SOME linguists are now saying English may never be dethroned as the king of languages as it dominates the world as no language ever has, International Herald Tribute has reported.
There may be more native speakers of Chinese, Spanish or Hindi, but it is English that they speak when they talk across cultures, and English that they teach their children to help them become citizens of an increasingly intertwined world.
But some insist that linguistic evolution will continue to take its course over the centuries and that English could eventually die as a common language as Latin did.
“If you stay in the mind-set of 15th-century Europe, the future of Latin is extremely bright,” said Nicholas Ostler, a British scholar and author of a language history called Empires of the Word. “If you stay in the mind-set of the 20th-century world, the future of English is extremely bright.”
Experts on the English language like David Crystal, a British academic and author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, however, say the world has changed so drastically that history is no longer a guide.
The skepticism seems to be a minority view. Most scholars say English seems to be too widespread to die out. Instead, it is likely to survive in some simplified international form. That form can be called Globish or World Standard Spoken English ? side by side with its offspring, for example, Spanglish, the hybrid of English and Spanish.
Jean-Paul Nerrière, a retired vice president of IBM USA, who is French, has proposed his own version of Globish that would have just 15,000 simple words for use by non-native speakers.
As a simplified form of global English emerges, the diverging forms spoken in Britain and America could become no more than local dialects ? two more Englishes alongside Singlish or Spanish. A native speaker of English might need to become bilingual in his own language to converse with other speakers of global English.
In a phenomenon never seen before, Crystal said, English is spoken in some form by three times as many nonnative speakers as native speakers.
The teaching of English has become a multibillion-dollar industry. Nearly one-third of the world’s population will soon be studying English, according to David Graddol, a British linguist and researcher on issues relating to global English.
An estimated 400 million people speak English as a first language, another 300 million to 500 million as a fluent second language, and perhaps 750 million as a foreign language.
