opinion essay global language

Essay on English as a Global Language

500 Words Essay On English as a Global Language

A global language is one that is spoken and understood at an international level by a wide variety of people. Moreover, no language in the world better fits this description than the English language. This essay on English as a global language will shed more light on this issue.

Essay on English as a Global Language

Why English is a Global Language

When it comes to languages, one can make a strong argument that a strong link exists between dominance and cultural power. Furthermore, the main factor that the languages become popular is due to a powerful power-base, whether economic or political or military.

The derivation of the English language took place from languages like French, Latin, German, and other European languages. This can be a reason why many Europeans don’t find English a difficult language to learn. Furthermore, linguists argue whether the simplicity of the English language is the main reason for it becoming a global language.

The Latin script of the English language appears less complicated for people to recognize and learn. Also, the pronunciation of the English language is not as complex as other languages like Korean or Turkish for example.

Generally, the difficulty level of a language varies from person to person and it also depends on the culture to which one may belong. For example, a Korean person would find less difficulty in mastering the Japanese language in comparison to a German person. This is because of the close proximity of the Korean and Japanese cultures.

Due to the massive British colonial conquests , no culture is in complete oblivion of the English language or words. As such, English is a language that should not appear as too alien or strange to any community. Consequently, learning English is not such big of a deal for most people as they can find a certain level of familiarity with the language.

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The Effectiveness of the English Language

English is a very effective language and this is evident due to the presence of various native and non-native speakers on a global scale. Furthermore, according to statistics, one-fourth of the world is either fluent in the English language or content with it. While it’s true that the number of native Mandarin speakers is the greatest in the world, Mandarin is not the global language due to its complex spellings, grammar , and letter system.

The English language, on the other hand, does not suffer from such complexity problems. Furthermore, the English language has a lot of words and synonyms to express something. As such, any word or its meaning can be expressed with a high level of accuracy.

Conclusion of the Essay on English as a Global Language

English is certainly the most widely spoken language in the world by far. On a global scale, English has the most number of speakers, who speak English either as a first or second language. Without a doubt, no other language in the world can come close to English in terms of its immense popularity.

FAQs For Essay on English as a Global Language

Question 1: Why English is referred to as the global language?

Answer 1: Many consider English as a global language because it is the one language that the majority of the population in almost every region of the world can speak and understand. Furthermore, the language enjoys worldwide acceptance and usage by every nation of the world. Therefore, it is an extremely essential global language.

Question 2: How English became the global language in the world?

Answer 2: By the late 18th century, the British Empire had made a lot of colonies. Moreover, they had established their geopolitical dominance all over the world. Consequently, the English language quickly spread in the British colonies.

There was also the contribution of technology, science, diplomacy, commerce, art, and formal education which led to English becoming a truly global language of the world.

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British Council

In our rapidly changing world what is the future of the English language?

By mina patel, assessment research manager, british council, 18 april 2023 - 16:54.

Woman sits in a library with shelves of text books behind her. She is holding a book call 'How English works'.

English is one of the most spoken languages in the world, but what will English look like in the future? Here Mina Patel, one of the authors of the new British Council publication ‘The Future of English: Global Perspectives’, looks at how English, its teaching, assessment and use in business will be affected in a rapidly changing world.

People ask: what’s so important about English? The answer is simple, English connects people and changes lives. English changed my life. I arrived in England at the age of four as a refugee from Uganda. I couldn’t speak a word of English. Today I am one of the authors of the British Council’s newest publication, The Future of English: Global Perspectives. I was lucky. I was inspired at school, had wonderful teachers, and they instilled in me a passion for learning and teaching. I have been in English language education for many years and English has connected me to thousands of people around the world.

The Future of English: Global Perspectives is part of a long-term research programme, which identifies key trends that will define the role of English as a global language in the coming decade. It also examines the issues and opportunities for countries around the world in achieving their goals for the use of English.

The publication describes the programme and presents the findings from discussions with 92 policy makers and influencers from 49 countries and territories during 14 roundtables, about what they see as the future of English. From these conversations, eight themes emerged, themes that we believe will have an impact on the future of English in the coming years. So, what are the global perspectives about the future of English and what does the data tell us?

Will English remain the world’s most sought-after language?

For the foreseeable future English will remain the dominant global lingua franca (a language used by people with different native languages to communicate with each other), but the role it plays in the lives of individuals or in policies will begin to change.

Numbers of learners will remain stable or rise in the next ten years. The main drivers for this are education, employment, technology and global mobility. Employers, parents and learners themselves are driving the need for English language education. They see it as a necessity for success in life, learning and employment.

What role will English play in our multilingual world?

Multilingualism is the norm in most contexts around the world. Exploration, colonialisation, migration, and globalisation have all contributed to today’s multilingual world.

English is often one of the languages used in multilingual situations where everyday communication is managed by individuals using their full range of languages organically and fluidly – a practice known as ‘translanguaging’.

One implication for English is that it increasingly ‘belongs’ (in the sense that any language can belong to anybody) to whoever uses it, in whatever form, to interact successfully in any given context.

What is the future of English as a medium of education?

English as a medium of education (EME), also called English as a medium of instruction is when students are taught subjects in English, regardless of their first language. It is hugely popular in some contexts and is driven by governments and parents that see it as a good way to achieve fluency in English, so improving the chances of students getting a good job in the future.

Universities which teach courses in English - with lectures, course materials and tutorials all given in English - are now very common. Primary and secondary schools where English is the main language of teaching and learning are also becoming more popular. However, EME is a topic of much discussion and debate.

How will teachers remain relevant in future English language learning systems?

Our data tells us that teachers are very much at the heart of the teaching and learning process and the education system. Regardless of the technological shifts during the Pandemic, teachers are very important. However, in some places in the world, there are concerns about capacity with two main questions being asked. Are there enough English teachers and are there enough skilled English teachers?

Linked to this is teacher motivation and well-being. If English is considered a valuable and important skill for a nation’s educational, professional and economic success, then it follows that English language teachers should be looked after, supported, developed and rewarded to reflect the significance of their contribution to society.

Public and private English language provision - who has the answers?

This is an interesting question, and although private language education provision can be better, our participants were concerned about the lack of monitoring and evaluation of private language provision.

That said, public-sector provision of English language teaching is inadequate in many countries, often featuring inappropriate or outdated curricula.

It is likely that the answers to better quality provision in both sectors lie in greater cross-sector communication and collaboration.

Can English language assessment meet stakeholders’ changing needs?

People require different types of proficiency for different tasks in different contexts. This has implications for teaching, learning and assessment (TLA), particularly as we expect that aligning these components will continue to be of interest in the future.

English is no longer seen in isolation. Instead, it is seen as part of a range of knowledge, skills and expertise, captured by the concept of 21st-century skills and required for a dynamic globalised world. This presents two challenges for current assessment practices:

• Assessment needs to be more creative and innovative to develop and measure individuals more holistically.

• Language Assessment Literacy (LAL) needs to be considered more seriously and concepts of LAL need to adapt to be relevant in this changing assessment landscape.

Can technology narrow the equity gap in English language education?

While there are significant advantages to using technology to aid learning, both in and outside the classroom, these advantages have not always been built upon. This is because uptake and success depend on several factors:

• Access to hardware, such as TV, radio, computers, smartphones and the Internet.

• Teacher skills and motivation to support learning.

• Stakeholder support (within the education system and at home).

• Inclusion in modern curricula of recognition of informal learning (typically online).

The reality is that in many cases there are significant disparities in access across communities. This ‘digital divide’ can have social, educational and economic repercussions for those affected.

It is important to note that in many developing or rural places, technology doesn’t just mean mobile devices, it also means televisions and radios.

To what extent is employment driving the future of English?

The world of work has changed. Globalisation, together with advances in technology, has changed the way many companies operate and the skills required by employees. Previously technical skills in specific areas were highly sought after, now employers are looking for ‘all-round’ employees who can combine technical expertise with additional skills, including teamworking, problem-solving, negotiation, intercultural awareness and digital literacy.

Multilingual and multicultural workforces are not uncommon, whether people are working remotely or in the same location. English is often the lingua franca and sometimes the official language of business as chosen by organisations. The very concept of international, dispersed teams changes and expands the parameters of English for work.

English is becoming a requirement for all sectors of industry. At all levels in organisations and all over the world, English at work is no longer only for professional jobs or senior management roles – it has increasingly become necessary for lower-skilled jobs in the tourism and retail sectors. As cited in a previous British Council study, ‘even if English is one of the working languages in a major multinational company, the English proficiency requirement differs from role to role’

All these factors have led to the notion of proficiency, as we know it, being re-defined.

As the data shows, the future of English is interesting, dynamic and contextual but there are still many questions. The future of English programme is an invitation for colleagues and partners to collaborate to try and answer some of these questions. We’re living in exciting times, change is the norm, but for the foreseeable future, English will continue to connect people and change lives.

Graphic with lilac background, abstract curved shape in dark purple and vermillion, diamond shaped photo of young people chatting. Text says: The Future of English: Global Perspectives #FutureofEnglish

Find out more about our Future of English programme and download a free copy of the book Future of English: Global Perspectives.

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illustration for long read about the global spread of the English language

Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting?

O n 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English … This is America.” A video of the incident quickly went viral , drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a “fiesta” protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.

As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. It’s a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that “we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse”.

As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English – he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes – published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include “last-minute”, “fitness”, “group sex”, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.

In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: “Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are going to trade out ‘sexting’ for texto pornographique ?”) Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.

The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.

Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland.

U ntil recently, the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread through a combination of conquest, trade and colonisation. (Some languages, such as Arabic and Sanskrit, also caught on through their status as sacred tongues.) But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millenium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a “lingua franca” or “global language” truly captures. It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a “hypercentral” one.

De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the “peripheral languages”, which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the “central languages”, though a more apt term might be “national languages”. These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.

Following these are the 12 “supercentral languages”: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili – each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation’s colonial past.

Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls “the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together”. The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a “universal language” . For Mizumura, what makes it universal is not that it has many native speakers – Mandarin and Spanish have more – but that it is “used by the greatest number of non-native speakers in the world”. She compares it to a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency. The literary critic Jonathan Arac is even more blunt, noting, in a critique of what he calls “Anglo-Globalism”, that “English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global.”

