Unit 1 english as a world language reading

Pre-reading activity

1. Do you know that...

... English has the largest vocabulary with approximately 500 000 words

and 300 000 technical terms?

... 85% of the world's mail and 90% of the world's telephone calls are in Eng­lish?

... 400 million people speak English?

... the oldest written language is Egyptian?

... Indian sub-continent has the largest number of languages — 845?

... Cambodian has the most letters in its alphabet — 72?

... the largest encyclopedia is printed in Spanish?

... it took the French Academy 297 years to write a book of 263 pages?

... there are eight million speakers of Esperanto in the world?

... by 2010 the number of people who speak English will exceed the number of native speakers?

2. Countries Where English Is Spoken

	1.				2.
3.								4.
				5.
			6.
7.

Across

1. European country whose capital is London.

5. African country whose capital is Nairobi.

7. Nation which is also a continent.

Down

2. Mr. Clinton's country.

3. See 6 down.

4. Where both English and French are spoken.

6. (with 3 down) Mr. Mandela's country.

Jigsaw reading

1. Get into three groups:

Group A is to read text 1.

Group B is to read text 2.

2. Read the texts.

text 1

Today, when English is one of the major languages in the world, it requires an effort of the imagination to realize that this is a relatively recent thing - that in Shakespeare's time, for example, only a few million people spoke English, and the language was not thought to be very important by the other nations of Europe, and was unknown to the rest of the world.

English has become a world language because of its establishment as a mother tongue outside England, in all the continents of the world. This exporting of English began in the seventeenth century, with the first settlements in North America. Above all, it is the great growth of population in the United States, assisted by massive immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has given the English language its present standing in the world.

People who speak English fall into one of three groups: those who have learned it as their native language; those who have learned it as a second language in a society that is mainly bilingual; and those who are forced to use it for a practical purpose - administrative, professional or educational. One person in seven of the world's entire population belongs to one of these three groups.

Three hundred million people speak English as their native language. English is their first language. They live in countries such as Britain, The United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Six hundred million people use English as an official, second language. They live in countries such as India, Pakistan and Nigeria.

But at least one hundred million people now study English as a foreign language. They live in countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, China, Russia and Poland - in fact, almost everywhere.

Incredibly enough, 75% of the world's mail and 60% of the world's telephone calls are in English. Therefore, at least one thousand million people can speak, read, write and understand English today.

text 2

Human language is, perhaps, the most astonishing creation of man. It helps us understand each other. We make use of it in practically everything we do.

Language is a means of communication in human society. People can use other means of communication, such as red lights and flags, but these signs are interpreted into human language. So language is the normal form and the main means of communication in human society.

We cannot say anything definite about the origin of language. But we realize now that language is a product of human society and it can exist only in human society.

Man (“homo sapiens”) is the only living being with the power of speech. The appearance of language on our planet is as recent as the appearance of man himself. Labour and language are distinctive and exclusive marks of human being. Without them the growth and progress of human society is unthinkable.

Primitive people had a few hundred words at the most. Today highly cultured nations have more that seven hundred thousand words in their dictionaries. This means that now people can communicate by words much better than they did it in the remote past. The rapid growth of the vocabulary of modern languages is due to the development of science and technology.

But spoken languages were easy to forget; so people invented writing to record them. Writing is a way of recording language by means of visible marks. The first form of writing was picture writing. Symbols representing the sound of a language appeared much later. The art of writing made it possible to fix thoughts and to store knowledge, and to pass them on from one generation to another.

There are people who know three, five or six languages. They are polyglots. They study languages because knowledge of languages is their specialty or hobby.

For a modern engineer and research worker it is absolutely necessary to have practical command of foreign languages. A scientist who can read the literature of his field in several languages has a much better grasp of the subject. Learning foreign languages enriches the native language, makes it clearer, more flexible and expressive.