English
is fast becoming the language of science around the world, but
what is its future among everyday speakers? One expert points
out that the percentage of native English speakers is declining
globally while the languages of other rapidly growing regions
are being spoken by increasing numbers of people. But English
will continue to remain widespread and important.
Just 10 years ago, native English speakers were second only to
Chinese in number. But British language scholar David Graddol
says English will probably drop in dominance by the middle of
this century to rank, after Chinese, about equally with Arabic,
Hindi, and Urdu, a south-Asian tongue closely related to Hindi.
He points out that the decline will not be in total numbers of
English speakers, but in relative terms. "The number of people
speaking English as a first language continues to rise, but it
isn't rising nearly as fast as the numbers of many other languages
around the world simply because the main population group has
been largely in the lesser developed countries where languages
other than English have been spoken," he says.
In a recent article in the journal Science, Mr. Graddol noted
that three languages not now near the top of the list of the most
widely spoken might be there soon. These are Bengali, Tamil, and
Malay, spoken in south and southeast Asia.
But another expert on the English language says Mr. Graddol underestimates
the future of its dominance. David Crystal of the University of
Wales, the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English
Language, says about 1.5 billion of the world's six billion people
speak it as a second tongue compared to the 400 million native
speakers.
"Nobody quite knows what's going to happen because no language
has been in this position before. But all the evidence suggests
that the English language snowball is rolling down a hill and
is getting faster and faster and faster and accreting new foreign
language users unlike any language has ever done before,"
he said. "I don't myself see that process stopping in the
immediate future. David Graddol thinks even that momentum will
die in the near future, but personally I think there is no sign
of this.
He also disagrees with the notion that English's growth as a
second tongue means it will become the world language to the exclusion
of all others. "We have grown up with the idea of dominance
meaning that a language actually pushes out other languages and
takes over the world. That's not actually what seems to be happening.
Precisely because people are learning English as a second language,
they are not actually giving up their first languages. They are
becoming bilingual or multilingual.
So the spread of English around the world is actually creating
a greatly increased bilingualism and multilingualism," he
says.
(Agencies)