In the last few decades, as globalisation has accelerated and the US has remained the world’s most powerful country, the advance of English has taken on a new momentum. In 2008, Rwanda switched its education system from French to English, having already made English an official language in 14 years earlier. Officially, this was part of the government’s effort to make Rwanda the tech hub of Africa. Unofficially, it’s widely believed to be an expression of disgust at France’s role in propping-up the pre-1994 Hutu-dominant government, as well as a reflection that the country’s ruling elite mostly speaks English, having grown up as exiles in anglophone east Africa. When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it made English its official language despite having very few resources or qualified personnel with which to teach it in schools. The Minister of higher education at the time justified the move as being aimed at making the country “different and modern”, while the news director of South Sudan Radio added that with English, South Sudan could “become one nation” and “communicate with the rest of the world” – understandable goals in a country home to more than 50 local languages.

An English class at a government school in Bentiu, South Sudan

The situation in east Asia is no less dramatic. China currently has more speakers of English as a second language than any other country. Some prominent English teachers have become celebrities, conducting mass lessons in stadiums seating thousands. In South Korea, meanwhile, according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung-Yul Park, English is a “national religion”. Korean employers expect proficiency in English, even in positions where it offers no obvious advantage.

The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung or “English frenzy”. Although mostly confined to a mania for instruction and immersion, occasionally this “frenzy” spills over into medical intervention. As Sung-Yul Park relates: “An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans.”

There is no evidence to suggest that this surgery in any way improves English pronunciation. The willingness to engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me, though, as a potent metaphor for English’s peculiar status in the modern world. It is no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks, as it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission for Air Navigation. It is now seen as the access code to the global elite. If you want your children to get ahead, then they better have English in their toolkit.

I s the conquest of English really so bad? In the not-too-distant future, thanks to English, the curse of Babel will be undone and the children of men may come together once again, united with the aid of a common tongue. Certainly, that’s what English’s boosters would have you believe. After all, what a work is English, how copious in its vocabulary, how noble in expression, how sinuous in its constructions, and yet how plain in its basic principles. A language, in short, with a word for almost everything, capable of an infinite gradation of meanings, equally suited to describing the essential rights of mankind as to ornamenting a packet of crisps, whose only defect, as far as I know, is that it makes everyone who speaks it sound like a duck.

Well, not really. (OK, maybe a little – English, while not an ugly language, isn’t exactly pretty either). Mostly, I’m speaking out of bitterness – one that is old, and until recently, lay dormant. My first language was Polish. I learned it from my parents at home. English followed shortly, at school in Pennsylvania. I learned to speak it fluently, but with an accent, which took years of teasing – and some speech therapy, kindly provided by the state – to wear away. That, combined with the experience of watching the widespread condescension towards those who take their time learning English, left me a lifelong English-sceptic. (I admit, also, that a strain of linguistic megalomania runs through many Polish speakers, one best summed up by the novelist Joseph Conrad, who, when asked why he didn’t write in his native language, replied: “I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient.”)

It’s not that English is bad. It’s fine! A perfectly nice language, capable of expressing a great many things – and with scores of fascinating regional variants, from Scots to Singapore English. But it is so prevalent. And so hard to escape. And so freighted with buffoonish puffery written on its behalf: “our magnificent bastard tongue”; “the language that connects the world”. Please. There is no reason for any particular language to be worshipped around the world like a golden idol. There is a pervasive mismatch between the grand claims made on English’s behalf, and its limitations as means of communication (limitations, to be fair, that it shares with all other languages).

Is English oppressive? When its pervasive influence silences other languages, or discourages parents from passing on their native languages to their children, I think it can be. When you do know another language, it’s merely constricting, like wearing trousers that are too tight. That’s because while English is good for a great many things, it is not good for everything. To me, family intimacies long to be expressed in Polish. So does anything concerning the seasons, forest products and catastrophic sorrows. Poetry naturally sounds better in Polish. I’ve always spoken it to cats and dogs on the assumption that they understand, being simultaneously convinced that raccoons and lesser animals only respond to shouts.

This isn’t quite as idiosyncratic as it sounds. Aneta Pavlenko, an applied linguist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who has spent her career studying the psychology of bilingual and multilingual speakers, has found that speakers of multiple languages frequently believe that each language conveys a “different self”. Languages, according to her respondents, come in a kaleidoscopic range of emotional tones. “I would inevitably talk to babies and animals in Welsh,” reports a Welsh-speaker. An informant from Finland counters: “Finnish emotions are rarely stated explicitly. Therefore it is easier to tell my children that I love them in English.” Several Japanese speakers say that it’s easier to express anger in English, especially by swearing.

Intuitive though it might be to some, the idea that different languages capture and construct different realities has been a subject of academic controversy for at least 200 years. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was among the first to articulate it in a complex form. After studying Amerindian languages in the New World, he came to the conclusion that every language “draws a circle” around its speakers, creating a distinct worldview through its grammar as well as in its vocabulary. In the 20th century, the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated this idea into a broader vision of how language structures thought. Both drew inspiration for their work from their study of North American languages such as Nootka, Shawnee and Hopi.

This idea – now usually known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had a checkered history in academia. At different times, it has been hailed by it proponents as foundational insight for modern anthropology and literary theory, and blamed by its detractors as the source of the worst excesses of postmodern philosophy. In recent decades, sociolinguists have arrived at a few startlingly suggestive findings concerning the influence of language on colour perception, orientation and verbs of motion – but in general, the more expansive notion that different languages inculcate fundamentally different ways of thinking has not been proven.

Nonetheless, some version of this idea continues to find supporters, not least among writers familiar with shifting between languages. Here is the memoirist Eva Hoffman on the experience of learning English in Vancouver while simultaneously feeling cut off from the Polish she had grown up speaking as a teenager in Kraków: “This radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colours, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection.” The Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo described something similar in her recent memoir, writing about how uncomfortable she felt, at first, with the way the English language encouraged speakers to use the first-person singular, rather than plural. “After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? … But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular – urgently.”

Li Yang teaches students his ‘Crazy English’ accelerated learning method in Nanjing, China

In the 1970s, Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish academia, stood the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on its head. Instead of trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter-gatherers, she turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones. For Wierzbicka, English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other language. It’s just that in an anglophone world, that invisible baggage is harder to discern. In a series of books culminating in 2013’s evocatively named Imprisoned in English, she has attempted to analyse various assumptions – social, spatial, emotional and otherwise – latent in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK.

Reading Wierzbicka’s work is like peeking through a magic mirror that inverts the old “how natives think” school of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves. Her English-speakers are a pragmatic people, cautious in their pronouncements and prone to downplaying their emotions. They endlessly qualify their remarks according to their stance towards what is being said. Hence their endless use of expressions such as “I think”, “I believe”, “I suppose”, “I understand”, “I suspect”. They prefer fact over theories, savour “control” and “space”, and cherish autonomy over intimacy. Their moral lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture-specific concepts called “right” and “wrong”, which they mysteriously believe to be universal.

Wierzbicka’s description of English’s subconscious system of values hardly holds true for the billion or more speakers of this most global of tongues. But it is also a reminder that, despite its influence, English is not truly universal. Its horizons are just as limited as those of any other language, whether Chinese or Hopi or Dalabon.

For if language connects people socially, it also connects them to a place. The linguist Nicholas Evans has described how Kayardild, a language spoken in northern Australia, requires a speaker to continually orient themselves according to the cardinal directions. Where an English speaker would orient things according to their own perception – my left, my right, my front, my back – a speaker of Kayardild thinks in terms of north, south, east and west. As a consequence, speakers of Kayardild (and those of several other languages that share this feature) possess “absolute reckoning”, or a kind of “perfect pitch” for direction. It also means removing one’s self as the main reference point for thinking about space. As Evans writes of his own experiences learning the language, “one aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild grammar literally puts everyone in their place.”

Kayardild and its kin are truly local languages, with few speakers, and modes of expression that are hard to separate from the places in which they are spoken. But that should not lead us to think that they are lesser. The world is made up of places, not universals. To speak only English, in spite of its vast vocabulary and countless varieties, is still to dwell in a rather small pool. It draws the same circle Humboldt described around its speakers as each of the other 6,000 human languages. The difference is that we have mistaken that circle for the world.

B ecause English is increasingly the currency of the universal, it is difficult to express any opposition to its hegemony that doesn’t appear to be tainted by either nationalism or snobbery. When Minae Mizumura published the Fall of Language in the Age of English, in 2008, it was a surprise commercial success in Japan. But it provoked a storm of criticism, as Mizumura was accused of elitism, nationalism and being a “hopeless reactionary”. One representative online comment read: “Who does she think she is, a privileged bilingual preaching to the rest of us Japanese!” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mizumura’s broader argument, about the gradual erosion of Japanese literature – and especially, the legacy of the Japanese modernist novel – got lost in the scuffle.)

Those of us troubled by the hyperdominance of English should also remember the role it has played in some societies – especially multi-ethnic ones – as a bridge to the wider world and counterweight to other nationalisms. This was especially keenly felt in South Africa, where Afrikaans was widely associated with the policy of apartheid. When the government announced that Afrikaans would be used as a language of instruction in schools on par with English in 1974, the decision led in 1976 to a mass demonstration by black students known as the Soweto uprising. Its brutal suppression resulted in hundreds of deaths, and is considered a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle. Similar protests have periodically racked southern India since the 1940s over attempts to enforce official use of Hindi in place of English.

A sign for English lessons in Nawalgarh, Rajasthan, India

In other parts of the world though, English still carries the full weight of its colonialist past. Since the 1960s, the celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has advocated on behalf of African languages and against the prevalence of English-language education in postcolonial countries. In his landmark 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, he describes the corrosive effect of English language instruction, comparing it to a form of “spiritual subjugation”. Colonial education, in which pupils were physically punished for speaking their native languages while at school (something also done to the Welsh into the early 20th century) was necessarily, and deliberately, alienating, “like separating the mind from the body”.

Since publishing Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ has worked to put its dictates into practice. He renounced his baptismal name, James, and with it Christianity, and ceased to write fiction in English. Since the 1980s, he has written all his novels and plays in his native Gikuyu, only using English (and occasionally Kiswahili) for essays and polemics. This last decision is one that many people still question. As he said in a recent interview : “If I meet an English person, and he says, ‘I write in English,’ I don’t ask him, ‘Why are you writing in English?’ If I meet a French writer, I don’t ask him, ‘Why don’t you write in Vietnamese?’ But I am asked over and over again, ‘Why do you write in Gikuyu?’ For Africans, the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African language.”

