Eli5: Why is the English language most common in this world?
In: 41
The short answer is money.
What everyone had been saying about cultural domination and empire is correct, but when you boil it all down, if you wanted to make money for the last few hundred years, you were probably doing business with the British until World War 2, then you were doing business with the US. They were/are the biggest economies. Everybody wanted to do business with them, so everybody learned English.
Now everybody assumes that everyone else knows English (even if neither side speaks English natively), so if you want to speak to the most other countries, you speak in English.
tldr the other posts: British imperialism in the pre- to early 20th century followed by American exceptionalism in the mid-20th to early-21st century.
[Here is a map of every former British colony and Britain](https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.29ed26561e50a296a3ee0351b5c3bf63?rik=GUGmY5V71s%2bDSA&pid=ImgRaw&r=0). As you can kind of see… it’s the largest empire that has ever existed. It’s larger than Russia and China combined. Because of this trade in all of these areas moved towards English. And then Britain setup trade ports in most other countries and solidified English as an international language.
The dominance of American post-WW2 further solidified this as for a decade the US was the largest trading partner with every country in the world (except the Soviet Union and Communist China for obvious reasons). American banks for a while became the dominant banks and in order to get US funding, you needed to speak English.
In countries that rejected English in the past, now speaking English is regarded as a status symbol. It doesn’t matter if they need it, just being able to speak it makes you a higher class person.
To add to what others have said, another reason for English being the most common language is that the Internet was invented / developed by English speakers. If the Internet had been invented by French speakers, we’d all be speaking French
It’s not, Mandarin is the most spoken language. English is second.
The thing about English is that it has the most *non-native* speakers of any language and the third most spoken language, Spanish, has more native speakers than English does. Those non-native speakers also have a lot of different native languages and are spread all over the world. So wherever you go and whatever the local language is, there’s always a chance that you will be able to find someone who speaks some English.
So English is currently the global “lingua franca”; the language people use to communicate in situations where many people with different native languages need to communicate. French sort of filled this role for a while and still does for some situations, particularly international sports and certain aspects of diplomacy. There are some languages that fill a similar role in specific regions like Hindi in India, and Malay in southeast asia. Latin, Greek, and Frankish at times served a similar purpose in Europe and “lingua franca” is Latin for “Language of the Franks”.
So, how did English get to be in this position? Britain controlled a large part of the world and brought their language with them. Even those areas that weren’t part of the empire had to engage in trade and diplomacy with the British. The next country that everyone had to deal with after the British was the United States, which as a former British colony also spoke English so again you need to speak English to deal with them. Several significant fields that require international communication have developed under these two hegemonies like aviation, computers, the Internet, and at least the later parts of the scientific revolution. So English permeates all of those fields.
I can’t remember where I read it, but it was a really good explanation as to why English is a global lingua franca. Yes, England and then after the Acts of Union the UK had its global colonies. The United States did as well. But one reason why English is the lingua franca of the world and not Spanish or French has to do with the language itself.
English is a bastard language. Yes it’s Germanic, but it has been so heavily influenced by other Germanic languages, like Danish, but also by Latin via Norman French. After William the Conqueror took over England, French was the language of the elite and everyone else spoke the ancestor of modern English.
But it also has to do with how the English, and later Americans, colonized. The French, Spanish and Portuguese elite were content in speaking their languages while their indigenous colonial subjects spoke their indigenous langauges. Even now French is considered a langauge signifying that a person is more cultured than someone who is doesn’t speak it (Seriously. I’ve had French people tell me that you are not civilized if you don’t speak French).
But the English, and later Americans, never felt that the English language itself was a measure of being “civilized.” Sure there are dialects that are considered more posh and “civilized.” Think Received Pronunciation vs Northern English, or Southern American style English vs a General American accent. But the language as a whole is not considered elite. People in British colonies, regardless of class, race, or subjugation were expected to learn English just because that was the language of their overlords. The Spanish, and especially the French did not do this.
I know I’m simplifying this, but I’m basically paraphrasing from something I read some years back, but I found it interesting.
Kind of a double whammy. The UK came out on top of colonialism then the US came out on top of the WWI/WWII/cold war phase.
To add what others have said, the BBC World service had a more significant role than people realise. In dozens of countries many people didn’t trust the news in their country and so used to listen to the BBC World service to get ‘the truth’. No other country had such a global reach except, to a lesser extent, Voice of America.
The global language of shipping was English because of the British Empire & Royal Navy. This made global interactions in English become common. This extended to flying, albeit this time it was in part because it borrowed from sailing and part because the US led the way in aviation. In the 1800’s the language of money was split between English and French. After World War One France had no more money. Then after World War Two neither did Britain. However, the US did so they hooked into the prexisting English speaking structures and expanded them from about half the world to just about all of it.
The big cultural shift happened in the ‘60s when the popularity of the Beatles led to kids in European countries singing in English. There was a concurrent spread of American rock and roll to expand this trend and then the global Hollywood explosion took this into the stratosphere. Now most of the cool music and most of the cool films globally were in English. Without a real competitor language this was now set as the lingua franca as for the first time people from two different countries, neither of which spoke English as a first language, started to use English between themselves.
At this point it became very much a generational thing. If you were older than X then you didn’t speak English but if you were younger than X, you mostly did. The final catalyst was of course the World Wide Web, a solution created ironically by an Englishman onto the American infrastructure of the internet that took English into every home with a computer across the globe.
Caveat: This is a highly abridged simplification. There are of course many countries where few people speak English even now etc.
I’m addition to the influence of the British Empire, English is—contrary to popular belief—much easier to learn than many other languages. There are 26 homophonic letters, not 3000 symbolic characters like in Mandarin. There is no gender to contend with, as in Romance languages like French
or Spanish. Despite being a Germanic language, there is no extended concatenation, as in German. And there are few—and relatively mild glottals, as in other languages like Hebrew.
The British empire, the BBC, worldwide English language television, English speaking countries (European countries are English speaking countries as a second language) won the big war, English speaking people invented airplanes and the internet, both mediums that are primarily English.
That is the lion’s share of it, but English is also well suited to be a second language. Because English’ grammar is simple compared to basically anything but Mandarin, you can form reasonable English sentences with foreign words and have it make sense. All of the primary functions of grammar, as far as understanding what the words do (where is the verb, what is the subject, and if you can’t figure a way to do the tense just say it) it is implied by the structure of the sentence. A little more detail on that, say I want to say that I went running yesterday but I don’t know the morphology required to make that proper English, you can contextualize it with other words and you will be understood. “I am running, yesterday, and someone yells at me.” That is enough for me to understand that you **were** **running,** yesterday ,and someone **yelled** at you. You don’t need to know a lot of English to communicate with English speaking people.
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