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DAVID CRYSTAL

“ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE”

Chapter 1 : WHY A GLOBAL LANGUAGE?

The topic of English as a global language has been treated these years in many magazines, newspapers and

television programmes and series. If English is your mother tongue you may have mixed feeling about the

way English is spreading around the world. You can be proud of the success of your language, but also

concerned because people who speak English around the world change it, they don't speak the same

English you do. They use it in the way they want. Often in English press we can find expressions like “look

what Americans have done to English”, and Americans say the same about variations in English which are

emerging all over the world.

But even if English is not your mother tongue you can have mixed feelings about it. If you want to learn it,

you can be proud of your achievement when you make progress, but you know that a mother tongue

speaker has an unfair advantage over you. Or you can be envious if you live in a country in which the

survival of your language is threatened by the success of English. This is why language is always in the

news, as much it's global, as much it's newsworthy.

What is a global language?

A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every

country – mother tongue use cannot by itself give a language global status. To achieve such status, a

language as to be taken up by other countries around the world and they must decide to give it a special

place within their countries. There are 2 ways in which this can be done:

1) Firstly, a language can be made the official language of the country, to be used as a medium of

communication in such domains as government, law courts, media and educational system = semi-

official status/second language complementary to the first one. English today has special status in

over 70 countries.

2) Secondly, a language can be made a priority in a country's foreign language teaching, even though

the language has no official status. English now is the language most widely taught as a foreign

language, often displacing another language.

So, there are different ways in which a language can be official.

Reasons for choosing a particular language as a favoured foreign language can be historical tradition,

political expediency, desire for commercial, cultural or technological contact. But also when chosen the

presence of this language can be different depending on the extent to which a government or a foreign aid

agency is prepared to give financial support to a language-teaching policy. In a well-supported

environment, resources will be devoted to helping people have access to the language and learn it,

through media, libraries, schools…In this way there will be an increase in the number and quality of

teachers able to teach the language. In many countries, however, lack of government support has hindered

the achievement of language-teaching goals.

The distinction between “second” and “foreign” language isn't just a difference in fluency or ability, a

second language has some kind of official status.

In the early 2000s about a quarter of the world's population was already fluent or competent in English,

and this figure is steadily growing= 1,5 billion people.

What makes a global language?

The fact that a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak

it, the important is who these speakers are. There is a close link between language dominance and

economic, technological and cultural power too. Without a strong power-base no language can make

progress as an international medium of communication. Language has no independent existence. Language

exists only in the brains and mouths and ears and hands and eyes of its users. If the users of a language

succeed on the international stage, their language succeeds. If they fail, their language fails. Some people

think that English has been chosen because of its easy grammar, but this property isn't enough to ensure a

language's world spread. A language has traditionally become an international language for one chief

reason: the power of its people, especially their politic and military power. It happened with Greek, Latin,

Arabic... the history of a global language can be traced trough the successful expeditions of its

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DAVID CRYSTAL

“ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE”

