There was an interesting back and forth Twitter discussion between Gary @EverywhereTrip and Soultravelers3 @Soultravelers3 yesterday about languages, specifically English. It began somewhere with Gary’s statement that “English has become pretty universal.”
The conversation is good and raises a good question. Follow some of the highlights from the conversation below and add your opinion in the poll below.
Language has brought up some lively conversations in the comments here too and I’d really like to hear your opinions. I’ll be posting my take on the question a week from today when I have the results from the poll and hopefully some comments from you all as well.
I would say Yes English is the Universal language. Most countries teach English in their schools. I can tell you, most of the people I know that live in Brazil are attempting to learn English, or already have learned English as a second language, as it is an incredible asset to have.
I think most countries around the world teach English in primary school, if not beyond. Many students are given a choice but I think the overwhelming majority choose English.
It’s certainly a useful language to know but does teaching it make it universal or is it taught because it is universal? Ah-ha, chicken and egg question.
I would go with “taught because it is universal”, and because knowing the language will get you farther in your career.
Good point. As Gary points out, it is the international language of business.
It is true it is taught, but is it really learned? Much depends on where you are and how much you need the language. It is taught in Spain, yet very few in Spain are fluent AT ALL in English.
Why? The same reason very few American’s or Brits or South American’s speak a second language. If you do not NEED to learn one, few really do. If you speak a dominant language, you are less motivated to learn another.
Even in heavy touristed areas of southern Spain ( that get MOSTLY UK tourists….so you’d think there would be motivation) and even in California or Texas where there are very high populations of native Spanish speakers ( so again a great motivation).
We have friends who own 2 tourist restaurants right on the beach of Costa del Sol which primarily gets UK ( or Netherland or Scandinavian) English speaking tourists.
They are Spanish ( she is from Argentina but he was born & raised in Andalusia) and would like to hire Spaniards, but they can not find any that speak English! Everyone who works for them is from a different country and speaks English as a second language!
The only person that I have met in our village who speaks some decent English ( but not really fluent) is one person that works at the school and one person who was in real estate.
I have been to 2 hospitals ( 1 major) here and just one doctor spoke a tiny bit of English, no dentists but expat dentists( speak English ( Danish/Swedish did…Argentine one a little) etc.
So it is not just uneducated people. The same is true in America. Many very educated people only speak one language.
So you can teach it in schools, but is it learned? ONLY in places where there is very high motivation!
True, learning anything is much improved by personal motivation. Perhaps there is more to teaching a language than inside of schools. Much like in Sweden where all of their shows are sub-titled rather than voiced over (there are a few other ‘outside of school’ differences I don’t recall here – Swedes please chime in 😉
It also depends on how the language is taught (i.e. the teaching methods) and of course the student.
Sure, there are lots of ways to encourage it and listening to music in the 2nd language or watching shows with subtitles is certainly a help. Any kind of daily immersion helps.
BUT the reason why Swedes, Netherlands ( & perhaps Turkey and other countries) are more motivated ( and have motivated parents that want the kids to be at least bilingual) is because they have native tongues that are not dominant languages today.
A person in the UK/US can do more with their one language. A person in Spain, or Mexico or South America can do international business and go far without ever learning another language. I imagine this is true for Mandarin speakers and others, but no less about them.
A person in France or Portugal can also do international business without learning a second language. It is just as easy to go from German to English, but one finds MUCH less who do it in Germany than Scandinavia or Netherlands. I don’t think it is the schooling as much as the motivation and size of the countries.
So need and motivation plays a huge role from what I have observed. Scandinavians see that English is a great advantage to them, but they are still much more comfortable in their native tongue and they usually will not talk in English unless they have to.( Typical of all people….we are most comfortable in our most used language).
Most Dutch, speak English well, but are always so happy to speak in Dutch. We have Dutch plates on our RV so we see this constantly as they always come up to us speaking Dutch. Often times, they speak several languages well, partially by the location of their country.
