The Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, has been working hard to export English language. Now, he’s asking America to get on board, too. From his press release:
Gordon Brown announced a bid to encourage more people across the world to learn English, as he began a three-day official visit to the United States.
The Prime Minister said he had asked the British Council to develop a joint UK-US initiative “to offer anyone in any part of the world help to learn English”.
In his words:
“In the last half-century the English language has become not only the language of Shakespeare and Twain, of JK Rowling and Cormac McCarthy, but of science, commerce, diplomacy, the internet and travel,” he wrote.
“So…I propose that together Britain and America strive to make the international language that happens to be our own far more freely available across the world.
The problem is, in many occasions, Americans and Britons don’t understand each other when speaking what they thought as the common language–English.
Should they settle their differences first before exporting English to other part of the world?
The full press release is here.
April 19, 2008 at 5:20 am
Do you not understand that the promulgation of an unwilling global population, to use English is just linguistic imperialism?
A language like Esperanto, which already has consultative relations with UNESCO, would avoid such an aggressive, pro-English attitude?
Can I ask you to check http://www.Esperanto.net