Part of the paradox of Ngũgĩ’s situation is that while he may be the world’s foremost advocate for writing literature in African languages, his novels have won acclaim and gained international recognition through the medium of English. The hegemony of English is now such that, in order to be recognised, any opposition to English has to formulated in English in order to be heard.

T oday it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks. Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century. For even a fraction of these to survive, we’re going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth learning.

In most of the world, it’s already too late. In California, where I live, most of the languages that were spoken before the arrival of Europeans are already extinct. On America’s eastern seaboard, thanks to long proximity to Anglo settlers, the situation is even worse. Most of what we know about many of these vanished languages comes in the form of brief word lists compiled by European settlers and traders before the 19th century. Stadaconan (or Laurentian) survives only from a glossary of 220 words jotted down by Jacques Cartier when he sailed up the St Lawrence River in Canada in 1535. Eastern Atakapa, from Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, is known from a list of only 287, gathered in 1802. The last fragments of Nansemond, once spoken in eastern Virginia, were collected from the last living speaker just before his death in 1902, by which time he could only recall six words: one, two, three, four, five and dog.

The great Malian historian and novelist Amadou Hampâté Bâ once said that in Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns. Today, across the world, the libraries are still burning. In his marvellous book, Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, the linguist Robert MW Dixon describes travelling across Northern Queensland in the 1960s and 70s to record indigenous languages, many of which had already dwindled to a handful of speakers. It’s hard to remain an oral language in an increasingly text-dependent world. All the forces of modernity, globalisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and the rise of the nation-state are arrayed against the small and local as opposed to the big and shareable.

In this past century, the Earth has been steadily losing diversity at every level of biology and culture. Few deny this is a bad thing. Too often though, we forget that these crises of diversity depend, to a great extent, on our own decisions. Much of what has been done can also be undone, provided there is the will for it. Hebrew is the most famous case of a language brought back from the dead, but linguistic revitalisation has been proven to be possible elsewhere as well. Czech became a viable national language thanks to the work of literary activists in the 19th century. On a much smaller scale, endangered languages such as Manx in the Isle of Man and Wampanoag in the US have been successfully pulled back from the brink.

Coming face-to-face with the current onslaught of linguicide, I find myself wanting to venture a modest proposal. What if anglo-globalism wasn’t a one-way street? What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools? What if British schoolchildren learned some of the languages spoken by the actual residents of the former empire? (This is a utopian project obviously. But how much would it actually cost to add a linguistic elective to larger high schools? One jet fighter? A few cruise missiles?)

Current educational discourse is full of talk about the need to bolster children’s cognition. In the culture at large, experts have been trumpeting the cognitive benefits of everything from online brain games to magic mushrooms. Why not try Hopi instead? The point of this education wouldn’t necessarily be to acquire fluency in an extinct or smaller language – it would be to open a door.

And think of the vistas it might open up. For generations, a huge percentage of philosophy and social science has been conducted in and about English speakers. Humankind, as imagined by the academy, is mostly anglophone. This has even been true in linguistics. Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar underpinning all languages was based on a rather narrow empirical base. More recent research into dozens of smaller languages, like Kayardild and Pirahã, has been steadily whittling away at his list of supposed universals. We now know there are languages without adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and articles. There seems to be hardly anything that a language “needs” to be – just thousands of natural experiments in how they might be assembled. And most of them are about to be lost.

In some ways, the worst threat may come not from the global onrush of modernity, but from an idea: that a single language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is therefore somehow “normal”. This is something that’s often assumed reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English, but historically speaking, monolingualism is something of an aberration.

Before the era of the nation-state, polyglot empires were the rule, rather than the exception. Polyglot individuals abounded, too. For most of history, people lived in small communities. But that did not mean that they were isolated from one another. Multilingualism must have been common. Today, we see traces of this polyglot past in linguistic hotspots such as the Mandara mountains of Cameroon, where children as young as 10 routinely juggle four or five languages in daily life, and learn several others in school.

Residents of Arnhem Land in northern Australia routinely speak half a dozen or more languages by the time they are adults. Multilingualism, writes Nicholas Evans, “is helped by the fact that you have to marry outside your clan, which likely means your wife or husband speaks a different language from you. It also means that you parents each speak a different language, and your grandparents three or four languages between them.”

A resident of another linguistic hotspot, the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, once told Evans: “It wouldn’t be any good if we talked the same; we like to know where people come from.” It’s a vision of Babel in reverse. Instead of representing a fall from human perfection, as in the biblical story, having many languages is a gift. It’s something to remember before we let English swallow the globe.

Main illustration by Miguel Montaner

The long read

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An opinion essay

Learn how to write an opinion essay.

Do the preparation task first. Then read the text and tips and do the exercises.

Preparation

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Information will soon be so easy to find on the internet that people will not need to remember anything. Do you agree?

Nowadays all the information we could ever need is available online and some people say that means the end of having to learn anything.

It is true that these days everything you want to know is a few clicks away as long as you have internet access. However, not everyone has working internet all the time, for example in certain buildings or remote locations, so we do need to be able to remember information. Moreover, it takes time to look up everything you need to know online, whereas remembering something is immediate. The human memory is a much more efficient system.

Another problem is the quality of the information online. How do we know if it is accurate or reliable? We need to think about other facts we know and remember how to compare information from different websites. Knowing (and remembering) how to find certain information will be more important than knowing the information itself.

Finally, the internet is a good tool but it is not a useful replacement for our brains. If we did not remember anything, we would all spend even more time on our phones and computers than we already do, which is not good for society.

In conclusion, the internet offers us many things but it is still important to use our knowledge and memories. We need our memories to function without the internet and we also need to know how to use the internet properly.

Read the question carefully. Respond to all ideas in it or all parts of it.
Plan your ideas first and then choose the best ones.
Introduce your essay by restating the question in your own words.
Show understanding of both sides of the argument.
Use linking words to connect your ideas.
Draw your conclusion from the main ideas in your essay. Don't introduce new ideas at the end.

What do you think about the question? Would it be better or worse if we never learned anything and just used the internet instead?

Language level

It would be worse. If we only look for information on the internet, for everythingg and every time when we have a question about something we will become ''rusty robots''.

In other words, our minds, without exercising the creativity and memory of our brains, will be almost completly out of purpose. What's more, we will be lazy and with a slow capacity of thinking properly.

It is evidently known that in recent days, the exchange of information is progressive over the network of various channels which we call it as Internet. Experts have made some definite predictions about the availability of data and information on the above mode of communication in near future. This particular development is totally agreeable. With respect to the technological advancements pertaining to the above, the human life shall be prepared to be compatible with the communication platforms on the network of servers. The key strengths will mainly focus on speed of communication, less errors and information accuracy. This aspect of technological development will eventually replace the traditional modes of information storage. This requires no effort in preservation of information on physical devices as all the core information will be stored in virtual servers. On the other hand, the above paradigm shift in terms of data centralization will certainly replace human brains. This attempt will not trigger any living beings to memorize information physically. It is quite obvious that our brains are limited and restricted with space constraints. Hence, this technology of information storage will drastically replace these drawbacks. Overall, this phenomenal trend of networking has provided a seamless mode of gathering, interpreting and storing information. At the same time, the consequences will be tremendous and noticeable as it will lead to an era where in people across the globe can surf and search their expected piece of data with-in no time. Practically, they don’t have to bother about any challenges related to failure of storage elements. Finally, this pattern of information storage is promisingly going to be accepted.

I think the use of the internet is not only in conflict with learning, but It has made the speed of learning faster and more comfortable.

On the one hand, With the advent of the internet and access to data whenever we want, we were able to free our minds from memorizing a lot of unnecessary data. It caused that instead of spending our time to remember the formulas and data, we use our time for a deeper understanding of the concepts. Concentration on understanding was a big step in order to make us more clear about how to apply scientific concepts practically, and It made the evolutionary process of turning scientific concepts into experimental tests go faster. Going through this evolutionary process quickly, in turn, caused, firstly, the faster growth of modern technologies and, secondly, the creation of many new data, concepts, and sciences. And now the data volume is so much that not only you can never remember or learn them, but you have to choose the best one that works for you. Somehow, the internet has changed how to learn. It has focused on analyzing the options and choosing the best one to learn Instead of memorizing a bunch of content.

On the other hand, Theoretically speaking, One of the laws In the world is that everything can be useful or harmful in turn. This law also applies to the internet. In fact, how to use the internet determines whether it is useful or harmful. Like many other tools that have been invented such as smartphones, smartwatches, electric cars, and so on we have spent time learning how to use them. In order to get the best out of the internet and don't waste our time, we must take the time to learn how to search. The searching skill is the most important one that helps us find better results.

In conclusion, Given the two analyzed reasons above, I agree with the idea that easy access to Information makes people get rid of memorizing lots of data. But this has nothing to do with the quality or quantity of learning.

I think it depends on the type of information. Some information are easier to remember, and hence it's more efficient to have them in memory instead of looking for them online. However, some complex information is offered online, and it will be impractical if we tried to remember it. Additionally, I believe that learning is not just about acquiring knowledge. It's about learning how to think with this knowledge available and solve problems efficiently. That's why the internet is considered a valuable tool to promote learning, not to replace it.

Nowadays we are witnesses how far technology has developed in a short time. A huge of information is backing up on internet and if you have access of surfing you can find any information that you are looking for. However, there are some relevant aspects that should be taking into account when we are talking about using always internet instead of learning. In this sense, the purpose of this essay will be to explain why it is not a good idea. Firstly, as you know, most of the information on internet is fake. For that reason, it is impossible the learning process can be replaced by internet use. If you are looking for reliable information you have to learn how it works. In other words you need of learning even if you want to use internet all the time because you have to discern what of all information is useful for you purpose. For example, if you are a student and want to write an essay about a specific topic you likely have to search for the best information if you want to get a job position or scholarship. Secondly, there is a high demand for professionals who have specific skills in the field that they are pretending to be involved. That’s why learning always is a must for satisfying the requirements of companies and institutions. For instance, in the education field, the main aim is the learning and knowledge which are essential on a daily life to be an expert in your field of action and these skills can’t be acquired through internet surfing. To sum up learning and knowledge are fundamentals in a current world that is demanding professionals highly qualified even in our daily live and the internet is far away of satisfying the required skills that you get every day through the practice, research and networking.

I think it become worse and dangerous for our society, we need to control it making rules. Without internet, many skills and knowledge could´nt be used.

