Episode 8: Why is English so popular?

English is the second most popular language in the world - and definitely vies with Chinese as to the title of 'international business language'. Chinese, as it happens, is a notoriously very difficult langauge to learn (especially for westerners) - and when we consider that the population of China is 1.3billion, maybe it isnt so suprising that 1.4billion people worldwide speak one of the 7 forms of Mandarin.

Either way there are many people in the world, especially here in south america, who have no affinity to England (or indeed America) but still find themselves learning English in school from a young age.

The question I´ve found myself pondering, then, is why/how has it become such a global language? Yes, Britain used to have an empire and we can see commonwealth countries such as south africa/australia still speaking english, but what I really mean is English as a second language. Personally I think that, rather than history, it goes down to the ease of the language itself.

I will assume, rightly or wrongly, that most of you have studied (at least at some level, even at 15/16) some other langauge than your mother tounge before. If not, hopefully this will all make sense anyway:

In english, think of the past tense of the verb 'to go'
-I went/ I was going
-I have gone
-I had gone.

And thats about it. If you want to talk about someone else (she/he, you etc) then the actual verb part (participle) stays the same:

-She went
-He had gone      etc

This, when you think about it, stretches to all other verbs with only a couple of exceptions - therefore, as long as you have a good memory then you should be able to have quite good english skills. On the contrary, (and I can only speak for Spanish here as it's been at least 5 years since I tried to learn french) out here it is completely different. Every tense has a different ending (won´t bore you with the details), and many of the most common ones are irregular, leaving you a lot of work to do in your head before eventually it becomes more natural* And for those of you familiar with the subjunctive tense - easily the hardest part of spanish to master - English doesnt have it. All we do it say ' I might/may do something', and thats as far as it goes.

So, the conclusion is simple - why is English so popular? Because it's easy (!), and therefore I guess we are all...lazy. Right?





*it´s taken me 5 years of classes to get to a good level; so if you're learning a language in the early stages and find it tough - give it time