Chapter 1 : WHY A GLOBAL LANGUAGE? The topic of English as a global language has been treated these years in many magazines, newspapers and television programmes and series. If English is your mother tongue you may have mixed feeling about the way English is spreading around the world. You can be proud of the success of your language, but also concerned because people who speak English around the world change it, they don't speak the same English you do. They use it in the way they want. Often in English press we can find expressions like “look what Americans have done to English”, and Americans say the same about variations in English which are emerging all over the world. But even if English is not your mother tongue you can have mixed feelings about it. If you want to learn it, you can be proud of your achievement when you make progress, but you know that a mother tongue speaker has an unfair advantage over you. Or you can be envious if you live in a country in which the survival of your language is threatened by the success of English. This is why language is always in the news, as much it's global, as much it's newsworthy. What is a global language? A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country – mother tongue use cannot by itself give a language global status. To achieve such status, a language as to be taken up by other countries around the world and they must decide to give it a special place within their countries. There are 2 ways in which this can be done: 1) Firstly, a language can be made the official language of the country, to be used as a medium of communication in such domains as government, law courts, media and educational system = semi- official status/second language complementary to the first one. English today has special status in over 70 countries. 2) Secondly, a language can be made a priority in a country's foreign language teaching, even though the language has no official status. English now is the language most widely taught as a foreign language, often displacing another language. So, there are different ways in which a language can be official. Reasons for choosing a particular language as a favoured foreign language can be historical tradition, political expediency, desire for commercial, cultural or technological contact. But also when chosen the presence of this language can be different depending on the extent to which a government or a foreign aid agency is prepared to give financial support to a language-teaching policy. In a well-supported environment, resources will be devoted to helping people have access to the language and learn it, through media, libraries, schools…In this way there will be an increase in the number and quality of teachers able to teach the language. In many countries, however, lack of government support has hindered the achievement of language-teaching goals. The distinction between “second” and “foreign” language isn't just a difference in fluency or ability, a second language has some kind of official status. In the early 2000s about a quarter of the world's population was already fluent or competent in English, and this figure is steadily growing= 1,5 billion people. What makes a global language? The fact that a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it, the important is who these speakers are. There is a close link between language dominance and economic, technological and cultural power too. Without a strong power-base no language can make progress as an international medium of communication. Language has no independent existence. Language exists only in the brains and mouths and ears and hands and eyes of its users. If the users of a language succeed on the international stage, their language succeeds. If they fail, their language fails. Some people think that English has been chosen because of its easy grammar, but this property isn't enough to ensure a language's world spread. A language has traditionally become an international language for one chief reason: the power of its people, especially their politic and military power. It happened with Greek, Latin, Arabic... the history of a global language can be traced trough the successful expeditions of its

soldier/sailor speakers. But international language dominance is not solely the result of military might. It may take a military powerful nation to establish a language, but it takes an economically powerful one to maintain and expand it. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries when economic developments began to operate on a global scale supported by the new communication technologies (telegraph, telephone, radio). The growth of competitive industry and business brought an explosion of international marketing and advertising. The power of the press reached unprecedented levels, soon to be surpassed by the broadcasting media, with their ability to cross national boundaries with electromagnetic ease. Technology, chiefly in the form of movies and records, fuelled new mass entertainment industries which had a worldwide impact. Any language at the centre of such an explosion of international activity would suddenly have found itself with a global status. And English was apparently in the right place at the right time. And by the beginning of the 19th century Britain had become the world's leading industrial and trading country and by the end of the century the population of the USA was the largest in Western Europe and its economy was the most productive and fastest growing in the world. Economics replaced politics as the chief driving force. Why do we need a global language? Translations has played a central role in human interactions for thousands of years. But there are limits to what can be done in this way. The more a community is linguistically mixed, the less it can rely on individuals to ensure communication between different groups. In communities in which just 2 or 3 languages are in contact, bilingualism or trilingualism can be a solution. But in communities where there are many languages in contact such a natural solution does not readily applied. The problem has traditionally been solved by finding a common language for example the PIDGIN, that's a simplified language used between communities when they begin to trade and it has different combined elements of their languages. The prospect that a lingua franca might be needed for the whole world is something which has emerged strongly only in the 20th century and since the 1950s in particular. Since then, many international bodies have come into being, such as the world bank, UNESCO and UNICEF. Never before have so many countries been represented in a single meeting place. The pressure to adopt a single lingua franca, to facilitate communication in such contexts, is considerable, the alternative being A small number of languages have been designated official languages for the organisation's activity. Now because of the high translation costs they want to reduce the numbers of languages included. The need for a global language is particularly appreciated by the international academic and business communities. People have become more mobile physically (as annual airline statistics show) and electronically (as sales of fax, modems and Pcs show) and so they need more than ever a global language to communicate with people in other countries. What are the dangers of a global language? The dangers of a global language are: 1) Linguistic power. Those who speak a global language as a mother tongue are in a position of power compared with those who have to learn it as a official or foreign language? No, but just if this global language is taught from the time that children begin their full-time education and maintained continuously. In this case they will be bilingual, and they will speak as good as a mother tongue speaker. But this kind of control is currently achieved by a minority of non-native learners of any language. Children are ready for bilingualism, but this ability seems to die away as they reach their teens, so the earlier, the better because when that task is taken seriously, with reference to the acquisition of a global language, the elitism argument evaporates. 2) Linguistic complacency. Will a global language eliminate the motivation for adults to learn other languages? British and American are not motivated to learn other languages because of a lack of money and opportunity and also interest. Or maybe because of the increasing presence of English as a global language. This is not a question of attitude, even if most of the times people say, “I'm not good at languages” and this self-denigration commonly derives from a bad language learning experience in school. These days, there are signs of growing awareness, within English speaking communities, of the need to break away from the traditional monolingual bias. At least at the levels of business and industry, many firms have begun to make efforts in this direction and people are discovering that they are not that bad as they thought at learning languages. Statistics about