I believe that, The internet become even more dangerous for young people who barely discovered the world around them, If they count on it for seeking information without parental supervision, it would be a disaster!

In nowadays,there are many ways to reach information.The Internet is just one of them but maybe most promising one.The Internet helps us to find information easily and efficently.

However there are some negative sides of Internet.For instance realibilty of information.There are no real control on Internet.I reckon there will not be soon.This reduces the trust in internet.This is why People will always need another source to be make sure and need to remember information.

It is also necesseray for objectivity. You can not just have one source and expect true and impartial information. It is against nature of science.This is not how science works.People must have and process the information.In this way we expand our knowledge.When we make brainstorm we always end up with another information. If we don’t have and process the information how Science works?

I suppose in the future People will never trust completely to Internet. They will always need another source and they will need to interrogate source of information.In conclusion Internet is by far most promising invention People have ever invented.However Internet is not beyond our brain and imagination.We will always need to posses and process the information.

It is about my hometown: My hometown is a beautiful, attractive and cool. N'beika is one of the most famous places in Mauritania where attractive views and economic capacities are in. It is located in Tagant which is in middle of the map. Therefore, It is one the biggest cities in the country. As there are interesting geographical features such as: high Mountains, nice valleys, light hills and wonderful pools. Historically, N'beika played an important role in culture, trade exchange and fighting colonialist. Also it has saved historical landmarks, for example: manuscripts, books and cities which the most important is Gasr Albarka. In the north, there have tourist views and in the East big mountains with lovely valleys like Matmata where there are some Alligators in and other attractive animals. As well as from the south and the west there are some fields, forests and farms. Moreover, people are interested in agriculture, trade, development and education. Furthermore, there are many schools and Mahidras and three colleges providing well-deserved education to students. What's more, mall shops is offering demands and created jobs for unemployment. There are different favourite for people , some of them are crazy about football as youth, and some people like doing agriculture and development. Moreover, there are entrepreneurs doing a small business like selling clothes, pitch, barbershop... etc. In conclusion, N'beika is a gift of Allah that has given to people to spend nice moments in order to feel happy and to invest for everything we want due to gain lots of money .

I believe it is amazing updated technology which has helped us a lot in our lives. In todays era everyone has access to internet over the globe. you can easily find all the information on internet that is required to you. Even though learn many new skills which aren't even taught you from the help of internet. it is good help for book writer like us where we can be part of book writing communities or book writing resources to enhance our skills and provides more guidance to others.

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — English Language — English as a Global Language

English as a Global Language

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Published: Jan 4, 2019

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English as a global language

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A Global Language: Band 9 Sample Essay

Posted by David S. Wills | Apr 30, 2017 | IELTS Tips , Writing | 0

Here’s a recent IELTS Writing Task 2 question and a sample Band 9 answer:

Scientists say that in the future humanity will speak the same language. Do you think this is a positive or negative social development?

Sample Answer

One of the consequences of globalization is that even though there are more humans on the earth, the number of languages spoken is decreasing. As nomadic people and small tribes are assimilated into the wider population, and as powerful languages are increasingly taught in schools, it seems likely that in future all people will speak the same language. I don’t believe this is a terrible thing, but it not without its problems. On the surface, it may seem as though the loss of languages is inherently negative . Our language is a part of our cultural identity , and without it people may feel a sense of loss. For example, some populations whose traditional language is dying out will lose their ancient stories and traditions, and feel that they are now no different from other groups of people. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that dominant cultures, whose languages are spreading throughout the world, maintain their cultural traditions. However, although there are clearly some unfortunate side effects of this aspect of globalization, there are so many benefits that they outweigh the negatives. For one thing, the dominance of major languages like English ensures an increased level of literacy throughout populations where previously there were only oral languages or very limited written materials. While the loss of cultural artifacts is regrettable, the rise of literacy increases standards of living, and this is more important. In conclusion, there are some undeniably negative consequences of a global language; however, the increase in literacy levels is an example of a benefit to humanity that vastly outweighs any imaginable drawback.

Word count: 264

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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Band 8 Sample About The Advantages And Disadvantages Of English As A Global Language

Band 8 essay sample.

As a part of globalisation English has become the most widely spoken language around the world. While there are many benefits to using English as a global language, it also has some negative effects.

To begin with, one of the main advantages of having one global language is that it will reduce the gap between the countries as there is no communication barrier. It helps to form a stronger relationship among the nations. As a result, international trades such as the importing and exporting of goods will increase and benefit the growth of economy around the globe. Furthermore, English helps people to travel around the world without experiencing any difficulties. Many tourists find it hard to communicate to the native people for their simple needs such as asking directions, ordering food etc. These issues will be solved if there is only one language.

On the other hand, there are many drawbacks to this trend. Language is a part of every culture. If everyone spoke one language, the other local languages will disappear gradually. Then, there would be no cultural diversity. One of the main reasons that attract tourists to other countries is that their cultural differences. If everyone has the same culture, there is no meaning in visiting other places. So this trend can have negative impacts on the tourism industry.

To conclude, although there are some negative sides to having a single global language, it brings many benefits such as the growth of international business and economy. In my opinion, the advantages of having one global language far outweigh its disadvantages.

(262 words)

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The advantages and disadvantages of a global language

I was reflecting upon the topic for my blog post when an idea popped into my head. Last summer, I was going over old photo albums, records, passports and such with my family. And then I stumbled across something that really struck me. My mother showed me my maternal grandfather’s work card, which he obtained in Germany. After World War II , my grandfather, who was the eldest in his family, decided to leave his village in Calabria, in the south of Italy, and search for work elsewhere in Europe. This German work card surprised me because there was no English translation in sight! In fact, the text was translated into French. I had become so used to English being the global language, especially after feeling its omnipresence while travelling abroad, that I forgot that French once occupied that same global position. This got me thinking, “What are the advantages and disadvantages of a global or universal language?”

Advantage 1: Facilitates communication between different cultures

A global language allows for communication between different cultures. Language has always been the focal point of cultural identity. A global language dismantles communication barriers and offers individuals a gateway to understanding one another’s cultures.

Two years ago, my family and I travelled to Argentina, where we watched the Buenos Aires soccer team play a game. As a futbol fanatic, I remember talking in English with this Argentinian university student after the game. We had an amazing conversation about Argentinians’ passion for soccer compared with that of Canadians. Even though we were both from different countries, and English was not our native tongue, we were able to connect culturally through our ability to speak the current global language.

Advantage 2: Facilitates international trade

With the rise of globalization and neo-liberalism since the 1970s, an unprecedented amount of international trade and business between different countries has been carried out. The reality is that in order to buy from or sell to a business partner from another country, you need to communicate effectively and accurately. Thankfully, a global language eliminates the communication barrier, promoting greater international trade and opportunities for economic growth.

As I was doing research for this blog post, I came across a very interesting index called the “Language Barrier Index (LBI).” In short, the LBI “quantifies international language barriers by measuring the dissimilarity between the main languages of trading partners.” Footnote 1 Although it involves a very complicated mathematical equation, it speaks to the advantage of having one world language. Using the LBI , Lohmann found that “language barriers are a significant deterrent to bilateral trade. A 10% increase in the Language Barrier Index can cause a 7% to 10% decrease in trade flows between two countries.” Footnote 2

Disadvantage 1: Presents challenges for non-native speakers in the sciences

There are bigger disadvantages of having a global language than the one I’m going to discuss in this section. However, I wish to explore this one because it has a direct impact on the field I’m currently studying in. Since I’m in environmental studies, scientific literature is vital to any lab, research project or assignment in my classes.

Getting a scientific paper published is a long (about one year) and difficult task that requires many steps. Having a global language has allowed scientists to access a vast amount of literature from around the world, but it has also presented significant challenges for non-native speakers of English. You might be thinking, “They’re scientists. Why are adequate English language skills needed by scientists to get their papers published?” Well, scientists need to clearly communicate their findings, conclusions and methods, and for some non-native speakers, that can be strenuous. Scientists who want their work to be globally recognized need to attend English conferences or discussions and read English scientific papers. According to an article published in The Atlantic , 80% of scientific papers were in English. Footnote 3 Furthermore, the article notes that “a journal published in a language other than English must at the very least include English abstracts.” Footnote 4

Disadvantage 2: Poses a threat to minority languages

According to a BBC article, in this last century, some 400 languages have become extinct – about one language every three months – and in the next century, 50% of all remaining languages will become extinct. Footnote 5 Needless to say, this is worrying, because simply put, an extinct language means the loss of a unique culture. People who speak a global language have greater opportunities for employment, education and overall success. Therefore, some minority language speakers believe that learning to speak a global language will benefit them financially. Footnote 6 Furthermore, with globalization, our cultures are ever increasingly interconnected, catalyzing the takeover of minority languages by a global language.

In conclusion, a global language has its advantages and disadvantages. Its strong points include facilitating communication between different cultures and paving the way for greater international trade between countries. Its drawbacks are the challenges it creates for non-native speakers in the sciences (especially when it comes to publishing scientific literature) and its contribution to the extinction of minority languages. The question remains: Will English continue as the world’s global language in this century and beyond, or will another language take its place?

The opinions expressed in posts and comments published on the Our Languages blog are solely those of the authors and commenters and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Language Portal of Canada.

Get to know Alexandre Chemla

Alexandre Chemla

Alexandre Chemla is a student at the University of Ottawa. He is enrolled in the bilingual environmental studies program, with Italian as his minor. As a fluent French and Italian speaker in Canada, and an active member of both the French and Italian communities, he values the importance of a language in connecting to his family roots.

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English as a Global Language

Global English, World English, and the Rise of English as a Lingua Franca

An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

In Shakespeare 's time, the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between five and seven million. According to linguist David Crystal, "Between the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1603) and the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth II (1952), this figure increased almost fiftyfold, to around 250 million" ( The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language , 2003). It's a common language used in international business, which makes it a popular second language for many.

How Many Languages Are There?

There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. About 2,000 of them have fewer than 1,000 speakers. While the British empire did help spread the language globally it's only the third most commonly spoken language in the world. Mandarin and Spanish are the two most commonly spoken languages on Earth.

From How Many Other Languages Has English Borrowed Words?

English is jokingly referred to as a language thief because of it has incorporated words from over 350 other languages into it. The majority of these "borrowed" words are latin or from one of the Romance languages.

How Many People in the World Today Speak English?

