(00:00): Welcome to the Merlin English Afterthought. Throughout this series, we will be looking back at previous audio blogs and discussing them in a bit more detail. We're going to be sharing anything that we found particularly useful or interesting. And we will do so in a slightly more relaxed and informal tone.

(00:20): Today, then, we are going to start by looking at episode number one, titled: English: the global language of communication.

(00:29): Here, then, we are at www.merlinenglish.co.uk/members where we can find the full transcript for this episode. I want to begin, then, by looking at the introduction and more specifically the opening line of the introduction.

(00:47): We can see that this reads as “English is a truly global language with an estimated 1.5 billion speakers worldwide”. Now, the figure of 1.5 billion is somewhat contested.

(01:02): Some sources have been have this slightly higher. Others have this slightly lower. To get a completely accurate number would be I guess near impossible.

(01:12): So yeah, today we're just going to stick with 1.5 billion and I want to look at who these speakers are.

(01:22): Who are these 1.5 billion English speakers? So to do so, I'm going to bring up a little graph and this graph shows the most spoken languages worldwide in 2023.

(01:36): So we can see that English is the most spoken language in the world with here 1.45 billion speakers. That's followed by Chinese Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, French, Arabic and so on.

(01:53): So I'm going to mention here the differences between an L1 speaker and an L2 speaker. So both L1 and L2, these are linguistic categories that we put people into and these are, essentially the same as calling somebody a native or non-native speaker.

(02:13): Just L1 and L2 might be used in slightly more technical contexts. So an L1 then or a native speaker, this is somebody who has, grown up speaking a language.

(02:26): Typically they would have learned this from very early on. They would have learned this usually from parents and relatives. Whereas an L2 speaker or a non-native speaker, this is somebody who perhaps started learning slightly later in life.

(2:44): So this can be as they entered into formal education. This could be throughout their adolescent years or adulthood.

(02:51): And English is really is a special language when it comes to L1 and L2 speakers. And I will show you why now. This table then, this table shows the amount of native speakers of a language.

(03:10): So we can see that Mandarin Chinese has the most amount of native or L1 speakers with 920 million. This is followed by Spanish which has 475 million native or L1 speakers.

(03:27): And in third place we have English. So English has 373 million native or L1 speakers. Now this means that there are another 1.1 million English speakers who are, in fact, L2 or non-native speakers.

(03:50): If we have this as a percentage, this is around 75% and I found that to be quite mind-blowing. So of course I knew that there were a lot of L2 English speakers or non-native English speakers, but I would have never have guessed that the proportion was so high.

(04:09): I would not have guessed that 75% of all English speakers were actually non-native. This was quite surprising for me. Here then we have also just another little image, a little So infographic and this is just showing where English is spoken where English proficiency is high, where it is slightly

(04:32): lower. We can see a lot of Central and Northern Europe. This has a very high English proficiency. Areas in Africa and parts of Asia.

(04:43): This proficiency is slightly lower and yeah, that's just an interesting graphic that I thought people might enjoy. So if we go back to the transcript then now and I want to go down to the main portion of the text, the main body of the text.

(05:03): And this starts with the historical factors. So the historical factors has been broken down into two parts. We have the influence of the English and the British Empire and we then have the influence of the United States post World War II.

(05:22): I thought then here it would be interesting for me to share a bit of brief history. About England and the British Empire.

(05:30): I have a map here of the extent of the British Empire and this was slightly later on so this was the 1900s and we can see just how much of an influence, you know, the British Empire had around the world and you imagining each of these areas English and the English language was, you know, being

(05:50): used in some capacity. But I want to go backwards. I want to briefly talk about how the British Empire started, how England started its rise and for us when we are in school we are often taught of a very famous battle that took place in the 1500s and this was the battle between the English Navy

(06:24): and what we call today the Spanish Armada. To give some context then Spain during the 1400s and part of the 1500s really was the sort of global power was during these two centuries that Spain colonised a lot of Central America, a lot of South America.

(06:45): However towards the second half of the 1500s this power started to wane a little bit. Spain found it difficult to maintain and keep control over all of these territories after it had sort of grown and expanded.

(07:03): To the size that it did. At the same time, Queen Elizabeth I came to power in England and she set it as one of her sort of priorities and one of her goals to really build up England’s Navy.

(07:20): She wanted to make England a naval superpower. For Spain to have a competing superpower, especially one within Europe was of course a great threat and a big problem.

(07:35): So in the 1580s Spain came up with the plan to invade England, overthrow Queen Elizabeth the First, and sort of suppress that expansion.

(07:48): So to do so Spain amassed at the time the biggest invasion force of history. This was consisting of around 130 ships.

(08:00): It was believed to have been 30,000 soldiers. So for this part of time, this would have been a huge invasion force that the Spanish came with and the plan was to sail across a sort of Spain's north coast through the English Channel, get to that south coast and then invade from there.

(08:24): However, things didn't quite go to plan. Some good old British weather caused the invasion to get off to a pretty bad start as they entered into the English Channel.