My Swedish friend bought all the Harry Potter books in English because she could not wait until they were translated and she speaks English well. BUT, she also bought them in Swedish as soon as they were translated and enjoyed them more that way.
If one has a native tongue that is not a dominant language, one is much more motivated to really learn a language in depth because it often brings more success and opens more doors.
As you can see, I could talk about languages for ever. Now back to packing for our 7 months of traveling! 😉
Hey Anil,
I just wanted to make clear that my argument isn’t that it’s not great to have English as a second language or that it is not the universal language.
Often it IS, especially for tourists who stay in hotels on tourist trails. I think tourists in Asia are even more aware of that.
What got me into the discussion was @everywheretrip’s statement:
“It really isn’t an issue in most countries.”
I can see how that can be true for him as his travels have been mainly in Asia while staying in hotels or hostels.
We have been traveling the world as a family since 2006, on 4 continents in 29 countries ( & I have done extensive travel all my life before this).
So I answered:
U said “It really isn’t an issue in most countries.” Often it IS, in my experience of travel
And
“When you do extensive travel in rural Europe & S. America, you will have a very different opinion/experience ”
Yes, English is definitely an important language to have and it will help one go far. Gary has very little experience in Europe as he has just arrived on this continent & has been totally on the most touristed American style trail ( hotels in Rome & Florence for a few days).
Our perspective is coming from a very different place, so I advise those who want to immerse more deeply, to add a second dominant language to make things easier. We will work on our 3rd ( Mandarin) when in that area.
We have primarily been in Europe, only took one long flight in 21/2 years & have traveled over 76,000 miles, ( most over land) using every means of transportation like cargo ships, mass transit, biking,horses,sailboats, camels, ferrys, trains, buses, etc.
We immerse very deeply, often staying for a month or more in places & have wintered in a tiny 15th century village in Spain for 5 months for the last 3 winters, where our child goes to the local school, takes flamenco lessons & we participate in all the festivals.
Gary has seen 31 of Hillman’s Top World Wonders, I have seen 51.He travels as a single, we travel as a family. So we have very different travel experiences and perspectives.
I am not saying that English is not the Universal language. I am saying that there are many places that it will do you no good what so ever, especially if you want a more authentic experience away from hotels/hostels and major tourist tracks. Many other travelers chimed in with similar perspectives.
It has been VERY helpful for us to have a 2nd major language. Spanish is particularly useful as it is close enough to Italian and Portuguese that it’s been very helpful for us there as well as other places where people do not know English, but may know Spanish as a 2nd language.
Our French and German are poor, so we can really tell the difference when we have to rely almost entirely on English in places like France, Germany and Morocco. Yes, it can be done, but it’s much harder.It is really nice to be able to talk to people in one of THEIR languages & gives a special perspective.
I’m also not as convinced that English will remain the global language forever, as he seems to be. Mandarin and Hindi are much more widely spoken and will continue to grow in popularity as will Spanish and Arabic.
The dominant Universal language is usually about how powerful one country is. Just due to demographics ( not to mention debt!) this is changing as US/UK decline and China/India/Brazil etc rise.
Nobody knows exactly how this will unfold in the future, but it does seem clear that those who only speak English will be at a disadvantage. That is why we raised our child from birth as a trilingual in Spanish/Mandarin Chinese and English. I think one gets much more of a global perspective and understand people and different cultures through language.
I’m not saying everyone must learn another language to travel. I do think one can get much more out of it, if you do speak more than one, especially if one of them is a dominant universal language. It is also easier to travel if you have more than one language. I learn a lot by observing my child in our travels who is much more fluent than I am.
Yes, one can get by traveling with just English, but if one goes off the beaten tourist path & outside of major cities ( even in Europe in countries like Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, plus Morocco and South America, Central America, Mexico etc) it WILL be “an issue”.
