Hey there my friend! I hope you're doing well, because we have a long journey. We will go to different places and explore the depths of World Englishes. C'mon let's go!

Let's start with the Introduction to Global Englishes.

From 17th century to twenty-first century, the number of speakers of English increased from a mere five to seven million to possibly as many as two billion.

There are approximately seventy-five territories where English is spoken either as a first language, or as an official second language in fields such as government, law, and education. These speakers constitute almost a third of the total population of the above territories.

Look at this meadow. It is very beautiful don't you think? It is called, Who speaks English today?

The spread of English around the world is often discussed in terms of three distinct groups of users, those who speak English respectively as:

a native language (ENL)

a second language (ESL)

a foreign language (EFL). 

And a fourth group of users, namely those who speak English as:

a lingua franca (ELF).

Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca, who use English for intercultural communication, are now arguably the world’s largest English-using group.

Wow! This place is very cold! But, hey, we are exploring right? This place is called The difference between ENL, ESL, EFL and ELF

English as a Native Language (ENL), or English as a mother tongue as it is sometimes called, is the language of those born and raised in one of the countries where English is historically the first language to be spoken. As “the traditional cultural and linguistic bases of English”.

English as a Second Language (ESL) refers to the language spoken in a large number of territories such as India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Singapore, which were once colonised by the English.

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is the English of those whose countries were never colonised by the British, and for whom English serves little or no purpose within their own borders. They typically learned the language in order to use it with its native speakers in the US and UK, though this is no longer necessarily the case. 

Look at this lovely village! You know where we are? What is a global language? Village.

 A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country. Such a role will be most evident in countries where large numbers of the people speak the language as a mother tongue. To achieve such a status, a language has to be taken up by other countries around the world. They must decide to give it a special place within their communities.

There are two main ways in which this can be done. Firstly, a language can be made the official language of a country, to be used as a medium of communication in such domains as government, the law courts, the media, and the educational system.

Secondly, a language can be made a priority in a country’s foreign-language teaching, even though this language has no official status. It becomes the language which children are most likely to be taught when they arrive in school, and the one most available to adults who – for whatever reason – never learned it, or learned it badly, in their early educational years. English is now the language most widely taught as a foreign language and in most of countries, it is emerging as the chief foreign language to be encountered in schools, often displacing another language in the process.

I have never seen a beautiful village like this. I think it is cutter than the other one. This village is called What makes a global language?

Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it. It is much more to do with who those speakers are. Latin became an international language throughout the Roman Empire, but this was not because the Romans were more numerous than the peoples they subjugated. They were simply more powerful. And later, when Roman military power declined, Latin remained for a millennium as the international language of education, thanks to a different sort of power – the ecclesiastical power of Roman Catholicism.

There is the closest of links between language dominance and economic, technological, and cultural power, too, and this relationship will become increasingly clear as the history of English is told. Without a strong power-base, of whatever kind, no language can make progress as an international medium of communication.

Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and French are among those which at various times have been lauded in such terms, and English is no exception. It is often suggested, for example, that there must be something inherently beautiful or logical about the structure of English, in order to explain why it is now so widely used. ‘It has less grammar than other languages’, some have suggested. ‘English doesn’t have a lot of endings on its words, nor do we have to remember the difference between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, so it must be easier to learn’.

Such arguments are misconceived. Latin was once a major international language, despite its many inflectional endings and gender differences. French, too, has been such a language, despite its nouns being masculine or feminine; and so – at different times and places – have the heavily inflected Greek, Arabic, Spanish and Russian. Ease of learning has nothing to do with it. From a lexical point of view, English is in fact far more a Romance than a Germanic language.

A language has traditionally become an international language for one chief reason: the power of its people – especially their political and military power.  Why did Greek become a language of international communication in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago? Not because of the intellects of Plato and Aristotle: the answer lies in the swords and spears wielded by the armies of Alexander the Great.

But international language dominance is not solely the result of military might. It may take a militarily powerful nation to establish a language, but it takes an economically powerful one to maintain and expand it. With economic developments beginning to operate on a global scale, supported by the new communication technologies and fostering the emergence of massive multinational organizations. 

Any language at the centre of such an explosion of international activity would suddenly have found itself with a global status. And English, was apparently ‘in the right place at the right time’.

Look at this impregnable waves! We came to Why do we need a global language? Ocean

Translation has played a central role in human interaction for thousands of years. When monarchs or ambassadors met on the international stage, there would invariably be interpreters present.

The problem has traditionally been solved by finding a language to act as a lingua franca, or ‘common language’. Sometimes, when communities begin to trade with each other, they communicate by adopting a simplified language. But most often, a language is accepted from outside the community, such as English or French, because of the political, economic, or religious influence of a foreign power.

The prospect that a lingua franca might be needed for the whole world is something which has emerged strongly only in the twentieth century, and since the 1950s in particular.

The pressure to adopt a single lingua franca, to facilitate communication in such contexts, is considerable, the alternative being expensive and impracticable multi-way translation facilities.

There is now a widespread view that it makes sense to try to reduce the numbers of languages involved in world bodies, if only to cut down on the vast amount of interpretation/translation and clerical work required. Half the budget of an international organization can easily get swallowed up in translation costs.

