Why English Is But Should Not Be the International Language (2/3)
March 6, 2008 – 9:26 pmThere’s nothing linguistically wrong with the English language (well…), and I admit it’s very convenient (for Americans, Brits, and Aussies) that English is so widely used (I myself have been a beneficiary of this global phenomenon), but the prevalence of English is one of the biggest reasons the majority of America’s youth know next to nothing about the outside world. Well, that’s not exactly true. The ignorance is not limited to just that age group. FDR ended American’s age of isolationism more than half a century ago. It’s time Americans did some serious footwork to catch up.
View of Seoul from the 63rd Building, the tallest skyscraper in the South Korean capital.
Maybe traveling by foot would be a little impractical. Studying abroad has become more popular over the years, but the most common destinations are still Britain and Australia. Next in line are Italy, France, and Spain. Granted, it’s some improvement that more students are showing interest in learning Italian, French, and Spanish. But that’s not always the case for students who opt for continental Europe over Britain. You couldn’t live in Rome without speaking Italian, Paris without speaking French, or Seville without speaking Spanish, but English would be arguably enough to get you by for a summer, which is typically the amount of time college undergrads spend abroad before they get back to work on their degrees back in the US in the fall.
Even if American college students stay abroad long enough to understand the language and culture to a modest degree, it is still usually limited to the West. The number of students who choose to study in Africa or Asia over Europe pales in comparison to the number of students who stick to what universities call “traditional countries,” most notably Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of Western Europe (you might be surprised to see that a number of study abroad catalogs actually categorize Australia and New Zealand under “Western Europe”).
But India and China send more students to America for higher education than any other country in the world. This is a severe global cultural imbalance (not unlike the import-export gap America has with China, and look where that’s gotten the US economy).
American movies and TV rule the world. That’s a fact. When was the last time you saw a TV ad or a billboard for a foreign film? Yes, we all know Bollywood, but the Indian actor/character Americans are most familiar with is undoubtedly Apu. Advertisements for Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Fearless have gotten some airtime, but it’s minuscule compared to what any standard American movie gets. Further, even big foreign films have limited releases only. During my time in Sweden, Pirates of the Caribbean II and Superman Returns were playing in major movie theaters whereas domestic Swedish films had posters in alleyways and were played in small movie houses. Let me add that most of them are indies. Friends is insanely popular in France. I know friends who stay up watching 24 in Hong Kong and Japan (or at least they used to…). I myself spent many weeknights watching Family Guy, in the original English (Swedes never dub their imported American TV shows), with fellow international students when we could’ve been exploring the nooks and crannies of Lund, the town we stayed in the south of Sweden.
When I was studying in Sweden, I had the privilege to take an academic trip to Brussels with a number of colleagues. While at a mini-conference with some representatives from the EU Commission, an American student raised her hand and asked, “Is the EU thinking about having a single official language?” The EU now has over 20 official languages, and annual translation costs are over $1 billion USD, so even though her question implied something thoroughly impractical, it did show some concern and deserved some merit, but then she had to say, “Maybe English?”
Actually, in Sweden, many scholarly magazines are published in English instead of Swedish because there isn’t a wide enough audience of Swedish speakers. The Swedes like to export their publications abroad as well. When Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes communicate with each other, although the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish languages are quite similar, they speak in English. Many Scandinavian bands play in English.
