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Share of people who are native English speakers declining

Monday, March 1, 2004
(2:58 AM ET) (07:58 GMT)
The Associated Press

"There is a distinct consciousness in many countries, both developed and developing, about this dominance of English. There is some evidence of resistance to it, a desire to change it," Scott Montgomery, a Seattle-based geologist and energy consultant, said in a telephone interview. For example, he said, in the early years of the Internet it was dominated by sites in English, but in recent years there has been a proliferation of non-English sites, especially Spanish, German, French, Japanese and others.

WASHINGTON -- AP
The world faces a future of people speaking more than one language, with English no longer seen as likely to become dominant, a British language expert says in a new analysis.

"English is likely to remain one of the world's most important languages for the foreseeable future, but its future is more problematic -- and complex -- than most people appreciate," said language researcher David Graddol.

He sees English as likely to become the "first among equals" rather than having the global field to itself.

"Monolingual speakers of any variety of English -- American or British -- will experience increasing difficulty in employment and political life, and are likely to become bewildered by many aspects of society and culture around them," Graddol said.

The share of the world's population that speaks English as a native language is falling, Graddol reports in a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The idea of English becoming the world language to the exclusion of others "is past its sell-by date," Graddol says. Instead, its major contribution will be in creating new generations of bilingual and multilingual speakers, he reports.

A multi-lingual population is already the case in much of the world and is becoming more common in the United States. Indeed, the Census Bureau reported last year that nearly one American in five speaks a language other than English at home, with Spanish leading, and Chinese growing fast.

And that linguistic diversity, in turn, has helped spark calls to make English the nation's official language.

(More: CNN.com / International Edition)

2004 © The Associated Press.

Dan