A very interesting article appeared on a Spanish site called speakup.es – the website for a magazine to help Spanish speakers wishing to practise their English – about the impact on the English language of it becoming the global language, and vice versa the impact on the global community of using English as the Lingua Franca.
I found the most interesting part a few paragraphs in where the author makes the point that understanding and being understood in another language is more than pronunciation, grammar and vocab: “A person can understand every word in a sentence and still not fully grasp the message. They may know the literal meaning of the words but miss the intention, the humour, or the cultural reference that the speaker takes for granted….. Learning a language involves much more than acquiring a set of grammatical rules. It also means engaging with the culture that has shaped that language: its history, its social references, its forms of humour, and the shared experiences of its speakers.”
So English being the global language also carries English idioms, humour, and culture across the globe, or at least to those who really want to understand what is being said to them and how to respond. I am aware that the English that we speak is hugely idiomatic – maybe every language is. But I also know how much harder it is to learn another language’s idioms, and play them correctly, than it is simply to get the vocab or grammar right.
As British linguist David Crystal explains, “One of the biggest challenges facing English language teaching in general is not learning pronunciation, grammar, and basic vocabulary, but rather achieving that level of awareness of the language’s cultural identity.”
Read the article (in Spanish) on speakup.es here.