1. European migrant workers

Freedom of labour movement within the EU has led to the emergence of new linguistic communities in many smaller English towns.

After the accession of new countries to the European Union in 2005, Britain elected not to impose restrictions on migrant workers. The result has been an influx of workers from eastern Europe, especially Poland. In October 2005 the New York Times reported:

Despite fears across Europe that low-cost workers would steal jobs, multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers with hardly a ripple . . .Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month . . . Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain.

In some parts of the UK, this influx has greatly increased demand for ESL classes, even in remote areas.

2. Returnees

As the economies of developing countries grow, many former economic migrants return – often with the skills and capital they have acquired overseas. The governments of both China and India encourage ‘returnees’ who have become a new social category in these countries, part envied, part resented. Returnees usually face challenging issues relating to identity. Some family members of returnees may feel they belong ‘elsewhere’ – children, for example, who have been brought up in the USA with English as their first language.

People on the move: Migrant workers. Refugees and asylum seekers. Immigrants. Tourists, visitors to friends and family. Business workers. International students. Troop movements, peace-keeping. Emergency aid work, NGOs.

3. Tourism

International tourism is growing, but the proportion of encounters involving a native English speaker is declining. There were around 763 million international travellers in 2004, but nearly three-quarters of visits involved visitors from a non-English-speaking country travelling to a non-English-speaking destination.

This demonstrates the scale of need for face-to-face international communication and a growing role for global English: English to English – 4%; English to other countries – 12%; Other countries to English – 10%; Non-English speaking to non-English speaking – 74%.

Tourism is growing, but the majority of human interactions do not involve an English native speaker. (Data derived from World Tourism Organisation)

4. The redistribution of poverty

One of the legacies of the British Empire is that, in many countries, access to English remains part of an elitist social process. In the old, modernist model, English proficiency acted as a marker of membership of a select, educated, middle class group. In a globalised world, English is much more widely distributed, as is access to education generally. The increasingly important role that English is now playing in economic processes, in providing access to the kind of global knowledges available in English and the jobs which involve contact with customers and colleagues for whom English is the only shared language, has brought with it the danger that English has become one of the main mechanisms for structuring inequality in developing economies.

Lack of English in some countries now threatens to exclude a minority rather than the majority of a population.