English seen as co-star among global languages
"English is likely to remain one of the world's most important languages for the foreseeable future, but its future is more problematic — and complex — than most people appreciate," language researcher David Graddol said.
He sees English as likely to become the "first among equals" rather than having the global field to itself.
"Monolingual speakers of any variety of English — American or British — will experience increasing difficulty in employment and political life, and are likely to become bewildered by many aspects of society and culture around them," Graddol said.
The share of the world's population that speaks English as a native language is decreasing, Graddol reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The idea of English becoming the world language to the exclusion of others "is past its sell-by date," Graddol said. Instead, he said, its major contribution will be in creating generations of bilingual and multilingual speakers.
A multilingual population already is the case in much of the world and is becoming more common in the United States. Indeed, the Census Bureau reported last year that nearly one American in five speaks a language other than English at home, with Spanish leading, and Chinese growing rapidly.
That linguistic diversity, in turn, has helped spark calls to make English the nation's official language.
Yale linguist Stephen Anderson noted that multilingualism is "more or less the natural state. In most of the world multilingualism is the normal condition of people."
"The notion that English shouldn't, needn't and probably won't displace local languages seems natural to me," he said.
While it is important to learn English, he added, politicians and educators need to realize that doesn't mean abandoning the native language.
Graddol, of the British consulting and publishing business The English Company, said he anticipates a world in which the share of people who are native English speakers slips from 9 percent in the mid-20th century to 5 percent in 2050.
As of 1995, he reported, English was the second most common native tongue in the world, trailing only Chinese.
By 2050, he said, Chinese will continue its predominance, with Hindi-Urdu of India and Arabic climbing past English among 15- to 24-year-olds, and Spanish nearly equal to it. Graddol said he focused on the 15- to 24-year-old group in 2050 to give an indication of the future past that point.
Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison noted, however, that "the global share of English is much larger if you count second-language speakers, and will continue to rise, even as the proportion of native speakers declines."
Even as English grows as a second language, it still may not ever be the most widely spoken language in the world, according to Graddol, since so many people are native Chinese speakers and many more are learning it as a second language.
English has become the dominant language of science, with an estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of papers in scientific journals written in English, Scott Montgomery noted in a separate paper in the same issue of Science. That's up from about 60 percent in the 1980s, he observed.
"There is a distinct consciousness in many countries, both developed and developing, about this dominance of English," Montgomery, a Seattle-based geologist and energy consultant, said. "There is some evidence of resistance to it, a desire to change it."
For example, he said, sites in English dominated in the early years of the Internet. In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of non-English sites.
Nonetheless, English is strong as a second language, and teaching it has become a growth industry, Montgomery said.
Graddol noted, though, that employers in parts of Asia already are looking beyond English. "In the next decade the new 'must-learn' language is likely to be Mandarin."
"The world's language system, having evolved over centuries, has reached a point of crisis and is rapidly restructuring," Graddol said. As many as 90 percent of the 6,000 or so languages spoken around the world may be doomed to extinction, he estimated.
Graddol does have words of consolation for those who struggle to master the intricacies of other languages.
"The expectation that someone should always aspire to native-speaker competence when learning a foreign language is under challenge," he said.