by : Gede Widia Pratama Adhyaksa
Few days ago, I read a tricky statement, addressed by Ali Wyne, a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the journal Foreign Policy. He said "Half (of) the world's people are projected to be speaking English by 2015. And so long as English is on track to become the world's unofficial language, the United States will likely be center stage" (Ref. Chosun Ilbo, June, 11,2009). For being humble, I have to say " I do not agree with you". Unlike his statement, my opinion is a little bit different. In my perspective, some kinds of 'domino effect' will be occourred. The global english will turn the supremacy of U.S into a weakness, by means the localized supremacy of U.S will be steadily distributely changed to the new emerging countries.
Since the last few decades, The English tends to become a necessity and an obligation need to be learned for every person around the world. Probably 400 million people are using the english as a first language, and nearly 1 billion people can fluently speak english at the moment. According to the data from Michael Backman (2008) written down in The book of 'Asia Future Shock', predicted, China will have the biggest number of english interpreter in the world, and 20% of total number of world population are in China, therefore we can imagine what movement will currently go on. Furthermore. The 'English Version' is also being used in the most of the newspaper, broadcasting and media industry in all around the world. It shows us that the english is globalizing now, and seems to be a global lingua francas.
Actually for the upcoming 10 years, Ali's prediction is in line with mine, however It's hard for me to be agree with him, if the same thing will also happen for the next after 10 years. Why?
I do believe that the knowladge is the keyword in this case instead of the language. How the sciences and technologies can be strongly globalized, that is the point. Nowdays, most of the scientific and technological journals are published in English. What does it means? it means transfers of knowladges will happen and affecting to each other. Moreover, some courses in universities around the world such as China, Japan, Korea, Europe, Africa, South America, and even Thailand-Vietnam, are taught in English, in some case there is only for one embarassing reason, for being reputable. Did we know that in the 1st century, The Latin was a dominating language, because at that time, all of the impacting literatures were located in Ancient Greece and Rome, afterward French dominated in 18th century, and English eventually. This is what I believe as a power of knowladge.
Power of knowladge itself can potentialy impact to all aspects of life, economics, trading, health, sport, and so on. If the founding futher of Singapore, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, read it, He will agree and support my opinion, because He said "the language ability and the intelegence are two different things.
One more times, I want to emphasize my statement, whenever a language dominates as a global language at least in quarter of world population, it's indicating a phenomenon of primary step of a supremacy movement from one country to other countries or to another one. This is more than just a supremacy, but it's all about a naturally cyclic phenomenon.
How about Indonesia?
(The Indonesian Version of this can be seen in
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