Why Does The Whole World Speak English?

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✍🏼 BLOG VERSION:

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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - English as 1st vs. 2nd Language
0:22 - Languages Come and Go
0:57 - Language Spread: Aramaic vs. Hebrew
1:30 - The First Global Lingua Franca
1:54 - Why Did English Go Viral?
3:12 - The Role of the British Empire
3:36 - Right Place, Right Time
4:40 - The Rules of Language Learning
5:01 - What Role Did the U.S. Play?
5:59 - The Role of Technology
6:24 - Will English Remain the World’s Lingua Franca?
7:16 - What About Mandarin Chinese?
8:04 - The Next Lingua Franca?

📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:

Wikipedia contributors. "List of languages by total number of speakers." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 Dec. 2021. Web.

“Roman Empire Trajan 117AD.png” by Tataryn is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

“Europe-UK (orthographic projection).svg” by Rob984 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

WIKITONGUES: Sjoukje speaking West Frisian

“Rolling Stones at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (1964).jpg” by Hugo van Gelderen (ANEFO) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 NL via Wikimedia Commons

“Hollywood Sign (Zuschnitt).jpg” by Thomas Wolf is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

[philipdavis]

One feature that will make English hard to knock off its perch is just how easy it is for young people to 'accidentally' learn it by things like playing online games in English or watching lots of US TV. A language that dominates popular media will always win out. This is another reason why mandarin will never displace other Asian languages, let alone become a world language. I'd also not underestimate Spanish - its very widely spoken and in my experience a very popular L2 or L3 all over the world.

[Sometimes_Happiness]

One of the biggest advantages for English to remain the lingua franca is that it is so extremely flexible. It's very easy for words to be added to the English language vocabulary, and there's no gatekeeper of what it means

[jimjohnson]

Also, English was the language that started the backbone of the internet and computer science… This helped with the modern English language boom we see today.

[Omhikmat]

I have met many people from Brazil, Haiti, the Philippines, and Spanish-speaking countries who speak English fluently--and they all told me that they gained their fluency mainly from watching English movies and television.

[darreljones]

A little-known fact about the phrase "lingua franca" is that it didn't originally refer to French. It referred to the language of the Frankish Empire (Charlemagne's domain), which is ironically closer to modern German than modern French.

[anthrogal]

I’m not so sure about French. Algeria is one of these francophone countries but each time I visit more and more young people are learning English. Yes, they would know French too but the amount of them learning English grows each time I visit.

[JK-brmu]

English is the #1 language in the world because the two Greatest World Powers in Their Era of the last 200 years were both English-speaking. The Brits spread English far and wide, from India to Australia to Burma to Africa to the Americas. And then the United States became the greatest economic power in the world, so their currency and language both became important globally, building even further on what the British Empire had done.

[Hadrianus]

My theory (in short):
The rise of English as a global lingua franca started with the British Empire, which, at its height, covered around 25 per cent of the world. English holds onto its status because of the cultural and economic dominance of the USA.

[Dogsnark]

There was a period of hundreds years in Japan when the country was all but closed to travel and commerce with other countries, except for a small contingent of Dutch who were allowed a trading post in Nagasaki. In order to deal with the Dutch, a number of Japanese learned Dutch, which they assumed was also the language of all Europeans. When Japan was finally opened to foreigners, many Japanese who had learned Dutch were surprised that Dutch was not the language of most of the foreigners who came to their shores.

[Player-remo]

Media definitely plays a huge part. Immersion is an important factor when it comes to becoming fluent in a language.

If you can't move to the country which speaks your target language, then the internet (movies, tv shows, video games, YouTube videos) is the only way you can gain immersion.

And English speaking nations produce more content available world wide than others. I wonder if Chinese would spread more, were it not for government censorship?

[Peter_Schiavo]

My wife is a native Spanish speaker, but was taught exclusively in Italian in elementary school. She was also taught English in high school. We are now living in Spain and Catalan is slowly working its way into her brain. She's told me in the past that English was the easiest to learn. It is so engrained in her that she thinks in English.

[djw]

I think that it was definitely because of a combination of the British Empire and the way that popular culture from the Anglophone sphere dominated the world--especially in movies and pop music. Leave the "artsy" stuff to other languages. Nobody does "superficial content" like the US and the UK! (Oh, and parenthetically, there is a lot of wonderful Literature--with a capital L--in English, as well.)

[naguoning]

A common misconception about Mandarin speakers is the number of native speakers vs non-native; Actually China, Singapore and Taiwan have many people who speak Mandarin but their real native language is a dialect of Chinese which can be VERY different from Mandarin or even something else like Taiwanese Aboriginal languages etc.

[flyatnight-]

I’m Australian born Chinese but I think English is underestimated in its beauty. Another factor to its success would actually be its simplicity, and it allows people to focus less on the language, but more in science and creativity.

[Sunflower-zcfr]

I am learning Spanish. Before I found this video, I noticed that all the Spanish learning videos I watched, the persons can speak perfect English while we English speakers are struggling to learn one. So I do agree with this video.

[benjaminr]

My favourite story of the dominance of English is about am airline pilot in Germany and the air traffic control people insisted on speaking English despite, of course, being native German speakers. The German pilot asked why he, a German flying in German air space, should be speaking English. To which a British pilot responded with “because you lost the war!”

[carolineb]

Your video is quite thought-provoking, thank you for taking the time making it.
I'm French and I teach English in middle and high school, I was actually looking for a video for my class to explain why so many people speak English around the world but unfortunatly, this is way too fast for them. However, I've been quite surprised with what you said at the end : French becoming the number 1 language and English being not so easy to learn. Very unexpected as I believe English grammar is super easy and English vocabulary is all around us (through media). Sure, it can be hard to pronounce but that's it - I will watch your other video to see if you can convince me. I truly believe that French is way harder to learn, so many things make no sense at all. If you ever make the same video but shorter and slower, I will definitely show it to my pupils. Keep up the good work. :)

[oussemazoghlemi]

Tunisian here and I'm seeing more and more of the youth gravitating towards English (but French is still a big part of their lives through school etc.)

[MDobri-syce]

English is a mixed blessing because it has given me the opportunity to communicate and form relationships with people from other cultures that would not have been possible otherwise. Also, because of the Internet.

The downside is I feel like English at times plays a dominant role in communicating. For example, I seen people in the language community in particularly Western European countries say, instead of speaking their mother tongue, it’s a mix of their native language and English words as a replacement.

[hebneh]

One other consideration is that when English was imposed on various conquered countries, in some places people ended up favoring it because there were so many different native languages. This is particularly true in India and the Philippines, where the various native tongues are mutually incomprehensible.