Eli5: Why is the English language most common in this world?
In: 41
The short answer is colonisation.
The long answer is that throughout history the language barrier posed a huge obstacle to trade, travel and the exchange of ideas and cultures. Of course for most of human history, most people wouldn’t travel very far out from where they lived, but those who did, whether as traders, scholars, warriors etc had trouble communicating with the people they met along their travels. Exchange of information was, and still is, crucial to the cultural development of individuals but also nations as a whole. A person or nation who do not speak any other language than their own are more or less cut off from the rest of the world, and have to rely on others to communicate with foreigners.
That’s where the concept of a “lingua franca” comes in, a concept that predates even that name itself. People realised that in order to facilitate trade and diplomacy, it was much easier to all “agree” on one common language to be learned and be used for those purposes rather than relying on a small number of translators to facilitate all communications. How this language is “decided” happens organically and many such languages have existed throughout history. Usually deciding factors were the cultural make up of regions, the language or languages spoken in regional super powers such as empires and kingdoms, and how easy they were to learn since most lingua francas in history have been relatively simplistic in order to prioritise ease of learning. Arguably though the main factor was money. If someone had a lot of money and you wanted to do business with them to get some of that money, you learned their language.
As empires rose and fell throughout history and trade, travel and communication was globalised English is currently the dominant trade language for most of the world. It’s relatively easy for most people to learn and it follows the trend of catering to the fattest wallet seeing as how it was the language spoken by the British, who had one of the largest empires in the 19th and early 20th century, and the US, who are a current global super power.
Personally I see the concept of trade languages as an overall good thing. It’s good for the average lay person to have a means to communicate with others around the world. Countries where english literacy is low are very isolated in many ways. Refusal to learn other languages and demanding to always be accomodated in your own language can also be chauvinistic. But at the same time there’s no “fair” way to compare languages and pick which one will be the official global language, in fact, there’s no such thing as an official global language, english is simply the de facto one but still it won’t accomodate you everywhere and in every context. The imposing of a language as a global language on others can in itself be chauvinistic so there’s no perfect solution. As someone to whom English is not his native language, I appreciate the benefits it affords me, and I believe it’s a relatively simple and easy language to learn, but also very versatile. However I can acknowledge that this is not the case for everyone, and for some people english is very foreign and hard to learn.
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