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The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.
Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.
But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.
This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.
[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:39AM (9 children)
Based on a sample of 17 languages, it looks like human languages have optimized at a bit rate of around 39.15 bits per second [sciencemag.org]. Those with more complex syllables are used more slowly. Also, what those bits are used for is a different matter and much depends on what the language is using each of its 39.15 bits (per second) for. It has otherwise long been acknowledged that some languages are more precise [theatlantic.com], such as Ithkuil (not in that study), and others, such as Mandarin, less so and depend more on context.
What English has going for it, is that it is the language of ICT. Without ICT, you aren't going anywhere these days, so English comes along for the ride so to speak. If usage remained within the domain and the local languages were used for everything else, then it would not be much of an issue. However, that is not the case.
A problem there is that is because English then has an outsized influence on the way of thinking, younger generations start to speak a creole or pidgin instead of their own native language. The problem quickly becomes political when you look at the centralized control over the content and style of popular films [axios.com], music, and literature produced in English. Whichever interest controls the production and / or distribution of said works controls the behavior of coming generations. We've seen it for decades already. Look at the attitudes, values, and mores which have become mainstreamed over the last half century or so mostly through shoehorning into nearly every last US-produced television show or movie.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:20PM (4 children)
ICT?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:33PM (1 child)
Ice Cream.... no, I got nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:31PM
Toupe
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:10AM (1 child)
Information and COmmunications Technology. I googled it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:20AM
Good for admitting that instead of pretending to be a know-it-all like too many others would.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:59PM (3 children)
The theoretical bandwidth measurement doesn't take into account all the context, though. Japanese, for example, can in spoken form omit something like 2/3 of what you'd think would be a full sentence and still be perfectly understandable due to context and the previous sentence(s). The structure itself is a fairly simple SOV word-order one with particles (wa, o, e, ni) and the conjugation of verbs is agglutinative; pick a root and change the stem based on tense, negation, etc. It's all the more subtle things like tone of voice, choice of pronouns for speaker and recipient, politeness levels, and so on where things get seriously complicated.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:36PM (2 children)
You can do that in English too. There are many spoken conversations that would be very hard to render coherently in written form. Vernacular usage is unrelated to the ease of use a language has for international communication though - everyone there is going to be doing it "by the book".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:30AM (1 child)
Why use lot word few do trick? Sho' Eng. g'd 'nuff tokkin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @03:40PM
Mostly for clarity and reliability. The fewer words you use the more you have to count on subtext and agreements in order to be understood and the less flexibility you have. Sure, we could ditch the word "the" in English and generally be understood, but there are times when the difference between "the Whitehouse" and "a white house is important. Simply uttering "Whitehouse" would not indicate which one and you'd have to make assumptions about which one it is. If you're in D.C. then it could be either one, you wouldn't really know without more information.
We could also ditch some of our color words as well, some languages don't have a word to describe the color of the ocean and English lacks a few color words that other languages have as well. We've added a crapton of them for paint, but they're not really used by people that aren't involved in painting and probably just as widely available in other languages.