#doubt it

1. An English Speaking World | Notes

The Oxford English Dictionary contains 500,000 words compared to German’s 190k and French’s 100k

350 million people use English as a mother tongue surpassed only by Chinese speakers

80% of information stored in computers is in English

English is a second language for three to four hundred million people

Received Pronunciation (RP) - The Education Act of 1870 in Victorian England changed the universality of access to “The Queen’s English”, making it more common in public and private schools among the middle and upper class, causing “accent leveling”

The World Wars necessitated use of recording technology more and more. The radio broadcaster BBC was established in 1922. The Advisory Committee on Spoken English (ACSE) was established in 1926 and were responsible for determining “appropriate” vocabulary. RP was only spoken by about three percent of the British population despite its influence. RP became distinguished between mainstream ‘unmarked’ and posh ‘marked’ RP. 

In the 1940s surrounding World War II the English spoken in America was becoming distinctly American, expressed through international English speaking institutions like UNESCO and NATO. In the 1950s the popularity of Hollywood and inventions in television brought American English worldwide.

Network Standard is “the accent of television newscasters.” Just as British English has Cockney to its BBC English, American English has a blue collar variant to the Network Standard used much more commonly.

Reagan highlighted the influence of California in particular on not just the economy ($450 billion 12% of GNP) but language. Silicon Valley and the computer industry have made certain English terms for the computer commonplace worldwide. 

English as a second language’s spread cross-culturally is unprecedented, used more widely than any other colonial language, vital to life in countries like India and Nigeria. 

The demands of modernization, technological change and international bank funding are still largely controlled by Anglo-American corporations and provide the main reason for global English. Of the leading countries in world trade, eight are countries where English is or was a major language.

China “preserved a lofty isolation from the outside world for centuries.” After the Revolution of 1949 “it sustained a Marxist contempt for Anglo American culture.” 

English is a hybrid of Old Norse, German, Latin, and Norman French

English is not inherently easier than any other language and is in fact highly idiomatic (Idiomatic refers to expressions or phrases that have a meaning not deducible from the individual words, often specific to a particular language or dialect. For example, the phrase "kick the bucket" means to die, which is not clear from the literal meanings of the words). The vowel sound in “bird” and “nurse” is found in virtually no other languages.

Unlike all other European languages, the gender of every noun is determined by meaning and does not require a masculine, feminine, or neuter article; nouns and adjectives have simplified word endings. Nouns can become verbs and verbs nouns in a way that is impossible in other languages.