Why English Is (But Shouldn't Be) the International Language

Paris. At a cafe outside the Pantheon, I see a group of Japanese tourists, all women between their 20's and 50's, telling a waiter in broken English, "Something to drink, please...non-alcoholic."

Costa Rica. Far away from any major city, I get an ear infection and have to go to the doctor, who asks me if I speak Spanish. I can chat in the language, but I couldn't discuss my medical status in necessary detail in Spanish. The doctor speaks to me in English.

Seoul. At dongtaemon (which is the place to shop in central Seoul), I see an American male telling an attendant at one of the shopping malls "I'll be back" in English. The attendant looks as if he understands.

Tokyo. At the TMG (Tokyo Metropolitan Government building) in the Shinjuku district, I see an indignant American lady asking a customer service employee why the shop only sells models of the North Tower and not the South. The lady speaks in English. The Japanese employee tries to speak in English.

Stuttgart. My German friend and I arrive at our other friend's house early. The front door is locked. It is raining. The neighbors come home and invite us to have a seat in their house until that friend's parents come back. I speak no German. The neighbors have no trouble switching to English.

Ho Chi Minh City. I go out with a friend who is bilingual in Cantonese and Vietnamese. I speak Cantonese and no Vietnamese. We stay at the house of one of his friends who speaks only Vietnamese. The friend tries to communicate with me in English.

I am quite annoyed when Americans tour the world expecting to be understood when they speak in English (granted, not every American is as such, but you have to admit Americans, especially teenagers and twenty-somethings, don't have a great reputation abroad). I am probably even more irritated when I see or hear non-native speakers of English from outside of the greater English-speaking world going to a foreign country where English is not the official language and trying to get around by speaking English.

True, English comes relatively close to being spoken in every major city in the world, especially popular tourist destinations. It comes closer than Mandarin, whcih is the language with the most speakers in the world, but Mandarin is not widespread. It was never a colonial language on a global scale. English comes closer than French, which was a colonial language but has been losing power ever since...well...ever since America became the dominant world power. More former African colonies speak English than French now. English comes closer than Spanish, which is spoken all over Latinamerica (except Brazil), but you can't speak Spanish in a country where it's not an official language and expect to be understood (except maybe some areas in Brazil and Portugal). Let's not talk about Esperanto. Most people don't even know what it is, much less speak it.

So, if there's an international language, English is it.

There's nothing linguistically wrong with the English language (well...), and I admit it's very convenient (for Americans, Brits, and Aussies) that English is so widely used (I myself have been a beneficiary of this global phenomenon), but the prevalence of English is one of the biggest reasons the majority of America's youth know next to nothing about the outside world. Well, that's not exactly true. The ignorance is not limited to just that age group. FDR ended American's age of isolationism more than half a century ago. It's time Americans did some serious footwork to catch up.

Maybe traveling by foot would be a little impractical. Studying abroad has become more popular over the years, but the most common destinations are still Britain and Australia. Next in line are Italy, France, and Spain. Granted, it's some improvement that more students are showing interest in learning Italian, French, and Spanish. But that's not always the case for students who opt for continental Europe over Britain. You couldn't live in Rome without speaking Italian, Paris without speaking French, or Seville without speaking Spanish, but English would be arguably enough to get you by for a summer, which is typically the amount of time college undergrads spend abroad before they get back to work on their degrees back in the US in the fall.

Even if American college students stay abroad long enough to understand the language and culture to a modest degree, it is still usually limited to the West. The number of students who choose to study in Africa or Asia over Europe pales in comparison to the number of students who stick to what universities call "traditional countries," most notably Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of Western Europe (you might be surprised to see that a number of study abroad catalogs actually categorize Australia and New Zealand under "Western Europe").

But India and China send more students to America for higher education than any other country in the world. This is a severe global cultural imbalance (not unlike the import-export gap America has with China, and look where that's gotten the US economy).

American movies and TV rule the world. That's a fact. When was the last time you saw a TV ad or a billboard for a foreign film? Yes, we all know Bollywood, but the Indian actor/character Americans are most familiar with is undoubtedly Apu. Advertisements for Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Fearless have gotten some airtime, but it's minuscule compared to what any standard American movie gets. Further, even big foreign films have limited releases only. During my time in Sweden, Pirates of the Caribbean II and Superman Returns were playing in major movie theaters whereas domestic Swedish films had posters in alleyways and were played in small movie houses. Let me add that most of them are indies. Friends is insanely popular in France. I know friends who stay up watching 24 in Hong Kong and Japan. I myself spent many weeknights watching Family Guy, in the original English (Swedes never dub their imported American TV shows), with fellow international students when we could've been exploring the nooks and crannies of Lund, the town we stayed in the south of Sweden.

When I was studying in Sweden, I had the privilege to take an academic trip to Brussels with a number of colleagues. While at a mini-conference with some representatives from the EU Commission, an American student raised her hand and asked, "Is the EU thinking about having a single official language?" The EU now has over 20 official languages, and annual translation costs are over $1 billion, so even though her question implied something thoroughly impractical, it did show some concern and deserved some merit, but then she had to say, "Maybe English?"

Actually, in Sweden, many scholarly magazines are published in English instead of Swedish because there isn't a wide enough audience of Swedish speakers. The Swedes like to export their publications abroad as well. When Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes communicate with each other, although Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are quite similar, they speak in English. Many Scandinavian bands play in English.

Yes, miscommunication due to ignorance of each other's languages have always been a driving force leading to ethnic wars (there's a reason European history plays out like a drama of war after war), but I don't think having an international language is the solution. Besides being far-fetched, it would also light the torch that could burn away all the cultural differences that make our world so interesting, reducing our vibrant global society to ashes (does anyone remember The Giver?).

Language, more than anything else, I think, defines a people. You can't fully understand a culture without first learning the language. Forgive me for mentioning pop culture, which some might find irreputable, but you can't deny the influence it has on the members of our society, especially the young If you listen to commentators on channels like VH1 and E!, who are typically editors of fashion or movie magazines, you often hear things like, "They must have a better word for beauty in Italian!" or "How do you say 'babe' in Chinese?" Our entire concept of everyday reality is shaped around language. If you speak multiple languages, you start to see things in many more shades because some things just cannot be translated, directly or indirectly. Have you ever tried to call someone a chicken in Spanish by directly translating the word? Didn't make much sense, did it? Did you know that the famous Japanese phrase itadakimasu, said before every meal, simply means "to receive" in formal speech? Imagine saying "Receive!" right before dinner. Even "let's eat," which is the typical translation in anime and Japanese dramas and movies, doesn't quite have the same effect.

Our different languages have shaped who we are, our history, our heritage, our culture, our identity. Why should the world have one when it can have many? After all, we have many, many ethnicities in the world.

It is unclear whether our global America-dominated media culture is an advantage to Americans or not. When I was in Sweden, most Swedes I met knew more about American politics than I did. The reason is simple: economically and politically, it is more important for them to know about America than it is for Americans to know about Sweden. Will you be comfortable knowing that the rest of the world knows more about you than you do about them? Will you be comfortable knowing that you only speak English when much of the rest of the world speaks English and something else?

Having a single language as the international language would undoubtedly make communications among nations much easier, but nothing worth it ever comes easy. English shouldn't be the international language, neither should Spanish, French, Mandarin, or Esperanto. The world doesn't need an international language. What it needs is more cultural exchange and less (American) cultural imperialism. America's position as the world superpower and English being the language of business and tourism are two things that are not going to change, but Americans, especially young Americans, can at least try to learn more about the rest of the world. And learn a foreign language or two along the way.