III. Comprehension check

State whether the following statements are true or false.

1. English was already an important language four hundred years ago.

2. It is mainly because of the USA that English has become a world language.

3. One person out of seven in the world speaks perfect English.

4. In English, many verbs can be used as nouns.

5. English has borrowed words from many other languages.

6. In the future, all other languages will die out.

IV. Speaking

Answer the questions.

1. What are the main groups of English learners? On what basis are they singled out?

2. What are the basic characteristics of English? Prove your answer by examples?

Text 6 a global language*

(Upper-intermediate)

I. Pre-reading tasks

Before you read the text study the following words.

assimilate(v) die out(v)

suck in(v) versatile(adj)/versatility(n)

You are going to read extracts from an interview with Professor David Crustal, author of English as a Global language. Do you think these statements are true or false?

1. English has become a world language because it is an easy language to learn.

2. English has borrowed from over 150 languages.

3. There are many different varieties of written English around the world.

4. There are many different varieties of spoken English.

5. The main reason other languages are dying is the growth of English.

II. Read the text and check your guesses.

1 English has over the past two or three hundred years repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time. If you go back to the beginning - why does a language become a world language? The answer is nothing to do with the nature of the language as such. No, no, a language becomes a world language for one reason only and that is the power of the people who use it and power here means political power, military power if you will, originally, economic power, cultural power possibly and various other kinds of power. There's nothing particularly attractive about the pronunciation system of English, it's not easier or more difficult than most others. In grammar it has an awful lot of grammatical constructions, well over 3,000 identifiably distinct grammatical features in English to be learned, you know, it's quite a lot of grammar, well up on the scale of grammatical learning in any context. Its spelling is very difficult in many ways, so I think, you know, there are difficulties with learning English. But all of this is beside the point, because if somebody is waving dollar bills under your nose and saying, 'If you learn English you are going to get a lot of these,' you will assimilate even quite a complicated language in order to get at some of those dollar bills, and the real reason why one learns English is because of the accessibility to the power structures of the world that it guarantees.

2 English has always been a vacuum cleaner of a language. It has sucked in vocabulary from every other language it has come into contact with since it was Anglo Saxon right from back in the 8th and 9th centuries. It was always borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, well stealing of course, because when you borrow words from other languages you don't give them back and it's been that way all the way through. And the thing is this, that if you come from another language background and you approach English, you'll probably find that some of the words from your mother tongue are already in English and it gives a kind of familiarity to the language, a kind of welcome, you know, some of your words are already there. And certainly over 150 languages, major languages around the world have had their words loaned into English in this way, so I think the range and versatility and size of the vocabulary is quite a plus as far as English is concerned.

3 Standard English of course exists at the moment in the form of standard written English, standard printed English. It has done for many decades now and when one looks at the way English has moved around the world one doesn't actually see very much change in the nature of that standard English. If you go for newspapers in Britain or America, or Australia, or for that matter in Athens, or Cairo, or Tokyo, any place which has an English language newspaper and you compare the language as it turns up in those newspapers around the world, you will find precious little difference in the language of those newspapers. At a spoken level, however, it's a much different scenario, very different scenario and very interesting because of course it is in speech that identity is most readily expressed. The way in which you express your identity in speech is through accent and dialect. And as the language has spread around the world the most noticeable thing everybody's seen in the last 20 or 30 years is the growth of these new Englishes, as they're called, so that in, it's not just America and Britain any more but in West Africa and East Africa and Singapore and Malaysia and India and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and all of these other places you are now getting these new varieties, localized varieties of English. Chiefly in vocabulary, hardly at all in grammar but quite substantially in pronunciation.

4 Now half the languages of the world dying is really quite a dramatic thing and it's a matter of great concern, a concern that many people are still not fully aware of. Most of these peoples are dying for reasons perhaps so many and varied that it's impossible to generalize about them. But there's one very important point to realize that it isn't just English which is at the heart of the matter here. If you take, for example Brazil, where the number of Brazilian indigenous languages is now perhaps a couple of hundred or less, whereas a couple of hundred years ago there were a thousand or more languages spoken in that part of the world. Well, yes these languages have died but not because of the influence of English, English has no place in Brazil, it's because of Portuguese.

5 Bilingualism is the answer. If I were a member of a minority language community or even a majority language community that was not a world language, I would want obviously access to the rest of the world by using the lingua franca that happens to be in vogue at the moment and it seems to be English. I would want to learn English, at the same time I would not want to lose my mother tongue because it's part of me. [2, 187]

III. Comprehension check

Answer the questions.

1. Why are language and power closely linked?

2. Why are there many drawbacks in English being a global language?

3. Why does English sometimes seems familiar to foreign learners?

4. What are the “new Englishes” and what characterizes them?

5. Why English is known to be a “vacuum cleaner” of a language?

6. What does Brazil illustrate about the death of native languages?

7. What is the way to preserve native languages according to Professor Crystal?

8. Do you disagree with any of Professor Crystal’s views?

IV. Speaking

1. Has English influenced your language? If so, What English words have entered your language? In your opinion, is it a good or bad thing? What do the linguists in your country think?

2. In Northern Spain the regional languages of Catalan and Basque are very important in the autonomous regions of Catalonia and the Basque Provinces.

1. What does your language mean to you? Is it simply personal and communicative or does it have cultural, political and historical meaning for you?

2. At what cost should we preserve “minority” native languages? Should there be financial and political support and should the languages be made compulsory in local schools and in the local media?

3. What do you think of the future of the Belarusian language and the way to preserve it.

4. Is it a good idea to learn a foreign language? Which foreign languages other than English would you like to learn? Why? Give arguments to support your point of view.