1) The British Empire. Before colonizing around a quarter of the planet (!), Britons were the only ones speaking English, and the language was confined to the British Isles. But once they started doing trade with places like Asia and Africa, colonizing and settling around the globe, the language naturally spread.
The rise of the English language is largely down to the rise of the British Empire. After developing in the British Isles, English was spread across the world via trade! In fact, one of the main goals of the British Empire was trade (buying and selling goods).
Because of America's dominance over cinema, television, popular music, trade, and technology (including the Internet) throughout the years, it made English even more universal! Today, English has become the leading language in business, science, literature, politics, diplomacy and many more areas and industries.
English is the world's most widely spoken language, with some 1.5 billion speakers even though it's native for fewer than 400 million.
Sanskrit is the Holy and Divine language of India, written in Devanagari script which is also known for its clarity and beauty. Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European languages family.
As David Graddol notes in “The Future of English?”, there is no reason to believe that another language will become the global lingua franca within the next 50 years. English probably won't replace other languages, but its usefulness as the common language in trade, diplomacy, and pop culture will continue.
English is one of the most important languages for business, as it's spoken by around 1.35 billion people around the world as a first or second language. Many top economies also use English as an official language, including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
English is an international language of business and most multinational companies prefer candidates who speak it. That's probably why the best business programs in the world are taught in English. And although there are phenomenal scientists in many countries, scientific journals are published in English.
English is also seen as the language of the Internet and high tech and that definitely has a negative impact on other languages. Some people claim that the world's linguistic diversity is less preserved because of English domination and that more local languages are declining each year.
The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
The Netherlands has emerged as the nation with the highest English language proficiency, according to the EF English Proficiency Index, with a score of 72.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
The Power Language Index (PLI) is a systematic way of evaluating the influence and reach of languages using 20 indicators to measure 5 basic opportunities afforded by language: geography, economy, communication, knowledge & media, and diplomacy.
So will Mandarin replace English as the next global language? Answer: not yet. English rose to prominence through the British Empire and as a result there are native English speakers to be found across the globe. English is the language of shared popular culture – music, film, even sport.
There is a strong chance that English will continue to be the lingua franca for the foreseeable future, but it is also wise for people to learn other languages such as Spanish and Chinese in case they begin to dominate.
Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as Latin, French, Dutch, and Afrikaans.
Of the thousands of different languages spoken around the world, the one language that has been regarded as the 'queen of all languages' is Kannada. Kannada is spoken in the southern state of Karnataka and is one of the most prominent Dravidian languages in India.
Chinese and English are from different families of languages and cultures. They are widely divergent in writing, sentence structure and vocabulary.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.