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A world language is a language which is found extremely important outside the country or countries where it is spoken as a mother tongue .
This means that when one wants to define a world language, it is not the number of mother tongue speakers, but the extent to which the language is found useful in countries where it is not the first language of the people which is relevant. Different languages have carried the role of a world language during different periods, but today I think that there is only one language which could truly be called so. This language is, and has already for a very long time been English .
English is the main language of world communication. It is the language of international business, diplomacy and mass media, to name but a few. It is a language that a large part of people everywhere around the world have at least some sort of knowledge of .
There are of course other languages entitled to be called world languages. Spanish, for one, is very important in Latin America but little used anywhere else, except for Spain. But at present English is the only language which could be given the role of the world's "first language".
The status English has as one of the main languages of the world today is so strong, that it is difficult to imagine that this has not always been the case. It is even more difficult to imagine that just some hundred years ago it was a language of relatively no importance in the world, not even known outside Europe .
In past times the role of the main world language was carried by other languages, such as Latin and French. Latin was the language of culture and education in the Middle Ages. French was "the" language of the eighteenth century. The status English has acquired today is so dominant that it seems unlikely that the situation could ever change. However, the future of a language cannot be predicted, so it is impossible to say what will be the position of English in a century's time. Maybe some day in the future English will also have transformed into a family of new languages in the same way as Latin did. Latin transformed into the Romance languages less than two thousand years ago. Such develpoment is entirely natural and could very well happen to English .
On the other hand, modern society is so different from the past that the progress of an ancient language such as Latin and a modern one like English cannot be compared. The biggest difference to the past is that when new varieties of English emerge in the English speaking parts of the world, they do not develop in isolation. Different varieties of the language can be heard almost anywhere in the civilized world just by opening up the television or going to the cinema .
English did not become an important world language overnight. As mentioned before, as recently as in the Elizabethan age, it was still a relatively unknown and unvalued language in the world. By the time of the Industrial Revolution the status of English had altered thoroughly. As the power of the British Empire grew, so did the position of English as a world language. The most important step was of course the settlement to North America, which began in the seventeenth century. The population of the country grew rapidly as massive amounts of immigrants arrived there in the following centuries .
The language policy of the country was very strict. For many years there was a condition for immigrants who wanted to become American citizens: they had to pass a demanding examination in the English language .
As America became independent it began to gain more and more economic and political power. The economic and political power of the United States is the most important reason why English is the main world language at the moment. This also explains why it does not seem to have any "competitors".
The American culture and way of life is admired in a lot of countries. Sometimes this admiration has gone so far, that English has even began to have an effect in the country's official language. Most of the time the effect has been on the vocabulary: An English word has supplanted a traditional word of the language in question. The result is that there are now a lot of words of English in origin which are now a part of almost any language's vocabulary. Common examples are words such as cowboy and picnic .
In most of the developed countries the American culture is considered to be so desirable that it has been noticed that if for example a product is given an English name, it will sell more than it would if it were named in the country's own language. Some countries feel that the americanization of their language has gone too far and have decided to do something about it. France has even set up a law which states that whenever a French word exists it must be used instead of an English word or expression. There is even a penalty for those who do not obey the rule!
Whatever other countries and cultures may feel about English, there is strong need for communication at world level. This means that a language which is universally intelligible is needed. The use of an auxiliary language such as Esperanto has been suggested, but without much progress. At the moment English is the only language capable of adopting the role of the main world language. Who knows about the future, but this is the situation today. At the moment there is no other language which could even try to compete with English. There are other languages which are of signifant importance in some parts of the world, but English is the only language people use and have a knowledge of the world over. This is why I think that English is entitled to be called a world language and this is why I also disagree with the subject of this essay. As I have tried to prove, I do not think that English is "increasingly becoming" a world language, but that it is one already .
