1 English as a world language Reading: Not the only show in town a) Read the text about English as a world language. First decide whether the statements (1–7) are true (T) or false (F) and put a cross ( ✘ ) in the correct box. Then identify the sentence in the text which supports your decision. Write the first four words of this sentence in the space provided. There may be more than one correct answer; write down only one. The first one (0) has been done for you. English is everywhere nowadays. When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the English-speaking world had a population of just eight million. In the 1960s there were about 250 million speakers of English. This has risen to around one and a half billion, including those who speak it as a second or foreign language. But why has it spread so far and wide? The driving force behind the success of English is that people move around much more than they used to. More people than ever leave their home countries to live and work in other parts of the world. Migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers, people travelling on business, international students, peacekeeping troops, aid workers, people visiting friends and family members and of course tourists. And more and more of them speak English – even though on a rather basic level. It is a fact that many non-native speakers use English to communicate. An international study on travel has shown that nearly three quarters of visits were by visitors travelling between non-native speaking countries. That shows that English is a lingua franca, a global language, which is spoken and understood almost everywhere – however basic it may be. In addition, Hollywood, jazz and rock ’n’ roll helped to make English the world language of pop culture – a status the language still has today. The leading American role in science and technology has also given the world the PC, the internet, e-mail, social media and instant messaging, all of which have taken English to every corner of the world. Now whole fields of business (e. g. IT and marketing) are dominated by English terms. The influence of English on other languages is quite strong. Some experts even say that English is responsible for “language death”, for killing off other languages. Five hundred years ago there were about 15,000 languages – now there are around 7,100. However, it is not only the rise of English that has led to this situation. The number of small languages has gone down mainly because the top twelve languages (like English, Chinese and Spanish) that are spoken by 50% of the world population have taken over. English isn’t the only show in town, though. Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and Russian are becoming more and more important. Portuguese is catching up fast, too. This is because large numbers of people use these languages as their second language. If you look at second language users today, we see that English only comes second after Mandarin (Chinese). 1 China India 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 14 The world speaks English Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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