Roughly 500 million people in the world are native English speakers . Another 510 million people speak English as a second language , which means that there are more people who speak English along with their native language than there are native English speakers.

In How Many Countries Is English Taught as a Foreign Language?

English is taught as a foreign language in over 100 countries. It's considered the language of business which makes it a popular choice for a second language. English language teachers are often paid very well in countries like China and Dubai.

What Is the Most Widely Used English Word?

"The form OK or okay is probably the most intensively and widely used (and borrowed) word in the history of the language. Its many would-be etymologists have traced it variously to Cockney, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Norwegian, Scots, several African languages, and the Native American language Choctaw, as well as a number of personal names. All are imaginative feats without documentary support." (Tom McArthur, The Oxford Guide to World English . Oxford University Press, 2002)

How Many Countries in the World Have English as Their First Language?

"This is a complicated question, as the definition of 'first language' differs from place to place, according to each country’s history and local circumstances. The following facts illustrate the complexities:

"Australia, Botswana, the Commonwealth Caribbean nations, Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, Ireland, Namibia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States have English as either a de facto or statutory official language. In Cameroon and Canada, English shares this status with French; and in the Nigerian states, English and the main local language are official. In Fiji, English is the official language with Fijian; in Lesotho with Sesotho; in Pakistan with Urdu; in the Philippines with Filipino; and in Swaziland with Siswati. In India, English is an associate official language (after Hindi), and in Singapore English is one of four statutory official languages. In South Africa, English [is] the main national language—but just one of eleven official languages.

"In all, English has official or special status in at least 75 countries (with a combined population of two billion people). It is estimated that one out of four people worldwide speak English with some degree of competence." (Penny Silva, "Global English." AskOxford.com, 2009)

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Essay On English As A Global Language

English as a Global Language Essay

500 words essay on english as a global language.

Globally, English is the most popular language, spoken in almost all countries. According to the statistics, nearly half of the world’s population is well-versed in this language. It is proved by many native and non-native speakers that English is an efficient language worldwide. Moreover, compared to other languages, English is easier to learn. For example, unlike Chinese, the English alphabet has only 26 letters that form words, and several English words are borrowed from other languages.

English is the language of technology, so knowing English is necessary to make the best use of the internet. It also makes tourism easy, as it helps better understand the people. Also, any international meeting will probably be done in English. This essay will discuss why English is considered a global language.

Why Is English a Global Language?

English is considered a global language because it is spoken and understood at an international level by a wide variety of people. Globally, English has the most speakers who speak it either as a first or second language.

We can see a strong link between dominance and cultural power in languages. English, as a language, became famous because of its power base, whether political, economic or military.

English language derivation occurred from German, Latin, and other European languages. Due to this, Europeans don’t consider English a complex language to learn. Also, according to linguists, English became a global language due to its simplicity.

English script in Latin appears less complicated to learn and recognise by people. Also, like other languages such as Turkish or Korean, English pronunciation is not so complex and is easy to understand.

Generally, if we observe closely, the difficulty level of a particular language varies from person to person. It also depends on the culture the individual belongs to. For example, A person from Korea will find the Japanese language less complicated than a Britisher because of the similarities between Korean and Japanese cultures.

The language, English, should not be alien or unknown to any community. Learning English was not a big deal during British rule, as most people from different cultures became familiar with the language.

Future of English as a Global Language

Nowadays, primary-level to higher-level education mostly uses English as the medium of instruction.

The English language is considered a global language. So, in most countries, education will be delivered in English. Students will read and write their field of interest in English. The English language will replace the arts, culture and science stream of education.

Globally, education is provided in the English language, due to which all variations of research-based education and projects are based on this language. Scientific, technical and medical research all depend on the English language. Nowadays, research-based learning is imperative in all education streams, and the medium should be English.

To Access Knowledge

In the modern era of technology, people approach the internet to get information about the smallest things possible. So, gradually, the English language has proved its strong presence globally, and people have started to access related content written in the English language.

Informative Sources

All kinds of information are available in the form of books, newspapers, specific topic-based print content, etc. There are various resources available online as well, and they can be accessed for free.

Conclusion of the Essay on English as a Global Language

English is the most helpful language globally, and its “universal language” status proves that fact. Learning anything new can be time-consuming. However, irrespective of where you come from, learning English will open an array of opportunities for you.

It’s always good to learn a new language. English is the business language, so learning English will make the road ahead more accessible for you if you want to start a business. We can safely say that learning English will add value to your life with all that in mind.

From our BYJU’S website, students can learn CBSE Essays related to different topics. It will help students to get good marks in their upcoming exams.

Frequently Asked Questions on English as a Global Language Essay

Why is english considered a global language.

The majority of the world’s population can speak and understand the English language. Also, this language is considered easy to learn when compared to other languages.

How many countries have recognised English as the official language?

English is recognised as the official language in 67 different countries, as well as in 27 non-sovereign entities.

Who is the Father of the English language?

Geoffrey Chaucer, born sometime between the year 1340-1344, is known to be the Father of the English language.

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IELTS Writing 2 Topic: Language and Culture

Updated On Oct 25, 2021

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IELTS Writing 2 Topic: Language and Culture

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The spread of a ‘global language’ such as English will threaten national languages. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion? (IELTS Writing Actual Test in 2014)

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Opinion essay

Introduction

Paraphrase the question in a sentence or two, and give an overview of the topic of the essay

Clearly state your point of view and what could be expected in the following sections of the essay

Facts have shown that countries, like Singapore, by adopting an international language, have generated a huge amount of profit through the tourism industry. More visitors worldwide swarm to this nation, as a result of finding less difficulty in their communication with local people and being attracted to these people’s high adaptability and hospitality

Admittedly, only by studying the King’s language, English, as people label, people in the third world enjoy significant economic growth and have a chance to extend the market to giant and developed countries, like America and Britain. Through this global language, each country can promote its culture easily through the internet and other means of media.

Sum up the essay by giving a conclusion in support of your opinion.

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Sample Essay

English is gaining its popularity in the modern world. Some people believe this trend might cause the possible extinction of the national language of each country, while others view it as acceptable, and even that this may result in the positive development of that country in many fields. I partly agree with the latter view for the following reasons.

Opponents even go so far to claim that the loss of a language is just the tip of the iceberg . Not only does that nation forget its own language, but its culture and economic situations are at stake as well. Is it true in any circumstance? Facts have shown that countries, like Singapore, by adopting an international language, have generated a huge amount of profit through the tourism industry. More visitors worldwide swarm to this nation, as a result of finding less difficulty in their communication with local people and being attracted to these people’s high adaptability and hospitality. Some of us may find ourselves falling in love with cultures of other nations, accidentally through our discovery of their people, way of thinking, and living after surfing information in such a common language.

It is undeniable that according to monthly social surveys, about three to four languages across the world are dying out, due to the increasingly small size of native speakers. In case that authorities are ready to pour a huge amount of money into linguistic programs, say, training, and insisting on indigenous textbooks, the language of that country is sure to survive well.

All things considered, provided that the language of each nation receives more attention from the government, and positive aspects of an international language as absorbed, the native language is alive, along with the contribution of the global ones, so as to enrich that country itself, economically and culturally.

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The rise of global languages has been substantially increasing in many parts of the world. A certain number of people consider such expansion to be precarious to the native languages. However, a considerable school of thought bolsters the increase in the usages of it. I agree with the latter notion and feel that the preponderance of such languages is indeed for good.

The very reason for the advent of global languages was the unification of the cord of different ideas encoded in various languages. Earlier, it was difficult for the standpoints at times for a particular geographical terrain with a certain vernacular connotation to be deciphered by others. Especially, during foreign visits. The very fact that languages like English have been soaring high across the globe strengthens the efficacy of international linguistics. For the tourism sector, it has proved to be a bonanza wherein the earlier times, foreigners warded off the idea to travel to a new place just because of a language problem. It has now been completely allayed. The economy, therefore, in the tourism industry has been ballooning.

For international businesses and ventures, usage of such languages has been very lucrative ever since the times they were used for multiple reasons as in terms of communication abstinence and the need for a third medium or translator to decipher the entire process as the speakers of international languages earlier were not many. In terms of the amicability of the relationship among nations, such languages have been a primary root cause. The foreign investments upon the fluorescence of global language acceptance have only seen mammoth and gigantic increments.

Some might contradict the usage of global languages as it could be an impediment to the existence and heritage of native languages. But it could be very effectively negated by conserving and promulgating the native vernacular medium of language. After all, the exponential inception of an international language in no way means the diminution of indigenous culture.

Conclusively it could be stated that international languages should be emboldened and duly accepted.

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Janet had been an IELTS Trainer before she dived into the field of Content Writing. During her days of being a Trainer, Janet had written essays and sample answers which got her students an 8+ band in the IELTS Test. Her contributions to our articles have been engaging and simple to help the students understand and grasp the information with ease. Janet, born and brought up in California, had no idea about the IELTS until she moved to study in Canada. Her peers leaned to her for help as her first language was English.

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Opinion Writing: a Guide to Writing a Successful Essay Easily

An opinion essay requires students to write their thoughts regarding a subject matter. Relevant examples and explanations back their point of view. Before starting an opinion paper, it is important to study the definition, topics, requirements, and structure. Referring to examples is also highly useful. Perhaps you need help with our admission essay writing service ? Take a look at this guide from our dissertation writing service to learn how to write an opinion essay like an expert.

What Is an Opinion Essay

A common question among students is: ‘What is an Opinion Essay?' It is an assignment that contains questions that allow students to share their point-of-view on a subject matter. Students should express their thoughts precisely while providing opinions on the issue related to the field within reasonable logic. Some opinion essays type require references to back the writer's claims.

Opinion writing involves using a student's personal point-of-view, which is segregated into a point. It is backed by examples and explanations. The paper addresses the audience directly by stating ‘Dear Readers' or the equivalent. The introduction involves a reference to a speech, book, or play. This is normally followed by a rhetorical question like ‘is the pope Catholic?' or something along those lines.

What Kind of Student Faces an Opinion Essay

Non-native English-speaking students enrolled in the International English Language Testing System by the British Council & Cambridge Assessment English are tasked with learning how to write the opinion essays. This can be high-school or college students. It is designed to enhance the level of English among students. It enables them to express their thoughts and opinions while writing good opinion essay in English.

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We will write you a plagiarism-free opinion essay, with a title page, unlimited revisions, and bunch of other cool features included!

What Are the Requirements of an Opinion Essay?

