Abstract
In 1998, the South Korean novelist Pok Ko-il proposed that his country make English its new mother tongue and that the Korean language be moved to a museum case where it belongs. Having provoked the uproar he must have intended, he relented a bit, suggesting that English should be the country’s second official language, something that many South Korean educators already support. In 2000, the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals for the 21st Century unleashed a similar storm by advocating that English be made a working language alongside Japanese or even the second official language. In 2003, the Chilean Ministry of Education set in motion a program known as English Opens Doors (Inglés Abre Puertas), to make all students proficient in English in a decade and to make all Chileans bilingual (in Spanish and English) in a generation. In 2009, the Swiss National Science Foundation in Berne suggested that the time had come to make English an official language in Switzerland, along with French, German, and Italian. 1 None of these daring proposals has yet become a reality, but they are all signs of the frenzy in the past two decades to meet the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world in which knowing English is a major asset.
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Notes
Yim Sungwon, “Globalization and the Korean Language,” in Language Policy, Culture, and Identity in Asian Contexts, ed. Amy B. M. Tsui and James Tollefson (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbawm Associates, 2007) 41;
Larry Rohter, “Letter from the Americas: Learn English, Says Chile, Thinking Upwardly Global,” New York Times, December 29, 2004;
Keith Davidson, “Language and Identity in Switzerland,” English Today 102, vol. 26.1 (March 2010): 15–17.
For example, see the list in David Graddol, The Future of English? (London: The British Council, 2000), 59, which is weighted by economic, demographic, and human development factors.
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference (New York: Little Brown, 2002), 7–9.
David Pogue, “Humanity’s Database,” New York Tomes Book Review July 4, 2010, 11;
Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree:Understanding Globalization rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 61–67, quotation 67.
T. R. Reid, The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 213.
Robert McCrum, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language (New York: Viking Penguin, 2010), 231–37.
Amy Waldman, “India’s Poor Bet Precious Sums on Private Schools,” New York Times, November 15, 2003.
Amy Waldman, “In India, a Heyday for English (the Language),” New York Times December 14, 2003.
David Graddol, “Thoughts from Kolkata on English in India,” English Today 25.4 (2009): 21–23.
Barbara Crossette, “English Is Making a Comeback in Sri Lanka,” New York Times, January 7, 1990.
James A. Coleman, “English-Medium Teaching in European Higher Education,” Language Teaching 39 (2006): 4.
David Graddol, English Next: Why Global English May Mean the End of English as a Foreign Language (London: British Consul, 2006), 76. The United Kingdom received 25 percent, the United States and Canada 47 percent, Australia and New Zealand 15 percent. Altbach, Reisberg, and Rimbly, Trends in Global Higher Education 7–11.
Tamar Lewin, “China Is Sending More Students to U.S.,” New York Times November 16, 2009, A13.
U. Ammon and G. McConnell, English as an Academic Language in Europe: A Survey of Its Use in Teaching (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), cited in Coleman, “English-Medium Teaching,” 11.
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© 2013 David Northrup
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Northrup, D. (2013). Tipping Points. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_6
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