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English Is the Natural Choice for a World Language. to What Extend Do You Agree with This Statement?

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English Is the Natural Choice for a World Language. to What Extend Do You Agree with This Statement?
Topic: English is the natural choice for a world language. To what extend do you agree with this statement?
In recent years, it is widely acknowledge that English has become the universal language occupying prominent position in the world. However, a debate has arisen over whether English is the natural choice for global language and continues to remain its permanent position. Although it might claim that there are some other languages have potential to replace English as a world language, English language has inarguably achieved the global status ‘world language’ and will retain its monopolistic position and continues to be the natural choice for the global language. This essay will first examines the reason why English has been regarded as world language recent decades and secondly, will discuss another choice for a global language and thirdly, will illustrate some other factors attribute to determining the world language and finally, will assess the extent to English language is a natural choice for a world language.
It is clear that English language has been widely accepted as the world language because of its large number of speakers in the world. It is obvious that there are significant number of people speaking English as a first language, which has 328 million native speakers (The Ethnologue, 2009).Those can be seen in 112 countries, such as UK, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Furthermore,according to statistics in The Ethnologue(2009), there are approximately 500 million people speaking English as a foreign language. It may because English has been made the official language in 55 countries and 25 territories and even been used in certain international institutions such as The United Nations and IBRD.it may also because of one country’s foreign-language teaching policy that English always have the priority to be taught in schools. In addition, English has been regarded as the main foreign language in over 100 countries where children have to



References: Behera,A. K. and Panda, S.(2012)."Global Languag: English?". Internagtional Journal of English and Education,Vol.7,Issue:1 July p44. Crystal, D. (2000). English as a global language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Graddol, D. and English (1997). The future of English? : a guide to forecasting the popularity of English in the 21st century. London, British Council. Lewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/. Pride, J. B. (1982). New Englishes. Rowley, Mass., Newbury House Publishers. Quirk, R. and D. Crystal (1985). A Comprehensive grammar of the English language. London, Longman. Seargeant, P. and J. Swann (2012). English in the world : History, diversity, change. London, Routledge.

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