English has a different role in that meetings in which a large number of nations have the right to participate using its own language. The European Union is the most complex example, where are required a large number of translation and interpreting services, and the situation becomes more serious at any new member, which join the union. Several solutions have been proposed. English might be used as an intermediary language. When people want to know that their cause gain maximum impact, they express it through the medium of English (political protests...). The media Any consideration of politics leads inevitably to a consideration of the role of the media, because often a successful access to the media is the guarantor of political achievement. The press The English language has been an important medium of the press for nearly 400 years. In the first decade of the 17th^ century, several European countries were publishing rudimentary newspapers, but censorship, taxation, wars, and other constrains allowed little growth. Progress was much greater in Britain. The first English newspapers began to appear. There were the Weekly news, the London Gazette providing general news as well as information about shipping. American developments began later than the British one. The 19 th^ century was the period of the greatest progress, thanks to the introduction of new printing technology and new methods of transportation. It also saw the development of a truly independent press, most of all in the USA, because in Europe there was the censorship, which meant that the provision of popular news in other languages developed much more slowly. Massive circulations were achieved by such papers as the New York herald and the New York tribune. In the meanwhile, in Britain, taxation restricted the growth of the press in the first half of the century but by the end of the century, popular journalism brought Britain into the line with America. Newspapers are not just international media, they play an important role in the identity of a local community. Top 5 papers were all in English: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Sunday Times. Of particular importance are those English-language newspapers intended for a global readership. LANGUAGE IN NEWSPAPERS Newspapers language is not a single, homogeneous object of study. This is mainly because there are many different types of newspapers and they include a variety of different genres. The prototypical type of text in the press is the news report: a short piece which consists of a factual account of events that have occurred since the last edition of the newspaper. News report are concerned with what are known as hard news: crime, accidents, disasters, wars, political and diplomatic events. In news reports, issues and events are presented in a narrative mode and the first person is usually banned. News reports typically consists of the following main elements: HEADLINE which may consists of a main headline and a sub headline ATTRIBUTION one or more by-lines crediting a news agency and/or the journalists who wrote the piece. LEAD : a paragraph that provides a summary of the story, that may be graphologically distinct from the rest of the article. HEADLINES The newspapers HEADLINES have to attract the attention of potentional readers and have to indicate the topic of the story, usually by providing a short summary. Headlines are characterised by short and dramatic words, which combine brevity with effectiveness. In headlines, the need to use highly synthetic language has led to the development of a specific syntax. Another grammatical feature is the use of NOMINALIZATION (nouns derived from verbs or adjectives, often, but not always, with a change in the word ending). Nominalization has the effect of presenting events as they were things or concepts. In the headlines numerical information is expressed in digits rather than words. In addition, headlines explicit a range of stylistic and rhetorical devices to attract readers. These include word play, generally alliteration, rhyme, metaphor proverb and intertextual reference.

