The President of Ukraine proposes to give English the status of the language of international communication [babel.ua]
The President of Ukraine proposes to give English the status of the language of international communication [babel.ua]
President Zelensky submitted to the Verkhovna Rada a draft law on the status of English as a language of international communication
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Making one of the hardest languages to learn the international language seems weird to me.
English is not even close to one of the hardest languages to learn. It has a simplistic grammar that lacks inflections, declensions, significant verb morphology / conjugation, or agglutination, as well as tone, aspect, or in most cases, mood.
Some examples of significantly more challenging languages include, in no particular order, Japanese, Hungarian, German, Icelandic, Hindi, Russian, Finnish, Arabic. Google any one of these languages followed by the word “grammar” and prepare to be absolutely bewildered.
Do people still delude themselves that English is not the international language and this somehow might change in the future?
It’s western imperialist bullshit my dude.
I'm confused. Could you expand more? I've been all over the world there's no other language that even remotely comes close to what English is nor there will be in the near future.
The origin of how English became the thing is irrelevant. There just has to be a linagua franca and just so happens that it's English. Anyone country with half decent leadership will invest into english to have access to international markets - it would be incredibly dumb otherwise.
Statistically there are far more people who speak Chinese and Spanish in the world than English as a native language. I’d probably go with Spanish personally as a worldwide language if we were going to go purely for equality of communication purposes, but statistically those countries are poorer, mostly because imperial nations like the US have totally ruined their governments and stolen their resources in the name of capital.
These imperialist ventures are also why many poorer countries end up teaching English, or learning English of their own volition; to either get jobs where they can communicate with these imperialist interests within their countries, or to escape the effects of imperialism in their country by going to the only place that’s safe from US imperialism, which is inside the US itself.
I see your point - thanks for exanding! I do disagree with you though but we can agree to disagree as there's probably no clear objective truth here :)
Chinese is a poor example because, while true in absolute terms, the overwhelming majority of speakers live in one country, no other major country has any internationally significant mass of speakers, and almost no foreigners learn it; compared to English or Spanish, which are pluricentric languages with multiple major economies speaking them natively, plus widely spoken as second languages. No other languages can seriously contend with these two on that basis.
English is de facto the language of choice principally because it’s a near universal second language for many. And actually, when second-language speakers are included, it is the most widely spoken language in the world, and so although it is not #1 in terms of native speakers, it is the most widely known language.
You asked why I said it was imperialist bullshit. I told you why.
You are replying to multiple different people in this thread 🙂
Oh. I’m a new lemmy user. I am also very stupid. Be patient with me.