Author's Opinion

Language is very important in our life as a means of communication. As a global community, we need a language which can be used as a means of global communication. In this case, English has become the international or global language. However, the English language has never had an official standard. It has evolved through the centuries and adopted many thousands of words through overseas exploration, international trade, and the building of an empire. It is a rich language with tens of thousands more words in its vocabulary than any other language. Because of its major role in international business, medicine, and education, people are more likely to learn English, as opposed to other foreign languages.

As for the future of English, it is very difficult to predict that English will retain its current global position in the next 50 years. However, we can at least speculate that the development of automatic translation software (E.g. Google Translate) which may come to replace English as the preferred means of communication. Moreover, according to David Crystal, “Predicting the linguistic future is always a dangerous activity.”