Avoid Going Off-Topic: Always write an opinion essay within relevance to answer the assigned question. This is also known as ‘beating around the bush' and should not be included in any opinion paragraph as it may lower your grade.

Indent the First Paragraph: With most academic papers, opinion writing is not different. Therefore, it contains the rule of indenting the first line of the introduction.

A Well-Thought Thesis: The full thesis statement is a brief description of the opinion essay. It determines the rest of the paper. Include all the information that you wish to include in the body paragraphs

The Use of Formal Languages: Although it is okay to write informally, keep a wide range of professional and formal words. This includes: ‘Furthermore,' ‘As Stated By,' ‘However', & ‘Thus'.

Avoid Internet Slang: In the opinion paper, avoid writing using slang words. Don'tDon't include words like ‘LOL', ‘OMG', ‘LMAO', etc.

The Use of First Person Language (Optional): For the reason of providing personal thought, it is acceptable to write your personal opinion essay in the first person.

Avoid Informal Punctuation: Although the requirements allow custom essay for the first-person language, they do not permit informal punctuation. This includes dashes, exclamation marks, and emojis.

Avoid Including Contradictions: Always make sure all spelling and grammar is correct.

We also recommend reading about types of sentences with examples .

Opinion Essay Topics

Before learning about the structure, choosing from a wide range of opinion essay topics is important. Picking an essay theme is something that can be done very simply. Choosing an excellent opinion essay topic that you are interested in or have a passion for is advisable. Otherwise, you may find the writing process boring. This also ensures that your paper will be both effective and well-written.

Do sports differ from ordinary board games?
Is using animals in circus performances immoral?
Why should we be honest with our peers?
Should all humans be entitled to a 4-day workweek?
Should all humans become vegetarians?
Does a CEO earn too much?
Should teens be barred from having sleepovers?
Should everyone vote for their leader?
The Pros & Cons of Day-Light Saving Hours.
What are the most energy-efficient and safest cars of X year?

Opinion Essay Structure

When it comes to opinion paragraphs, students may struggle with the opinion essay format. The standard five-paragraph-essay structure usually works well for opinion essays. Figuring out what one is supposed to include in each section may be difficult for beginners. This is why following the opinion essay structure is something all beginners should do, for their own revision before writing the entire essay.

You might also be interested in getting more information about: 5 PARAGRAPH ESSAY

Opinion essay introduction

Address the audience directly, and state the subject matter.
Reference a speech, poem, book, or play.
Include the author's name and date of publication in brackets.
1 or 2 sentences to make up a short description.
1 or 2 summarizing sentences of the entire paper.
1 sentence that links to the first body paragraph.

Body Paragraph 1

Supporting arguments
Explanation
A linking sentence to the second body paragraph.

Body Paragraph 2

Supporting argument
A linking sentence to the third body paragraph.

Body Paragraph 3

A linking sentence to the conclusion.

Conclusion paragraph

Summary of the entire paper
A conclusive sentence (the bigger picture in conclusion)

If you need some help, leave us a message ' write my essay cheap ' and we'll help.

Opinion Essay Examples

Do you need something for reference? Reading opinion essay examples can expand your knowledge of this style of writing, as you get to see exactly how this form of an essay is written. Take a look at our samples to get an insight into this form of academic writing.

Over the past, American popular culture has been strong in creating racial stereotypes. Images displayed through television, music, and the internet have an impact on how individuals behave and what individuals believe. People find their identities and belief systems from popular culture. Evidently, I believe that American pop culture has created racial stereotypes that predominantly affect other ethnic minorities. Analyzing the history of America reveals that African Americans have always had a problem defining themselves as Americans ever since the era of slavery. AfricanAmericans have always had a hard time being integrated into American culture. The result is that African Americans have been subjected to ridicule and shame. American pop culture has compounded the problem by enhancing the negative stereotypes ofAfrican American. In theatre, film, and music, African Americans have been associated with vices such as murder, theft, and violence.

The family systems theory has a significant revelation on family relations. I firmly agree that to understand a particular family or a member, they should be around other family members. The emotional connection among different family members may create functional or dysfunctional coexistence, which is not easy to identify when an individual is further from the other members. Taking an example of the extended family, the relationship between the mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law may be tense, but once they are outside the family, they can pretend to have a good relationship. Therefore, I agree with the theory that the existing emotional attachment and developed culture in the family is distinctively understood when the family is together.

Opinion writing is a form of academic paper that asks students to include their thoughts on a particular topic. This is then backed by a logical explanation and examples. Becoming more knowledgeable is a practical way to successfully learn how to write an opinion paper. Before writing anything, it is essential to refer to important information. That includes the definition, topics, opinion writing examples, and requirements. This is what turns amateur writers into master writers.

Feeling like you need some assistance with your essay? No matter what kind of writer you need, opinion or persuasive essay writer , our team consists of experts in all fields. Our college essay writing service helps those students who need an extra push when it comes to their assignments.

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Family Essay: How to Write, Topics and Examples

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An opinion essay.

Look at the essay and do the exercises to improve your writing skills.

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Do the preparation exercise first. Then do the other exercises.

Preparation

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Check your writing: matching - useful words and phrases, worksheets and downloads.

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The Ultimate Guide to Writing an Opinion Essay

04 November, 2020

14 minutes read

Author: Elizabeth Brown

Picture this. You're walking on a tightrope that's about 70ft in the air, with no protective gear and no expert to guide you. While this may seem like an extremely dramatic scenario that you'd never find yourself in, this is exactly what opinion essays seem like to many people. For a lot of people, especially students, writing an opinion essay can be very tricky. How do you strike a balance between stating your opinions and dishing out pure facts? How do you structure an opinion essay?

This guide will provide an answer to all the questions racing through your mind. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

What Is an Opinion Essay?

Just like the name implies, an opinion essay is a type of essay that outlines and reflects the writer’s point of view. However, it is important to point out that in writing an opinion essay, it isn’t enough to just present your opinions or point of view. You will also need to support them with sufficient logical reasoning and examples.

In most cases, you may outline or suggest an opposing viewpoint and then back it up with arguments that point out its flaws.

At this point, you’re probably asking one question that every essay writer has asked at some point in their lives: ‘isn’t an opinion essay the same as an argumentative essay? Absolutely not. In argumentative or persuasive essays, you have to explore the topic from different viewpoints while providing counterpoints at the same time.

On the other hand, opinion essays only require you to focus on your opinion about the topic.

Opinion Essay Outline

Looking to write an opinion essay? Relax and take a deep breath. Just before you get down to the main task of writing the essay, it’s important to draft an outline first.

With the right outline, writing an opinion essay would be as easy as passing a knife through butter.

The typical opinion essay format looks like this:

The introduction
The main body
The conclusion or concluding statement

The Introduction

Not sure how to start an opinion essay? Well, start with the introduction. The introduction clearly presents the topic or issue and states your opinion as well. Here, you need to include a thesis statement which basically summarises the main point of your essay.

Writing an introduction seems pretty straightforward. However, there’s a slight catch to it. How do you keep your audience from rolling their eyes or giving your paper to their dogs before they’ve even read it?

It’s simple. Include a hook to get them engaged as soon as they start reading. This way, your audience will get interested and stay engaged throughout the reading process.

Your hook could be a rhetorical question. It could even be a quotation or a sentence from a popular book or play. All that matters is keeping your audience engaged.

The Main Body

The main body usually contains points that support your thesis statement. Here, you would need to write different paragraphs that address separate aspects of the topic. You would also need to support each paragraph with logical reasoning and facts.

Each paragraph in the main body of the essay should begin with a topic sentence. Subsequent sentences in the paragraph will then contain arguments or evidence that back up the topic sentence.

When it comes to writing the main body of an opinion essay or any essay at all, it is important to address one main idea in one paragraph. Do not begin a new paragraph only to continue talking about the previous idea.

Each new paragraph should introduce a new idea.

The Conclusion

The conclusion or concluding statement basically restates your opinion in different words. An important point to note is that the conclusion isn’t an avenue for you to state new ideas that you forgot to address in the body.

You can only say: “Oh! And one more thing!” in real life conversations. It has no place in the concluding statement of an opinion statement.

Instead, try ending your essay with a provocative question, recommendation or warning.

Basic Expressions to Use

When it comes to writing an opinion essay, it is important to use the right phrases and expressions. This way, you can convey your thoughts and viewpoints succinctly. Here are some basic expressions you could use:

I strongly believe that…
As far as I am concerned…
In my own opinion…
It seems to me that…
I think that…
It is popular knowledge that…
This proves that…
Despite the fact that…
Studies have shown that…
This supports the…

These expressions are quite basic and would help you link thoughts, facts and information perfectly. You could also create your own expressions. Just make sure you use the right nouns, adjectives, tenses and linking words.

Opinion Essay Examples

If you’re new to the world of opinion essays, you may still be unsure about how to write a perfect essay. In this case, it’s always best to draw inspiration from well-written opinion essay examples.

Here are some excellent examples that could guide you:

https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/skills/writing/intermediate-b1-writing/opinion-essay

http://ielts-academic.com/2012/06/24/ielts-writing-task-2-opinion-essay-with-sample-answer/

30 Opinion Essay Topics

Looking for the perfect topic for your opinion essay? Whether you’re sourcing for an assignment topic or you just need to keep your fingers busy by practicing, there are tons of opinion essay topics out there.

In some cases, you may be required to come up with your own topic. If this is the case, there’s no need to panic or try guessing new topics with the “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” method. That almost never works – unless you’re a toddler, of course.

Instead of panicking, here are some excellent topics you could either use or draw inspiration from:

Do students in the 21st century rely too much on technology?
Should the Internet and social media platforms be censored?
Social media limits the depth of human relationships. Do you agree?
Is cyberbullying as bad as physical bullying? Which should parents be more concerned about?
Is it right for parents to go through their kids’ phones to protect them from cyberbullies?
Global warming doesn’t exist. Support your response with reasons and examples.
Is there sufficient ecology education in high schools?
Medical marijuana should be illegal.
Should children be able to decide in critical medical situations?
Homeschooling has immense psychological benefits for children.
Can reading help PTSD students heal?
Paper books have no place in today’s technological world.
Can science fiction help to advance technology?
Do games have cognitive effects on adults like they do on children?
People believe that face-to-face interaction is superior to other indirect forms of communication. Do you agree?
Salary teachers should be paid depending on how much their students and pupils learn.
Is personal experience the optimal way to learn or gain knowledge about life?
Change in one’s clothing or mode of dressing can alter the person’s behaviour. Do you agree? Support your position with factual statements.
Reading novels and other forms of literature has a larger cognitive effect on children than watching movies.
Should uniforms be mandatory in schools or should students be able to wear what they want?
Companies should screen potential employees for mental and psychological issues.
In some cases, when students move to new schools, they encounter problems like bullying. How can schools help to solve these problems?
Borrowing money from friends can put a long-term strain on the friendship. Do you agree?
Has social media changed the way we view people and the world at large?
The Internet has a role to play in the rising rate of eating disorders.
Small town life helps to foster long-lasting human relationships.
Are e-books damaging the reading culture among students and teenagers?
Parental communication is vital in building trust within families.
Social media has spiralled intentional plagiarism out of control.
Why war crimes should be punished.

