Going Global

Everyone seems to be doing it. Taxi drivers in Beijing  are learning English in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Chile wants to make its 15 million citizens bilingual in Spanish and English within a generation. “Iraqi Kurdistan has had an explosion in English-language studies,” reported The New York Times in 2005. And Mongolia’s former prime minister Tsakhiagiyn Elbegdorj sees English as “a way of opening windows on the wider world”.

The spread of English is both a cause and result of globalization. In his report for the British Council, English Next, David Graddol predicts that “within a few years there could be around 2 billion people learning English” — nearly a third of the world’s population.

Are standard native-speaker models of English still relevant for international business?

But Graddol warns that this trend is “probably not a cause of celebration by native speakers”. In a world in which English becomes a global basic skill, says Graddol, native English-speakers will lose their historic competitive advantage (see Spotlight 8/2006).

Another British language expert, David Crystal , has estimated  that only about a quarter of the 1.5 billion or so people who speak English are native speakers from countries like Australia, Britain or the US. A further quarter are in countries where, for historical reasons, English plays an important role as a second language, such as India, Nigeria and Singapore. The biggest group, however, consists of those who have learned English as a foreign language.

It is also thought that around 80 per cent of the world’s communication in English is between nonnative speakers using the language with each other as a lingua franca rather than with native speakers. If this is true, are the traditional native-speaker models such as British or American English still relevant models for learners?