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1、World English: A Blessing or a Curse? Universal languageBy Tom McArthur1 In the year 2000, the language scholar Glanville Price, a Welshman, made the following assertion as editor of the book Languages in Britain and Ireland: For English is a killer. It is English that has killed off Cumbric, Cornis
2、h, Norn and Manx. There are still parts of these islands where sizeable communities speak languages that were there before English. Yet English is everywhere in everyday use and understood by all or virtually(actually) all, constituting such a threat to the three remaining Celtic languages, Irish, S
3、cottish Gaelic, and Welsh. that their long-term future must be considered. very greatly at risk. (p 141) Some years earlier, in 1992, Robert Phillipson, English academic who currently (at the present/ at the moment) works in Denmark, published with Oxford a book entitled Linguistic Imperialism. In i
4、t, he argued that the major English-speaking countries, the worldwide English-language teaching industry, and notably (especially) the British Council pursue policies of linguistic aggrandisement. He also associated such policies with a prejudice which he calls linguicism a condition parallel to(equ
5、al to/ similar to) racism and sexism. As Phillipson sees it, leading institutions and individuals within the predominantly white English-speaking world, have by design(=deliberately) or default(=mistake) encouraged or at least toleratedand certainly have not opposedthe hegemonic spread of English, a
6、 spread which began some (about) three centuries ago as (when) economic and colonial expansion.2 Phillipson himself worked for some years for the British Council, and he is not alone among Anglophone academics who have sought to point up the dangers of English as a world language. The internationali
7、zation of English has in the last few decades been widely discussed in terms of three groups: first, the ENL countries, where English is a native language (this group also being known as the inner circle); second, the ESL countries, where English is a second language (the outer circle); and third, t
8、he EFL countries, where English is a foreign language (the expanding circle). Since the 1980s, when such terms became common, this third circle has in fact expanded to take in the entire planet.3 For good or for ill, there has never been a language quite like English. There have been many world lang
9、uages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. By and large, we now view them as more or less benign, and often talk with admiration and appreciation about the cultures associated with them and what they have given to the world. And it is fairly (very) safe to do this, because none of t
10、hem now poses much of a threat.4 English however is probably (perhaps) too close for us to be able to analyze and judge it as dispassionately (objectively), as we may now discuss the influence of Classical Chinese on East Asia or of Classical Latin on Western Europe. The jury is still out in the tri
11、al of the English language, and may take several centuries to produce its verdict, but even so we can ask, in this European Year of Languages, whether Price and Phillipson are right to warn us all about the language that I am using at this very moment. warn sb. of sth.5 It certainly isnt hard(diffic
12、ult) to look for situations (examples) where people might call English a curse. An example is Australia, which is routinely regarded as a straightforward English-speaking country. The first Europeans who went there often used Latin to describe and discuss the place. The word Australia itself is Lati
13、n; evidently (Obviously/ Apparently) no one at the time thought of simply calling it Southland (which is what Australia means). In addition (besides), in South Australia there is a wide stretch of land called the Nullarbor Plains, the first word of which sounds Aboriginal, but nullarbor is Latin and
14、 means no trees. And most significantly of all, the early settlers called the continent a terra nullius. According to the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999) the Latin phrase terra nullius means:. the idea and legal concept that when the first Europeans arrived in Australia the land was owned by
15、 no one and therefore open to settlement. It has been judged not to be legally valid. But that judgment was made only recently. When the Europeans arrived, Australia was thinly populatedbut populated nonetheless (from then on)from coast to coast in every direction. There were hundreds of communities
16、 and languages. Many of these languages have died out, many more are in the process of dying out, and these dead and dying languages have been largely replaced (substituted) by either kinds of pidgin English or general Australian English. Depending on your point of view, this is either a tragic loss or the price of progress.6 At the same time, however, can the blame for the extinction of Aboriginal languages be laid specifically at the door of Engl
