Question

Why is English a global language? It’s a question that just gets over my head from time to time. Everyone speaks it. Even the Asian countries use it as a secondary language. It’s cool that we decided somehow that English will be the standard of language for everyone. But why did we decide on English as the global language?

Answer 1

English become a global language all thanks to one empire, the British Empire. With all the colonies they set up across the world, be it Asian or Middle-East, English is taught to the natives to ease their communication. Why not learn the native language? Simple really, the English looks down on them and would rather force the natives to learn their language. It is a colony after all, with the British as the master. But yeah, they never really did reinforce that the natives must only learn and speaks in English. English is just used as the language for business and trade. With that, a quarter of the world speaks something that resembles English.

Then we came to the greatest country in the world, the USA. In making it united, being made up of bunches of Europeans who speaks a variety of language, the founders decide on the English as the national language. So once again, English is forced upon those who do not want to learn it in the USA, with banning of teaching of foreign languages. Coincidently, the English language is a language that adopts words from other languages such as Latin, French and German. An empire monopolizes the market and the world, with a language that symbolize unity and learning, then it becomes the national language of the USA. The USA with its huge influence of the world would mean that other country would need to learn English to trade with them.

Answer 2

Why is English a global language is a great question to ask when learning it. So you see, the popularity of Hollywood blockbusters and performing artists of the USA reaches all the corners of the world. Action movies especially are extremely popular in the world market. If an action movie failed to perform in the USA blockbusters, it will return the profit umpteen folds once it is exported to China. It can be said that English is the number one exports of the USA to the global market. Watching English movies leads to people learning English inadvertently or pique their interest. In Asian countries, knowing English can be seen as being more sophisticated. That’s how much power the USA has over the world. Coupled with the fact that English is the language of the internet as well, it is not surprising that English become a must learn language. Due to English being so easy to pick up, you don’t have to learn a million different strokes like Mandarin to learn English. It’s a relatable a language that is easy to access and really popular to learn, so soon enough, the world picks it up as the global language.