Sharing Languages

One of the most fundamental needs in a global society is a common language for communication. In the modern world, the most important language of international communication is English. A Polish airline pilot who flies over Spain speaks to the traffic controller on the ground in English. Swiss bankers speak German among themselves, but with German bankers they prefer to speak English. English is the language spoken at an aircraft factory in France and an appliance company in Italy.

The dominance of English as an international language has facilitated the diffusion of popular culture and science and the growth of international trade. However, people who forsake their native language must weigh the benefits of using English against the cost of losing a fundamental element of local cultural identity.

Lingua Franca

A language of international communication, such as English, is known as a lingua franca. To facilitate trade, speakers of two different languages agree to use a language known to both as a lingua franca. The term, which means “language of the Franks,” was originally applied by Arab traders during the Middle Ages to the language they used to communicate with Europeans, whom they called Franks.

People in smaller countries need to learn English to participate more fully in the global economy and culture. All children learn English in the schools of countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden to facilitate international communication. This may seem culturally unfair, but obviously it is more likely that several million Dutch people will learn English than that a half-billion English speakers around the world will learn Dutch.

The rapid growth in importance of English is reflected in the percentage of students learning English as a second language in school. More than 90 percent of students in the European Union learn English in middle or high school, not just in smaller countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands but also in populous countries such as France, Germany, and Spain. For people who are deaf, American Sign Language has become a lingua franca, and it is widely learned as a second language to communicate with people who are deaf.

Learning English in China

Middle School, Taizhou, China.

Students choosing to study internationally increasingly seek admission to universities in countries that teach in English rather than in German, French, or Russian. Students around the world want to learn in English because they believe it is the most effective way to work in the global economy and participate in the global culture.

Other than English, modern lingua franca languages include Swahili in East Africa, Hindi in South Asia, Indonesian in Southeast Asia, and Russian in the former Soviet Union. A number of African countries that became independent in the twentieth century adopted English or Swahili as an official language for government business, as well as for commerce, even if the majority of the people couldn’t speak it.

In view of the global dominance of English, many U.S. citizens do not recognize the importance of learning other languages. One of the best ways to learn about the beliefs, traits, and values of people living in other regions is to learn their language. The lack of effort by Americans to learn other languages is a source of resentment among people elsewhere in the world, especially when Americans visit or work in other countries.

The inability to speak other languages is also a handicap for Americans who try to conduct international business. Successful entry into new overseas markets requires knowledge of local culture, and officials who can speak the local language are better able to obtain important information. Japanese businesses that wish to expand in the United States send English-speaking officials, but American businesses that wish to sell products to the Japanese are rarely able to send a Japanese-speaking employee.

English on the Internet

The emergence of the Internet as an important means of communication has further strengthened the dominance of English. Around one-half of all Internet content is in English (Figure 5-24). Because a large share of the material on the Internet is in English, knowledge of English is essential for Internet users around the world.

English and Hindi signs on Internet cafe, India.

Languages of Websites

Figures are percent of all websites. More than one-half of all websites are in English.

The dominance of English-language websites persists despite the fact that a decreasing percentage of Internet users are English speakers. English was the language for only 25 percent of Internet users in 2017, a substantial decline from 71 percent in 1998. The early dominance of English on the Internet was partly a reflection of the fact that the most populous English-speaking country, the United States, had a head start on the rest of the world in making the Internet available to most of its citizens. Meanwhile, Chinese (Mandarin) language online users increased from 2 percent of the world total in 1998 to 19 percent in 2017.

Languages of Internet Users, 2017

Figures are percent of all speakers. English and Chinese speakers account for the largest shares of Internet users.

English may be less dominant as the language of the Internet later in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the United States—and with it the English language—remains the Internet leader in key respects. The United States created the English-language nomenclature for the Internet that the rest of the world has followed. The designation “www,” which English speakers recognize as an abbreviation of “World Wide Web,” is awkward in other languages, some of which do not have an equivalent sound to the English w.

The U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been responsible for assigning domain names and for the suffixes following the dot, such as “com” and “edu.” Domain names in the rest of the world include a two-letter suffix for the country, such as “fr” for France and “jp” for Japan, whereas U.S.-based domain names don’t need the suffix. Reflecting the globalization of the languages of the Internet, ICANN agreed in 2009 to permit domain names in characters other than Latin. Arabic, Chinese, and other characters may now be used.

Chinese: The Next Lingua Franca?

The future leadership of Chinese in social media comes in part from the large number of people worldwide who speak Chinese languages. The attraction of Chinese languages also comes from the way they are written. Rather than sounds (as in English), Chinese languages are written primarily with logograms, which are symbols that represent words or meaningful parts of words. Ability to read a book requires understanding several thousand logograms. Most logograms are compounds; words related to bodies of water, for example, include a symbol that represents a river, plus additional strokes that alter the river in some way.

Chinese is thus an attractive language to use in social media that restrict the number of characters, such as Twitter. An English message that uses the maximum 280 symbols permitted by Twitter could be written in Chinese in only around 140 characters.

Pause & Reflect 5.2.3

Can you spot the spelling error in Figure 5-23? Why might that have occurred