The future of English

We often think about, “When did English originated?” or “How was English made?”. Well, we
can get the answers by simply searching it up online. But how about this, “What will be the
future of the English language?” It more interesting because when you try to search it online, it
wouldn’t give you an specific answer but would rather give you predictions because we are
talking about the future.

Honestly speaking, we actually have no idea of what will happen like how people million or
thousand years ago had no idea that Latin will die, well it didn’t literally died since there are lots
of words today that came from Latin words but there is no one who uses Latin fluently or uses it
as their official language or when having a conversation.

So what will be the future of English? Will it continue to be the Lingua Franca that we all use to
be able to communicate to each other despite the nationality? Or can it be replaced by another
language? Or it will meet the same fate like what happened to Latin?

According to David Crystal, a British linguist, to ask about the future of language is to ask about
the future of society. Now let us focus on English. We all know that ENglish is a global language
or the lingua franca that we all use, and it becomes global for only one main reason and that is
the power of the people who uses it. It’s not only the british people, the australian and
americans who uses English but also other countries like India, Philippines, Africa and a lot
more that’s why we have tons of English varieties.

Let’s try to talk about what might be the impact of the internet to the future of english. When the
internet was invented, the first language used was mostly English, well since the internet was
created by american computer scientists. So by that time, probably only countries who uses
English as their official language are the ones who can easily use the internet. But what about
now? When a korean searches something in the internet, everything that will pop out is all
translated to korean. There are tons of blogs in the internet that weren’t typed in english. As of
today, it doesnt really matter anymore if you search the internet even without knowing how to
speak, write or read in english because the internet became multilingual.

Next is that will English stay as a global language? It might or it might not. We are going to talk
about now the power of a nation. If the powerful nations, like America, would still continue to use
English then all of the other nations will also use it too. Let’s say for example is China or India,
they are the top rice-producing country in the world and they want to sell their products to
America since America is powerful and also contains billions of people. They need to learn
English in order to communicate with America so that they can sell their products. Another
reason is like for example the Philippines or the Filipinos wants to interact with Americans so
they need to learn English for this to happen. (another example are ofw’s)

Moving on, Can english be replaced as a global language? Yes it can. Since the American
nation or the United states that uses the American English is considered the powerful country in
the world, what if the power of america diminishes? Then the second most powerful country,
which is China, might create a global spread of their language and eventually it might turn up to
be the next lingua franca. The power of China will grow together with the Chinese language. It
could be Spanish since its the fastest growing language in the world and it is also being used in
some places in south and central america and also being taught in north america.

Let us now proceed with what David Graddol, a british language scholar, about the future of
English. He pointed out that English would probably drop in dominance in rank. He said that the
people who uses Englsih as their second language have surpassed the number of native
English speakers. "We have grown up with the idea of dominance meaning that a
language actually pushes out other languages and takes over the world. That's not
actually what seems to be happening. Precisely because people are learning English as a
second language, they are not actually giving up their first languages. They are becoming
bilingual or multilingual. So the spread of English around the world is actually creating
a greatly increased bilingualism and multilingualism," he says. So this will put native
english speakers at a competitive disadvantage. In today’s generation, we all know how
powerful and influential a person if they know how to communicate in different
languages.

So now let’s go back again to Technology and how can it possibly overtake the position
of english as the lingua franca. According to the leading linguist Nicolas Ostler, he stated
that ENglish will follow the same fate as Sanskrit, Persia, Greek and Latin, which is
those languages dies. The English language would not be replaced as a lingua franca
because humans would no longer need a dominant world language in order to
communicate with each other because of machine translations. Dr. Ostler said: “The
most plausible future for English is it will continue to be spoken as a mother tongue (in
English-speaking nations) but its position as lingua franca will be overtaken by
technology as more and more people live their lives electronically.”