Gary said only a farmer in Spain does not know English, when the truth of the matter is MOST of the educated people in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal etc are not fluent in English. Just like in US/UK many study them in school, but few actually can speak them, nor do speak them unless they have to. I think many American’s assume that everyone in Europe will speak English like they do in Scandinavia or the Netherlands. Just not true! Even in countries where it is widely spoken, most are much more dominant in their native tongue & prefer books, movies etc in that.
It is really just human nature ( for most), not to learn another language unless one has to and speak/read in ones native tongue or what one has grown most accustomed to. Stretching out in the language area can add so much to a journey and help with connecting/respecting/understanding other cultures.
Personally, I think all kids should be raised as bilinguals from birth and all schools should teach bilingually ( especially in major languages). One of the reason’s I love being in Europe, is it is a place where one can see first hand, the importance of language.
My daughter can see first hand that the expat kid who speaks 4 languages, has an advantage over the Spanish kids who struggle trying to learn English basics ( just as the US kids struggle with their language studies in school). She also understands what it is like to have her dominant language NOT be the dominant language of the country she is going to school in. She see’s how being a fluent bilingual ( who reads, rights, speaks & thinks in 2 languages) helps her in many ways as we travel.
If one wants more out of ones travels, if one wants to go off the tourist trail,I think having more than one language is a big advantage.
No one was right or wrong in our discussion by the way, just lots of different folks having fun discussing language and travel from different perspectives.
I think the discussion has been very thought provoking and you mention many good points and bring up great questions that I’m not sure there are a definite answer to. The original point “It really isn’t an issue in most countries” opened up a great discussion about languages – something many travelers talk a lot about but don’t actually spend the time learning.
Perhaps a better question would have been, do you really need to learn another language (other than English)?
You experiences and Gary’s travels differ in a number of ways and I’m sure that this influences your thoughts on how important English is to the traveler. It’s based on where you go and I suspect that the further you are from major cities, the less English is spoken (true for most countries, that is).
Re: “Perhaps a better question would have been, do you really need to learn another language (other than English)? ”
The answer still depends on WHERE you are going & HOW You want to travel & What experience are you looking for.
If you are doing extensive travel off the tourist path in most of Europe, South America, etc English alone will be difficult and will not allow you to connect deeply.
Yes, the people may study English in school, but in large monolingual countries, there are few places to practice and one only gets better at a language by using it.
I always got top grades in language and know people who got A’s in college in their 2nd language and can not speak it! Just because people study a language, does not mean they speak it or can use it effectively.
If you get away from tourist folks trained to talk it to English speaking customers, it will not be easy.
You are right, out side of cities ( and even in many European cities of every large country) few people have need to use a second language, so very few, if any do. I’ve always found rural areas and small villages to be a much more authentic experience in travel & it is certainly much more compatible as a family. I feel one gets more to the heart of the people and sharing a language helps even more.
We almost never stay in hotels, only stayed in one hostel so far, almost never take a plane, so that does affect our impressions. We like to travel like the locals and with the locals often in mass transit, trains, buses or on the road with our small RV.
We do go to cities for their cultural interests, but often will stay in more rural suburban outskirts even then & take the train/bus in with the commuters. Concrete jungles are not the best environment for a child, so we prefer to stay near nature. Even when we are in a city, like Paris, we stayed in a campsite in one of the largest parks there.
We cook most of our own food, so we shop with locals. We do go out to restaurants, but certainly not for every meal.Just going to markets & finding food is often a wonderful cultural experience! Being able to communicate, helps tremendously ( often there are no English menus ).
All the kids in our village in Spain study English, but they can not speak it any better than their American counterparts can speak the Spanish that they learn in school!! They might know their colors and counting to 10, but that is about all they will retain because they don’t use the language.
It takes practice to keep a language up. Many of the English expats here lose their mother tongue, just as many Mexican expats in America lose theirs or become receptive at best. One must USE languages if you don’t want to lose them.
If you are in a tourist area and go to a tourist restaurant, you will probably find some people who speak some English. BUT, if you want to see something special where there are very few UK or American tourists who visit it, English will do you absolutely no good.
