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Senior Member
Remember "T Dot"?
Remember "Megacity"?
Remember "Megacity"?
English may be a little too flexible for some in its arcane rules and multiple strange spellings, yet it remains the leader in the West nonetheless. Must have something going for it after all.
As for megacity, I forget how that came about - was that the fruit of amalgamation?
Hell yeah, three cheers for anti-intellectualism.Canadians and Australians should be thankful that because there is a strong economic/military power who shares the same language, they don't need to learn any foreign languages
Agreed that there is nothing intrinsic about the English language which makes it superior to other languages. I was being a bit flippant.
But your contention that we have America to thank for the dominance of English is suspect. Before the US rose to prominence there was this little thing called the British Empire. They colonized extensively and fostered powerful trade mechanisms everywhere they went. England was a great sea power and that's how they extended their influence - all this long before commercial flight. Their language of business was English. America simply took up the torch after England was done.
Next up, perhaps future generations will be speaking Mandarin or Hindu. Who knows? Meanwhile English will be dominant for some time yet.
Sure, there are other excellent reasons why English rose to dominance; trade/business being only one of them. My main point earlier was that the United States is not the reason English is so global in the current era.The dominance of the English language goes beyond it being the language of commerce solely. For those parts of the world that were colonized by Britain, it became the prestige language, the language of government and education. Those who led the struggle for Indian independence were by and large fluent in it, as were those who assumed positions of authority in Kenya, South Africa, Singapore, etc. Eventually, through later American exploits, this also became true of places like the Philippines, South Korea, etc. One of the legacies of two of the world's largest empires has been that people all over the world have one common language - something that no level of economic dominance can easily sideline. Mandarin and Hindi have comparatively little reach or enough prestige outside of their respective countries to make abandoning English as the global language possible. Consider the very history of English itself: it was centuries after the Norman invasion before the language of prestige (then French) was abandoned by the upper classes, and even then Latin and French were essential to a proper education.
Is there another important language as flexible as English ? The English language is so accommodating and plastic, counter to the somewhat classic forms of other notables... well beyond it's Germanic/French roots.
I think the point about English's flexibility is an important one, and does help to explain English's dominance. I think it's the reason English is language of Science.