Paper 4 Question 1

    Over the years English has increased in popularity and more countries are being obligated to learn English. Countries like China, Indonesia, and Sweden, it’s mandatory to learn English. As it’s grown in popularity the majority of its speakers speak it as a second language rather than it being s first language.

    Because of the popularity English has reached, many are thinking of making it the official global language. A global language is a language that’s so spread out across the world that everyone would know it. Setting it as the official global language could prevent any miscommunications when two countries speak to each other. This could be between the UK and China or China and France. The chances of someone that speaks only mandarin and someone that speaks only french meeting in the middle to speak english are way higher than they used to.

    According to the article “The World Economic Forum estimates about 1.5 billion people around the world speak it – but fewer than 400 million have it as their first language.” Thus proving English’s success in becoming the world’s favorite lingua franca. However it will take some time due to the idea of English becoming the official global language has become a more resent discussion.

    It first came up in 1997 but was first written down as an idea in 1995. To some it feels like a long time but compared to other plans that took more years to accomplish, 25 years isn't a lot. Plus, it wasn’t a big hit right away. It takes time for something to be considered so in reality it’s been less than 25 years of discussion. Furthermore, this is the whole world that has to talk about this. All the counties need a say if English is going to be a global language.

    Regardless of how close it seems to accomplish this accomplishment, the one thing that gets in the way of this becoming reality is the evolution of technology. As technology grows, they are coming up with ways where two people could talk in their native languages and still understand each other. AI has been evolving to translate for people over call, text, and more. No more use for human translators or learning english.

    But at the same time it’s because of technology and the internet that is spreading English. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are merging the different languages into one circle to interact. On some of these, they already have a translation button for viewers of a different language to understand what a comment was or the description of the video or picture.


    Social media isn’t the only place that has that ability. In the article it says “But with a couple of clicks on your computer, or taps on your tablet, you could just as easily be reading it in German or Japanese.“ From this, it can be inferred that there are programs on computers that can do the same translation magic.


    There are two main problems when it comes to technology. One the ability to hack into the system. Two, the accuracy of the translations.


    The ability to hack into these programs to translate words in real time can cause a lot of problems regarding communication. Meaning the words said could easily not match up with the words heard. This can cause a dispute between the two and cause lots of miscommunications.


    As for the accuracy, that isn’t as big of an issue as the first since that can be modified with time. More programs are being more and more accurate when translating one language to another. But there should be a limit on how well it can be translated unless translating every single sentence.


    In the end, the idea of learning a common language between everyone should be talked about more. The outcome to learning a single language everyone understands has many benefits and can prevent the hacking and messing with words and then no one has to keep evolving the work on how well a translator works. Even though the technology works it would be good to learn English as well for plan B.