ENGLISH AS A TOOL OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION
Although the statement ‘English is the world’s most important language’ may be taken as a truism, it answers some objective criteria of ‘importance’. R. Quirk (1972: 2) suggests four such criteria.
One criterion is the number of native speakers that a language happens to have. From this point of view, English comes second after Chinese, which has double the number of speakers.
A second criterion is the extent to which a language is geographically dispersed: in how many continents and countries is it used? This criterion makes English a front runner.
A third is its ‘vehicular load’: to what extent is it a medium for sci 252d33c ence or literature or other highly regarded cultural manifestation – including ‘way of life’? English scores as being the primary medium for twentieth century science and technology.
A fourth is the economic and political
influence of those who speak it as ‘their own’ language. English is the
language of the
What emerges strikingly about English is that by any of the criteria it is prominent, by some it is pre-eminent, and by a combination of the four it is superlatively outstanding As Quirk (: 3) points out, no claim has been made of the importance of English on the grounds of its ‘quality’, such as the size of its vocabulary, the alleged flexibility of its syntax. It has been rightly said that the choice of an international language, or lingua franca, is never based on linguistic or aesthetic criteria but always on political, economic and demographic ones.
English is the world’s most widely used language. There are three primary categories of use: It is used as a native language, as a second language, and as a foreign language.
English is spoken as a native language, or mother tongue, by nearly three hundred million people in countries such as Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean and South Africa, without mentioning smaller countries or smaller pockets of native English speakers (for example in Rhodesia and Kenya).
As a second
language, English is used chiefly for certain official, social, commercial
or educational activities within several countries: within the French-speaking
As a foreign language, English is used for international communication, i.e. the medium of communication with speakers from other countries.
But many more use it as an international
means of communication, because English has become a truly international
language meeting more than just national needs. science,
trade, sport, and international relations of various kinds have given the
English language the status of one of the world’s most important languages.
Many scientific and technical journals are written in English although they are
not necessarily published in
The role English plays today is the result of historical processes which affected large parts of the world and are, to some extent, reflected in the language itself. Thus, the English language, in the course of its historical development, has met with so many influences from abroad that its very structure, both lexical and grammatical has come to reflect in many ways its international use. What we call English words are very largely, by more than two-thirds, French, Latin, Greek and other words in origin. In effect, the power of the English language to take up elements from other languages has become almost limitless. This capacity of assimilation is one of the key features of English as an international language.
The inflectional system of modern English, using analytical rather than synthetic means, is extremely simple. There are no more than a handful of grammatical endings. The ‘-s’ denoting the plural and possessive of nouns and the third person singular Present Tense of main verbs; the ‘-er/ -est’ used for the degrees of comparison of adjectives, the ‘-ed’ forming the Past Tense and –ed participle of regular verbs, the ‘-ing’ making up the -ing participle and the gerund, and finally the ‘-ly’ of adverbs are the only endings left of the highly inflected language spoken a thousand years ago.
Along with this simplification of the grammatical form has come a much greater ease in using the same word in more than one word-class. ‘answer’, for example, can occur as a verb and a noun. ‘round’ may even be used in no fewer than five different word-classes. It can be an adjective in ‘A round table will seat more people than a square one’; a preposition in ‘We travelled round the country’; an adverb in ‘He turned round and ran back to the house’; a noun in ‘The next round of peace talks will be held in Rome’; a verb in ‘The van had just rounded the corner when it was hit by a lorry’. Thus, a very large number of English words are used in at least two word-classes, usually as nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives. Thus, English words are very flexible and may be put to a great variety of uses within the sentence.
The structure of English sentences, in contrast to the relative uniformity of the word forms, is very complex, not to say complicated, as is evident from its difficult phraseology, and its complicated syntactic structure. English syntax seems to be making up for what the language has lost in morphological richness. Thus, English, by virtue of its vast stock of words and its highly productive grammatical structure, is indeed able to cope with the most diverse tasks of international communication (D. Giering, 1979: 11).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Algeo, John – 1972 – Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language,
second edn., Harcourt Brace New York
2. Baugh, Albert, Cable, Thomas – 1978 - A History of the English Language, 3rd edition
revised,
Redwood Press Limited,
3.
History of Literature, Penguin
Books,
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