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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: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:53AM (7 children)
but I reckon it's high time the entire world's population spoke one single standard language by default. The hodgepodge of languages that has been our Babel tower for millenia only brought us misunderstanding, hatred and war.
I'm not saying English should be the universal language - although, in many ways, it already is the de-facto default. I'm okay if it's Mandarin, Spanish or Esperanto. But puh-leeze choose one and make it the official compulsory first language everywhere, with the "historical" other languages relegated to second languages the locals can choose to speak between themselves and to amuse the tourists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:55AM
There's first language and there's native tongue. All the countries in the world can decide to swap to English (or whatever language of choice) as their official first language, it still doesn't remove some of the issues around language and opportunity (lack of) as people who still have their native tongue will continue to struggle where it is not English (or whatever language of choice).
Changing native tongue is about changing culture, that requires cultural assimilation... which are typically done via conquest through wars and then subjugating the losing populace to assimilate.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:11AM (1 child)
By that logic the whole world should listen to only yacht rock music, drive Toyota's, use Microsoft Windows OS, and eat a strictly vegetarian diet so we're all on the exact same page. I thought the new zeitgeist was all about diversity these days (e.g. I identify as a Klingon language speaker)?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:41PM
It's only racial/sexual/other identity related diversity that matters, because everyone's equal, but somehow race and sexual identity makes a difference in matters that have nothing to do with race or sex. Or so the neo-Bolshevik Jews and their useful idiots say.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:39PM (1 child)
I don't know, we've got plenty of misunderstanding, hatred, and war even between native English speakers. Might be interesting to do a historic analysis of how bad those have been between same-language groups versus different-language groups, but I suspect there's not actually much difference. The quest for cultural supremacy and power is not going to be quenched by something as simple as being able to understand the insults you're hurling at each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:49AM
They tend to be less bad as you're expecting things to not translate properly between languages. It's why you have your interpreter interpret to your language and not to the other person's language. It greatly cuts down on shenanigans with purposeful mistranslation. But, when you're speaking the same language and things aren't being clearly communicated, that can get very ugly as all parties involved are supposed to agree about what the language means, but that doesn't always happen.
That's not to say that there haven't been major problems between speakers of different languages, just that they are more likely to be caught as it's expected that some concepts and words won't translate well.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:20PM
Not sure I'm keen on the compulsion bit. Not that it would work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:23AM
Perhaps we need a global *second* language, the first languages being whatever children earn at home from their parents and friends.
English is starting to take on that role.
For common regional languages we've had several in the past.
Latin was one in Europe.
Sanskrit was one in India. The important Sanskrit literature was written when it was everyone's second language, at a time when there were no longer any native speakers. If you wanted to communicate with people in the next kingdom over, you and they learned Sanskrit.
-- hendrik