The attractiveness of headlines may also often depend on the play with spellings and sounds. Finally, headlines can engage the reader by including a pun. Puns explicit word ambiguity to humorous or rhetorical effect. Such ambiguity can arise through: Word polysemy : the multiple meanings of words Word having similar or identical sounds but different meaning: homophony HEADLINES MAY ALSO CONTAINS EXPRESSIONS TAKEN FROM EVERYDAY LIFE, BUT WHICH ACQUIRE A DIFFERENT MEANING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STORY THE NEWSPAPE TELLS. LEAD Leads are news story introductions. Their function is to give readers an immediate sense of what the article is about. Typically, leads are one paragraph long, consist of a single sentence and do not exceed 25 words. There are 2 main types of lead: DIRECT LEAD AND DELAYED LEADS. DIRECT LEADS are used for conventional hard news stories. As regards the DELAYED LEADS here the information is presented in highly condensed form, and grammatical subject of the sentence is a long nominal group. Delayed leads must capture the essence of the story. Unlike direct leads, they can be a few paragraphs long. They introduce the story through an anecdote. The aim is to create a sense of suspense. The story continues with the so-called nut paragraph, providing more information in decreasing. Advertising At the end of the 19th^ century a combination of social and economic factors led to a dramatic increase in the use of advertisement in publications, especially in the more industrialized countries. In the USA, publishers realized that income from advertising would allow them to lower the selling price of their magazines and this way publications in which over half the pages were given over to advertising became the norm. Posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs became part of the everyday scene. Now is one of the most noticeable global manifestations of English language use, because English advertisements are not only the most numerous in countries, where English has no special status, but they are usually the most noticeable. The official language of international advertising bodies is English. Broadcasting English was the first language to be transmitted by radio, the first commercial radio was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Advertising revenue became the chief means of support, as it later did for television. The British Broadcasting Company was established in 1922 and it was a monopoly, no other broadcasting company was allowed. The fist director-general of BBC, developed a concept of public-service broadcasting to inform, educate and entertain, which was highly influential abroad. Broadcasting organizations use English as a lingua franca, as it happens in the world of international politics. A similar dramatic expansion affected later public television. Although later to develop, the USA rapidly overtook Britain, becoming the leading provider of English language services abroad. Many countries during the post-War years launched English radio programmes and if we list the languages in which these countries broadcast, only one language has a place on each of the lists: English. THE DISCOURSE OF RADIO COMMERCIALS Over the last decades, the field of discourse analysis had paid much attention to the description of different forms of discourse in order to examine how language is used in a specific context with the intention of obtaining a particular purpose. Commercials discourses would clearly fall into the category of exhortative or persuasive discourse. It is clear that there is a crucial distinction in the way in which radio commercials and other forms of advertising attempt to achieve persuasion. Unlike other types of advertising discourse in which persuasion relies heavily on the images and pictures displayed in them, in radio commercials, LANGUAGE constitutes THE ONLY TOOL THE SPEAKER CAN USE IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE HIS AIM. Radios make extensive use of suprasegmental, syntactic and semantic features. The main linguistic traits that we often find in the radio commercial are: -high pitch tone

- emphatic stress -lengthening of vowels

As regards the relation between journalists and the language there are several assumptions:

