On the wall of the classroom where I had my TEFL course, a poster cited a statistic to the effect that 25% of the world’s population speaks English. There was no source given for the statistic, nor was there any context. What level of fluency, for example, is encompassed by this statistic? Does it include people who took a year of English in high school 30 years ago, for example? And even if it does, 25% still seems awfully high.
Living in Prague, though, I’m starting to come around to the view that English really is becoming a lingua franca. On tours and in restaurants and shops, I frequently hear conversations being conducted in English between Czechs and tourists who are obviously not Anglophones. And even once I get off the tourist track in Prague, I have no trouble finding people who can manage at least a little English. Occasionally, as they apologize for their limited English, they come up with some novel constructions. (I once had a clerk quote me a price of "1000 CZK less 1", rather than 999 CZK.)
I suppose this effect was present in France, too, although to a more limited extent. Paris, at least, offers a lot more accommodation than does Prague to tourists who speak neither French nor English. On the other hand, although my classmates at the Institut Catholique were not exclusively American, almost all of them spoke some English in addition to French and their native languages.
So I was interested to see this article in The Economist recently, which takes for granted English’s exalted status and goes on to discuss the problems. In particular, that "English, in effect, blocks the learning of other languages", and not just for notoriously foreign language averse Americans. It’s good news, of course, for a would-be English teacher.
Yet another reminder of the ways in which I’m one of a priveleged few!
