Through the years, man's progress has been marked by uncertainties, by crises in all fields: medicine, transport, industry, and the like. These crises have sent man in the search of solutions to these problems. Different peoples from different countries speaking and writing in different ways have found alternatives which somehow serve as breakthroughs or advances in man's progress. The major crisis is, however, the matter of communication: how to give and gain information.
How are we to bridge the gap? A global language is one answer, and English is that language.
Why English? There are so many languages around the world, but, why English?
English has a strong cultural base—political, military, economic—because it is spoken by recognized world powers such as the United States of America and Great Britain.
English is taken up in places that were at one time very much under the sphere of British influence such as India, Australia, Canada. Or those under the American flag. In such areas, English became the official language, or one of their official language, used as a medium of communication in government, the law courts, the media and educational system. In such societies, people needed to master the English language to be bilingual, and so as to be able to "get on," to succeed. Today, English has some kind of such status in over 70 countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singapore, and the Philippines. Besides this kind of administrative status given English, it has also become the primary foreign language taught in schools.
Out of the world’s approximately 7.5 billion inhabitants, 1.5 billion speak English — that’s 20% of the Earth’s population. However, most of those people aren’t native English speakers. About 360 million people speak English as their first language. In addition to being widely spoken, English is by far the most commonly studied foreign language in the world, followed by French at a distant second.
The political, business, and academic worlds demand a world language. The chief international forum for political communication—the United Nations—needs a global language. Without one, expensive and impractical multi-way translation facilities are needed. A conversation over the Internet between the academic physicists an Sweden, Italy, India, and Japan is practicable only if a common language is available. Otherwise, there will be miscommunication. Similarly, the technology of air transport brings together international business contract.
Today, in this world which has a "global village", people have become more mobile, both physically and electronically. There has never been a time when so many nations were needing to talk to each other so much, or when so many people wished to travel to so many places.
Never has there been a more urgent need for a global language to bridge the gap.
Thank you for reading.
Lead photo source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/language-in-the-mind/202001/how-does-communication-work%3famp