People tend to learn only what they have to learn. In large countries that have large areas where they have no need to learn English, they don’t! We winter in a highly touristy area ( in summer high season,not winter) where the primary tourist is from UK ( they come for sun). Even with that, almost NONE of the locals speak ANY English!
Re: “The answer still depends on WHERE you are going & HOW You want to travel & What experience are you looking for.”
I completely agree. I am curious to see how English permeates (or doesn’t) further into different societies over the next few decades. English may not remain dominant, but it has the huge advantage of being the language of business and the Internet.
And you’re right that you must speak a language to effectively learn and retain it. I’m finding it difficult to keep up with my French, but am confident that I’d pick it up and get the flow of speaking if immersed in it again.
That’s why I find immersion classes, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone so effective. They force you to speak the language and not just memorize words. Learning the culture helps you to learn the language and learning the language helps you to understand the culture.
But I do think that if you were an alien and could only learn one language before your visit to Earth, it would have to be English. That’s what makes it universal. Although, as I’ve mentioned, languages are integral to the cultures they are used by and change based on them and visa-versa.
Hi Anil,
Regardless of how convenient or acceptable English has become, it can never substitute the local language. If you want to travel with what I call ‘an American mindset’, fine, go ahead with english, live in touristic areas, show off pictures and get annoyed with people who don’t speak english. (I think you wrote a post about this too?)
But learning languages is a personal quest. I have made a resolve not to travel to a country without knowing either its first or second language. I can so far speak 3 Indian and 3 foreign languages and english, but I will learn Turkish before going to Turkey! It need not be perfect, but should be sufficient. This might sound too much and I am not saying it is THE way to go, but this is just something that I have decided to do because I have an inherent love for languages and travel. 🙂
Therefore I overwhelmingly agree with soultraveler3.
cheers, Priyank
I think it goes without saying that knowing a local language is better than not knowing it. That is like saying good communication is better than bad communication.
Knowing more than 2 or 3 languages isn’t an option for most people.
There are over 10,000 languages and dialects in the world. Not including smaller languages found in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, I would have to have learned about 30 languages to have gone to the places where I’ve been in the last two years.
There is a very practical need in a globalized society to speak with other people. There are, I think, 27 languages in the EU. They picked English as the common language to use in the European Parliment and European Bank (and there were no English speaking countries in the Euro zone when they made that decision. Ireland joined later).
English has become the defacto 2nd language for most of the world. At least 200m Chinese are studying it, it is a unity language in Nigeria (the largest African country), and is spoken by most of the educated and elites in India/Pakistan. You have countries where English is the primary or major language on every continent. It is the language of aviation, science, and the internet. Even in Switzerland, English is now taught as the 2nd language in every canton.
I never said that it isn’t worthwhile to learn another language. I’d personally like to learn Spanish. However, for any non-English speakers, I think it is pretty obvious in the 21st century that English is the other language you should pick up. There are practical limits on the number of languages most people can reasonably learn.
I think it’s the Swiss army knife of languages. A tool that can’t be used for everything, but gives you a great asset for many occasions.
I agree that languages evolve and that English’s reach is beyond what any controlled methods could be done to make it universal. The French have been trying for years – look at how it worked out with the European Parliament.
It is true that it certainly is not practical to learn every language on the planet. With little effort, we could raise our children as fluent bilinguals and that would help a lot ( especially in 2 dominant languages). I think it is a shame that in America, every school isn’t bilingual immersion.
I am less fluent than my family members, so I can observe closely the ties & contrasts between mono-lingualism in English & bilingualism in 2 dominant languages. Like you, I am interested in languages and how it affects us all and how it will affect the future, particularly for my child. I have been reading and studying this for many, many years long before I was married almost 20 years ago.
I personally don’t think things are as black and white as you see them. I think the “facts” are also not clear and often times misleading. “Facts” and how most “experts” or how main stream media views things, often makes me giggle. It’s not unlike the current global economy crash that I saw coming many years ago ( & our world tour is related to), but few “experts” or main stream media seemed to see the obvious with their “facts” & future predicting.
