Anyone spending their Christmas holidays on the European mainland will likely have observed that it is quite common to meet staff in shops and hotels who can hold a conversation in English, and to read signs and menus in the language. This fact should come as no surprise, and it is no accident: the spread of English skills in Europe is largely the result of educational policies that have intensively promoted its teaching in public schools over the past decades.
The reasons are diverse and well known. English is a major language of culture, and it is the third most spoken language in the world as a native language, after Chinese and Spanish. Native speakers of English number about 373m (roughly 5% of the world population), mostly concentrated in six advanced industrialised democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US), which together produce 33% of the world’s gross domestic product in nominal terms. As a result of the colonial legacy, English is an official or co-official language in many countries of the world, mainly in Africa.
The communication value of English is therefore high, and so is the interest in learning it. Many people use English as a second or foreign language. Precise estimates are risky but taken together, native and non-native speakers in the world total between 1 billion and 1.5 billion, depending on the definition of “speaker”. This amounts to 12-19% of the global population. Proficiency levels, however, are very uneven.
The emergence of English as the predominant (though not exclusive) international language is seen by many as a positive phenomenon with several practical advantages and no downside. However, it also raises problems that are slowly beginning to be understood and studied.
The most important challenge is that of fairness or “linguistic justice”. A common language is a bit like a telephone network: the more people know a language, the more useful it becomes to communicate. The question of fairness arises because individuals face very different costs to access the network and are on an unequal footing when using it. Those who learn English as a second language incur learning costs, while native speakers can communicate with all network members without incurring such costs. It’s like getting the latest smartphone model and sim card with unlimited data for free.