Writing Tips for an Opinion Essay

At some point in your life, you’d most likely be required to write an opinion essay on a specific topic. Whether you’re a college or a high school student, there are several things to keep in mind when embarking on this journey.

Fortunately, we have outlined a few tips that would help you write the perfect essay.

Here are some of them:

Carry out Research on Your Topic

Before you start writing an extensive opinion essay, it is important to research the topic first. Here’s why: it’s almost impossible to have a solid opinion about a topic you know nothing about. Carrying out research on a particular topic would help you understand all aspects and nooks of the topic.

For instance, if you had to write an opinion essay on “The importance of reading games in learning exercises”, you would need to find out what reading games are. You would also need to research previous studies on the psychological and cognitive effects of reading games on children.

This way, you will be able to form your own opinion about the topic.

Cite and Acknowledge Popular Arguments Related to the Topic

In most cases, you would be writing on a topic that has been debated or argued about in the past. As such, it is important to explore popular arguments that have been made before. See how they fit into your own point of view or opinion.

If there are any similarities or differences, explore them in your writing.

Let’s consider our previous sample topic which addresses the importance of reading games. When writing an opinion essay on this topic, you could acknowledge popular arguments this way:

“ Although many parents believe that reading games are a distraction, others believe that it makes the learning process easier and more fun. “

Watch Your Tone

Let’s admit it: it’s easy to get carried away when you’re writing an opinion essay. However, even though you’re really passionate about airing your opinions, you also need to be mindful of your tone.

Avoid using derisive language to convey your thoughts.

For instance, do not say:

“ Reading games are not teaching-focused and as such, are an excuse for lazy teachers who don’t want to do their jobs “.

Instead, you could say:

“ Reading games are not teaching-focused. Instead, they could create an avenue where children get distracted and play without actually learning anything “.

This way, you can communicate your opinions and thoughts without sounding unprofessional. Remember that your audience is made up of people that come from different backgrounds and walks of life. You definitely don’t want to offend them in the process of airing your opinion.

Use Evidence and Facts to Back up Your Claims

Even though you’re writing all about your opinion, it is important to back up your claims with evidence and facts.

While researching your topic, search for evidence and factual statements to reinforce your position. Typically, factual statements have more impact than emotional or subjective statements. As such, it is advisable to fill your supporting sentences with facts and evidence.

For instance, you could say something like:

“ Studies have shown that children are 60% more likely to learn faster when a game is introduced into the learning process “.

With a statement like this, you would have successfully given more credibility to your point of view.

Make Use of Transition Statements

When writing an opinion essay, transition statements help to link your personal opinions to already existing arguments. They could also portray the flaws in those arguments.

For a clearer picture, take a look at this statement:

“ Although there are concerns that reading games may distract children, I think it is particularly useful in making the learning process more enjoyable, especially for children who struggle with reading “.

Use Formal Language

When writing an opinion essay, it is important to use formal language throughout. Even though you can decide to use informal language, keep various professional and formal words such as: “furthermore”, “thus”, “moreover” and so on.

In the same vein, avoid the use of Internet slang words like “OMG”, “LMAO,” etc.

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Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

UN leaders galvanize action for reparations for people of African descent

Most Haitians are of West African descent, mostly speaking Creole, a blend of French and African languages.

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Reparatory justice must tackle the grave human rights violations deeply entrenched in the legacy of colonialism and enslavement, the General Assembly heard on Thursday on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination , marked annually on 21 March.

Experts and UN leaders exchanged views about the best ways forward, centred on this year’s theme, A Decade of Recognition, Justice, and Development: Implementation of the International Decade for People of African Descent .

While the decade ends in 2024, much work remains to be done, General Assembly President Dennis Francis told the world body.

To galvanize action-based efforts, he announced a meeting focusing on the issue of reparatory justice , to be held on Monday on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade , marked on 25 March.

People of African descent face many prejudices and injustices through legacies of slavery and colonialism, from police brutality to inequalities, he said, stressing that the world must take action to fully protect their human rights.

“Racism and racial discrimination are a flagrant violation of human rights ,” he said. “It is morally wrong, has no place in our world and must therefore be roundly repudiated.”

UN chief slams ‘devastating’ legacies

The results of the legacy of enslavement and colonialism are “devastating”, said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement delivered by UN Chef de Cabinet Courtenay Rattray.

Pointing to opportunities stolen, dignity denied, rights violated, lives taken and lives destroyed, he said “racism is an evil infecting countries and societies around the world.”

While racism is “rife”, it impacts communities differently.

Action must dismantle inequalities

“People of African descent face a unique history of systemic and institutionalized racism , and profound challenges today,” the UN chief said. “We must respond to that reality, learning from and building on the tireless advocacy of people of African descent.”

Action must change that, he said, from governments advancing policies and other measures to eliminate racism against people of African descent to tech firms urgently addressing racial bias in artificial intelligence.

Violent history

Chef de Cabinet Mr. Rattray, speaking on his own behalf, reminded the world body that the International Day is observed annually on the day the police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against apartheid “pass laws” in 1960.

Since then, the apartheid system in South Africa has been dismantled, and racist laws and practices have been abolished in many countries.

Today, a global framework for fighting racism is guided by the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination , which is now nearing universal ratification.

Protesters gather in Times Square in New York City to demand justice and to protest racism in the United States following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, while in police custody. (file).

‘Commemoration is not enough’

However, Mr. Rattray said, racism is entrenched in social structures, policies and the realities of millions today , violating people’s dignity and rights while fuelling silent discrimination in health, housing, education and daily life.

“It is high time we shook ourselves free,” he said, calling for action.

“Commemoration is not enough. Eliminating discrimination requires action .”

That includes countries and businesses delivering reparatory justice, he said.

Also addressing the General Assembly were Ilze Brand Kehris, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights and June Soomer, Chair-designate of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.

For full coverage of this and other official UN gatherings, visit UN Meetings Coverage, in English and French .

Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy ‘revolution’ is a string of leftist clichés

The vermont senator looks at america’s global record and sees mostly failure and disgrace..

Bernie Sanders at the "Bernie Sanders: It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism" hosted by the Royal Geographical Society on Feb. 22, in London.

This week Foreign Affairs published a 2,800-word essay by Bernie Sanders, the US senator from Vermont whose campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020, though unsuccessful, attracted wide interest and support. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and his essay, titled “A Revolution in American Foreign Policy,” faithfully reflects the far-left worldview he has always embraced.

That worldview is easily summarized: Most of what is bad in world affairs can be blamed on the United States, and especially on American corporations and billionaires. Sanders sees US foreign policy as fundamentally “disastrous,” a word he uses repeatedly in his essay. “For many decades, there has been a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign affairs,” Sanders writes in his opening paragraph. “Tragically, that consensus has almost always been wrong.”

The great 19th-century French statesman Talleyrand reportedly said about the Bourbon royal dynasty that they learned nothing and forgot nothing . The same can be said of the 82-year-old Sanders. He regards America’s global record since World War II as an almost unrelieved litany of failure. “It’s easy to see that the rhetoric and decisions of leaders in both major parties are frequently guided not by respect for democracy or human rights but militarism, groupthink, and the greed and power of corporate interests,” he declares.

From Sanders’s perspective, America went wrong with the Cold War. What President John F. Kennedy described as “a long twilight struggle” to defend liberty from a Soviet empire bent on global repression, the Vermont senator sees as America’s “shameful track record” of propping up anticommunist dictators, fighting unwinnable wars, and backing military coups in countries like Iran and Guatemala. In Southeast Asia, “the United States lost a war that never should have been fought,” he fumes, making no connection between the eventual departure of US forces and the horrors imposed by the Communist regimes that subsequently took control. In Eastern Europe, America’s victory in the Cold War opened the door to freedom, democracy, prosperity, and grateful alliance with the West. To that victory, the greatest US foreign policy success in the second half of the 20th century, Sanders doesn’t even allude.

He likewise pours out his scorn on the US policies that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Reasonable people certainly found much to debate about the global war on terror and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would be interesting to know how Sanders thinks the United States should have responded to the murderous threat posed by radical jihadists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But he doesn’t say. Should Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s cruelest dictators, have been left in power? He doesn’t say. What does Sanders recommend regarding Iran, which is ruled by a regime implacable in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of regional terror networks, and its hatred of the United States? He doesn’t say.

Throughout his essay, Sanders is voluble on the subject of what American foreign policy makers have gotten wrong, yet almost wholly silent when it comes to explaining how they could have gotten it right.

He is no more illuminating on today’s international crises. He devotes a single boilerplate sentence to Russia’s savage war against Ukraine: “Like a majority of Americans, I believe it is in the vital interest of the United States and the international community to fight off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” But after that throat-clearing, he focuses on the real villain — the “many defense contractors” that see the war in Ukraine “primarily as a way to line their own pockets.” Sanders rails at length about how much Raytheon charges for its Stinger missiles and the “record-breaking profits” earned by weapons manufacturers. Those profits clearly infuriate him far more than Putin’s slaughter.

He offers a similar bait-and-switch on China. “The United States can and should hold China accountable for its human rights violations,” Sanders writes. What follows, however, is not Sanders’s plan for promoting liberty in China but an extended denunciation of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. There is no question that the record of the Saudi regime is appalling. But Sanders’s lopsided outrage reflects a theme that runs throughout his essay: The governments he denounces most heatedly are those that ally themselves with the United States.

