Week 8

When looking for a blog to write about from the Fischbowl, I found this one from the best of 2007, "Is it English as a Second Language World?" I found this article interesting because I always knew that English was a taking a back seat to Spanish, but I never considered any other languages. In this article it says that 50 years ago English was the number one spoken language, except for Mandarin. In just a short amont of time, less than a lifetime, things have changed immensly. Today there are more Spanish and Hindu speakers than English combined! They are now predicting English to fall into fifth place for first languages by the middle of this century, behind Arabic. What would happen if English became an obsolete language? It is not something that could happen anytime soon, but it seems the way things are going it may lead to that one day.
Reading this article made me wonder how teaching English is schools may one day change. Slang is something that it seems to me is changing the language more and more everyday. How do we teach our kids to communicate with the rest of the world? Things are ever changing and how we speak and teach English may change one day as well. He also talks about in his blog native English speakers to non-native English speakers. He says in the article, “the majority of encounters in English today take place between non-native speakers”, and he follows with saying, “relief at the absence of native speakers is common.” Why is that that non native speakers do not like dealing with native English speakers? He also says in the article how he wonders if native speakers will have to soon conform to non native speakers. It is a really good question to ask oneself, it makes me also wonder what is our language going to be like in another 50 years.