English as a World Language

The text “English as a World Language”, taken from The English Language: A Historical Introduction by Charles Barber, Joan C. Beal, and Philip A. Shaw, 1993 CUP, features in B.Ed. 1^st Year’s General English book (Tribhuvan University). The key takeaways from the text are as follows:

• English as a major world language is a relatively recent thing.
• Shakespeare (1564-1616) ’s English was confined to England and southern Scotland, not yet having penetrated very much into Ireland or even Wales.
• Increase in the population of England.
• English penetrated more and more into the rest of the British Isles at the expense of Celtic languages.
• The spread of English was encouraged by deliberate government policy.
• English has become a world language because of its wide diffusion outside the British Isles, to all countries of the world by trade, colonization, and conquest. The process began with English settlements in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• British domination of the Indian subcontinent dates from the second half of the eighteenth century: the East India Company was founded in 1600, and British trading-posts established from the seventeenth century onwards, but it was only from the 1770s that British rule was firmly established. British settlement in Australia began slightly later after the American War of Independence. The expansion of British influence and power continued at an even greater rate during the nineteenth century.
• Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the American form of English became dominant.
• Increase in the population of the Americans.
• It is American political and economic power, even more than the diffusion of English through the former British colonies and dominations, that accounts for the dominant position of English in the world today.
• United States’s explicit linguistic policy.
• The world-wide expansion of English means that it is now one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with well over four hundred million native speakers, and roughly the same number who speak it as a second language.
• There are now many varieties of English; used for many different purposes in varying social contexts.
• The English of the old ‘White Commonwealth’ and of the United States has remained relatively close to standard British English. Elsewhere, the linguistic situation can be extremely different.
• A distinction is usually made between English as a second language and English as a foreign language. A German or a Norwegian learning English learns it as a foreign language: it will not be used for communication with other Germans or Norwegians, but only with foreigners. A learner of English there will usually be taught either standard British English or Standard American English. But an Indian learns English as a second language: he will expect to use it for communication with other Indians, and will hear it used in the speech-community as a matter of course. Moreover, an Indian will most often learn a local variety of the language, taught by an Indian who speaks that variety.