When all is said and done, the foreign policy “revolution” Sanders advocates is merely a tired recapitulation of leftist naysaying and eat-the-rich socialist clichés. He calls for unspecified “long-term efforts to build a world order based on international law,” for “ensur[ing] that all countries are held to the same standards on human rights,” and for “trade agreements that benefit workers ... not just multinational corporations.” Fine words, devoid of substance.

Over the years, Foreign Affairs has published articles of paradigm-shifting importance — George Kennan’s “ X Article ” in 1947, for example, or Samuel Huntington’s influential “ The Clash of Civilizations .” What Sanders has written will shift nothing. It is mere preaching to the choir, convincing only to those who already believe.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @jeff_jacoby . To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable .

Globe Opinion

Opinion: What I’ve learned about living alone after losing my wife of 42 years

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This year, at the age of 72, I started living alone for the first time in my life.

For 42 years before that, I lived with my wife, Diane, who passed away in December. In college and as a young man, I always had roommates.

When my wife was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, about a year ago, she tried to prepare me for living alone. She taught me how to do the laundry. She showed me where the contact information was for the various tradespeople who repair our 100-year-old house.

All this was necessary, practical information, but I told her I didn’t understand how I could live without her.

VALLEY VILLAGE, CA-MAY 8, 2023:Maxine Shelley, 82, who lives alone at her home in Valley Village, is photographed with her 2 dogs, Ruby Mae, left, a 7 year old bichon frise, and Rylee Mae, a 7 year old teacup shih tzu. Her husband, Richard Shelley, a drummer for the band, Iron Butterfly, died, unexpectedly, last September. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Column: They’re facing an ‘epidemic of loneliness and isolation,’ but solutions are within reach

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“We have a wonderful family and really good friends,” she said. “Depend on them.”

This has been good advice, but family and friends don’t live under the same roof as me. They’re not there when I want to complain about a McMansion going up down the block or when I wake from a bad dream in the middle of the night.

It’s also difficult to live alone in a house suited for four people. It was just right for me, my wife and our two children. Now, it feels vast (even though it’s not), and I wander its empty spaces at night like a character in a Gothic horror novel, startled by every floorboard creak.

It would be easier to live by myself if I were more outgoing. Diane was much more social than I am, and she drew a steady stream of people to our door and engaged in conversations with everyone — not just friends and neighbors but also the mailman and Amazon delivery employees.

LOS ANGELES, CA-DECEMBER 27, 2021: Philip Eason, 26, of Los Angeles, uses a tree to shield himself from the rain during a visit to Vista Hermosa Natural Park in Los Angeles. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

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Diane was what my mother referred to as a balabusta — Yiddish for a good homemaker. She was always vacuuming, dusting, straightening. I became accustomed to her literally sweeping through a room.

I miss her familiar motions.

To compensate for their absence, I fill the house with noise and light. I blast the stereo. I turn on lamps in every room as it grows dark. I watch television as I eat dinner with my new best friend, CNN’s Erin Burnett.

I didn’t need the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent report on loneliness to know that it’s dangerous to be alone for extended periods of time. But even on my best days, when it comes to groups I’m not much of a joiner. I tried an online site for people who have lost their spouses, but it felt like being locked in a virtual room saturated with grief. It made me want to be by myself.

Isolation is a slippery slope that can send you splashing down into depression’s depths. To avoid it, I do what my wife advised and see or at least talk to family and friends as much as possible.

None of this, though, teaches me how to live alone.

a hand reaches out toward a silhouette of another outstretched hand

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I suspect I just have to avoid being lonely — a neat trick if you can pull it off. I’ve made the effort to keep busy, to exercise, continue working full-time and meet friends for lunch. People tell me that eventually I’ll be ready for a relationship with someone else — the ultimate cure for living alone. I can’t imagine it. Just as I wouldn’t want to be the quarterback who takes over from Tom Brady, I wouldn’t want to be the woman who takes over from Diane. She was the one. For now, at least, I prefer not to date the equivalent of Mac Jones.

I resolve to go on alone and make the best of it, engaging in small talk with the delivery people and listening to sad songs (Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time” is possibly the saddest song ever sung).

As I wander from room to room during my insomnia midnights, the house sometimes comes alive with memories. Diane’s piano still squats in the music room where she taught her students, and I can hear her patient voice correcting their mistakes. Upstairs are our children’s bedrooms where I read them “Green Eggs and Ham” and “Where the Wild Things Are.” The fireplace in the living room used to be our family gathering spot during holidays, the burning, crackling oak and birch punctuating our conversations.

William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead . It’s not even past.” I never understood this famous quote until I began to live alone. Diane may be gone and my kids may live more than 1,000 miles away, but the memories keep them close and me, not so much alone.

Bruce Wexler is a book ghostwriter and editor in the Chicago area.

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Guest Essay

Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It.

A crowded freeway in Los Angeles against the setting sun.

By Stephen Lezak

Mr. Lezak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford who studies the politics of climate change.

The world’s leading institution on geology declined a proposal on Wednesday to confirm that the planet has entered a new geologic epoch , doubling down on its bombshell announcement earlier this month. The notion that we’re in the “Anthropocene” — the proposed name for a geologic period defined by extensive human disturbance — has become a common theme in environmental circles for the last 15 years. To many proponents, the term is an essential vindication, the planetary equivalent of a long-sought diagnosis of a mysterious illness. But geologists weren’t convinced.

The international geology commission’s decision this week to uphold its vote of 12 to 4 may seem confusing, since by some measures humans have already become the dominant geologic force on the earth’s surface. But setting the science aside for a moment, there’s a reason to celebrate, because the politics behind the Anthropocene label were rotten to begin with.

For starters, the word Anthropocene problematically implies that humans as a species are responsible for the sorry state of the earth’s environments. While technically true, only a fraction of humanity, driven by greed and rapacious capitalism, is responsible for burning through the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Billions of humans still lead lives with relatively modest environmental footprints, yet the terminology of the Anthropocene wrongly lays blame at their feet. Responding to the vote, a group of outside scientists wisely noted in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution that “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.”

What’s more, inaugurating a new geologic epoch is an unacceptable act of defeatism. Geologic epochs are not fleeting moments. The shortest one, the Holocene — the one we live in — is 11,700 years long and counting. The idea that we are entering a new epoch defined by human-caused environmental disaster implies that we won’t be getting out of this mess anytime soon. In that way, the Anthropocene forecloses on the possibility that the geologic future might be better than the present.

By placing Homo sapiens center stage, the Anthropocene also deepens a stark and inaccurate distinction between humanity and the planet that sustains us. The idea of “nature” as something separate from humankind is a figment of the Western imagination. We should be wary of language that further separates us from the broader constellation of life to which we belong.

Before the recent vote, the Anthropocene epoch had cleared several key hurdles on the path to scientific consensus. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the global authority on demarcating the planet’s history, established a dedicated working group in 2009. Ten years later, the group formally recommended adopting the new epoch. But the proposal still had to be approved by a matryoshka doll of committees within the commission and its parent body, the International Union of Geological Sciences.

By all accounts, the process leading up to the vote was highly contentious. After the initial vote was held, scientists in the minority called for it to be annulled , citing procedural issues. This week, the committee’s parent authority stepped in to uphold the results.

Ultimately, what scuttled the proposal was disagreement about where to mark the end of the Holocene. The Anthropocene Working Group had settled on 1952, the year that airborne plutonium residue from testing hydrogen bombs fell across broad stretches of the planet. That ash, scientists reasoned, would leave a sedimentary signature akin to the boundaries that mark ancient geologic transitions. But scientists at the stratigraphy commission objected — what about the dawn of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution? After all, the human footprint on the planet long predates the atomic age.

“It’s very obvious to me that human activity started long before 1952,” Phil Gibbard, a founding member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is the secretary-general of the commission, said when we spoke on Thursday. “It just didn’t make sense to draw a rigid boundary within my lifetime.”

In recent years, philosophers have bandied about alternative names: the Capitalocene , the Plantationocene and even the Ravencene , a reference to the raven who figures widely in North Pacific Indigenous mythology as a trickster figure, reminding humans to be humble amid our destructive capacity. For my part, I’m partial to “post-Holocene,” an admission that the world is vastly different than it was 10,000 years ago, but that we can’t possibly predict — or name — what it might look like in another 10,000 years.

In the end, it might be too late to find a better term. The “Anthropocene” has already entered the popular lexicon, from the cover of The Economist to the title of a Grimes album. The scientists who coined the term do not have the power to extinguish it.

Whatever we choose to call these troubled times, what matters most is that we keep an open mind about what the future holds and maintain an appreciation for the complexity of the issues we face. The scars humanity leaves upon the earth are much too fraught to be represented with a single line drawn across time.

Looking ahead, we should follow the geologists’ lead and keep a healthy skepticism of the A-word. After all, nothing is more hubristic than reckless tyrants who names the world after themselves — think Stalingrad, Constantinople or Alexandria.

Geologists will continue to disagree over what to call the present era. The rest of us must continue the difficult politics of caring for a planet that can (still) support a panoply of life.

Stephen Lezak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford who studies the politics of climate change.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE Distinctionssuchasthosebetween'ﬁrst','second'and'foreign' language status are useful,but we must be careful not to give them a simplistic interpretation. In particular,it is important to avoid interpreting the distinction between 'second' and 'foreign' language use as a difference in ﬂuency ...
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Certainly, by the turn of the century, the topic must have made contact with millions of popular intuitions at a level which had simply not existed a decade before. These are the kinds of statement which seem so obvious that most people would give them hardly a second thought. Of course English is a global language, they would say.
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English as a global language. English is spoken by more than 300 million people as a first language. It is a big language and millions of people have english as a second language. This is what we can call Global English. It is the English that is used in commercial television and in films and series.
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In our rapidly changing world what is the future of the English language?

What role will English play in our multilingual world?

What is the future of English as a medium of education?

How will teachers remain relevant in future English language learning systems?

Public and private English language provision - who has the answers?

Can English language assessment meet stakeholders’ changing needs?

Find out more about our Future of English programme and download a free copy of the book Future of English: Global Perspectives.

British Council Worldwide

Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

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An opinion essay

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English as a Global Language

English as a global language

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A Global Language: Band 9 Sample Essay

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Band 8 Sample About The Advantages And Disadvantages Of English As A Global Language

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The advantages and disadvantages of a global language

Advantage 1: Facilitates communication between different cultures

Advantage 2: Facilitates international trade

Disadvantage 1: Presents challenges for non-native speakers in the sciences

Disadvantage 2: Poses a threat to minority languages

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English as a Global Language

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