The Emergence of Global Languages

Abstract

It is a rather trivial truism to state that English is the leading global language today, by far. This is not a statement which should result in a triumphalist attitude, and it is a fact which clearly also meets with some opposition, predominantly on the side of so-called 'critical' linguists (e.g. Phillipson 1992). However, whether this is perceived as desirable or not, despite some efforts to the contrary and the need to recognize the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity, the pull toward English in many regions and contexts simply cannot be denied. This fact can be documented by various aspects, including speaker numbers, regional distribution patterns, and functional expansions of English, such as its default role as a lingua franca in transnational and intercultural contacts or its leading role in various cultural domains such as cyberspace, media, etc.An obvious initial question is the one for speaker numbers: How many speakers of English are there around the globe today? For reasons to be discussed in a moment, this is actually a more complex question than one would expect at first sight. The most recent reasonable estimate suggests remarkably high figures: Crystal (2008) assumes that by now there are up to 2 billion speakers of English, divided into roughly 370 million native speakers, ca. 500 to 600 million second-language speakers in countries in which English functions as an important second language internally (ESL), and somewhere between 600 million and 1 billion of foreign language speakers in various countries (see also Mair, this volume). What is perhaps even more interesting and suggestive of the ongoing dynamics are two additional points which Crystal (2008) emphasizes. One is the tremendous, almost exponential increase of speaker numbers in the very recent past: within just one generation the proportion of English speakers on a global scale has increased from roughly one fifth to roughly one third of the world's population. Secondly, this rise is not due to changes in native speaker numbers: native speakers of English are outnumbered by about three to four times as many fluent nonnative speakers nowadays.