English, the world’s language

“English would become part of the globalization a part of the globalization”

English is currently considered, one of the most spoken languages for big amount of people around the world, but believe it or not, if we talk about statistics, Chinese and Spanish lead the list of the most spoken languages around the world, placing themselves in the first and second place respectively. And the question that comes to our minds is: How can Chinese and Spanish beat English in the amount of speakers? Everybody knows that learning English is so important to communicate with others, to apply for scholarship, summing up, to get many opportunities. However, English has only about two million native speakers. In the other hand, Chinese placed himself on the top of the list, with 14.1% of the world population , speak it natively, and Spanish trailing the row with 5.85%.So why English is so popular? K. David Harrison, who is a recognized linguistic from United States declared in an interview: “The global share of English is larger if you count second language speakers, and will continue to rise, even as the proportion of native speakers declines” Mr. Harrison said.

So if we count the amount of people who speaks English as their second languages plus the amount who speaks natively, the percentage of English speaker people increases incredibly. I consider that this phenomenon is a part of globalization. English is used in many societies as a standard way of communication. From bank transaction to currency changes are done in English, that´s the reason people want to learn English, they want to be communicated with the world.

By Miluska Andrea Huaman Granilla

Sources:

• ·        Wikipedia contributors (2017). List of  languages by the number of speakers..Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
• ·         Harrison k. David (2000) Linguistics. Recuperado de :http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/dharris2/