As I spend the day playing with the sounds of English words, others, in other countries, are spending it learning English. As this article points out, English is now a world language, the first in history to be spoken by more people as a second language than as a native tongue. Carla Power questions what this will mean for the language:
Researchers are starting to study non-native speakers' "mistakes"—"She look very sad," for example—as structured grammars. In a generation's time, teachers might no longer be correcting students for saying "a book who" or "a person which."As a grammar stickler, I'm loathe to see these changes, but this article also brings out a rare moment in me, one in which I concur with folks with whom I usually disagree. Those who want to make English the official language of the United States and offer government materials in only that language generally aren't my ideological allies, but you've got to read this article and then ask: Why are people around the world--more than 2 billion in a decade, Power says--interested in learning and using English, while people who come to the United States--where English is the dominant if not official language--often seem to shun it? Wouldn't it be a scary and strange thing if a higher percentage of residents of China than the United States spoke and understood English?
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