[etni] FW: [Krashen] The sun is not setting on English

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Subject: [Krashen] The sun is not setting on English


Sent to the Los Angeles Daily News

"Sun may set on English language" (Feb 27) was
excellent, but the headline was wrong.  The percentage
of native speakers of English in the world is
declining, but the dominance of English as an
international language is growing. In 1997 95% of
scientific papers cited in the Science Citation Index
were written in English, up from 83% in 1977.  English
is the international language of aviation. Seventyfive
percent of all websites are in English. When Israel
talks to Japan, when Korea talks to Brazil, when
Germany talks to Ethiopia, it is in English. The sun
is not setting in English. 

Stephen Krashen



Los Angeles Daily News
Sun may set on English language, experts say
By Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press

Friday, February 27, 2004  

WASHINGTON -- The world faces a future of people
speaking more than one language, with English no
longer seen as likely to become dominant, a British
language expert says in a new analysis.

"English is likely to remain one of the world's most
important languages for the foreseeable future, but
its future is more problematic -- and complex -- than
most people appreciate," said language researcher
David Graddol.

He sees English as likely to become the "first among
equals" rather than having the global field to itself.

"Monolingual speakers of any variety of English --
American or British -- will experience increasing
difficulty in employment and political life, and are
likely to become bewildered by many aspects of society
and culture around them," Graddol said.

The share of the world's population that speaks
English as a native language is falling, Graddol
reports in a paper in Friday's issue of the journal
Science.

The idea of English becoming the world language to the exclusion of
others "is past its sell-by date," Graddol says. Instead, the language's
major contribution will be in creating new generations of bilingual and
multilingual speakers, he reports.

A multilingual population is already the case in much
of the world and is becoming more common in the United
States. Indeed, the Census Bureau reported last year
that nearly one American in five speaks a language
other than English at home, with Spanish leading, and
the number of Chinese speakers increasing quickly.

And that linguistic diversity, in turn, has helped
spark calls to make English the nation's official
language.

Yale linguist Stephen Anderson noted that
multilingualism is "more or less the natural state. In
most of the world multilingualism is the normal
condition of people."

"The notion that English shouldn't, needn't and
probably won't displace local languages seems natural
to me," he said in a telephone interview.

While it is important to learn English, he added,
politicians and educators need to realize that doesn't
mean abandoning the native language.

Graddol, of the British consulting and publishing
business The English Company, anticipates a world
where the share of people who are native English
speakers slips from 9 percent in the mid-20th century
to 5 percent in 2050.

As of 1995, he reports, English was the second
most-common native tongue in the world, trailing only
Chinese.

By 2050, he says, Chinese will continue its
predominance, with Hindi-Urdu of India and Arabic
climbing past English, and Spanish nearly equal to it.

Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison noted,
however, that "the global share of English is much
larger if you count second-language speakers, and will
continue to rise, even as the proportion of native
speakers declines."

Harrison disputed listing Arabic in the top three
languages "because varieties of Arabic spoken in, say,
Egypt and Morocco are mutually incomprehensible."

Even as it grows as a second language, English may
still not ever be the most widely spoken language in
the world, according to Graddol, since so many people
are native Chinese speakers and many more are learning
it as a second language.

English has become the dominant language of science,
with an estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of papers
in scientific journals written in English, notes Scott Montgomery in a
separate paper in the same issue of Science. That's up from about 60
percent in the 1980s, he observes.

"There is a distinct consciousness in many countries,
both developed and developing, about this dominance of
English. There is some evidence of resistance to it, a
desire to change it," Montgomery said in a telephone
interview.

For example, he said, the Internet was dominated by
sites in English in its early years, but in recent
years there has been a proliferation of non-English
sites, especially in Spanish, German, French and
Japanese.

Nonetheless, English is strong as a second language,
and teaching it has become a growth industry, said
Montgomery, a Seattle-based geologist and energy
consultant.

Graddol noted, though, that employers in parts of Asia
are already looking beyond English. "In the next
decade the new 'must learn' language is likely to be
Mandarin."

"The world's language system, having evolved over
centuries, has reached a point of crisis and is
rapidly restructuring," Graddol says. In this process
as many as 90 percent of the 6,000 or so languages
spoken around the world may be doomed to extinction,
he estimated.

Graddol does have words of consolation for those who
struggle to master the intricacies of other languages.

"The expectation that someone should always aspire to
native speaker competence when learning a foreign
language is under challenge," he said.


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