Cultural globalisation and languages

The current neoliberal phase of globalisation, and its strong focus on free markets, blah blah blah (you know the story) is often given far more emphasis than cultural globalisation, I feel. I'm quite interested in the linguistic nature of globalisation, and changing perceptions of language, and I feel that how much of the west regards language is changing.
English is a dominant global language, and it seems to be perceived as being somehow better for certain things than other languages. For example, in the sciences and other branches of academia, most journals are in English. Conferences are in English. Many postgraduate researchers function more in English than the local language. This, I believe, represents a shift back to a more colonial mindset, wherein the colonial language (English) is regarded as naturally more suitable for education, administration and so on, while the local language is relegated to a lower stratum.
What are your opinions on this?

Personally, I am against the use of English as the unitary lingua franca. I am not against language learning, but I feel that it is not a reciprocal relationship: continental Europe, Asia etc. are increasingly learning English, while native English speakers - generally - remain complete monoglots, often using the arrogant 'everyone speaks English anyway' excuse. I myself speak (and I am constantly learning) German, and I'm interested in Dutch and French.

I realise the irony of bemoaning the use of English on an English-language forum, on an English-dominated medium (the internet).

 

English is about the worst language on the planet. It has a weak structure. It's a mash of tons of different languages, and doesn't have a strong enough system for it.

Take the word "Acai Berry". How do you say it? Well you say it "Ah-Sai-Eee Berry". It's a Spanish word, yet we are given no clue it is. We don't even translate it phonetically.

We need to use a better developed language for a global one. And switch to the Metric System!

 

English is a good choice for the common language of the world. It is very easy to learn, but quite difficult to master, and if you become proficient it is one of the most effective languages in terms of how descriptive it is.

It is also the most practical language currently. The vast majority of people in wealthy/developed countries speak English, many of them go abroad to teach, and it is the second language of choice virtually worldwide. If the goal was to have everyone in the world speaking one common language as soon as possible, English would be the logical choice if only because of how widespread it is.

I do, however, agree that English speakers - hell, any monolingual person - should learn at least one other language. The understanding of language that comes with speaking more than one is invaluable and can prevent much misunderstanding and miscommunication, especially when speaking with someone who has a different mother tongue. Certain concepts are impossible to communicate in some languages, and realizing that really does grant great understanding for how language and communication works in general.

 

English is only the world's primary language because the Western World rules the world. It's actually one of the harder languages to learn.

All English is is a bad attempt at cramming together many Romance languages and misc. words from other lands. It's by far much easier to speak Spanish or French than English.

 

I beg to differ.
English is very simplistic. For example, Spanish and French both have genderized nouns, English does not. Then the verbs of Spanish are quite challenging. Gaining decent fluency is much easier than with, say, Spanish. It is very hard to truly master, but very easy to learn enough to get by.

Further, with the amount of adjectives in the English language, if you are proficient, you can express yourself and communicate with great efficiency.

As for your final point, well, that is true of many languages. Language is always evolving and changing. To be able to import a word from another language that does a better job of describing/expressing something is a strength, not a weakness.

 

My problem with English is that there are too many exceptions. If we take the word "cafe" (without the accent for example), we wouldn't know whether to say it as "cayfe" or "ca-fay".

When u translate a word to Spanish such as "computer" it's either translated into "computadora" or said "cum-poo-tare" (with Spanish pronunciation).

Defintately nothing wrong with adding words to your cultural dictionary. But English has 100,000 borrowed words and no intrinsic way for you to know how to say em.

Genderized words isn't a complicated concept at all. Some words have "a" or "o" at the end, or "el" and "la" before. I do see your point though.

I still think they should make up a word for "he/she". I never know what to put down when I'm writing about anonymous people in an essay.

 

FUck English, how bout dat? No offense, but it sucks.. I mean just listen, makes me sick to think of speaking English, I would rather dribble Japanese.

I was gonna also say I hate English in some intrinsic fashion, it is indescribable. Almost like the language forces you to be self centered. Blegh. I disaggree with it wholly.

 

English is a horrible language for spelling, and this is coming from a person (myself) that only knows English. I have never been good with spelling because in school there are "rules' about spelling but there are more exceptions to the rules then the number of rules themselves. I do not have as hard of a time with grammar as it is my native language, but it still has some oddball rules. Example : good, better, best. In a proper language it should be good, gooder, goodest. I do really like the fact that there are no gender words for inanimate objects as that makes learning a different language very hard. I always had a hard time with French for that reason along with the fact that French also has almost as many silent letters as English does. All silent letters do is waste peoples time trying to read, and force them to go off memorization, which is harder to do than a set of rules that are steadfast.

English could be a better language, but it would take a major spelling and grammer reform to make it so. It makes it hard for Canadians as the US has done a partial spelling reform, but some of our words have followed the US spelling while others have retained the British spelling. All I can say is that is a good thing that computers have spell check, so most of my spelling does not show how bad I am at spelling. It is much faster than having to look words up all the time in a dictionary, like I needed to do when in high school ( pre-consumer computer boom era).

 

Conforming to one language means loss of native languages, which means loss of culture and history, which sucks.

 

There's nothing wrong with losing culture and history in general, but it is detrimental if that culture and history adds positive value to our lives.

Take words, concepts from old languages, and combine them into the new. Don't be stuck.

 

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