“If you stay in the mind-set of 15th-century Europe, the future of Latin is extremely bright,” said Nicholas Ostler, the author of a language history called “Empires of the Word” who is writing a history of Latin. “If you stay in the mind-set of the 20th-century world, the future of English is extremely bright.” 😉
Even Chrystal admits, “There are no precedents to help us see what will happen.”
The determination of a global tongue is made, more than anything else, by the ECONOMIC POWER of the countries where a language is spoken. The dollar as the reserve currency affected things as well, but seems to be changing. With the huge debt, demographics & decline of the US ( plus demise of dollar) & rise of China, India, Brazil etc, some of the “givens” could change quickly and many already are. We don’t know what the future brings.
How large an English vocabulary and how great a command of English does a person need in order to be considered an English-speaker?
Language researchers readily admit that their statistics on second- and foreign-language use are “educated guesswork.” The number of people in the world who speak English is unknown, and how well many of them speak and understand it is questionable. So much for facts & figures! 😉
Native speakers of English are already outnumbered by second-language and foreign-language speakers, and will be more heavily outnumbered as time goes on.
You mention it is used in European Bank & Parliament which is a little misleading I think. A good proportion of the people using English for business or professional purposes around the world aren’t and needn’t be fluent in it.
“When ad researchers recently tested 4,500 Europeans for “perceived” versus “actual” English-language skills, the results were discouraging. First, the interviewees were asked to evaluate their English-language abilities, and then to translate a series of sample English phrases or sentences. The study produced, in its own words, “sobering” results: “the number of people really fit for English-language television turned out to be less than half the expected audience.” In countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, the study found, fewer than 3 percent had excellent command of English; only in small markets, such as Scandinavia and the Low Countries did the numbers even exceed 10 percent.”
I think you would find similar 3 percent figures in Germany, Portugal and many other countries. It is true, English is ONE of the languages used as a universal language when needed amongst many in Europe & other places, but it does not mean that the people using it are fluent or that the nations people are fluent.
India accounts for 1/4 of the world English speakers, yet barely 1% of the population speak English. Their movies are in Hindi and most advertise to them in that.
Even in America, English is losing ground. According to the census, from 1980 to 1990 the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States grew by 50 percent. Over the same decade the number of speakers of Chinese in the United States grew by 98 percent.
Research suggests that people are likely to find a language easier or harder to learn according to how similar it is to their native tongue, in terms of things like word order, grammatical structure, and cognate words. Asia and Arabic languages are much harder for native English speakers and vice versa.
In much of East Asia, Mandarin Chinese already *has* displaced English as the chief second language of study– you’ll get more mileage with Mandarin in countries like Korea, Japan and Thailand, for example. Mandarin already is a lingua franca in parts of Asia and it is certainly on the rise. As their economies become more connected and the US declines, this should increase. It is MUCH easier for Asians to learn Mandarin than English.
Too many people vastly overstate the difficulty of the Chinese characters as a “barrier” to Mandarin as a lingua franca. First of all, for languages that “go global,” they always adapt and simplify themselves in ways to become manageable for large pools of non-native speakers. Written Mandarin is already accomplishing this via the evolution of “digraphia” or “digraphic representation”– with the Chinese characters naturally the most important written standard, but pinyin Romanization being employed for much basic and informal written communication in Chinese between non-native speakers. The Chinese characters themselves are a remarkably concise tool for communication as I and many other Westerners have found, but in many cases we simply rely on the pinyin for quick message dispatches. So there’s no “technical barrier” whatsoever to Mandarin becoming the new global standard.
We should remember that Mandarin’s function in China itself is as a lingua franca.Mandarin- over time became as simple and as standardized as possible, because most of the people using it did not speak it as their first language.
Non English speakers are the fastest growing group of new Internet users. The consensus among those who study these things is that Internet traffic in languages other than English will outstrip English-language traffic within the next few years. Of the 56 million people who speak languages on the Internet other than English, Spanish speakers represent nearly a quarter.
The relationship between science or technology and English is, essentially, accidental. It is chiefly because the United States has long been in the vanguard of much scientific and technological research, of course, that English is so widely used in these fields.Future technology may well originate elsewhere.Theoretical physicists at international conferences may speak English among themselves, but most high school and college physics teachers use their native languages in class with their students.
“The main message,” Graddol says, “is that the globalization of English isn’t going to happen the way people expect it to.” He ticked off a dizzying array of eventualities that could transform the world language picture: political alliances that have yet to be formed; the probable rise of regional trading blocs, in such places as Asia; the Arab world, and Latin America, in which the United States and other primarily English-speaking countries will be little involved; the possibility that world-changing technological innovations will arise out of nations where English is little spoken
Yes, English ( or perhaps Chinglish or Springlish more accurately) is an important language & may remain so, but I don’t think it will ever be the only universal language. I see the future as much more gray & time will only tell.
To make things easier & quicker for me because of time issues, I cut and pasted quite a few things from the following links (that I also posted on twitter).
http://is.gd/BIJc
http://tiny.sm/04
http://is.gd/BIND
http://is.gd/BHeQ
Thank you very much for the links, I’ll be reading them soon. On a glance they will be great material to help me write my post on the topic next Thursday.
And thank you for adding and making for an enlightening conversation about language!
I did write something about it actually:
http://www.foxnomad.com/2008/01/30/how-americans-can-blend-in-abroad/
I agree that learning the local language gives you far better access to the culture – but of all the languages, is English the one that can best serve you for a travel around the world? (Of course, the world is a big place).
I’m not at all sure that English is a universally understood lingua franca, and I’m not convinced that it should be.
I favour the planned international language Esperanto. Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net I’d be interested to know what you all think!
Languages are organic creations, not created by committee. People learn a language because they need to. Children learn the language of their parents because they need to communicate with them.
There is no need to learn Esperanto. No one speaks it. There is no economic incentive.
The popularity of English is not due to some central planning committee that made it so. It is the result of a host of reasons (economic, political, historical, and linguistic) none of which Esperanto has going for it.
Gary, I agree with your comment. Imagine traveling back 100, 200, or 500 years ago and trying to speak English with the Brits or American colonists. The further back you go the less a language resembles what it is today. No committee could have controlled any language effectively over a period of time and circumstances shape languages in unpredictable ways, the Internet being one of the best examples.
I had not heard of Esperanto and it’s an interesting concept. Languages though are organic and take on a life of their own. I’m not sure that an international language can be ‘implemented’ in this manner.
Even if you could, Esperanto would eventually take on its own course and change. Languages are also integral to the local culture, they influence each other. Some words are specific to a particular culture (or place) and wouldn’t translate into another language (very well).
Being multi-lingual, I can say that English has always been, and will most likely always be the most useful language I know when traveling. And I do think it is THE universal language. Fluency in English is not needed for you to be understood or even for others to be understood, but where ever you go, there is always somebody who has learned a bit of English (whether traveling on or off of the “tourist path”). Believe me, I am a strong believer in the idea that in order to thoroughly understand people or a culture, you must understand their language but let’s face it, globalization has made English THE universal language. You won’t find Spanish or French speakers everywhere, but you will always find someone who either speaks English, knows English literature, or listens to American music. It’s as simple as that.
Language usage, like you mention, is not the only export of English – it’s the culture that goes along with it. Music, movies, art, as well as business and the Internet all help to make English a valuable commodity.
I agree with Soul Traveler, you need more than one language! I know it’s come very useful for me on many occassions.
Even though I’m bilingual since 6 yrs old, I did learn spanish in my very late 20’s so it’s possible for everyone to learn enough to get your thoughts across and look that you took the time to learn that language.
It’s a shame to miss out on the cultural perspective that a second language can give you – but is English the universal language? It is *the* language to know if you don’t?
Depends, of course, but if you could only use 1 language before setting off on an around the world trip, would it be English, or another language?