English: Should it dominate?

It’s tempting to consider English the most important means of communication; humans do tend to be egocentric. Yet with 7,097 living languages in use, humility begets curiosity: Is English, or should it be, the lingua franca?

A lingua franca is the world’s preferred language in common, used between speakers whose native languages differ. Historically the lingua franca has been Greek, Arabic, Spanish, and French. Today, there is an emerging case for English, even though more people speak Chinese or Spanish.

According to annually updated linguistic research published in the 19th edition of “Ethnologue: Languages of the World,” 339 million people worldwide speak English. That puts us third behind 897 million Mandarin Chinese speakers (1.3 billion, counting all Chinese dialects), and 427 million who speak Spanish. Immediately following English are Arabic (267 million) and Hindi (260 million). While these figures are global, to add perspective, China and India’s populations each exceed one billion, more than twice the U.S. and U.K. combined.

So if English is outnumbered, what makes it the emerging lingua franca? Culture, mostly. Given aviation’s early history, pilot communications are in English, used by more than 90 percent of the world’s airlines. An Italian piloting an AirItalia flight into Rome contacts the tower and identifies his aircraft in English. Same goes for maritime operations.

More surprising is science and news; half or more of the world’s scientific papers and newspapers are published in English, regardless of national origin. Add American music and film popularity, and it isn’t shocking that the majority of global Internet content is also in English.

Maybe that’s partly the nature of this language — a unique blend of so many others. The same thing that makes it so hard to learn by comparison — its melting pot history — may help explain its prominence.

English is comprised of roughly 29 percent Latin and French,

26 percent Germanic languages (e.g., Middle English, Norse, and Dutch), and about 16 percent mix of Greek and other languages.

Perhaps that’s part of why so many in the EU speak English. Nearly 80 percent of those in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark; and 30 to 50 percent in France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Belgium, and Austria do.

But we must be careful not to expect it. The dominance of an outsider’s language understandably can lead to a reaction against it; resentment is part of the picture, especially given history’s colonial and forceful methods. Nobody likes having an element of culture imposed on them, despite any practical value.

Changing populations, such as the rising Latin-American ethnic population in the U.S., is also an influential factor which may change English’s popularity abroad.

Beyond travel-related ease and cultural respect, learning other languages is not only useful and mind-expanding, it’s not as hard as it may seem. That’s because to get by, we need less than a whole language. If it’s true that of The World Language Monitor’s estimate of English’s 1.02 million words, we only use around 171,000 (Oxford English Dictionary); and of those, less than 2 percent covers 95 percent of reading (Reading Teachers Book of Lists), does one really need to learn an entire language?

No, says the 95/5 rule. Lingholic.com presents a convincing mathematical approach to make picking up a new language seem far less intimidating.

As Lingholic presents it, the Chinese dictionary contains 370,000 words. To read a Chinese newspaper, one needs 2,500 words (1,710 characters) — less than 1 percent.

French dictionaries list about 100,000 words and 350,000 current definitions. Of those, 600 common words account for 90 percent of common texts — less than 1 percent. Similarly small percentages hold true for other languages. So in general, 5 percent or less of a language’s vocabulary is all it takes to manage in non-specialized settings.

That’s a lot less than the 30,000 to 50,000 words in an average native language speaker’s vocabulary. So it takes a lot less effort than a dictionary or stacks of year-long course materials may imply, and if the language lessons are presented mostly in context, the rest of the vocabulary — with increasing ease as lessons go by — comes that way, too. Learning by phrases and situations, rather than lists.

An easy, free way to start is through your local library system’s online language courses.

“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.” — Frank Smith

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Sholeh Patrick, J.D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.