ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

A language has the greatness of the people who speak it and this is the result of its
economic, commercial, social and cultural achievements. In Europe French, English
and German are important because of their peoples. In Asia Chinese has influenced
the languages, cultures and civilizations of the other Asian countries in the area.
Today English seems to have got the upperhand among the languages of the
world. It is spoken by more than 350 million people as a first language in the United
Kingdom, the United States and the former Commonwealth. Although it is the mostly
spoken language in Europe, it is not the largest in the world. The supremacy is held
by Chinese, spoken by more than a billion people, in China alone, and Indian follows
suit.
The importance of a language is not only connected with the cultural, artistic and
literal background of one people, but also with its commerce, international affairs,
standard of living, scientific development and most of all politics. Invention,
exploration and discovery have also played an important role in spreading a language
worldwide.
Languages have come to be learned as a means of communication, especially in
those areas where there used to be a foreign ruling. In some countries of
Africa,English and French are indispensable, especially in official or state affairs, and
are used as lingua franca.
English is also used as a second language throughout the world. There are
estimates of the number of speakers that vary between 50 million and 300 million. In
some developing countries, such as India, Nigeria and the Philippines, English is one
of the official languages. In the areas where English is not a first language, pidgin and
Creole varieties are gaining ground.( Iaţcu, 7-8 )
According to British linguist David Crystal, around a thousand million people
in the world have some ability in English. And today the 400,000 million mother-
tongue speakers of the language are outnumbered, by more than 2 to 1, by speakers of
English as a second language. By the end of the 21th century, more than half the
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human race will speak some form of English. Quite a progression for a language
which in Shakespeare’s time belonged to fewer than four million people. The
question logically arises: who owns the “copyright” to the English language?
Several factors contribute to the increase in status of a language: economic power,
political and military strength, cultural anf religious influence, the need for a common
code of communication. It is precisely that need that suggested the creation of
artificial languages that would not favour any of the national languages; however, the
idea did not prove feasible in practice. There is no doubt that the dominance of
English as a world language has been facilitated by the economic and cultural power
of the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the United States. As a consequence,
science and technology, business, politics, the film industry, sports, and
transportation have all adopted English as their main language of communication.
Yet, how can the unprecedented rise of English to its present-day world status
really be explained? First of all, by its linguistic qualities; it is fluid, elastic, open and
absorbent, greedy for new words, ever ready to rework and reclaim them as its own.
It is this thirst for new words from other languages that has given English such a vast
and eclectic vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary lists about half a million
words, far more than for any other language, and about 1,500 new ones are added
every year.
Another strength of English is its impurity. It began life as a mongrel language
when Danes mingled with Anglo-Saxons in Britain in the 6th and 7th centuries AD,
and it has never lost that character.Tree hundred years later, the Norman invasion
added thousands of new French words and helped to simplify grammar. British
colonial expansion from the early 17th century further exposed the language to
contamination from abroad. But growing impurity only increased the mongrel’s
vigour. A fascinating aspect is that its two most important centres, Britain and the
United States, did not create academies to guard linguistic purity.
As David Crystal puts it, “You can’t have it both ways. If you wish to preserve the
identity of your own language, it is to some extent at the expense of making it more
difficult for people from outside to learn it.” However, this could be the main danger

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as, while the language becomes used in all corners of the world by people from all
walks of life, it begins to develop new spoken varieties which, in time, might become
mutually unintelligible.
It is only natural that a global language like English does need to have some
standard or reference point. This is particularly important for speakers of English as a
second language.
There are pidgin forms resulting from a few English words mixed with the respective
mother tongue and no grammar rules, and there are the many local varieties clearly
recognizable as English but not always easy to understand if you do not belong to that
particular group. Hence, the need for international standard English as a widely used
tool of communication across cultural boundaries all around the world.
Despite voices foretelling the rise in importance of major regional languages such
as Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Spanish, to ever think that the ascension of English
can now be stopped seems totally unrealistic.(English News & Views, 167)
Why do people want to learn foreign languages? Why do people want to study
English? Is it for pleasure? Is it because they want to understand Shakespeare?
Maybe they want to get a better job. There are a number of different reasons for
language study and the following list (which is not exhaustive) will give an idea of
the great variety of such reasons.
(a) School curriculum
Probably the greatest number of language students in the world do it because it is on
the school curriculum whether they like it or not! For many of these students English,
in particular, is something that both they and they parents want to have taught. For
others, however, the study of languages is something they feel neutral (or sometimes
negative) about.
(b) Advancement
Some people want to study English (or another foreign language ) because they think
it offers a chance for advancement in their professional lives. They will get a better
job with two languages than if they only know their mother tongue. English has a

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special position here since it has become the international language of
communication.
(c) Target language community
Some language students find themselves living in a target language community
(either temporarily or permanently). A target language community (TLC) is one
where the inhabitants speak the language which the student is learning; for students
of English an English-speaking country would be a TLC. The students would need to
learn English to survive in that community.
(d) English for Specific Purposes
The term English for Special or Specific Purposes has been applied to situations
where students have some specific reason for wanting to learn the language. For
example, air traffic controllers need English primarily to guide aircraft through the
skies. They may not use the language at all part from this. Business executives need
English for international trade. Waiters may need English to serve their customers.
These needs have often been referred to as EOP (English for Occupational
Purposes).
Students who are going to study at a university in the USA, Great Britain,
Australia or Canada, on the other hand, may need English so that they can write
reports or essays and function in seminars. This is often called EAP (English for
Academic Purposes). Students of medicine or nuclear physics – or other scientific
disciplines – (studying in their own countries) need to be able to read articles and
textbooks about those subjects in English. This is often referred to as EST (or English
for Science and Technology).We can summarise these differences in the following
way:
What is interesting about all these examples is that the type of English the
students want to learn may be different: waiters may want to talk and listen, whereas
scientists may want to read and write.
(e) Culture
Some students study a foreign language because they are attracted to the culture of
one of the TLCs (see (c) above). They learn the language because they want to know

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more about the people who speak it, the places where it is spoken and (in some cases)
the writings which it has produced.
(f) Miscellaneous
There are of course many other possible reasons for learning a language. Some
people do it just for fun – because they like the activity of going to class. Some
people do it because they want to be tourists in a country where that language is
spoken. Some people do it just because all their friends are learning the language.
(Harmer, 1-2)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Rada Bălan and “et al.”, English News &Views, Pathway to English, Student’s

book 11, Oxford University Press, 1988

2. Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching, London and New

York: Longman, 1991

3. Tatiana Iaţcu, O istorie a limbii engleze, Universitatea “Petru Maior”, Târgu-

Mureş, 2004

Baricz Rita
Română-Engleză, Anul III, IFR

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