English Language

English language is a truly global language as it has been used by up to four hundred million people around the world who speak English as the first language and most of those people live in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the ‘Western offshoots’. Furthermore, English is also used by up to a billion others including a large numbers of people in India and China as a second language. In the last century, English language has continued to grow with the rise to global pre-eminence of the United States. Originally spread across the British Empire. At the United Nations, in the European Union, and the Commonwealth, English is an official language and also used in many cases when seeing the face of globalization for the first time of people, they usually use English to communicate each other. The impression is stronger still measured in terms of media rather than people. You can see that there are numerous websites on the internet where use English on their web boards. Moreover, in certain areas like an international science publishing, there is currently something like an English language monopoly.

 

English is not governed or regulated by a single or central authority, unlike some other languages. From time to time, we can look something up in a good dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary which is a good choice for the writers, the speakers, and the readers. Certainly that what we consider to be a good or authoritative dictionary include a matter of choice, though we make it with the force of tradition, convention, and habit behind us.

 

Similar to any evolving language, English language is alive. It is not coordinated or controlled. You can found that at the major English language dictionaries around the world, the job of the editors is to recognize which words in the lexicon have currency, not to tell you which one should be used or how they should be used. It means the way to use English and varieties of English are depending on the communities using the language. According to this fact, it is not surprising that there are huge numbers of varieties of English produced by hundred numbers of diverse communities around the world. Then, they are diffused English speaking population.

 

Some varieties of English are constructed and quite deliberately with a purpose in mind. For instant, ‘Basic English’ is a cut-down version of the English language in order to get an easy learning for the beginners and also helpful to minimize the potential for misunderstanding between international speakers. However, most varieties of English are according to the behavior of one English language community or other as we know there is the difference between American English or US English and British English or UK English. Not only be like that, English language used by people in the same country who live in different region or city can vary greatly from one location to the next too. This make us difficult to understand when communicate with people who use English in ways quite native.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Writing and Speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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