It is certain that there has never been a time when so many nations were in need to talk to each other so much. There has never been a time when so many people wished to travel to so many places. There has never been such a strain placed on the conventional resources of translating and interpreting. And never has there been a more urgent need for a global language.

Poor warship... It is being tugged by a little boat compared to him. You know what is the name of the ship? It is What are the dangers of a global language?

Perhaps the presence of a global language will make people lazy about learning other languages, or reduce their opportunities to do so. Perhaps a global language will hasten the disappearance of minority languages, or – the ultimate threat – make all other languages unnecessary.

It is important to face up to these fears, and to recognize that they are widely held. There are many who think that all language learning is a waste of time. And many more who see nothing wrong with the vision that a world with just one language in it would be a very good thing. For some, such a world would be one of unity and peace, with all misunderstanding washed away.

The use of a single language by a community is no guarantee of social harmony or mutual understanding, as has been repeatedly seen in world history (e.g. the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War); nor does the presence of more than one language within a community necessitate civil strife, as seen in several successful examples of peaceful multilingual coexistence (e.g. Finland, Singapore, Switzerland)

It is possible that senior managers who do not have English as a mother tongue, and who find themselves working for English-language companies in such parts of the world as Europe or Africa, could find themselves at a disadvantage compared with their mother-tongue colleagues, especially when meetings involve the use of informal speech.

However, if proper attention is paid to the question of language learning, the problem of disadvantage dramatically diminishes. If a global language is taught early enough, from the time that children begin their full-time education, and if it is maintained continuously and resourced well, we can easily remove this disadvantage.

British or American tourist who travels the world assuming that everyone speaks English, and that it is somehow the fault of the local people if they do not. There seems already to be a genuine, widespread lack of motivation to learn other languages, fuelled partly by lack of money and opportunity, but also by lack of interest.

‘I’m no good at languages’ is probably the most widely heard apology for not making any effort at all to acquire even a basic knowledge of a new language.

These days, there are clear signs of growing awareness, within English-speaking communities, of the need to break away from the traditional monolingual bias. At least at the levels of business and industry, many firms have begun to make fresh efforts in this direction.

Language attitudes are changing all the time, and more and more people are discovering, to their great delight, that they are not at all bad at picking up a foreign language.

The processes of language domination and loss have been known throughout linguistic history, and exist independently of the emergence of a global language. No one knows how many languages have died since humans became able to speak, but it must be thousands. In many of these cases, the death has been caused by an ethnic group coming to be assimilated within a more dominant society, and adopting its language.

When a language dies, so much is lost. Especially in languages which have never been written down, or which have been written down only recently, language is the repository of the history of a people.

In recent years, one of the healthiest languages, French, has tried to protect itself by law against what is widely perceived to be the malign influence of English: in official contexts, it is now illegal to use an English word where a French word already exists.

Finally we landed to the ground, and look! The people are waiting for us. We came to Could anything stop a global language? Port.

The short answer must be ‘yes’. If language dominance is a matter of political and especially economic influence, then a revolution in the balance of global power could have consequences for the choice of global language.

A rather more plausible scenario is that an alternative method of communication could emerge which would eliminate the need for a global language. The chief candidate here is automatic translation (‘machine translation’). If progress in this domain continues to be as rapid as it has been in the past decade, there is a distinct possibility that, within a generation or two, it will be routine for people to communicate with each other directly, using their first languages, with a computer ‘taking the strain’ between them.

As translation software is currently very limited in its ability to handle idiomatic, stylistic, and several other linguistic features; the machines are nowhere near replacing their human counterparts. The accuracy and speed of real-time automatic translation is undoubtedly going to improve dramatically in the next twenty-five to fifty years, but it is going to take much longer before this medium becomes so globally widespread and so economically accessible to all.

Look at this cute garden. This garden answers to the ones who in need of great explanation. And we will listen to the answer of Why English is a global language?

English is a global language because of the things that speakers of this language had accomplished big things. Colonizing the areas which they migrated and building settlements increased the amount of people who speak English. With trading, they became a massive power and UK started the Industrial Revolution. Science followed this development and with the World War I, USA became a prominent power in English language. The entertainment industry in USA influenced many other countries and English became a global language eventually. Many movies we watch, many songs we listen, many books and articles we read; most of them are created or translated in English. So the short answer is being in the right place, at the right time.

Wow! After we took our answer, the garden sent us to the bottom of the ocean. I think we still have to continue to explore.

Look! There is a cave! And there is a name on top of it. It says 

Models and Description of the Spread of English

There are some basic models which most of the scholars accepts. These are:

Strevens (1980): World map of English

Kachru (1985/1988): Three-circle model of World Englishes

McArthur (1987): Circle of World English

Görlach (1988): Circle model of English

Modiano (1999): The centripetal circles of international English

The oldest model of the spread of English is that of Strevens. His world map of English first published in 1980, shows a map of the world on which is superimposed an upside-down tree diagram demonstrating the way in which, since American English became a separate variety from British English, all subsequent Englishes have had affinities with either one or the other.

Look I found the map! I wonder how it is not wet at the bottom of the ocean... And how I am breathing under the ocean?