is distributed all over the world, as if all by itself it were pushing to become the language of the global village.
The two cat pictures are 12th century Chinese paintings on silk: the kitten hiding behind its mom and, below, the two little kittens fighting and the flowers. — In public domain according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mao_I_001.jpg
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In addition to native and fluent English speakers, there are untold millions of people who manage to speak somehow.
The technocracy use English at work. Tourists try wherever they go.
And the kids? All those computer games, songs, and music? It has been an ongoing cultural revolution.
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To some English might even look like a cancer. It has been advancing all over and destroying or displacing many languages on its way. That is a view, and it is not necessarily conclusive, but it is well founded:
Three-quarters of the world’s mail, telexes and cables are in English.
More than half of the world’s technical and scientific periodicals are in English.
So, if you need information of any kind, you’ll find it – if you know how to search for it in English.
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As this family tree shows, the internationalism of the English language is the result of a very long development that started maybe about 400 years ago and is still on the increase, though now maybe with less prestige.
It is a tree that hangs upside down. It begins far up north and then branches out towards America nd Europe and Asia finally reaching latin America, Africa, and Australia.
The map is from http://www.sterlingtimes.org/memorable_images36.htm
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The chart is from http://www.nationmaster.com/.
It shows where the world’s English speakers live: nearly 60% are in the US, and 20% are in India. In the United Kingdom there are only 11.5%. Canada and Australia each account for about 3.5%.
The surprise is that there are more English speakers in India than in England.
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Not too long ago the Esperanto lobby still used to say that if everybody spoke the same language, there would be fewer wars in the world, because people would “understand” each other better.
It was a word play.
>>>>> >>>> over to T i m e l i n e W W I I
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No one has ever said that Esperanto will bring world peace and I wonder where you received this incorrect information ?
Many ill-informed people describe Esperanto as “failed” – others say that if human beings were meant to fly, God would have given them wings.
Esperanto is neither artificial nor a failure however. As the British Government now employs Esperanto translators it has ceased to be a hobby. More recently this international language was used to address the United Nations in Bonn.
During a short period of 125 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook and Google translate recently added to its prestigious list of 64 languages.
Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child.
Esperanto is a living language – see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
Their online course http://www.lernu.net has 125 000 hits per day and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400 000 hits per day. That can’t be bad :)
If Esperanto is so successful, why then isn’t there any successful forum online in Esperanto?
As to your other bit of misinformation, see Wikipedia on Esperanto, first paragraph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto:
“Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that transcends nationality and would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages.”
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