ENGLISH AS THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Illiteracy in the Middle Ages was common. When one king needed to communicate with another, he would hire a scribe to draw the message in written language. It is well-known the fact that Charlemagne (8th century) was illiterate. The art of writing was a professional skill not available to everyone. That is perhaps one of the reasons
why the Portuguese expedition with Pedro Álvares Cabral in command brought Pero Vaz de Caminha as the official writer.
By 1700, Europe's literacy rate ranged from 30 to 40 percent; by 1850,50 to 55 percent; and by the second half of the 19th century writing became a basic qualification in the human societies. In the 20th century illiteracy became definitely an ailment in any field, in any profession. Today an illiterate person in a developed country is an outcast. What happened with the skills of reading and writing will soon happen with the ability to speak a second language. If we compare the importance of speaking a foreign language 50 years ago with the necessity it represents today, we can foresee how important it will be by the time our children become adults.
It is also predictable that wealth will give way to knowledge and information in determining the shape of the future human society, and speaking the common world language will be fundamental to achieve success. Today's search for information and need for global communication have already promoted English from being the language of the American, the British, the Irish, the Australian, the New Zealand, the Canadian, the Caribbean, and the South African peoples to being the international language. Besides being spoken as a native language by nearly four hundred million people, it has also become a lingua franca, the Latin of the modem world, "spoken in every continent by approximately eight hundred million people" (Todd iv).
More radical estimates, which include speakers with a lower level of language fluency and awareness, have suggested that the overall total is these days well in excess of 1,000 million. (Crystal 360)
In addition, it is estimated that 80 percent of all information in the world's computers is in English.
The inexpensiveness of air transportation increases international contacts on an interpersonal level. Computer, optical fiber, and satellite technologies on the other hand; have made possible a boom in telecommunications, bringing up the concept of information superhighway. These two developments demonstrate how the world has evolved into a global village and how imperatively a standard language is required.
In this role of global language, English becomes one of the most important academic and professional tools. English is unquestionably recognized as the most important language to be learned in the prevailing international community. This is an unchallenged fact that seems to be irreversible. English has become the business and scientific worlds' official language.
Philip B. Gove in his preface to Webster's Third New International Dictionary illustrates this point:
It is now fairly clear that before the twentieth century is over every community of the world will have learned how to communicate with all the rest of humanity. In this process of intercommunication the English language has already become the most important language on earth. (5a).
by Ricardo Schütz
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