(08:35): The seas were very rough. It was very difficult for the Spanish to sail. They could stay into their formations and stay organised.

(08:44): And in addition, England put up some quite fierce resistance. This battle is quite famous for England using the strategy of fire.

(08:56): This is where ships or fire boats, and this is where they sort of filled boats with very flammable material and sailed it into the Spanish formations.

(09:07): This caused them to have to sort of split up and get very disorganised and England having smaller ships, more nimble ships were able to sort of come in, pick off Spanish ships.

(09:21): Sort of one by one this battle lasted for some time and by the time it was over, the Spanish had suffered some quite heavy losses ships tried to retreat back to Spain but ended up going off course running into more storms and this was a great defeat for the Spanish navy and for the Spanish empire as a whole.

(09:52): However, for England this was of course a great victory. There are a couple of famous paintings which you can see from this battle.

(10:00): So this is the first one of course, you have the fire ships there, you have this very rough sea, ah, smoke, fire, just chaos.

(10:12): And then the second picture here is of Queen Elizabeth I, we can see behind her two paintings of this battle we can see her with her crown next to her, her hand on the globe.

(10:27): Perhaps symbolising you know, her intentions for global dominance and yeah, these are a couple very famous paintings which we have in the UK so once the Spanish then were defeated in this battle in 1588, this was for most historians the turning point.

(10:50): This is really the part in time where you saw it started to see the real decline of the Spanish empire and then the, the rise of England, which would of course go on to become the British empire.

(11:04): This started from ready the 1600s, the British empire lasted all the way up until the end of World War II where essentially England had run out of money.

(11:18): They could not maintain these territories anymore. More and more countries were sort of trying to gain independence in 1947, of course India gained their independence.

(11:31): India was often referred to as the crown jewel of the British Empire. So once India gained independence, this was the start of the end for the British Empire.

(11:45): However, it was during these years that the US sort of stepped in as the new global power. And this was following World War II.

(11:56): Of course, Europe was destroyed. Many other countries around the world were destroyed and had really had some heavy, heavy losses from World War I and World War II.

(12:09): And the US really was the only country in the world at that time that had the resources, the industries, the resources, and money to rebuild these countries. So, in doing so, the US, not only spread, you know, their industries globally, but they also of course spread their culture, their customs, places which perhaps before had never had access to, ah, American culture and the US now did.

(12:46): Of course, in rebuilding a lot of these countries as well, the US offered, certain security guarantees to make sure another world war would not happen and this is when you started to see the real, explosion of, you know, the American economy.

(13:03): You saw the expansion of the American military and this, of course, was again centred around English,

(13:10): of course America is an English-speaking country and power. So, if we go back to the transcript here then and look at the next section, we can see, that we speak about the economic factors and the technological factors and I think that these two sections are slightly connected with one another and these

(13:37): are connected through one word. And that word is globalisation. So globalisation, I have the definition here from Investopedia. So globalisation here, of course with American spelling with the Z,

(13:57): has been defined as the spread of the flow of financial products, goods, technology, information, and jobs across national borders and cultures.

(14:11): So, globalisation then, we saw this start to, ah, ready to become a thing as technology advanced, as things such as the internet came about and computers started to, to be, ah, used.

(14:25): There were people communicating, people connecting with people from all over the world, from all different, ah, cultures, ah, and countries

(14:37): and in linguistics we have a term called lingua franca. Now, a lingua franca is, ah, known as a common language, and this is essentially, in many contexts, English.

(14:52): So, for example, if somebody is speaking, ah, Japanese, and they're trying to talk to somebody in Turkey, perhaps they do not speak Turkish, perhaps the Turkish person doesn't speak Japanese, but maybe they both speak English.

(15:08): So English, in that context, would be the lingua franca. And English sort of, ah, as globalisation sort of took the world, English played a more and more and more important role in allowing people to communicate, people to connect.

(15:27): Of course, it would be now impossible for us to try and learn a different language for everyone that we would speak to, so English really sort of filled that hole quite nicely.

(15:41): Yeah. As we look at just the final section here then for today. We can see the cultural factors and the cultural factors, as we have mentioned before, things such as movies, TV shows, of course Hollywood.

(15:56): This allowed people to digest and consume. English content in a fun and entertaining way. And yeah, if you ask most students, you know, they will tend to be much more confident and have a better grasp.

(16:16): Of American accents, of speaking to Americans, they perhaps find this easier to understand than say British people, Australian people, South African people.

(16:27): And this is simply because there is more American content out there. People are more familiar watching American TV shows, American news, American music.

(16:37): So yeah, typically American English tends to be the easiest English for many people to understand. So then we have just briefly touched on these factors.

(16:51): We've added in just a little bit more information, a little bit more context to this audio blog. I hope that you have learned something that perhaps you didn't know before.

(17:43): And yeah, hopefully we can see you. Next time, take care of that and I will see you soon.