Author: igamenir
Written: October 17, 2006
In today’s world, English is the most often spoken language in the world. About 400 million people speak English as a primary language and almost 2 billion people, that means every third human, know at least the basics.
English is used as an international communication language in many organization and services, e.g. air traffic, as well as in tourism. English speaking employees became essential for restaurants, hotels, museum, travel agencies and shops. Learning English is supported in all countries, that don’t want to be left behind in the international business.
Because of that, English vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar are under great stress from non-native speaker. Many of them are not able to completely forget about their native language grammar and they usually use words of another meaning or in incorrect order. Terms like Spanglish, Czenglish and Engrish describing these pidgins became very common. Some people even don’t want to master English language anymore, because they know others can understand their pidgins.
But in the countries where English is a mother tongue, there are differences. Everyone knows about significant differences between American and British English. There are some different words and mainly, American doesn’t bother with difficult grammar, e.g. past perfect tenses. But you should know that there are groups like Australian English, South America English, East Asia English and much more. Each of this type summaries the main characteristics of local English grammar and vocabulary and there are many dialects, which differ in smaller or larger way.
It’s understandable, that linguists from England don’t like spoiling of their language and call for some action. But if you carefully look at language of England, you will notice, the language is not uniform there either. The Englanders use about thirty local dialects and only small part of people from there knows the proper Queen’s English (also knows as BBC English, because the Queen and BBC station are expected to use it).
And would happen if French linguists or German linguists don’t want their language to be used in no way against their grammar rules? The origin of English language is in mixture of this two and many other languages after all. In that case, the English would completely disappear. And the world would collapse, because it became dependent on English communication.
So linguist of England can say whatever they want. No one cares about some old man’s opinion. There’s no way it will ever happened that all the dialects and pidgins disappear. It doesn’t matter if it is a legacy of Babylon Tower or some social rule. There will always be many different languages and even more dialects. The most important thing is people understand each other and the world prosper greatly.