English Should Be the only World Language: A Killer of Culture or A Necessary Step?

...

English is not only prominent in the professional world either. The huge surge in popularity of American pop culture has made sure young people across the globe become easily acquainted early on with the English language by means of TV shows, movies, books and music. But while previous generations relied mostly on radio and television as their primary sources for popular culture, today’s generation looks mainly toward the internet where they can not only consume culture but also discuss it freely with likeminded people. This communication needless to say, as it involves people from many different countries a lot of the time, takes place mostly in English. A good example of this is the popular video hosting website YouTube. Thanks to the statistics on the website we know that most of the viewers are in fact not native English speakers and yet, the comments below the videos are almost exclusively in English. This is mostly due to the fact that users realize leaving a comment in English will get them much more responses than one written in their native tongue.

It’s probably due to the same reason that most of the content on the internet is in English as well. Almost 55 percent of all the content online is in English, while the second place, Russian, takes up only a mere 6 percent of the content[6].

So while it’s not quite there yet, English is in a prime position to become the only world language as it is very accessible to people from all over the world thanks to its wide spread and is already the main language used in business, science and the internet. And no matter how much people protest, I think we can only benefit from having a language that everyone can understand.

---------------------------------------------------------------