Not the Queen’s English

The name – Cambridge School of Languages – conjures images of Anglo-Saxon aristocrats conversing in the Queen’s English. But this Cambridge is composed of a few rooms with rickety chairs at the edge of a Delhi suburb. Its rival is not Oxford but the nearby Euro Languages School, where a three-month English course costs $16.

The professors back in Cambridge, England, would no doubt question the schools’ pedagogy. There are few books or tapes. Their teachers pronounce “we” as “ ve ” and “primary” as “ primmry ”. And yet such storefront shops aren’t merely the ragged edge of the massive English learning industry, which in India alone is a $100 million-per-year business. They are the front lines of a global revolution in which hundreds of millions of people are learning English, the planet’s language for commerce, technology – and, increasingly, empowerment. Within a decade, 2 billion people will be studying English and about half the world – some 3 billion people will speak it, according to a recent report from the British Council.

And governments from Tunisia to Turkey are pushing English, recognizing that along with computers and mass migration, the language is the engine of globalization.

Linguistically speaking, it’s a whole new world. Non-native speakers of English now outnumber native speakers 3 to 1, according to English language expert David Crystal, whose numerous books include English as a Global Language. “There’s never before been a language that’s been spoken by more people as a second than a first,” he says. In Asia alone, the number of English users has topped 350 million – roughly the combined populations of the United States, Britain and Canada.

The new English speakers aren’t just passively absorbing the language – they are shaping it. New Englishes are mushrooming the globe over, ranging from “Englog,” spoken in the Philippines, to “Hinglish”, the mix of Hindi and English that now crops up everywhere from fast food ads to South-Asian college campuses. In South Africa, many Blacks have adopted their own version of English, laced with indigenous words, as a sign of freedom – in contrast to Afrikaans, the language of oppression. An Amherst College professor recently finished a translation of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” into Spanglish, the English-Spanish hybrid spoken in the United States and Mexico.

All languages are works in progress. But English’s globalization, unprecedented in the history of languages will revolutionize it in ways we can only begin to imagine. In the future, there could be a tri-English world, one in which you could speak a local English-based dialect at home, a national variety at work or school and international Standard English to talk to foreigners. With native speakers a shrinking minority of the world’s Anglophones, there is a growing sense that students should stop trying to imitate Brighton or Boston English, and embrace their own local versions.

Linguists ask why some Asians, who have trouble pronouncing the “th” sound, should spend hours trying to say “thing” instead of “sing” or “ting”. International pilots, they point out, already pronounce the word “three” as “tree” in radio dispatches, since “tree” is more widely comprehensible.

Indeed, English has become the common linguistic denominator. Whether you’re a Korean executive on business in Shanghai, a German Eurocrat hammering out laws in Brussels or a Brazilian biochemist at a conference in Sweden, you’re probably speaking English. And as the world adopts an international brand of English, it’s native speakers who have the most to lose. Cambridge dons who insist on speaking the Queen’s English could be met with giggles – or blank stares.

To achieve fluency, non-native speakers are learning English at an ever-younger age. The demand for native English-speakers is so huge that China and the Middle East are starting to import English teachers from India. Despite all the new Englishes cropping up, it’s the American and British versions that still carry prestige. “Owning English is very big business.” The average price for a four-day business-English course in London for a French executive runs 2,240 euro.

To see big business in action, one need only walk down London’s busy Oxford Street, where ads offer instant access to the language of success: DOES YOUR ENGLISH EMBARRASS YOU? BUSINESS ENGLISH FOR BEGINNERS; LEARN ENGLISH IN JUST 10 WEEKS! Above clothing stores, English-language schools are packed with eager twenty-somethings from around the world.

Why such enthusiasm? In a word, jobs. A generation ago, only elites like diplomats and CEOs needed English for work. Today, at the new Toyota and Peugeot plant in the Czech Republic, English is the working language of the Japanese, French and Czech staff.

Technology also plays a huge role in English’s global triumph. Eighty percent of the electronically stored information in the world is in English; 66 percent of the world’s scientists read in it. “It’s very important to learn English because computer books are only in English,” says an Uruguayan IT student learning English in London.

In countries like Germany the market for English studies is already shrinking. Most kids begin English as early as the second or third grade and language schools no longer target English beginners but those pursuing more-expert niches: business English, phone manners or English for presentations. Beginning-English classes are filled with immigrants eager to catch up with the natives. As with migrants the world over, they’re finding that their newfound land is an English-speaking one.