The importance of correct usage and its basis in maintaining journalistic identity.
The exigencies of the medium: live reporting requires a special attention to language production, to performance. That editors, especially, function as usage monitors.
The explicit connection of credibility-as essential journalistic goal and professional value- and language in use. There are tools on hand to assist with the routinization or conventionalization of language as it appears in the news. These tools are both operational and discursive. To sum up, to understand standardization in the media context, it is useful to look at it as journalistic and discursive, as well as linguistically and prescriptively related to the larger culture’s nation of correct usage. News discourse is rule governed, routinized, and follows specific norms and routines. Journalistically, standardization involves the rules of writing for the appropriate modality. Cinema The years preceding and during the first world war stunted the growth of a European film industry. The new technologies which followed the discovery of electrical power altered the nature of the public and home entertainment and provided fresh directions for the development of the English language. In Europe, France and Britain provided an initial impetus to the artistic and commercial development of the cinema. But when sound was added in the late 1920s, English language came to dominate the movie world. Of the 44 studios, 32 were British or American. Despite the growth of the film industry in other countries, English- language movies still dominate the medium. As regard film dialogues, they cannot be considered a faithful reproduction of real life exchanges, even when dealing with realistic films in terms of the context they present, language varieties, acting style and some other aspects always reveal the scripted form of film language. THE BASIC UNIT DISCOURSE IS THE UTTERANCE. An utterance can be focused by only one tone unit or more. A tone unit is the minimal unit which can carry intonation. It can be one syllable long, but usually extends over a few syllables. Tone units are separated by prosodic breaks that can have terminal or non-terminal intonation. Tone units may be significantly longer in scripted dialogues than in oral conversations. What is film speak? Film speak is the natural object of audio-visual translation studies. English film speak is already, from a certain point of view, a translation of “English out there”. In the sense that it is a representation of interactions. The difficulty with film lies in the fact that their dialogues present themselves as spontaneous and yet, in most cases, are not spontaneous. There is therefore an essential duality in the fact that film dialogues generally look spontaneous and yet are not. The duality of film speak is ultimately rooted in the processes of representation and fictional creation. There are differences regarding what is said, how, where, when and by whom it’s said, why it is said and what effects it produces. Narrative films are, most usually, commercial enterprise. Films are appropriate examples for the study of the language genres of filmspeak and for the study of social representations, narrative conventions… Films are also important for the teaching of spoken language. The advantages of using film to teach languages:
It facilitates comprehension activities that are perceived as real
It creates a curiosity gab that facilitates exchange of opinions and ideas about the film

It helps to explore non-verbal elements
It improves oral skills
It provides meaningful contexts and vocabulary Types of film: Fiction films: tells a fictional story or narrative Documentary films are a visual expression attempting to document reality Short films are generally longer than a minute and shorter than 15 minutes How to choose a film? In general teachers should try to avoid films that contain:
High verbal density
Naturalism in the speech
Use of technical language/argot (slang belonging to a particular group)
Dialect and regional accents, as they are notorious for mispronunciations of sounds All these elements make language learning more difficult. So, teachers should try to select films that have unambiguous action and a clos connection between speech and action, films with simple story plot lines and films where only one character speaks at a time. To sum up, we can say that films can improve the language learning process by designing a series of activities that can develop linguistic, cultural, and intercultural skills. Popular music Most of technical developments in the recording industry took place in the USA and radio sites around the world testify to the dominance of English in the popular music scene today. Many people make their first contact with English in this way. During the early 20th^ century, European light opera, developed an English-language dimension, because several composers were immigrants to the USA. When modern music arrived, it was almost entirely an English scene (Elvis Presley in the USA, the Beatles in the UK). No other source has spread English-language around the youth of the world so rapidly and pervasively. Although every country has its popular singers, only a few manage to break through into the international arena, and in order to do so they need to be singing in English. 99% of the pop groups worked in English and his mother tongue was irrelevant (abba Swedish but sang in English). During the 1960s and 1970s, English for the younger generation around the world became a symbol of freedom, rebellion and modernism. The social, political and spiritual messages carried by the words resounded in many countries, providing many people with a first experience of the unifying power of English. International travel Each journey has immediate linguistic consequences. The leading tourism earner and spender is the USA and money speaks very loudly in tourism because a tourist has extra money to spend while on holiday. Restaurant menus have a parallel version in English, credit card facilities are most noticeably in English. But we don't have to forget that there is still 2/3 of the world not exposed to English and if we stop at a village on our way to a destination, we can experience this linguistic diversity. Safety instructions in international flights and sailings, in hotels are now increasingly in English alongside local languages. The role of the military in the spread of English is difficult to evaluate: the presence of US and British forces have certainly brought he local inhabitants into contact with English speaking culture rapidly and in some instances the effects would be long-lasting, for example in case of marriage. But a short-term presence would have a long-term influence on local language awareness?

The Rise of English as a Global Language: Impact, Challenges, and Future Prospects, Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

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Anteprima parziale del testo

Scarica The Rise of English as a Global Language: Impact, Challenges, and Future Prospects e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!

DAVID CRYSTAL

“ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE”