English as World Language

Within a decade, Mongolia is expected to convert the nation’s written language from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet, as English replaces Russian as the second language (via The Marmot’s Hole):

“We are looking at Singapore as a model,” Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia’s prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed at graduate school at Harvard University. “We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world.”

Camel herders may not yet refer to each other as “dude,” but Mongolia, thousands of kilometers from the nearest English-speaking nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language.

Fueled by the Internet, the growing dominance of U.S. culture and the financial realities of globalization, English is now taking hold in Asia, and elsewhere, just as it has done in many European countries.

In South Korea, six “English villages” are being established where paying students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English language immersion, taught by native speakers imported from all over the English-speaking world.

The most ambitious, an $85 million English town near Seoul, will have Western architecture, signs and a resident population of English-speaking foreigners.

In Iraq, where Arabic and Kurdish are to be the official languages, there is a growing movement to add English, a neutral link for a nation split along ethnic lines.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, there is an explosion in English language studies, fueled partly by an affinity for Britain and the United States, and partly by the knowledge that neighboring Turkey may soon join the European Union, where English is emerging as the dominant language.

In Chile, the government has embarked on a national program of teaching English in all elementary and high schools. The goal is to make that nation of 15 million people bilingual in English within a generation. The models are the Netherlands and the Nordic nations, which have achieved virtual bilingualism in English since World War II.