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March 16, 2006
English as a Second Language
Was in London a couple of weeks ago, sitting in a cafe waiting to meet with a client and picked up one of my favorite papers, the Financial Times. Same salmon color, same columnists, slightly different size and emphasis, but more or less the same paper as the one I read almost every day.
Maybe it was the location that made me pause--one tends to read things differently when away from home--but on that day, an editorial by John Kay caught my eye.
The whole article is good and worth a read but in sum, he observes that "English as a first language is in decline. Once the most widely spoken mother tongue, English may already have been overtaken by Hindi, Spanish and variants of Mandarin. But English as a second language is in irresistible ascendancy."
So what? Consider this. Kay asserts that, "Native English speakers are now less internationally useful than their bilingual French, German or Spanish colleagues."
What this means for you will depend on both your mother tongue and the number of other languages you speak. But what it means for the workforce in general would appear to be a further expansion of opportunity for polyglots. And that can only be for the good.
Posted by davidkippen at March 16, 2006 08:10 PM